Climate Column: New Leaders Send Powerful Signal

The Argus Courier has asked our Campaign Director, Natasha Juliana, to write a monthly climate column for the newspaper. Here is the May installment:

NATASHA JULIANA
May 27, 2022

My uncle is a retired FBI agent and he has some stories you wouldn't believe are true. And he also said something a few months ago that really stuck with me. He was giving my 17-year-old daughter some advice about going off to college and being safe in the world and he explained to her that when something happens, a common human behavior is to look to others to see how to react, especially those in positions of authority. For example, if there was an alarming sound outside the classroom and the teacher kept on talking, not reacting at all, and my daughter looked around to find the rest of the students weren’t reacting, she’d most likely think, well, ok, that must not have been anything important, and would follow the pack, ignoring the noise. His caution to her was that she should always investigate that noise, even if others are ignoring it.

This could explain why climate action has had trouble gaining traction.

In August of 2021, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report that month was nothing less than "a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk. Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible.”

To be clear, this report was not written lightly. The working group that wrote this portion of the report was made up of 234 experts from 66 countries. What’s more, IPCC reports required consensus for every line! When 234 experts from 66 countries agree completely that the planet is in deep trouble we should all stop to investigate!

So, we hear brief reports on the news of scientists saying this is a code red climate emergency, but we look around and nobody seems to be reacting like it’s an emergency. Life goes on as usual. People complain about crazy high gas prices and brag about the cheap flights they booked across the country. Leaders say they plan to “fight climate change” but any movement seems small and slow, like no one is in any huge hurry to get going. 

That is why the work the Cool Petaluma Block Leaders are doing is so important. Block-by-block, across our city, life is beginning to change in beautiful and meaningful ways. These emergent leaders are inspiring their neighbors to not only sit up and take notice, but to start taking action. Only four months in and the program already has 45 active blocks with 177 active households who have reported 1,886 action for an estimated combined carbon savings of 697,623 pounds! An additional 40 Block Leaders were just trained this week and now they, too, will be heading out to form teams with their neighbors. 

Denise Toll is a retired sixth grade teacher who is loving her new role as a Block Leader. After calculating her household carbon footprint, her first thought was that she was already doing so much it would be hard to make a dent. But then she looked more closely at the list of action “recipes” provided by the Cool Block program and found there was plenty of room for improvement. That clothes line she had been meaning to hang up was suddenly installed and put to good use. Showers got significantly shorter and that water spent waiting to for it to get hot is now captured and used on plants. The household diet went to almost 100% vegan and the old worm bin was brought back to life for on-site composting. On and on it went. Toll finds that “the accountability to the group is an amazing motivator! And having the instant feedback of the carbon reduction built in to the checklist is perfect for a math and science person, like me.” And her team of eight households is on a roll with her. “We feel more powerful together.”

But even more powerful than the actual number of actions taken or pounds of carbon emissions saved is the signal these people are sending. The fact that hundreds of parents, teachers, business owners, religious leaders, you name it, are stepping up and volunteering large amounts of time and energy to organize their neighbors to take collective action is a powerful sign that there is, indeed, a climate emergency. These people have heard the alarm bell and have decided to react. Now, when others look around to determine how important climate action is, they will see their community’s response and know it is essential.

Natasha Juliana is the Campaign Director for Cool Petaluma. She can be reached at natashaj@coolpetaluma.org For information on how to get involved, visit coolpetaluma.org