Citizens' Climate Lobby

There’s been a shift among Republicans in Congress on climate change, due in no small part to polling that shows younger GOP voters are as concerned about climate change as their progressive counterparts. As vice president of Students for Carbon Dividends, Keira O’Brien is working to harness that passion among young conservatives to generate political will for carbon dividends legislation, which places a fee on carbon and gives revenue to households (sound familiar?). Kiera, who is President Emeritus of the Harvard Republican Club, recently testified at a congressional hearing alongside Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Over the summer, she spoke about carbon dividends at the Teen Vogue Summit: “There are many climate-oriented groups rallying around the problem, but Students for Carbon Dividends is rallying around the solution.”

Helpful Links:IMF's Support For a $75/ton Carbon Tax: https://blogs.imf.org/2019/10/10/fiscal-policies-to-curb-climate-change/Students For Carbon Dividends: https://www.s4cd.org/Economists' Statement: https://www.clcouncil.org/economists-statement/CCL Monthly Action Sheet: http://cclusa.org/actionsheet

Interested in learning more about what it takes and key details to remember when leading a virtual lobby meeting with a member of Congress or staff? 

Join CCL Northeast Regional Coordinator Iona Lutey  for a training that will review the role of a lobby team leader, how they assign team roles, coordinate practice times and how to handle other special situations.

Skip ahead to the following section(s):The Importance of Leads (4:21)Advance Planning (8:35)Pre-Lobby Meeting Suggestions (19:28) Expressing Leadership (27:48)Meeting Debrief & Filing Minutes (39:35)

Additional Resources: Presentation slides: http://cclusa.org/lobbylead Training on CCL Community: https://community.citizensclimate.org/topics/working-with-congress/lobbying-401

Recent updates to the Personal Carbon Dividend Calculator help make it even an easier--to-use online tool to estimate the financial outcome of the policy for an individual household under the first-year carbon dioxide fee of $15 per metric ton. It's a way to take the abstract statistical findings of the Household Impact Study down to the personal level.

Join Rick Knight, CCE's Research Coordinator and Bryan Hermsen, CCL's IT Administrator and Applications Developer as they walk through the updates for this CCL-created powerful tool for all CCL volunteers.

Calculator Link:https://energyinnovationact.org/carbon-dividend-calculator/

This tool is a handy way to answer questions from friends, family, interested parties at a tabling event or presentation, or potential supporters who need a clearer idea of how carbon fee and dividend policies work. It can be used to create case studies for households in a particular Congressional District or town and can also be used to find out how certain lifestyle change will affect your bottom line under our policy.

Skip ahead to the following section(s):What is the Calculator? (2:20)What's been updated? (5:39)Where can I access it? (8:43)Calculator Case Studies (10:42)What about negative results & how do I use it? (19:14)

Presentation slides: http://cclusa.org/calculator-trainingTraining Page on Community: https://community.citizensclimate.org/resources/item/19/133Follow us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/citizensclimatelobbyTwitter: http://twitter.com/citizensclimate/

Join Dr. Dave Christian, Utah State University Professional and Scientific Psychology Professor for a training that will show you how to use Motivational Interviewing to more effectively connect with your members of Congress, local leaders, or even members of your own CCL group.

“Motivational Interviewing” is a communication style that fosters collaboration and offers you as an advocate a package of skills to collaborate with anyone, especially “difficult people.” As a well-regarded professional approach Motivational Interviewing has thirty years of research across many fields and more than 1,000 studies demonstrating its effectiveness.

Skip ahead to the following section(s):What Is Motivational Interviewing? (2:03)The Spirit of Motivational Interviewing (PACE) (8:58)Core Skills: OARS (23:04)Live Role-Play Demonstration (31:17)Next Steps (43:25)Presentation slides: http://cclusa.org/motivational-interviewingTraining Page on Community: https://community.citizensclimate.org/resources/item/19/123Follow us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/citizensclimatelobbyTwitter: http://twitter.com/citizensclimate/

Tatiana Schlossberg is the author of the new book, Inconspicuous Consumption.  In it she highlights just how good we are at being bad when it comes to fossil fuel pollution. She exposes the pollution generated by four major industries--Fuel, Food, Internet, and Fashion. About the book, Bill McKibben writes, “[Schlossberg] deserves real credit for coming through her journey into the guts of the consumer machine with a clarifying insight: We aren’t going to solve our problems one consumer at a time. We’re going to need to do it as societies and civilizations, or not at all.”

In her conversation with host, Peterson Toscano, Schlossberg dives into the the vast world of fashion and the extreme pollution the industry produces, and how this pollution contributes to global warming. She focuses on specific sectors including denim and the production of jeans.

