Nearly four decades ago, Nancy and Derek Casady were among 1,400 people (including Daniel Ellsberg) arrested in a protest at the Livermore nuclear weapons lab. It was a time of “Doomsday Clocks” and nuclear winter fears.
Now 77, Nancy Casady hears another bomb ticking, and she’s sounding the alarm with her second run for Congress — after one in 1996.
As of last Wednesday, when she and husband Derek sat down for an interview over a bagel breakfast, the Earth had “eight years, four months and two days” until greenhouse gases rose to too-dangerous levels, she said.
“We used to have until the end of the century,” she said. “Then we had until 2050. And it used to be we could manage 2 degrees [Celsius rise in global average temperature]. Now it’s 1.5. So we know which way it’s going. It’s going faster. It’s worse than we thought.”
Calling this a “time certain ending if we don’t act,” Casady says she decided after a May 30 meeting with Rep. Scott Peters that he didn’t share her commitment to a World War II-scale mobilization to transform America’s energy systems via the Green New Deal.
After a series of protests, she said, Peters met with about 35 climate activists at a rented meeting room across the street from his University City offices. He sat there and said: ‘I don’t like and will never support the Green New Deal because it has this provision for free college tuition and because it has a jobs guarantee,'” she said.
Calling herself shocked as a lifelong Democrat (who backed Peters in his council and Congress campaigns), “I couldn’t believe that he was absolutely taking that stand. I think it’s very shortsighted to be worried about whether you’re going to be returned to Congress when we have the planet coming apart before our eyes.”
Her decision to challenge Peters from the left in the 52nd Congressional District wasn’t immediate, however.
Derek Casady, 83 and also a former candidate for Congress (running in a primary to face Duncan Hunter’s father in 2006), said they went back-and-forth over entering the race during their morning walks at La Jolla Shores.
“Derek is reminding me that if there were some young Ph.D candidate who had the desire to run, we would certainly support that candidacy,” she said.
“But nobody has stepped up,” said Derek Casady, acting as her campaign manager (as she did for him in 2006 — although now “we’re being pressured by our campaign committee to have a professional campaign manager.”)
The Casadys said they filed paperwork Aug. 20 with the Federal Election Commission.
Also informing her race is being on the state Board of Food & Agriculture, where she meets farmers worried about crops sensitive to minor heat changes.https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2019/09/09/climate-warrior-nancy-casadys-race-against-doomsday-and-scott-peters/
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