MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – They’d hold candidates’ feet to the fire, but fire emits carbon dioxide.

So global warming activists, eager to get their issue at the top of government’s agenda, plan rallies today in more than a dozen places across Vermont to urge the winners of Tuesday’s elections to take action when they take office.

“It’s to remind them and ourselves of why we’re sending them to Washington,” said Middlebury College scholar in residence Bill McKibben. “This is an absolutely critical, top-of-the-agenda issue that we want them to focus on the minute they get to D.C.”

Saturday’s events are designed to drive home a point made Labor Day weekend, when McKibben led more than 600 marchers on a 49-mile walk from Ripton to Burlington in what organizers said was the largest demonstration about climate change in the country up to that time.

He said Vermont’s delegation in Washington should be made up of “people working very hard to make clear to the leadership in the House and Senate that this is an issue they can’t sweep under the rug for the next couple of years.”

More than 20 simultaneous rallies were planned in Putney, East Burke, St. Albans, Ripton and elsewhere. Climbers wishing to join McKibben on Camel’s Hump were urged to gather at the Burrows trailhead at 11 a.m.

The biggest crowd was expected at the Intervale farm in Burlington at 12:30, for a rally including the formation of the outline of a maple leaf to be photographed from a Greenpeace helicopter flying overhead.

“We’re forming a maple leaf to symbolize all that Vermont stands to lose if we don’t take strong action soon on climate change,” said Rebecca Sobel, a Greenpeace organizer. “We don’t have any more elections to waste – this is the most critical issue facing the planet today.”

McKibben said he wasn’t worried about the environmental impact of demonstrators driving cars and trucks to the rallies, or of the helicopter flying over the Burlington event.

“Given the volume of carbon that the U.S. pours out each day, the idea that it (people traveling to the rallies) might be a real contributor to global warming is pretty much of a stretch,” he said.