In writing about cotton, Schlossberg points out, “It’s grown in more than sixty-five countries around the world, makes up about one-third of all the fibers used in textiles, takes up about 3 percent of global agricultural land, and has a big carbon footprint: producing the world’s cotton supply for the use in textiles results in 107.5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year.” 

In addition to creating pollution, growing cotton and manufacturing cotton textiles demand a massive amount of water. “Producing one kilogram of cotton requires somewhere between 1,800 and 7,660 gallons of water, depending on where its grown,” according to Schlossberg. Once harvested, the cotton is then transformed into fabrics like denim, a process that is also water intensive. Schlossberg states, “as much as 2,900 gallons can be used to produce a single pair of pants (using conventional methods), mostly because of the dyeing and finishing.”  

When it comes to the alternatives to cotton, like synthetics, Schlossberg reveals the tremendous greenhouse gas emissions and micro-fiber pollution created every year as a result of the manufacture, use, washing, and disposing of synthetic fabrics. The company that pioneered synthetic fabric, Patagonia, is now hard at work looking for solutions and alternatives. Schlossberg warns pollution from fashion is increasing because of the growing industry of fast fashion, where cheap quick production comes with a hidden ecological price tag. 

In her book and this podcast episode, Schlossberg does a great job of pointing out the many sources of pollution that come from the world of fashion. She readily admits she does not provide many solutions. Her job is to help us understand the scale of the problem. She recognizes the response needs to be in relation to the size of the problem. Individual efforts are not nearly enough. The role of politicians and the political process is vital to bringing about the changes in policy we need. In addition, the role of citizens speaking out about climate change is more important than ever.

Schlossberg helps us consume this heavy topic with plenty of spoonfuls of sugar; her humor, warmth, and hope shine through.  

The Art House

What does it take to create a poetic masterpiece that is also able to express the complex emotions we feel around climate change? Poet Catherine Pierce describes her process crafting her moving poem, Anthropocene Pastoral  Host, Peterson Toscano produces an Art House segment heavily influenced by the podcast Song Exploder. They invite a musician to unpack a song and talk about almost every aspect of it and their creative process. In the Art House, Pierce does something similar for us with Anthropocene Pastoral. The poem first appeared in the American Poetry Review. 

Inspired by the California Super Bloom of 2017, Pierce captures the strangeness of living in a world that is rapidly and dangerously changing but at the same time can be unseasonably pleasant and beautiful. (Tatiana Schlossberg wrote about a Super Bloom for the New York Times.) 

Pierce opens the poem with the line, "In the beginning the ending was beautiful.”

In the conversation she reveals the many choices she made as a poet to create the haunting mood of the poem and the lush landscape in it filled with a riot of images, animals, and life. She explains some of the techniques and devices she uses to construct the poem. Then she reads the poem for us.

You can read more of Catherine Pierce's climate change themed poetry online including High Dangerous and Planet.  Pierce’s last book of poetry, The Tornado is the World  is about an EF-4 tornado/extreme weather. The filmmaker Isaac Ravishankara produced a beautiful short film out of one of the poems in the collection, "The Mother Warns the Tornado.” 

Catherine Pierce is the co-director of the Writing Program at Mississippi State University, and the author of the award winning collection of poetry, Famous Last Words. She is working on a new book of poetry, Danger Days, which continues her exploration of climate change. It will be available in autumn 2020.

Puzzler

Students from Susquehanna University answer last month's puzzler question. Victor, a middle school student is freaking out because of climate change. “What could I even do about?” What does he need to hear?

We also get inspiration from elementary students at the River Valley Nature School who gave a presentation at the Climate Strike event held in Lewisburg, PA.

New Puzzler Question:

After attending the recent climate strikes you ran into your cousin, Kristan. She saw news reports about events around the world. She says, “I love the sign—system change not climate change, but it seems like a total fantasy. They expect everyone to go vegan or something? What systems can we change that will make any difference with climate change? ”

Kristan needs some help envisioning the kind of change that you are pursuing. How would you answer Kristan?

Leave your name, contact info, and where you are from. Get your answer in by October, 15, 2019. You can email your answers to radio @ citizensclimate.org or leave a voicemail of 3 minutes or less at 518.595.9414. (+1 if calling from outside the USA.)

