Sad Note: Founder of Citizens’ Climate Lobby Dead at 80

As I’ve mentioned, I’m one of more than 100,000 members of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, whose purpose is to promote its approach to putting a tax on carbon called “Carbon Fee and Dividend.”  The organization was formed in 2007 by  Marshall Saunders, who passed away yesterday at the age of 80. He was such a terrific person that I feel compelled to reprint this, an excerpt of the death notification that I received:

To say that he made the most of his time on this earth would be an understatement. In addition to being the most kind and generous person I’ve ever known, he was also a visionary, someone who saw the things that are broken in our world and then set out to fix them. As Buckminster Fuller once said, “The things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.”

That was Marshall, doing the things that needed to be done that nobody else was doing.

As I reflect on his life, there’s a scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life” that comes to mind where the angel Clarence shows George Bailey all the lives he saved and transformed. I cannot even begin to count the number of lives that Marshall touched. Whether it was the thousands of women in Mexico who lifted their families out of poverty because of Marshall’s microlending program, Grameen de la Frontera, or the many people who turned their despair about climate change into positive action through CCL, Marshall emerged as a beacon of hope for so many of us.

If you would like to express your condolences or share your remembrances of Marshall, we’ve set up a memorial page on CCL Community.