Ride for the Future

From May 22^nd – July 30^th, our Ride for the Future team will travel exclusively by bicycle together from New Orleans to ExxonMobil’s headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Along the way, the participants will learn from and highlight local efforts to improve communities while transitioning them away from fossil fuels.  At the same time, the riders will highlight the harms fossil fuels cause communities, visiting communities suffering from pollution from refineries and power plants, communities still suffering from the the BP oil spill, and communities suffering from natural disasters in line with scientists’ predictions of a changing climate, including the droughts and wildfires in Texas and hurricane damage across the region.

While learning from those who have suffered from fossil fuels and those who are building a better future, riders will engage in direct community service to mitigate the suffering and ease the transition.  As they travel, they will ask communities to help them calculate the cost of damages caused by fossil fuels and ask them what community projects they would like to invest in. They will present this information to ExxonMobil in the form of an invoice and will call for a meeting with executives from the world’s wealthiest fossil fuel company to ask them to use the taxpayer money they have received from the government to help the communities most affected by their and their peer’s activities.

Our consumption of fossil fuels has helped humanity in countless ways and saved countless lives. Fossil fuels heat our buildings, power our hospitals, and every day carry our children to school and our workers to their jobs and back home. But they also have deep costs that are not reflected in their price – pollution that leads to sickness and death, the oppression of human rights in dictatorships that thrive on oil money, and perhaps most worryingly, fundamentally altering our weather systems in ways that will make it harder for our farmers to grow enough food to feed the people on our planet.

And right now, our government is subsidizing this activity. We believe we ultimately need to responsibly transition to benign forms of energy that do not require human casualties, but the very first thing we should do is to stop subsidizing energy sources that kill people. Fossil fuel companies receive billions of dollars in taxbreaks and direct taxpayer hand-outs each year. Because these companies have shown an ability to control our government’s spending decisions, we are going to appeal directly to the fossil fuel companies to turn over their taxpayer dollars to the communities in the Gulf Coast that are most harmed by their activities.