Why Is Climate Change Photography

a Nonprofit Charity?

Climate Change Photography is a part of the Climate Change Now Initiative, an IRS designated 501c3 nonprofit charity. One-hundred percent of revenues go to support the Initiative. We are a charity because we work for the commons. We work for you.

Our goal is to increase climate change science awareness, to benefit the people — us — all of us, and every living thing on Earth. We are nonprofit charity because every penny needs to go to outreach for advancing climate change awareness so we can act appropriately before it is too late. None of our revenues, zero, go to benefit some rich guy’s bank account or shareholders personal lives. There is no profit to fatten the pockets of owners or photographers.

We also have a history of charitable actions. In the mid-2000s Sierra Club leadership in Austin kept trying to get our director of (Bruce Melton PE) to run for an elected board position at the Austin Group, but he kept turning them down. Eventually one of them told him he know too much about the environment to not become involved in environmental conservation leadership; they said it was his responsibility. At the time he had been involved in environmental issues in Austin as a professional engineer, working for both an environmental NGO and private consultants for 25 years. Melton started his time volunteering in Sierra Club leadership in 2010 when he was elected to the Austin Group ExCom.

In 2013 he was elected to the Texas Lone Star Chapter of Sierra Club Executive Committee. In 2019 he was appointed to a national Sierra Club Climate Policy Committee with a small team of national policy experts to create new climate policies for the Club. He was the principle team member responsible for the Club lowering their warming target from 1.5 degrees C  to a target of “less than 1.0 degrees C above normal.” This was the first time any major entity anywhere adopted a warming limit of less than 1.5 degrees C.

We do this for you. We do it for the commons, for the preservation of our civilization. We do it for all the plant, animal and insect people living in this beautiful world. We do it because we see things out there, in the farthest reaches, beyond the end of pavement, in the wild places where things are free; we see collapse in a world we have always known to be nearly perfect.