Climate change is a sobering subject. And with national gridlock on the subject, some people have simply turned away, but others are organizing at the local level. In Charlottesville, for example, several competitions are underway to make eco-friendly change easy and fun.
It’s a Wednesday night at Kardinal Hall where at least a hundred people have gathered after work for a beer and a bite – but in the back room there’s something more happening.
“Scientists agree that lower meat consumption is better for the environment,” a woman calls into a microphone. “What are the three greenhouse gases that animal farming releases into the atmosphere?”
The Charlottesville Climate Collaborative is hosting a game of Climate Change Trivia – one of many programs it’s organized to inspire, support and reward changes that reduce the community’s carbon footprint.
“People are really excited about the possibility of actually addressing an issue they really care about,” says Claire Habel, residential program manager. “You get to involve your friends. Folks are really jazzed about it.”
Karl Quist and his family, for example, joined the Home Energy Challenge. Friends hosted a party where they learned about the competition and a special website where they got ideas and calculated the impact of what they could do.
“I had my daughter go around the house and inventory every light that we had, so I knew how many we needed, what wattage. I replaced every single lightbulb in the house with LEDs.”
Those LED bulbs use 75% less energy than the old ones. Quist also got a thermostat that could be programmed to cut back on heating and air conditioning.
“The upstairs during the day, nobody’s really using that, so we condition that less during the day. In the winter we let it get colder, and in the summer we let it get hotter.”
And Quist replaced the family’s SUV with a plug-in vehicle. That raised his electric bill a little, but he saved about $100 a month on gasoline.
“From the energy standpoint, it’s equivalent to having a car that has like 115 miles to the gallon,” he says.
Those and other changes made him a winner of this year’s Home Energy Challenge. The Collaborative also sponsors a competition called the Better Business Challenge, inspiring Peter and Liza Borches, who own 18 car dealerships in Virginia, to install 480 rooftop solar panels over Colonial Nissan in Charlottesville.
“Ninety-three percent of this dealership is powered by the sun,” Peter says. “Everything that we use in this building, including vehicle charging – we have electrical vehicles. Five months out of the last eleven we didn’t have a utility bill.”
And, he adds, the excitement is contagious.
“We’re underway to put solar on our Subaru dealership in Richmond right now and evaluated a proposal to band five dealerships together and go 98% carbon neutral!”
In addition to organizing contests and activities, the Charlottesville Climate Collaborative advises local governments on ways to reduce their use of energy, and it works with schools to inspire the next generation of environmental activists. Anna Sneider of Western Albemarle High School, Sophie Farr of Tandem Friends School and Viv Shields from St. Ann’s-Belfield got support in organizing a conference on sustainable schools – spreading the gospel of solar panels and gardens, turning off lights when leaving the room, recycling, and composting.
Local organizers say they hope to serve as a model for other communities unwilling to wait for federal leadership.
“Climate change can be an overwhelming problem,” says Susan Kruse, executive director of the Charlottesville Climate Collaborative, “but when you offer people a path forward to solutions they can take in their own lives or in their businesses or in their communities, they’re ready and eager to take action.”
She adds that there are no big prizes for contest winners – those who know, for example, that animal farms produce methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide – but the energy saving competitions allow people to brag that they’ve lost huge amounts of weight – from their carbon footprint.
