Twenty-three months ago, I rode my bike 350 miles down the Northern California coast, across the Golden Gate bridge, and up to a rally in San Francisco. Our small group of cyclists met up with a few more than 1,000 people there, taking part in what CNN would call "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history."

October 24, 2009, was 350.org's first global day of climate action, with thousands of loosely coordinated, locally planned events taking place in 181 countries. It felt like the start of something good, something big. But there's no sugar coating it. The two years since that day have been ... disappointing, to say the least.

First there was the grand flop in Copenhagen. Not long after, the cap-and-trade bill failed to even garner a vote in Congress's upper chamber. Since then, climate change as an issue has essentially fallen off the political map and out of the cultural landscape as an anemic economy leaves little room for the public to fret about the future (even if there's growing evidence that the future is now).

Which makes 350.org's new international day of action, Moving Planet, all the more important. Tomorrow, September 24th, people in countries all around the world will organize thousands of events with a common theme: moving the world beyond fossil fuels.

Now you might be asking: Wasn't Gore's big Climate Reality Project just a couple weeks ago? Didn't we do this last year? And the year before? Does the world really need another climate change action?

Well, yes.

Woman suffragists didn't pack up the signs and quiet down after a few disappointing years. Civil rights activists didn't quit during a decades-long struggle, despite a steady record of legislative and moral defeats.

But, you might be thinking, those are human rights issues, not environmental ones. Well, I'd argue (and plenty of people much smarter than me have argued) that climate change is the greatest human rights crisis that the world faces today. There's nothing else that stands to cause greater suffering to a greater number of people, and this is a crisis that disproportionately affects the very poor, who are both most vulnerable and least responsible for the problem.

And the fact of the matter is, these local events do make a difference. In the fall of 2007, a then-unknown group of kids hatched a plan called "Step It Up." The goal was to get the public to understand the "targets" set by the latest climate science: that we'd need to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. What started as a totally ludicrous goal in a dorm room in Vermont wound up growing into more than 1,400 events in cities and towns all over the country, and by the time the presidential primaries were underway, every legitimate contender had publicly embraced these targets.

Of course, we know what has happened -- and what hasn't happened -- since. But the point is, the campaign moved the goal posts.

The target of this year's actions is less specific, but more direct: fossil fuels. We know the problem: extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. We solve that, we go a heck of a long way to preserving a livable planet.

In Sao Paolo, Brazil, hundreds of activists will "take back" a viaduct that is locally notorious as a symbol of bad auto-centric traffic planning. In Johannesburg, South Africa, youth will join hands with trade union members and call for an end to coal mining, as well as jobs-training programs for transitioning miners. Check out the Moving Planet map to see if there's an event planned near you -- there are actions planned in 177 countries from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe, in newly liberated Egypt and Libya, and all throughout America.

The fossil fuel interests may have the money, but they're outnumbered by the rest of us who want -- and will fight for -- clean air, clean water, and a safe climate.

Check out this Moving Planet video, which shows just how truly global this movement is. It is, in all seriousness, quite moving.

Images: Posters from 350.org's Flickr stream