Be a climate voter

Letters to the editor in The Parkersburg News and Sentinel by Eric Engle

Oct 17, 2020

Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action is a voluntary association on file with the WV Secretary of State’s Office and works on both sides of the Ohio River to organize, mobilize, educate on and build coalitions around addressing anthropogenic (human-caused) global climate change. We have been around for 5 years this month and are busier than ever! Our current major focus is encouraging the people of West Virginia and Ohio and the surrounding region to be climate voters.

We have over 400 yard signs out in several counties, but predominately Wood and Washington, that say on one side “Climate Voter Make America Green Again” and on the other side “Protect What’s Ours Be A Climate Voter.” We are well on our way to having 500 of these signs out! We also have 6 different billboards in Parkersburg, Vienna and Marietta sending messages like “The future will be green or not at all” and “Don’t deny our future! Be A Climate Voter,” with a picture featuring 7 young and prominent climate activists globally. In addition, we’re running about a 15 second radio ad with a climate poetry reading from two of our members the entire month of October, and we have run TV and radio Public Service Announcements from a contest we did with local colleges where the students created the PSAs and we offered cash prizes and paid to run them on television.

We’re in the process of sending out climate voter postcards that send this same message to everyone we can think of in our social circles, families and among our membership and their social circles and families. We can frequently be found on the editorial pages of the Parkersburg News and Sentinel and Marietta Times and we have a strong social media presence on Facebook and Instagram, a YouTube Channel, a website (movclimateaction.org), and have more social media coming (Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok).

Prior to the devastating pandemic, we had a very successful climate education program in both public and private schools reaching middle and high school science classrooms with a nonpartisan program that conformed to state science education standards with the full knowledge and approval of Superintendents’ Offices, administrations and science teachers, who were always present during presentations. We reached approximately 4,000 to 5,000 students and hope to continue this work when it is once again safe to do so.

We ask that you vote for candidates at all levels of government who will take the climate crisis we’re living in seriously and act meaningfully to address it with public policy. Together, we can address this crisis, but much of the work starts with governments, wealth and asset owners and managers, investors, insurers, bankers and financiers and others in both the public and private sectors who can alter our trajectory globally. For ourselves, our children, grandchildren and the rest of posterity, and for countless other species of flora and fauna with which we have evolved on this incredible planet, be a climate voter!