Bill and Margot Moomaw, two of the world’s major movers and shakers in the field of climate change, are bringing their own personal message to Vineyarders about how to take small steps to make a big impact in combatting global warming:
Live deliberately, make real choices about how you live and what you do.
It’s the motto the couple has lived by for years, and it’s a message they hope to instill in others to find meaningful ways to act locally and think globally when it comes climate change.
“We began thinking about a whole range of things – what is it that creates our big carbon footprint?” Mr. Moomaw, director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, said in an interview with the Gazette. “It’s our housing, it’s our transportation, it’s our food and it’s our landscape.”
Mr. Moomaw is used to advising entire governments on the matter. He was the lead writer on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chapter on greenhouse gas emissions reduction, and the lead author on three other panel reports. The IPCC, which was established in 1988 by the United Nations, was one of the first major agencies charged with making scientific assesments of climate change. Its work was recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Mrs. Moomaw is a green design consultant to homeowners and builders.
Now the Moomaws are taking their message to the people. The Vineyard Conservation Society will host the Moomaws on July 9 at the Grange Hall, where the couple will speak about their experience of taking small steps to make a big impact. The evening begins at 5 p.m. and admission is free.
The couple determined that working locally, starting with their own actions, was the best place to begin. Now they encourage others to do so. The Moomaws decided “for a whole range of environmental reasons” to renovate their home in Boston to reduce its energy use by two-thirds. That was 40 years ago, “right at the time of the first oil crisis” Mr. Moomaw said. “Suddenly that’s how we became experts. We were doing this before it was a fashionable thing even to talk about.”
They decided to do it again, and eight years ago retrofitted their home in Williamstown. They turned the 1928 colonial into a 21st century home. The house was one of the northeast’s first zero-net energy homes—houses with zero net energy consumption and zero carbon emissions annually. Their energy bill this year was $119.
Mr. Moomaw spoke of zero net energy homes on the Vineyard. Within the Eliakim’s Way affordable housing complex in West Tisbury, there are two zero net energy homes with several others having close to zero.
“It depends on your hot water use, how many lights you leave on, what media you have going on all the time; it’s not occupancy,” Mrs. Moomaw said. “[If] one family has a newborn baby, that’s a lot of laundry.”
Their assessment of one major New England amenity—the fireplace—may not go over too well with some locals. -
“They love to have a fire on a cold, drafty night, but what they don’t understand is if your house isn’t drafty and it’s adequately warm, you feel no need for a fire,” Mrs. Moomaw said. “Putting a fireplace in a house uses twice as much energy...whether you’re using it or not, it’s a major source of drafts in your house.”
“It’s being conscious of your energy use and energy influence of everything you do,” Mrs. Moomaw said. “Any time you are making an improvement, whether you’re replacing a roof or siding, it’s an opportunity to look at how can we be more energy efficient. In many cases it makes the house more beautiful and liveable.”
Other low-impact and easy changes include what the Moomaws call chaining their shopping—clustering together errands to make one drive to town rather than many, eating things that are in season and grown nearby, and frequenting restaurants that cook with local produce.
“It’s helpful when you can get people to recognize they’re already doing it...and then they realize, that wasn’t so bad,” Mr. Moomaw said. “I’ll never forget after someone took a tour of our house he looked around with a dazed look on his face and said, ‘Well, I guess if you’ve done it, it must be possible’.”
While the Moomaws target local action, it’s hard for Mr. Moomaw to ignore the ongoing dialogue about climate change—or lately, the lack of it—in the nation’s capitol.
“When I first started working on it in the late 1980s, I was working in Washington, D.C., and there was tremendous interest—we would host a meeting and fill it with 150 congressional staffers or agency people,” he said. “Now, no one in Washington dares speak its name [climate change]. There’s this incredible disinformation campaign.”
The last five or six years have been most challenging, Mr. Moomaw said. Cordial disagreement has morphed into threatening discord in the political arena, largely split down party lines.
“Members of Congress have created an ugly atmosphere...it’s become terribly polarized where one political party has made it a litmus test, like no taxes for being a loyal member of the party,” he said.
“It’s become a belief system as opposed to dealing with science,” Mrs. Moomaw added. “People who say I don’t believe in climate change – measurements are measurements and science is science...in a way it’s really saying I don’t believe in science.”
Even so, Mr. Moomaw said conversations about climate change have increased since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but there’s gross room for improvement.
“The tragedies we’re seeing today are only a warmup, no pun intended, for future changes that are already embedded in the system,” Mr. Moomaw said. “We’re talking about decades and centuries of additional impacts.”
“I think people are beginning to get the message and beginning to understand that this is important,” he continued. “It’s really hard to make the connection to their own contribution. We are all contributors. It’s not about placing the blame and pointing fingers; it’s about figuring out what to do and how to do it.”
Mrs. Moomaw said climate change includes both short- and long-term problem solving.
“It requires a very long time horizon. We have a corporate world that looks at quarterly profits and an election system that looks to the next election,” she said. “We’re really talking about a time horizon of generations to correct the problems and we need to be on a steady course, which our government has been the worst at. Even Spain and Italy have built infrastructure for a future in which they knew they needed to have renewable energy.”
Instead of getting angry (although Mr. Moomaw admitted during a hearing before Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe he “could have been in contempt of Congress” if he had said what was really on his mind), the Moomaws have found a way to channel the frustration into action.
“The ultimate goal is to change people’s behavior,” Mrs. Moomaw said.
“The way I cope is by doing something” Mr. Moomaw said.
“He’s doing something all the time,” added his wife.
“When I see what can be done, I become hopeful and see progress,” Mr. Moomaw said, noting states such as Massachusetts, California and Oregon which have taken a proactive role in dealing with climate change. And, he added, each person must do their own share. “When we get that electric bill and it’s really way down or we’ve generated a lot more electricity [through our solar panels] than anticipated, that’s a real upper.”
And when Mr. and Mrs. Moomaw arrive on the Island this weekend, they’ll be doing so on bicycles.
“It’s the only we do it on the Vineyard,” Mrs. Moomaw said.
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