A few months ago, I shared with the dKos community the amazing opportunity my wife and I received as a result of the film An Inconvenient Truth. The opportunity? Funding for a year so that the two of us could quite our jobs and work towards mitigating the climate crisis. We were given the freedom to be creative and think big. (Hopefully, we lived up to the opportunity.)
At the time I asked for suggestions, and was overwhelmed with both a flood of positive well-wishes and some fantastic ideas. I can't stress enough how much the responses did to launch us in the right direction. I promised to post updates as our research progressed and ideas coalesced. It's been a while but here's the skinny. I hope you'll join me below the fold.
It's hard to encapsulate all the research, thinking, conversations, hand-wringing and minor epiphanies that made up our journey, but before going any further, I do want to share some general thoughts:
First, there is no shortage of technologies, policy solutions, and conservation ideas for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels or our impact on the planet. This is a good thing, considering that there is no magic bullet for solving the climate crisis. (In time I think we’ll come to realize just how incredibly special fossil fuels are as a source of energy. We tend to think of them now as dirty and dangerous—-and yes, burning them is both—-but they are also the organic history of our planet.)
While governmental policies are the keystone of any successful movement towards sufficiently reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, developing or advancing a policy plan doesn’t make sense for the two of us. In fact, I think there are already way too many existing plans being forwarded by environmental or energy groups and not enough convergence. This is emblematic of a larger issue, which is the lack of alignment and collaboration on the part of groups focused on the climate crisis. A lack of a central message and the preponderance of differing information makes it really, really hard to form the kind of popular movement needed to tackle this problem. But don’t get me started on that...
Some themes emerged from our own explorations and conversations, as well as from the input we received here on dkos and elsewhere. Together, these served as the frame through which we generated our core ideas:
- There’s too much preaching to the choir and not enough conversions taking place. We want to focus on everyday people. By that, I mean those who aren’t already initiated. This requires developing a different message and reaching people in different ways than is typically done.
- We want to focus on Americans, for three reasons: 1) They are who we know; 2) Americans are the worst emitters of greenhouse gases (5% of the world’s population but 25% of its total GHG emissions); and 3) The world is waiting for American engagement in this issue. Like it or not, once we move, others will follow.
- We want to offer simple and focused actions that people can take. Even if those actions don’t, in and of themselves, reduce individuals’ carbon footprints by a huge amount, they help overcome the complacency or state of denial that many people have in the face of this crisis.
- We want to move individuals along what we consider a ladder of engagement: 1) Educate those who are uninformed or misinformed; 2) Help the informed take actions to reduce their own impact; and 3) Assist those who have taken steps in their own lives to engage in collective solutions.
Using this framework, we arrived at three ideas that we shared with our philanthropist friends. After much discussion and further examination, we recently agreed on it--the initiative that we hope will accomplish our mission of addressing the global climate crisis by inspiring everyday people to reduce their impact on the planet.
The way we see it, climate change is a matter of degrees. The terrifying threats of the climate crisis are the result of an increase of just a few degrees in global temperatures. But many of the changes each of us can make now to avert the worst impacts of global warming are also simply a matter of degrees. This includes things as basic as using compact fluorescent lamps and energy efficient appliances, conservation, and driving more efficiently.
The majority of Americans consider global warming one of the most serious threats to our future. And yet most of us haven’t taken even the most elementary steps (only five percent of light bulbs sold last year were CFLs). Why? All too often, people don’t act because they are uninformed or misinformed, they feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the crisis, they simply don’t know what to do, or because the suggestions they hear seem unachievable or meaningless ("walk more, drive less"). Sadly, we weren’t able to find anything out there that effectively overcame these obstacles and made tackling the climate crisis something people want to do.
While it’s true that the ultimate solution to the climate crisis will require significant behavioral and technological changes, creating the unified movement of individuals, governments and businesses required to meet this challenge begins with engaging mainstream Americans. And we believe that this can only be accomplished if addressing climate change is made personal, accessible and achievable—even if only through small measures.
So how are we going to meet this need? Through a web site, of course: Climatechangers.org.
I can just imagine what you’re thinking: "Um, another friggin’ web site? And isn’t being a climate changer a bad thing?" Well, here’s the thing: Whether we like it or not, we all a play a role in the climate crisis. The sooner we come to accept and embrace that fact, the sooner we can work towards saving this planet for current and future generations. Being a climate changer means that you "own" your part of the problem and are engaged in its result. But that doesn’t mean you have to immediately disconnect from the grid, become a vegetarian, eat local, and never travel. Setting that kind of expectation is not only unrealistic, it’s stupid and serves only to turn away millions of people who may be willing to do one small thing today. Climatechangers.org will help people take that first step—-and hopefully many beyond—-by providing them with tools, inspiration, resources, and incentives that make it easy, fun and rewarding to be a positive force for climate change.
How will the site accomplish all this? For that, my friend, you’ll just have to stick around and find out.