What if every morning, you got that invitation? You, the climate hawk, activist, educator, scientist, entrepreneur, or the civic, corporate or political leader.
And then you and millions could click on and pass along a free, eye-opening quick video climate message: moving, funny, inspiring, alarming, ridiculous, thought-provoking, urgent, galvanizing.
Rationale & Evolution
ClimateMinute.org will be a bottom-up, informal, open-minded ecumenical collaboration, ignoring all turf, because, as 50 million people just heard spoken word activist Prince Ea memorably say, “Whatever you’re fighting for…it won’t matter in the least, because if we don’t all work together to save the environment, we will be equally extinct.”
After a transparent, day-long selection and development process, at 9PM PT/midnight ET, a diverse young team of curators and producers will unleash tomorrow’s climate news flash, sound bite, image, insight, or comeback. It will start as a low-tech, narrated, mainly radio minute with accompanying still photos and video of memorable speaker quotes. We’ll email, text, and Tweet a link plus optional transcript to subscribers.
Tip submissions will come from everywhere. Growing numbers of us will share what we were moved to do after watching or reading a ClimateMinute.
ClimateMinute can become a wellspring for the climate world. Its archive and extras will enlighten and energize newbies and challenge and expose deniers. Making life easier for journalists, it will turn highlight breaking news, with transcripts.
Who (Part 1)
We don’t need a traditional pathway, with savvy climate veterans and experienced media professionals as curators/producers/promoters. The urgent climate crisis presents the opportunity for a more sustainable way!
We’ll recruit enthusiastic, committed, diverse climate activists. People aged 15-25 are eager to have their first public impact — and the hours will work for them. Paired teams with members in different time zones can ease some deadline pressure. And those stellar climate and media experts will be mentors and advisors.
A sponsoring group will make available stipends or honoraria to teams or their institutions. Prizes and awards can go out as subscribers vote on top weekly and monthly ClimateMinute picks.
Distribution
ClimateMinute will appear in a regular spot on the blogs, streams, and home pages of individuals, groups, campaigns, governments, and online, social, and traditional media. Executives at firms eager to show their commitment to go beyond “business as usual” can take an important no-cost step by featuring the feed on their companies’ home pages.
Launch
Will you help shape and build ClimateMinute? Will you help create the prototypes that will start making it real?
First steps? Get a few advisors on board; reach out to organizational and academic watering holes where our first team members hang out; secure philanthropic seed funding; create illustrative pilot ClimateMinutes.
BY THE WAY: We don’t care who gets the credit or takes the lead; we just want ClimateMinute to happen. (Felix Kramer, initiating this idea, at CalCars.org conducted a popular truth-telling for the auto industry in 2005-2007 as part of the successful 10-year campaign to keep the pressure on auto companies to build plug-in hybrids.)
Who (Part 2)
Core players start with:
- Hosting sponsor(s)
- Curatorial/editorial/production teams
- On-screen anchors and voices
- Advisory board
- Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and distribution teams
Possible players
We welcome your suggestions!
- Hosting candidates/distribution partners (alphabetically): 350.org, Buzzfeed, Citizen Engagement Lab, Citizens Climate Lobby, Climate Nexus, Climate One, Climate Progress, Climate Reality, Earthweek, EcoAmerica, Facebook, Forecast The Facts, Grist, Guardian, InsideClimateNews, NextGen, TED, Vox.
- Curator team: send us suggestions or contact us to see our initial working list.
- Advisors: send us suggestions or contact us to see our initial working list.
Already in the game
We’re encouraged by what’s been tried. We all share a goal: to galvanize interest and action through urgent, important climate messages. We hope our approach can catch on quickly and broadly. We will learn from, and maybe partner with these and others:
- “Time to Wake Up” talks: delivered heroically on the Senate floor over 100 times since April, 2012 by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. (These speeches inspired the idea of ClimateMinute.)
- Climate Connections: a daily 90-second public radio program from the Yale Project on Climate Communications.
- iChange Competition: 248 university teams from 66 countries competed in 2013 to create 30-second video messages about climate change themes.
- Climate Cast: a weekly radio show on news, science, and solutions from Minnesota Public Radio.
- MassClimateMinute: despite its name, it’s actually an extended once-a-week podcast from the Massachusetts Climate Action Network.
- Earth Focus: a weekly environmental video news magazine on KCET and LinkTV.
- This Planet: curating and distributing 90-second video stories and a magazine.
- StarDate: a national radio science show produced daily since 1978 at the University of Texas.
What Climate Experiences Have Packed an Emotional Punch for You?
- Bill Nye The Science Guy: What to do about climate change? Talk about it! (May 2015)
- “Dear Future Generations: Sorry” by Prince Ea, seen by over 50 million people in a week (April 2015)
- Vatican climate meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon & Pope Francis (April 2015)
- Goldman Prize winners (April 2015, shown in photo at top)
- Obama loses it about climate despite his Anger Manager (April 2015)
- Under the Dome: Investigating China’s Smog by Chai Jing (March 2013)
- You Can Believe the Senator with a Snowball or Every Major American Scientific Society by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (February 2015)
- Vien Truong, environmental equity director at Greenlining Institute, tells her story (October 2014)
- Stephen Heinz of Rockefeller Family Foundation: John D. would have led the charge to clean energy (September 2014)
- Kelsey Juliana tells Bill Moyers at age 15 she sued Oregon’s Governor for for failing to protect her future (September 2014)
- Ex-Republican Congressman Bob Inglis at TEDx on his family’s impact on his thinking about climate (December 2013)
- Climate Name Change satire (August 2013)
- Venture capitalist John Doerr tells TED how his daughter confronted him on climate (March 2007)
- Alec Loorz videos since he was 12 in 2007 and became a climate activist
- The Girl Who Silenced the World for 5 Minutes: Severn Cullis-Suzuki at the 1992 Earth Summit