Dig Deeper

The Price of Fast Fashion (Nature)

Making Climate Change Fashionable—The Garment Industry Takes on Global Warming (Forbes)

We Have No Idea How Bad Fashion Actually Is for the Environment—But it’s definitely not good. (Racked)

Synthetic Microfiber Pollution (Patagonia)

Waste Not, If You want to Help Secure the Future of the Planet. (NY Times article by Tatiana Schlossberg)

You can hear Citizens’ Climate Radio on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, SoundCloud, Podbean, Northern Spirit Radio, Google Play, PlayerFM, and TuneIn Radio. Also, feel free to connect with other listeners, suggest program ideas, and respond to programs in the Citizens’ Climate Radio Facebook group or on Twitter at @CitizensCRadio.

If you listen on iTunes, please consider rating and reviewing us!

Lobbying can be both exciting and intimidating. Being prepared is one way to reduce anxiety.

Join CCL Director of Field Development Elli Sparks for a training that will walk you through CCL's step-by-step process for preparing for your meetings in Washington, D.C. with Congress and/or their staff, including research tips, available CCL tools, lobby meeting roles, the value of practice, and the power of listening.

Skip ahead to the following section(s):Resources For Preparing To Lobby (5:59)Roles in Your Meeting (19:16)Supporting Asks (24:06) The Importance of Practice (38:43)Sample Practice Meeting (43:21)

Presentation slides: http://cclusa.org/planning-your-meetingTraining Page on Community: https://community.citizensclimate.org/resources/item/19/185Follow us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/citizensclimatelobbyTwitter: http://twitter.com/citizensclimate/

How did American politics get to be so dysfunctional? It has a lot to do with psychology, and our guest this month, Jonathan Haidt, will help us wrap our heads around this phenomenon. A Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business, he is the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt’s book explains the origins of the human moral sense and how variations in moral intuitions can help explain the polarization and dysfunction of American politics.

Helpful Links: Monthly Action Sheet: http://cclusa.org/actionsheethttps://www.openmindplatform.orghttps://righteousmind.com/about-the-book/discussions-of-the-book/CCL Youth Outreach: [email protected] out more at https://www.citizensclimatelobby.org

Join CCL Communications Coordinator Flannery Winchester for a training that walks through the various media resources CCL's staff offers. We'll cover Letter to the Editor opportunities, op-eds, editorial packets, and press releases: not just what they are, but where you can find them on CCL Community and how you can use each of them in your local media market. Flannery will also highlight the important role of Media Manager for CCL chapters and how you can sign up to find out more.

Skip ahead to the following section(s):LTE Opportunities (5:09)Op-Ed Opportunities (8:50)Editorial Media Packets (11:54)Press Releases (16:28)Media Manager Role (20:33)

Tonight’s slides: http://cclusa.org/media-resources

CCL Resource: https://community.citizensclimate.org/resources/item/19/372Follow us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/citizensclimatelobbyTwitter: http://twitter.com/citizensclimate/

Join Dr. Kristina Dahl, co-author of the Union of Concerned Scientist's recent report "Killer Heat in the United States: Climate Choices and the Future of Dangerously Hot Days."

Dr. Dahl will review the main findings of the report, the importance of communicating local impacts from climate change, as well as how to use the Union of Concerned Scientists' new tool where you can see an estimated number of extreme heat days for cities and counties in the US in your own local outreach and meetings. We'll also review where you can find the rest of CCL's Local Impacts Resources on CCL Community.

Extreme Heat Report & Tool: https://ucsusa.org/killer-heat

Background on the Analysis (3:14)About the Heat Index & Scenarios (6:39)Mid- and Late-Century Projections (7:50)Takeaways & Tool (12:43)Questions (15:26)Finding Local Impacts Resources on CCL Community (18:30)

Tonight’s slides: http://cclusa.org/extreme-heat

CCL Resource: https://community.citizensclimate.org/resources/item/19/424Follow us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/citizensclimatelobby

Twitter: http://twitter.com/citizensclimate/

Join George Marshall, Climate Outreach's Co-Founder & Director of Training and Consultancy (and former CCL Monthly Speaker) along with Tom Erb, Partner Relations Coordinator, Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition at The World Bank in a training that will help CCL volunteers improve our communications around carbon pricing policy based on the main findings and recommendations in the Guide to Communicating Carbon Pricing report (Partnership for Market Readiness & Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition, 2018).

Skip ahead to the following section(s):Background & Key Findings (2:53)Improving The Standard Narrative (16:41)Challenges To Communicating (27:47)Energy Innovation Act Applications (33:58)Ground Rules for Effective Conversations (42:13)

Presentation Slides: http://cclusa.org/communicating-carbon-pricing

CCL Community Training Page: https://community.citizensclimate.org/resources/item/19/423

Follow us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/citizensclimatelobby

Twitter: http://twitter.com/citizensclimate/