How many times has someone asked you, "You got a minute?" They want to know if this looks good with that; if this should go over here; or, what did you think about this, that, or the other? When it's a friend, you usually do stop for a second and give them your attention because friends listen to each other (at least most of the time). Your voice means something to your friends; in fact, it means more to your friends than any stranger's voice. We guess that makes you the most important person around to a lot of other people. Taking a minute to share what you know is so very important for all of us. Take a minute over dinner to talk about our planet. Spend 15 seconds at work, at the PTA, while waiting for a movie to begin, during a commercial break, to your old college roommate, your new college roommate. Share one out of the 1,440 minutes in the day with a local official, the grocer, your spiritual leader, your mom, your dad, the person who is sitting next to you on a plane, share it with a date.

Now, we don't want to tell you what to say, but here are seven ideas that you might want to talk about. Your words are important, so adapt our ideas to your way of saying things. You really do have the power to make a difference and we thank you for the last minute you spent with us.

These ideas are based on the 7-Point Pledge, which you can tell your friends about as well.

  1. The climate crisis is a huge problem that needs global leadership, but it's also just a lot of smaller problems that will be solved by people like you and me. This challenge is too big for anybody to sit out. We need you: your talents, your vision, your sense of responsibility. Everyone is part of the cause, and everyone needs to be the solution.
  2. Governments worldwide must come together to act on carbon. In the last 30 years the temperature has risen one degree, but it will only take 15 years to add the next degree. Further warming will both increase nature's production of greenhouse gases and diminish the earth's ability to absorb them. Our only responsible choice is to act now.
  3. Coal is tempting, it's cheap to buy and we, in America, have abundant supplies, but we also have better solutions. A ton of coal costs only $35, but burning it for electricity releases 2 tons of CO2 that will do $150 worth of damage by the end of the century. So $35 of cheap electricity now actually costs our grandchildren more than four times that. No dirty coal power or other coal-based energy systems should be built without technology to capture and store carbon.
  4. What if we could meet all of our projected power needs with what we have? It's called efficiency. Over time, our electronics use more electricity when they are sitting idle than when we're using them. If everybody replaced five old-style light bulbs with compact fluorescents we'd save $3 - $5 billion a year worth of electricity. A programmable thermometer can cut home energy use by 10%. Inflated tires and one less day of driving per week gets us another 10%. We can do these things and save money too. We as individuals have the power to make a difference.
  5. Renewable power has huge potential. For illustration, harvesting less than 3% of the strongest winds would provide all of Earth's electricity, or solar panels covering land equal to just 1% of the Sahara Desert would accomplish the same. We're not that far away from shifting our economy to renewable power if we try: America is a leader in ingenuity and technology.
  6. Destruction of forests releases 20% of the world's global warming gases. By carefully protecting and tending forests we can build powerful natural engines to capture and store carbon. Tropical regions can store several percent of the world's emissions. Care for earth's natural systems and they will return the favor with resilience in the face of change.
  7. Great change is a great challenge and an opportunity for great accomplishments. What's needed to beat the climate crisis is more than just a simple changing of the guard. First, we must change the light bulb. Then, we must change the power that feeds the light bulb and remodel the building it lives in. Finally, we must retrofit the neighborhood. Along the way our economic choices will remodel the economy, and our political choices will reinvent government.