The “I Will Act on Climate” tour bus made a stop in Des Moines Sunday. The tour is hitting the road to rally behind the President’s new climate change plan.
Those on board this tour bus are serious about the need to protect the environment.
Drake University Environmental Science professor, David Courard-Hauri says, “We can, we should do it, it’s win win, all we need to do it push.”
Last month President Obama announced his new efforts on the climate change issue. However the “I Will Act on Climate” supporters are taking matters into their own hands.
Courard – Hauri says, “Were making shockingly slow progress on this nationally. It is in some sense spectacularly easy to act now, so we have to act quickly.”
The bus tour drives home how climate change is affecting their communities.
“It’s real it’s happening on our farm it’s happening all over the globe,” says farmer Matt Russell.
Russell says this is unsettling information. Scientists predicted a year like Iowa had this year, to happen years from now.
“By the time I reach the end of my life we will have either screwed this up so bad that things are really horrible or we will have actually fixed it,” says Russell.
Russell along with other farmers are trying to fix the problem and are looking for answers.
“We need to figure out how to stop releasing carbon into the atmosphere and start pulling the carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into the earth.”
He says farmers are practicing conservation and cropping rotations that takes the carbon emissions and puts them back into the soil.
The climate change bus tour will travel to three more cities across the state. The bus will be in Cedar Rapids and Davenport on Monday, and then will make its way to Burlington on Tuesday.