 to this Earth Day event. We're so glad you could be here this evening. And we're putting on a light touch on a serious concern, the climate crisis. So we're bringing tonight a stand-up comic who is using humor to educate and provoke action on climate change. And also, we're going to end with a short film that I made that features main solutionaries who are building the resilient future that we all imagine and want. In between, like Matt said, we're going to be out in some breakout rooms where we're going to each have an opportunity to reflect and share on a couple of questions we've prepared. Matt said, I'm Andy Bird. I've been a decades-long activist and volunteer community organizer with Sierra Club here in Maine and with other environmental groups. Four years ago, I became a film producer. I was intrigued that there were so many Maine climate activists whose stories I felt were really powerful. And I wanted to bring them to audiences around the state. Last year, I made a second film, which you're going to see tonight, Maine Road Trip to the Future, that documents Maine people's stories both through interviews and photographs, the solutions that they've implemented in communities all across the state. For me, these solutions, rooftop solar, community gardens, and so on, they really represent people's stories. And they are the hopeful signs that we're moving in the right direction. Even as we read on the front page how climate change is accelerating. And I believe that people's stories can change hearts. They can inspire actions and build the movement. So we're going to begin our hour together with Jason Wentworth, who's a longtime environmental activist, eco-conscious, businessman, former state legislator, and now stand-up comedian and solar farm developer and installer. Jason has a natural gift for humor. And about a year ago, he decided to try his hand at stand-up comedy around his deep concern for the earth and the climate emergency. So Maine, Maine Sierra Club has been really intrigued by his routines and is eager to help communities and schools plan climate comedy coffee houses this year, featuring his work and others. You can contact the Sierra Club office for more information about that. So without further ado, take it away, Jason. Thank you, Andy. Thank you. That was a very nice introduction. Maybe oversold my skills a little bit. As Andy said, I've been trying to do climate change comedy now for a little over a year, and it turned out to be a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be. And now I'm finding that trying to do climate change comedy in the middle of a pandemic is really, really hard. It's kind of like trying to tell cancer jokes to a room full of smokers. It's very dangerous territory. And doing comedy on Zoom is a whole new experience for me. For a comedian, if you can't hear the laughs, it is a lot like telling bad jokes. And that's a little bit painful. The nice thing about Zoom is that you can easily mute any hecklers that you might have, and you don't really have to be concerned about what you're wearing from the waist down. So the only thing that's normal about tonight for me is that I did not prepare as much as I hoped to. I thought I'd start with just a little thank you to the unsung heroes in this crisis we're in, all of those folks who work in hospitals and delivering things, and the people who are really on the front line risking their lives to make our lives better. Particularly, I wanted to thank the craft distillers in Maine who have converted over to making hand sanitizer. Really overnight, they completely reversed their business model. They are now making an inexpensive product that can actually help prevent premature death. So a thank you to them. Most of my material tonight is new, so it's a little bit like doing an open mic. Only I can't really tell when things fall flat. We're celebrating the 50th anniversary of Earth Day this year, and it's 50 years of preaching to a shrinking choir. But actually, I don't remember the first Earth Day. I was four years old at the time. Maybe some of you do remember. My parents had decided to join the Back to the Land movement that year, and so we were taking up homesteading on 100-acre organic mosquito sanctuary in southern Maine. And April was really the end of mud season at that time in Maine. And so I think on the 22nd of April, 1970, we were probably knee-deep in the Earth Day. And so I don't really remember it, but a lot happened. A lot happened in that time. Some major accomplishments, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the EPA was started. McDonald served its billionth customer. And now, unfortunately, since then, it seems like we haven't been able to accomplish things on the same level. We've mostly been defending those accomplishments from the early days. It was estimated that 20 million people turned out on the first Earth Day across the US. If Donald Trump had been counting, it would have been 100 million. But that's a lot of people to celebrate one cause. I don't think that since then, we have had 20 million Americans spend a day devoted to the same cause. Unless you can count binge-watching Tiger King as a cause, but here we are at a time where more than ever, we really need to focus our efforts on the environmental crisis that we face. But what better way to celebrate Earth Day, the 50th anniversary, than with a massive global reduction in pollution and greenhouse gases? A couple months ago, people planning these events would never have imagined that we would celebrate under these conditions. And though it's a little bit like celebrating grandma's death