In 2007, a college professor and several of his students discussed NASA scientist James Hansen's recommendation to lower carbon emissions to 350 parts per million—the upper limit of carbon dioxide before the world would be frequented by natural disasters. We were already at 385 ppm.
Just a year earlier, Al Gore had released An Inconvenient Truth, his film and call to action around climate change. In the first decade of the 21st century, Southeast Asia had already been paralyzed a few times by devastating tsunamis, and the U.S. was unprepared for Hurricane Katrina in 2005. At Middlebury College, students worked with Professor Bill McKibben to organize a national day of protest telling the U.S. legislature to “Step It Up, Congress: Cut Carbon 80% by 2050.”
