“It was just the realization that they were not going to have the same kind of future that I always assumed I had when I was their age,” Kimball said. “The descriptions of what was likely to happen were just terrifying and totally not acceptable.”
The family started by cutting down energy use in their own household. Then Kimball decided to expand her efforts.
She helped found a group called Earth Care Indiana, an interfaith group of congregations that tries to cut down energy use of both churches and individuals. Through the program, Kimball developed an initiative called Task of the Month to encourage households to undertake one task per month that reduces environmental strain.
According to the Earth Care website, tasks include insulating water heaters, lowering water heater temperature to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in January and air-drying clothes during warm months. October’s task is to install attic insulation and seal and insulate ducts. These changes Kimball and Earth Care Indiana determined could yield household savings of up to $200 per year.
Task of the Month has since been adopted by other entities, among them the Monroe County Energy Challenge, Kimball said.
Kimball said she hopes those participating in the program will have a sizable, collective effect on climate change reduction.
“In a sense it’s making the whole problem smaller by giving you a discrete task to do each month,” Kimball said. “But at the same time it’s not insignificant because you’ve got gazillions of people doing that one task each month. A lot gets done, and you have the camaraderie and the community of doing it with other people.”
Other actions not part of the program can also be beneficial for the environment, Kimball said. She said reducing consumption of material goods and eating lower on the food chain help reduce carbon footprint significantly.
Although Kimball’s work has focused on individuals and households, delegates from many nations are looking to achieve the same outcome of carbon footprint reduction on a much larger scale at upcoming negotiations in Paris.
From Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will bring together about 25,000 international delegates in Paris, according to the conference’s website. The conference aims to create a legally binding agreement between countries to reduce net global greenhouse gas emissions and keep atmospheric temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.
Joint professor at School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Maurer School of Law, Daniel Cole teaches a course in climate law and policy.
Cole said any changes in climate change policy implemented at the Paris conference will likely be marginal at best but efforts might be gaining momentum, partly due to recent attention by world religious leaders and partly due to changes in public opinion.
“It finally seems to be getting through to people, at least on one side of the aisle, that climate change is happening,” Cole said. “It is substantially caused by human emissions, and the costs of not dealing with it would be very, very high over the coming centuries. At some point they start rising steeply.”
Cole said people near Bloomington are already experiencing these costs. Farmers in southern Indiana, for instance, have been forced to use costly pivot irrigation systems due to a decrease in rainfall.
These increasing real-life costs are what originally prompted Kimball to become a climate activist nine years ago.
“We decided we couldn’t just let the predictions come true,” Kimball said. “We had to do all we could to stop it.”