because you finally get an inheritance, I think it's OK to feel good about the fact that we're showing ourselves. We really can change things in a dramatic way. This tragedy, this global tragedy, has definitely hurt a lot of people. But I think all of us will admit that there have been some silver linings to it. We've learned some things about each other and ourselves that we might not have known otherwise. And I think, for example, it's created a great opportunity to push the Green New Deal through in Congress. If you remember the last attempt, the only really solid argument the opponents had was that it would destroy the economy. And we've certainly taken care of that argument. So what do they have left at this point? What we've also learned in this pandemic is that fear actually can be a motivator. We've been told for a couple of decades now that we shouldn't try to use fear, shame, guilt, or judgment in the climate change movement because it doesn't motivate people to change. But I think we may need to re-question those rules. I know certainly when I saw the first studies come out that showed that those tactics really didn't work, my first thought was, well, maybe I misinterpreted the success of the Catholic Church. And my second thought was, this is really tragic for me because that's my skill set pretty much. And now I'm being told I can't use it. But fear, of course, it does have its problems. If you use too much of it, people tend to panic. And I think the toilet paper issue we had these past months is good evidence of that. And even government can panic. Like the president ordering an auto manufacturer to make ventilators didn't seem really well thought out to me. GM's first prototype that came out had four cupholders. And so they've had to rework that one a little bit. Maybe we can use fear more effectively than we have been. Rather than have the spokespeople for the climate movement using charts and graphs that show CO2 levels and different weather patterns. And maybe we just need our own Anthony Fauci to lay it on the line and tell people how many millions are going to die if we don't act right away. I see a typical thing that happens in the United States when these kind of crisis hit that we start to get conspiracy theories on what the roots of it are. It's the Chinese lab that's trying to destroy capitalism. It's the CIA trying to destroy China. I think pretty quickly we're going to see that the really weird ones come out. It'll be Greenpeace's fault because they were trying to get rid of the cruise ship industry or Al Gore's fault because he was trying to promote his final film in the trilogy, The Inconvenient Pandemic, I told you so. Or maybe it's going to be blamed on 350.org and Bill McKibbin. And well, it's possible that this whole idea was on one of their brainstorming session sheets. I don't think they would have taken this tact or if they were going to that they would have waited this long. I imagine this week that Bill McKibbin was probably doing a happy dance when the price of oil went into negative territory briefly. I'm not sure if I want to try to imagine Bill McKibbin's happy dance. It's probably a lot like my happy dance, which my daughter has informed me, looks like a standing seizure. But he probably has been pretty happy. And I can imagine that there are a few folks in the investment community that wish now they had listened to his calls for divestment from the oil industry because they've probably lost their shirts, which is a problem on Zoom. We're not certain where this pandemic started. We'll probably find that out in the not too distant future. But what is obvious is that it has had a major impact on the entire globe. And it's obvious that it got out of control because world leaders didn't take it seriously enough soon enough. And that's, I think, a good lesson for us to learn, that we need to take this much more seriously, the climate change problem much more seriously, and act more quickly. Another thing that is clear is that both policy at the national and global level and individual actions are what are necessary to solve it. And we've been slipping slowly in the environmental movement towards this idea that only global policy is really going to make a change, big policy initiatives, and that we don't need to focus so much on individual actions because they don't add up fast enough. And I think what this pandemic has taught us is that both are really necessary. And then the other thing that I've learned from this is that our, and I've believed this for a long time, is that we really need to make sure that whatever solutions we adopt work globally. They have to work locally, but they also have to work globally. And an example of that would be electric cars. They are definitely part of the solution to decarbonizing the future. But I don't think realistically we can make an electric car for everyone who wants a vehicle on Earth. And there just aren't enough resources for that. And I think proof of that is the fact that Elon Musk, who started Tesla and claims he can save the world with it, is spending half of his billions in his fortune to get to another planet. And to me, that's a sign that he's hedging his bets. He's not completely certain that we've got a future here. I think we do. My part of the comedy at this point is over if it ever started at all. I have a son totally coming through the background here. What I wanted to do at this point is have us break out into, we've got enough people so that it might be a more interesting conversation if we break out into a few groups where there's three or four of us in a group. And we've