Photo credit: Carbon Nation
Aug. 18, 2010
By Jessica Tobacman
The city of Chicago hosted a celebration on Aug. 10, 2010, that included a screening of the new movie, Carbon Nation, at Millennium Park.
Before the movie showing began, the stage at the front of the nearly full Jay Pritzker Pavilion was the setting for several live performances and speeches. One of the most memorable was an energetic, modern dance by the Happiness Club, a group of Chicago youth who sing, dance, rap and create original material with a message about taking responsibility for fixing environmental problems. There was also stand-up comedy, a video and a live song featuring Eric Petersen in full costume and makeup as the title character of Shrek the Musical on Broadway in Chicago, and speeches from the makers of Carbon Nation, including Director and Producer Peter Byck.
"We’ve made Carbon Nation to give a majority of people an entertaining, informed and pragmatic primer about why it’s incredibly smart to be a part of the new, low-carbon economy: it’s good business, it emboldens national and energy security and it improves health and the environment," Byck said.
Carbon Nation combines an approach detailing information about global warming and its effects with one describing potential responses to it. "Our film is a climate change solutions movie that doesn't even care if you believe in climate change," said Producer Chrisna van Zyl.
The film advocates increasing the amounts of wind power, geothermal energy and solar energy used, increasing fuel efficiency, using algae as an energy source, and improving the energy efficiency of buildings. It states how these responses are leading to more clean energy jobs.
Other solutions include helping to stop deforestation and sequestering carbon in forests, farms and pastures, all of which would help to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Deforestation occurs in locations such as the Amazon partly because of the tremendous demand for meat around the world. The movie suggests that it would be helpful if omnivores avoided meat one night a week.
In Roscoe, Texas, at the same time that the town’s Dairy Queen closed, a wind farm developed. “[This] has turned out to be a blessing,” said Cliff Etheredge, a West Texas cotton farmer turned wind farm organizer. About 20% of the electricity used in the United States could come from wind energy, stated Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, a federal research lab.
Another option for energy is algae. It efficiently converts carbon dioxide into energy, taking it in and returning it to the atmosphere. Increasing the use of algae would be an inexpensive way to decrease emissions.
Making buildings more energy-efficient is another key approach to addressing global warming. This has the potential to decrease electricity use worldwide by 20%, partly because of the large dependence on coal, a dirty fuel, as an energy source.
A straightforward way to see the difference that green building can make is to compare the variation in temperature between a black roof, which is between 160 and 170 degrees, and a green roof, which is between 80 and 90 degrees. In addition, a green roof cools the ambient environment around a building, decreasing it by 1 degree. White roofs also reflect sunlight.
Retrofitting structures with environmentally-friendly home improvements will lead to thousands of contracts and billions of jobs, said Van Jones, a green jobs activist and founder of Green for All, a national organization working to build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Ridding homes of old refrigerators is an easy way to raise energy efficiency. Many workers are weatherizing homes in low-income communities. “It’s the people that nobody’s heard of that are going to solve the problem,” Jones said.
“We need a World War II level of mobilization,” Jones said. World War II involved producing more than 100,000 planes in several months.
The movie depicts Jones’ close relationship with his father, who passed away relatively recently. His father was a junior high school principal who inspired Jones in his current work by going beyond the expectations others had for him. He fixed up a building in one year, instead of in the five years that were allotted for a particular project.
“I’m doing this for him and myself. This is the most beautiful thing in the world, right here,” Jones said, pointing to workers weatherizing a home. “People want to turn this ship around.”
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