“On the level” is a phrase that means “honest” or “genuine.” We believe it’s time for all of us to get honest about climate change and for politicians and others in positions of power to start acting in ways that reflect the existential threat of climate change. 

To use it in a sentence (or two), we might say: Bill Nye is on the level. Exxon Mobile is not on the level. 

Here at On the Level, we define a climate action as being both (a) a social action undertaken as part of a group or movement and (b) directly related to combatting climate change. Because our goal is facilitate the masses to demand change, we are not including individual actions, like buying an electric car or choosing not to fly, in our index (though we support all those who can and do choose to take those individual actions to lower their own emissions).  Similarly, we applaud and admire those groups who are working to improve the world in all sorts of ways, like fighting for racial justice, or cleaning up toxic waste, or doing both at the same time, but such efforts, if not explicitly or implicitly linked to the climate change movement, are outside the scope of our index. Practically, this would mean that something like installing solar panels on your own house would not be included in our index, but if a group in your neighborhood was working on a campaign to get solar panels to as many houses as possible in the area, that campaign would be included in our index.

We want On the Level’s index to be as inclusive as possible while staying true to our mission of building the climate movement. We house actions ranging from pipeline and indigenous rights protests to letter-writing campaigns for sustainable agricultural policies, from petitions to lower emissions in specific communities to making art to communicate the upcoming crisis, and much more. 

A note on trainings: The line between action and not-an-action is blurry here, but our Climate Action Explorer will include trainings that aim to grow the climate movement through education.

The backend of the Climate Action Explorer uses a web crawler that searches for climate actions all across the internet, and then our web scraper retrieves the relevant information about the actions (type, location, date, etc.). Each potential action is then manually reviewed by a human team member to ensure it belongs on our platform. 

Still curious about the more technical aspects of our data collection? Drop us a line at info@beonthelevel.org!

If you’ve already taken a look at our Climate Action Explorer and gathered ideas about how to take action, but you’re still hungry for more, be sure to tell your friends and families about us, support our work through a donation, follow us on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), and subscribe to our newsletter.

Or ideas or suggestions?

Email us at info@beonthelevel.org! We’d love to hear from you.