Month: March 2019

What can I do about it?  When it comes to the climate crisis, all of us have thought or expressed that sentiment, even—at some point or another—the most passionate environmental activists.  It can be uttered out of well-meaning curiosity… or genuine bewilderment… or political frustration… or apathetic abdication.  Regardless of which mindset it reflects, it is a universally valid—and perfectly understandable—acknowledgment of the overwhelming complexities of the problem of climate change.  What can any of us, as individuals, really do about it?

Especially when individual efforts simply aren’t going to move the needle on this at the speed and scale required; we have ten years, per the IPCC, to halve our greenhouse-gas emissions if we’re going to keep global warming below catastrophic levels.  By all means:  swap out your lightbulbs, compost your trash, take public transportation whenever possible—but understand the time when “small” personal actions like that could’ve actually made a meaningful difference has passed.

Now this existential crisis must be addressed legislatively, with bold and effective public policy, hence the reason so much has been made of the Green New Deal resolution, and the less-publicized but no-less-crucial Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would (finally) put a price on carbon pollution.  As exciting and promising as those steps are, though, in some respects they only make an answer to our intimate question—What can I do about climate change?—seem yet further out of reach.

Take me, for instance.  A recovering screenwriter, I’m happy to illustrate at length the storytelling transgressions of Ghostbusters II, or mathematically quantify the similarities between Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger’s interpretations of the Joker (they’re precisely 60% alike, for the record)—ya know, intellectual stuff—but good luck putting those “skills” to use in service for environmental-policy initiatives, right?

Well, not so fast.  Here’s how a bunch of ordinary laypeople banded together to do exactly that—to make a legislative difference in relatively short order—and how a few tricks I picked up in the Hollywood trenches actually came in handy.