A group of Ohioans spent their Tuesday in Washington lobbying their own lawmakers to take action on climate change.

As Congress returned to a cloudy D.C. after the midterm elections, Oberlin resident Ray English was here to greet them.

“I’ll be going from the Senate side to the House side and back and forth throughout the course of the day,” he said, standing outside the U.S. Capitol.

Inside the Russell Senate Office Building, Steve Schlather, from Springfield, jumped from floor to floor to talk climate change.

“Yeah, it’s more happening on the coasts and maybe south of us, but it’s happening in Ohio too,” Schlather said.

The two men are part of a group of six Ohioans — and more than 600 volunteers from across the country — who are in Washington this week to lobby their lawmakers as part of the grassroots non-profit Citizens’ Climate Lobby.

“We want [lawmakers] to make climate a bridge issue, not a wedge issue,” Schlather said, “to bring people together to work on a solution.”

“And for me,” English said, “modeling a new way of — a different way of politics, in addition to working on the issue of climate change, is what brings me here.”

The Citizens’ Climate Lobby wants a bipartisan carbon tax bill to be passed by Congress.

English and Schlather each had four meetings on the hill on Tuesday with Ohio lawmakers or their staffs.

Both men have made trips to D.C. before for this group and say they keep returning because they’re seeing progress.

“With some offices, we’re in a phase of educating those offices on the potential effects of climate change,” English said. “In other instances, they’re very engaged and ready to act.”

“But I have noticed over the five trips that they’re seeming to get more interested,” Schlather said, referring to lawmakers and their staffs. “I think more of them are realizing, from seeing things that are going on in California and other places, we’re going to have to start grappling with this.”

Schlather and English plan to return to Washington in June, when the Citizens’ Climate Lobby will host more than 1,000 volunteers to meet again with Congress.

Both men help run their local chapters in Clark and Lorain counties.