We love and need winter. However, climate change is here displaying incredible impacts on places we love – trails, mountains, waterways, deserts, oceans, and our communities.
Protect Our Winters (commonly referred to as POW) is an international organization focused on advocating to fight climate change impacts on our recreational environments.
Through guidance, support, and passion from athletes, scientists, artists, and forward-thinking business leaders, the organization works to help protect our recreational environments.
POW’s mission is to make civic engagement and climate advocacy a focus for all outdoor enthusiasts.
A Brief History
POW was founded in 2007 by pro-snowboarder Jeremy Jones. Due to Jones experiencing snow loss at both resorts and remote ski areas, he began to worry about the climate and did not hesitate to take action to fight climate change. Through the quality work of pro athletes, recreational enthusiasts, and others, POW works proactively to address the harms that can negatively impact the outdoor industry, rather than wait to react to a future downset.
They do acknowledge that being a climate advocate involves a lot of devotion and dedication to a number of strategies. As a response, POW encourages their team to build political and public support aimed for winning key policy changes.
Three Areas of Focus for POW
POW focuses specifically on three approaches for making changes:
- technological and financial solutions (renewable energy and storage, tax credits, and carbon pricing);
- political will (working with political leaders); and
- cultural shifts (acknowledging the need of climate action, especially through voting)
POW’s Clean Energy Thinking
To carry out their climate goals, POW partners with the top research institutions across the world in various scientific fields, including climate scientists, glaciologists, hydrologists, historians, and economists.
Information observed and gathered from these professional resources are creating their foundational messaging and leading their efforts to engage interconnectedly and advocate on behalf of the environment, in particular to promote clean energy solutions.
POW works consistently to inform their followers on how to interpret the data collected. And how to analyze it into informative language and representation. The information is coherent and delivered in such a way that makes the scientific analysis easy to communicate and understand.
POW’s Most Inspiring Political Involvement to Fight Climate Change
POW proves they have the ability to form interpersonal relationships with the intent to bridge and leverage alliances with aligned activists. POW has shown progression on both the state and federal level, as they work hard to develop relationships with state legislatures, governors, commissioners, and create coalitions to implement strategies around the campaigns.
Notably, POW takes the initiative to form strong relationships with key decision-makers through regularly attending Congressional meetings, interacting with federal representatives, providing comments to promote awareness, and educating about the urgent need to address past, current, and future environmental conflicts. These strategies are fundamental tools for tackling climate change.
POW works hard to influence Congress by putting stewardship of the environment above the politics of government. One of their largest federal projects is their commitment to work effectively on the well-known path to achieve the 80 percent emissions reductions by 2030.
Persistent engagement in federal policy campaigns ensures legislation is going to be passed on Capitol Hill to reduce emissions, add clean energy to the electric grid, invest in electric cars, accomplish a just transition to a renewable energy economy, and reduce fossil fuel emissions on public lands. And, at the state and local level, POW promotes reduction of climate change through amending current legislation and enacting new public policies.
POW’s Encouragement to Stoke the Vote
POW works to protect democracy, which is our right to voice our opinions through our votes. More than anything, POW is encouraging all of us to “Stoke the Vote.”
Our votes have the strongest power for governmental change. The team is traveling around the country to stoke us all up for the mid-term elections on November 8th. With both the Senate and the House of Representatives having a narrow Democratic majority seating, there is stress about the success of continuing to pursue more climate-oriented momentum. Moving forward with climate legislation will help to align climate solutions with policy priorities in targeted areas.
November 2022 is when we all make the choice of who is on the ballot for the 2024 primary election. Actively promoting voting during this time is the best way for POW to help progress our national movement towards a cleaner energy environment and gives us the greater potential to shift the nations response to the climate crisis.
POW’s Future Goals
Looking into the future, POW envisions carbon neutrality accomplished by 2050 by prioritizing renewable energy, electric transport, breakthrough technologies, and market policies.
The well-known 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has concluded that we only have about a decade to avoid the impacts of climate change. To stay at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius is only possible by deducting our greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent below the 2010 levels by 2030. Further, we must attain net zero emissions by 2050.
Our target greenhouse gas reductions need to be made by addressing reductions in the energy sector, industrial sector, building sectors, urban areas, agriculture, forestry, land-use sector and transportation. POW keeps us informed on their interactions and progression with contributing to accomplishing these goals in the limited time we have to succeed at defeating climate change.
Join POW’s Team!
We do need winter. POW stresses the importance of solving our climate threats and works hard to team up for accomplishment.
You can join the POW team here.
If you want to stay informed on what POW is crushing? Sign up for their newsletter!
To support POW and help fight climate change, click here to contribute a donation!
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