More than 40 people stood on the corner of Lincoln Way and Welch Avenue on Sept. 21, holding signs in support of action on climate change.

Participants worked in solidarity with a rally in New York City and rallies all around the world for the People’s Climate March. The rallies were meant to show the United Nations that there is support for action on climate change.

The rally came ahead of Sept. 23’s United Nations summit on climate change. According to MSNBC, hundreds of thousands of people attended the march in New York City.

“Until you get people in the streets, until you have massive rallies across the country, including maybe over 100,000 people in New York, a decent turnout here and all sorts of cities across the country, you aren’t going to get the needed policy changes,” said Stephen Biggs, assistant professor of philosophy and religious studies and a leader of the Ames chapter of the Citizens Climate Lobby.

The People’s Climate March had more than 1,000 organizations participating, including 350.org, a website dedicated to connecting climate change campaigns. The website partnered with ActivUS, an ISU club that chooses an activist campaign in which to participate each semester.

Rivka Fidel, graduate student in agronomy and president of ActivUS, said the current campaign for ActivUS is Fossil Free. It is pushing for the university to take all money it has invested in fossil fuel companies and re-invest it elsewhere.

“When other people start organizing for something like this, it’s really empowering to know that there’s other people who believe in the same thing as I do,” Fidel said. “And then when they actually show up in person, it’s even greater.”

Fidel said she created a Facebook page and placed the event on the People’s Climate March website to let students know about the event. She said she was happy to see that some of the participants were not involved in ActivUS or the Ames chapter of the Citizens Climate Lobby.

Biggs said he thinks people have a terrible misconception that when important things need to happen, political leaders will take care of it. He said people need to put pressure on their elected leaders and politicians need to have a large number of people telling them that they won’t get votes if they don’t take action.

The Citizens Climate Lobby is pushing for a carbon pollution tax that would be paid for by fossil fuel companies. The proposed legislation would also give all of the collected tax money back to the public, according to its website. The tax would increase from year to year in an effort to discourage fossil fuel production.

“The basic science is very clear that we are increasing greenhouse gasses and we are changing our climate,” said William Gutowski, professor of geological and atmospheric sciences. “All it takes is college freshman level physics and a little bit of algebra. It’s not rocket science.” 

ActivUS has meetings at 6 p.m. every first and third Thursday at Sloss House.