This chunk is a transcript excerpt from a multi-speaker panel on climate change, sustainability, and innovation. Speakers emphasize climate urgency and human-centered framing (saving people not the planet), highlight environmental justice disparities in urban communities, call for collaboration across companies and generations, and express cautious optimism that corporate action and technology can accelerate decarbonization.
Chapters
Sound speed.
Check 1, 2. Check 1, 2.
Yep, there you are.
Nice and loose.
Yeah. Hopefully you're rolling.
Okay.
I kind of see myself as a climate superhero. You gotta fight for the climate.
I started covering climate in 2015 and I was like, whoa. I just had an epiphany. Like, this is literally going to be the defining issue of the next century. I think people like to think of it as this, like, abstract thing that occasionally appears in the form of a hurricane or, you know, a sort of heat wave, but it's actually much more diffuse. It's happening everywhere to everyone.
I think we really need to understand that looking at climate change really is looking at ways to save the humans.
If people think we're saving the planet for the planet's sake, that's not true. It's really about our ability or our want to live on this planet.
You see how much hotter urban communities are, how little shade people have, the rates of asthma that are higher in communities of color, and, you know, the amount of pollution and the lack of resources.
Why is my air literally poisoning me, but I can take a trip 20 minutes into downtown Manhattan and have better cleaner air and better cleaner streets. That makes no sense to me.
That's a very broken system and we need people who are thinking holistically about all people to make that change, and I feel personally called to do that.
Change will take people recognizing that we need to change and then doing the things to make that happen.
For a long time, it's felt really grassroots and a lot of us cared and we're trying to make an impact. But now that you see companies coming together, that's given me more hope than I've had in a long time.
So I think the potential is there to rapidly decarbonize, but it's going to take collaboration at a. A level that we've never seen before.
We knew we weren't just going to continue for another 90 years doing exactly the same thing, that we had to evolve. And think about it before, when we had our first generation of goals, it was on energy and it was on water, and that was very tangible stuff that people could get their arms around. This was really taking a significant leap and saying, what else should we be doing in this space?
So a lot of what's been moving to sustainability and what we're doing from an environmental perspective requires advanced technology. Plus our customers are now embracing.
I see companies taking action and moving and devoting real time energy budgets to getting stuff done. People need to come to a realization that what we're Doing right now actually is going to shape the future.
I think one of the biggest challenges that we have is how we talk to each other. When we come to understand that we're all in this together, then we can really find ways to work better together to solve these problems.
There's no way that any one of us are perfect in this space, but I really do believe all of us can do something. And every day we try to do something is better than not.
We don't have all the answers right. And I think that we need to have transparent, open, honest conversations around where we are and where we're going together.
Climate stories are showing up everywhere. From our food to our buildings, to our transportation, to our energy, everybody has a part to play.
The truth is that in this current environment, where federal government in the US and many governments have set these strong targets, but they haven't actually been able to deliver policy, the role for businesses is to, you know, sort of step in and fill that gap and also push.
You ask about hope, just the fact that we're talking about it, that means people are thinking about it.
The entire market is shifting this way. And the next several years is just going to be an absolute awesome journey.
There are so many more conversations happening around climate change. And that gives me hope. Right?
You know, the Gen Z's and the others coming after them have more drive, more focus, more passion, more sincerity around. You know, there's no Planet B. So I'm super excited and hopeful about the generation coming up behind me.
Hope is the secret ingredient.
Every single one of us is going to be interviewed by some descendant of ours in year 2040 or 2050 for their middle school class project about what was it like in the 2020s when this data was here? And I want to have, you know, I want to have a lot of good things to say.
