Movie and Action: Stop the Fossil Fools from acting like Everything’s Cool with Climate Change!­

Everything’s Cool explores what it will take to move America from laggard nation to world leader on addressing global warming and ushering in a new energy economy.

Working Films has brought together the filmmakers and messengers featured in Everything’s Cool and the Energy Action Coalition. We invite you to host a movie and action night for Fossil Fools Day on April 1st. Join thousands of youth from around the world who are taking action against the biggest fossil fools and building a cleaner and just energy future.

Hold on… this is bigger than changing your light bulbs!

Register your movie and action here. If you are one of the first 100 to sign up, we will send you the special edition Activist DVD free of charge. All other activists may purchase the DVD for the affordable price of $10.

Tie your screening to an action!
After you’ve registered your screening. Find out ways that you can promote green job creation, get clean energy policies passed on campuses and other local and national action ideas by checking out the Energy Action Coalition.

Our partners at Clif Mojo and Focus the Nation want you to propel your creative Global Warming solutions into action with Project Slingshot. Three winners will receive up to $10,000 to slingshot their ideas into reality. How can you best utilize your skills, talents and passion to make a difference? There will be one winner in each of three categories:

1. Outdoor Fanatics: How will you protect the places you love to play?
2. Artists: How will you inspire your communities?
3. Innovators: How will you challenge our expectations?

Everything’s Cool filmmaker Judith Helfand is on a panel of judges who are renowned for their commitments to climate justice; including Billy Parish of the Campus Climate Challenge, Denis Hayes of the International Earth Day Network, and Rocky Anderson Mayor of Salt Lake City from 2000 – 2008.

For more information on this grant program, including how to apply, watch the video below and visit the Project Slingshot website.

Going to Power Shift this weekend? This is not only your chance to connect with 5,000 other youth climate change activists, its’ also your chance to catch up with one of the stars of Everything’s Cool and one of the bad boys of the climate change movement, Michael Shellenberger. That’s right the famous, or in some circles, infamous co-author of The Death of Environmentalism will be at Power Shift to talk about his vision for a new energy economy. Thanks to our Friends at Energy Action, you can read a great interview with Michael at the It’s Getting Hot in Here blog. Check out what Michael has to say about the youth climate movement and then find out how to host a screening and watch him and fellow bad boy Ted Nordhaus in action in Everything’s Cool.

Bish Neuhauser, a character in Everything’s Cool, was motivated to make biodiesel for his car, and eventually succeeded in pushing the ski resort where he worked to run their vehicles off of biodiesel. After a special screening for high school students, Bish made a visit. Check out what was catalyzed:

Can’t see the video? Download Quicktime 7
Video by Jeremy Levine, music by Atwood.

Working Films teamed with John Quigley of Spectral Q to direct a human aerial image encouraging the growing community concerned with the perils of global warming to take immediate action by stepping up our responses. This event launches a two-year audience and community engagement campaign organized by Working Films for the Sundance Film Festival film “Everything’s Cool.”

Approximately 1000 middle and elementary school students, along with the production team of Everything’s Cool and some of the main characters in the film, formed a message with their bodies, spelling out “Step It Up.” The image contains a circle with bear paws, representing carbon neutral footprints and a word in Inuktitut meaning: “I hear you and I am doing something about it.”

Park City’s students were sending a message back to the Arctic Inuit Community, where, as captured in Everything’s Cool, residents and activists on Earth Day 2005 lay on the Arctic Sea ice in 30 below temperatures sharing the ancient wisdom of their elders and warning the world about the devastating impact the melting arctic will have on the rest of the world.

“The themes and messages of this film arrive at such a critical moment in our struggle to see action on the issue of global warming,” said Robert West, co-founder and executive director of Working Films. “The image we’re created today demonstrates that each individual is a necessary part of the chain for change; by linking together, we can create a call to action.”

Working Films, Spectral Q and Cucolaris – who specialize in social messaging – jointly coordinated the event. This is part of a series of aerial images linked to the STEP IT UP Day of Action; the next will be created in Greenland in May of this year to encourage individuals and corporations to go carbon neutral.

Photo credits: top left: John Quigley, Spectral-Q; middle right: Working Films and Chris Pilaro

Can’t see the video? Download Quicktime

Video by Jeremy Levine