Creating THE inspiration resource for ambitious climate goals

We’re building public awareness of inspiring, hopeful climate goals to spark new policies, strategies, events, campaigns, organizations, and coalitions around them. Audiences have mostly been hearing about the urgency of the climate crisis — not about how people, projects, and solutions working to reverse global warming and restore our climate. In 2019, ClimateChangesEverything partnered with the Foundation for Climate Restoration (F4CR) gain to gain initial support from individuals to create a sponsored strategic advocacy journalism Special Project at Grist, a leading media outlet on climate. From April to November 2019 we published six articles focused on hopeful news!

Now we’re on pause as we recruit a team to continue the series. We intend to launch, promote and moderate a crowdfunding, crowdsourcing community of readers. That will enable many people donating modestly to effectively catalyze publication of a continuing stream of articles about climate restoration campaigns and solutions. We plan to do this on the Patreon crowfunding platform.

For Phase 2, we are proposing:  We nominate for Grist to profile opinion leaders, entrepreneurs, and media figures talking about new strategies and solutions to reverse  global warming and restore our climate. Grist’s profile includes other peoples’ reactions to their perspectives. A followup could be a dialogue packaged as a video, a podcast, and a transcript.

We see this as a promising early project for ClimateChangesEverything’s new ClimateSparking project. We’re looking for candidate Climate Project Managers with crowdfunding experience and media production experience and for two Climate Projects Sponsors to support them. And if you’d like to be one of the founding donors, please contact us.

We’ve already published six stories about Climate Restoration

We sponsored six articles from April to November 2019:

1. The breakthrough that could actually reverse climate change profiles Blue Planet’s solution to capture restoration-scale amounts of carbon dioxide in synthetic limestone for roads and buildings.
2. In the warming Arctic, a promising solution to climate change profiles the non-profit Ice911 and its solution to restore Arctic ice.
3. Everyone has a climate plan — which ones get us to a livable future? reviews the leading climate plans, asks whether any of them will get us where we need, and introduces climate restoration to new audiences.
4. For young people, restoring our climate means restoring hope explores that with youth climate activists Alexandra Villaseñor (14) and Daphne Frias (21).
5. One leader’s journey to climate restoration profiles Rick Parnell, CEO of the Foundation for Climate Restoration; he played a central role in organizing the Global Climate Restoration Forum at the UN.
6. Candidates are finally talking about climate change, but they’re asking all the wrong questions was published at the time the third version of the Climate Restoration Emergency Action Report Card for presidential candidates and profiles Paul Zeitz, founder of Build A Movement 2020 and senior policy advisor at the Foundation for Climate Restoration.

The precedents and inspiration that got us started

To image what a ClimateHope Media Project could do, we looked back at how information and insights spread and spurred the global recognition of the need to switch from fossil fuels to renewables ASAP.

In 2011, the UK organization Carbon Tracker released the Unburnable Carbon research report. It didn’t make waves broadly. But a year later, Bill McKibben’s eye-opening article in Rolling Stone, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, jolted climate activists and investors. His allies joined in to promote divestment and make memes of Keep It In the Ground and Fossil Fuel Resistance. In 2017 that led to our worldwide Fossil Free movement.

The transformation we seek

At a critical point for climate action evolving toward Climate Restoration, we’ve enlisted Grist as ou editorial partner, hoping that our goals and our media platform will gain significant visibility and influence on the momentous changes we need.

We aim to shift the definition of climate success, starting with thought leaders, experts, entrepreneurs, and activists. Today most leaders and influencers limit themselves to the practical and achievable. They mostly call for global action to decarbonize everything. Their cautious, best-case goal can be summarized as  “Avoid the Worst Consequences of Climate Change.”  

Now we’re promoting more inspiring goals: “Reverse Global Warming” and “Restore a Healthy Climate.” We invite people to ask themselves, “Why don’t we aim to give a world we dream of to future generations?” These goals may sound visionary and even grandiose. But we’re developing the case that they’re technically feasible by 2050 — and they can be affordable and achievable.