On Saturday I volunteered with the Sierra Club at the Environmental Film Festival. My main job was to hand out programs, offer people raffle tickets, and get people to sign a petition asking Obama to be proactive about climate change. Initially I was a little anxious because I really didn’t know that much about Obama’s clean energy policies. Besides from the occasional article, this was new to me. I was interested in climate change, yet I was not an expert by any means.
The points brought up in the petition include to finalize a carbon, mercury, and air toxics pollution standards for new power plants, limit carbon pollution from existing power plants, and create a new ozone pollution standard.
I felt since I was advocating these points and asking others to pledge to fight for them, I should be more knowledgeable about the subject. Below are a couple of facts I looked up!
- Power plants are currently the dominant emitters of mercury (50 percent), acid gases (over 75 percent) and many toxic metals (20-60 percent) in the United States.
- The final emission standards will result in: preventing about 90 percent of the mercury in coal burned in power plants being emitted to the air; reducing 88 percent of acid gas emissions from power plants; and reducing 41 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants
http://www.epa.gov/airquality/powerplanttoxics/basic.html
Yet, I also realized that many of the people going to the film festival and signing the petitions weren’t experts. If they were experts they probably wouldn’t be going! They were here to learn. They may not have known everything about the current clean energy policies or specifics of climate change, yet they wanted to help. And at the end of the day, an expert’s signature on our petition form is equal to the signature of someone who is not as well informed. You do not need to be an expert to get a point across; you simply need to be invested and passionate.
James Balog, lead director of EIS, is a testament to this fact. In the film Chasing Ice he explains how he studied environmental science, yet didn’t like how modern science was centered on statistics. So instead he learned how to capture miraculous natural moments via a camera. This newfound skill resulted in the creation of Chasing Ice, an incredibly powerful movie documenting melting glaciers in Iceland and Greenland. He has reached a vast number of people and has shown them never before seen footage including the process of ice caps melting, crashing into the sea, and permanently receding. It is humbling to think this wondrous film started with a simple idea.
There is also a point in the film which I found particularly powerful, not for its breathtaking images, yet for a brief moment when James Balog speaks to his children. He says he wants his children to be able to watch the film and realize their father was advocating climate change awareness. He wasn’t passively sitting around, he was acting. Most of the time, people (myself included) believe in something, such as a strong sense of stewardship for the planet we live on, yet do not act on it. Largely, the most common excuse is, I am just one person, what can I do? Today, I saw normal, everyday people acting on beliefs. They were educating themselves, which will likely lead to them educating others. Simply by going to see a movie and signing a petition they were making a difference.
I would like to encourage everyone to watch at least part of one of the films they showed and share it with someone else. Just by engaging in this simple act you are getting a message across.
I had a chance to watch part of Chasing Ice. The trailer is below! It is only 2 minutes long and is truly amazing. Please watch it!!!