Lesson 2 Supporting Organizations

As was the case with using your voice and your time, there are tons of organizations that you could potentially get involved with or contribute to, even if you don't have time to spend with the group. These organizations are across the US, available to look for by geography, by specific interests, by profession, by age.

We certainly can't try and tell you which is the group that you might want to belong to. One group that I think does good work, even though it hasn't been overly successful up to this point, is the Citizens Climate Lobby. This group is trying to get a carbon tax passed -- a national carbon tax -- the money of which then gets recycled into the economy so that people get checks back.

This means that you are not hurting the economy. You may be changing the economy, because some sectors will win and some sectors will lose -- but you're not taking all of that money out of the economy the way you could be with other forms of taxation. The Citizens Climate Lobby does great stuff in terms of getting people to Washington and other places to meet with and to lobby legislators. They've got it down to a science! So, that's certainly an organization that you might want to support with your time or your money (or both!).

In the learning activity, I'll provide you with some other organizations that if you have extra money, would do good things.

Even if you're not particularly concerned about your carbon footprint, the carbon contributions claim concept that we talked about in the carbon offsets section is something to consider. Organizations like milkywire.com are sending money to organizations that are protecting indigenous tribal rights to forests in Brazil -- an effective way of slowing deforestation.

There are many examples where organizations are trying to figure out what's the best way to spend money to advance climate goals. Carbon contribution claims might be useful to you, even separate from your carbon footprint. It could simply give you a good way to spend any extra money in a way that you can be confident that someone has really tried to figure out how to spend that money for the climate.