got a couple of questions we wanted people to focus on because so much has happened in such a short time in our lives. And a lot of us have made some pretty big changes and a lot of small changes that are worth sharing and talking about and how they impact the bigger picture in the climate movement. So I'm going to post these questions, which will be there for the breakout sessions. And we'd like everybody to have a chance to share their experience. It's about 10 to 12 minutes in the breakout rooms. And hopefully you'll have an opportunity to share some of the things that had happened for you. And then when we come back to the larger group, we can share some of those highlights. So I'm going to post this question and then give it back to Matt. OK, I'm going to pause the record. Done. And just one word so that we can capture a sense from this call of all the things that people have been up to. I'm just putting in rooftop solar for myself. But everybody, if you can just jump on and put in some of the things you've done, we can get a feeling of what people are doing. Great. Wow. Thanks, Theo, for cleaning up the roadside. Heat pumps, great. LED lights, CSA shares, the local foods. People are thinking about what they're purchasing, riding bikes. Yeah, I was on a call last night, somebody who had had a great bike ride. Walking. Yeah, it sounds like people are getting outside and doing more without cars, driving less. Wonderful. And Theo, I see you're working on sea level rise with your town. That's exciting. So there are things at the local level. What about any holes or things that you've realized that are missing in your community as a result of this living in this new reality or new normal? Are there things that you're aware of? I have been aware of a lack of the distribution of our local food system. We need to do more coordination with that so that people are fed. Public transit being a vector in a pandemic. Yeah, you don't want to get on a bus with people or we're not supposed to. Great. I think more and more we're going to be finding ways that we need that this is going to point to. And I think the exciting thing is that where forever we said that we had the technology, we have the solutions, but we didn't have the will. Suddenly, not only did we have the will, but we also seem to come up with the cash to move some things forward. So redirecting some of that towards climate solutions. I thought Jason's point that we might have a new sales pitch for the Green New Deal was well stated if with a little bit of humor. So one of the things I said at the beginning is that I've become a film producer because I wanted to bring stories. I felt like actually showing visuals would move people to action, including the legislature. This film that you're going to see, we actually gave every legislator, thanks to the Sierra Club of Maine, we gave every legislator in January of 2019 a copy of the film. And then we tried to have volunteers asking if they've had a chance to watch it. We've done some follow-up with that. But Sierra Club has been really active in communities all over the state actually forming climate action teams or CAT teams. And we've been working with local folks. They decide what is the place where they're most passionate. And they have been doing things like the window dressers building storm window inserts for their community, no idling campaigns. In Portland, they actually worked to get the city council to put climate change in as something that needs to be considered whenever they're looking at public policy to make changes. So it's part of the comprehensive plan, which is an exciting thing. And we've also worked with groups on organizing food waste projects, again, where the interest is coming from people. There's a great program that we've also been very involved in, which is called, it's a national Sierra Club program. And it's called Climate Parents and Clean Energy Schools. We have been in conversations with several school districts, which are beginning with students and adults and staff in the schools to look at how to reduce their energy costs in the school. When you realize that in a town budget, generally the school budget is the largest item, and on a school budget, energy is the second largest item after personnel. It is a really great winning strategy to bring people together in a community, people who are interested in saving taxes, as well as people who want to make an environmental impact. So you can contact the Sierra Club main office and get more information about that. One of the pieces of that is also working with students to organize climate comedy cafes that can have Jason as one of the participants. So that's kind of what I wanted to share with you. And now we are going to go and watch the little 15-minute film Main Road Trip to the Future that I made. I want to just make a note that the first story, which is about a project that happened on the Booth Bay Peninsula, from my perspective, it's one of the most exciting model projects that has happened in Maine and could be replicated everywhere. It is a distributive clean energy solution that saved, it cost 1 third of the cost of a solution that Central Maine Power was proposing for the peninsula. So we tried to figure out how to actually put the film up for you to watch. But Matt has, I think, put the link up to the film. And if you can just do that, then what you can do is click on the link, and it will take you directly to the Road Trip to the Future film. And then we'll come back after you've watched it. I think you'll find there's some very interesting stories, and it's a short little film.