OWN VOICE. ~ InPerspective by Gregg Dieguez —
The Coronavirus isn’t the only problem marching unchecked over the world. The Climate Crisis is also intensifying. This article contains a presentation by the world’s leading policy scientist to get you up to speed on what’s happening, and what we should be doing about our other crisis… I view this as essential reading/viewing, more so than your next movie or football game.
Footnotes: to use, click the bold text to jump to the desired material, and then click your browser Back button to return to the text where you were reading.
Right now, we’re suffering the effects of a one degree climate warming, compared to pre-industrial times. It now appears that, with permafrost melt releasing methane into the atmosphere, we’ll no longer be able to hold the temperature rise to the hoped-for two degrees. That is bad news. There is some good news.
Professor John Holdren of MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/Cal Tech/Harvard is perhaps the world’s leading policy scientist. What other scientist has been able to work to achieve Nuclear Disarmament well enough to accept the Nobel Prize for his group’s efforts, win a MacArthur (genius) prize, become an international prize winner for environmental science, and to serve for the longest tenure in history as the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy? Prof. Holdren melds scientific insight with real-world policy, in a phrase: “making science matter”. This is something we need desperately in 2020. His bio is INSANE in its depth of excellence: https://www.mitcnc.org/john-holdren/
Most relevant to our situation today, after four Trump years of REVERSING the Clean Technology gains from the Obama administration, is that from January 2009 to January 2017, Holdren was President Obama’s Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and has intimate familiarity with our Congress and the Administrative departments which execute policy.
Below I provide four (4) ways to view the presentation:
A) You can view the entire program, including the moderator (me) introduction.
B. You can start with Prof. Holdren’s talk/slide show
C) You can jump to the Q&A, which covered things not addressed by the speech and which – as with many high tech events – is often more revealing than the prepared remarks.
D) You can jump to the slide show and not watch any video. Holdren intentionally prepares dense slides, so you can get the gist without listening.
[A] Entire program with Intro:
More From Gregg Dieguez ~ InPerspective
Mr. Dieguez is a native San Franciscan, longtime San Mateo County resident, and semi-retired entrepreneur who causes occasional controversy on the Coastside. He is an elected member of the MCC, but his opinions here are his own, and not those of the Council. In 2003 he co-founded MIT’s Clean Tech Program here in NorCal, which became MIT’s largest alumni speaker program. He lives in Montara. He loves a productive dialog in search of shared understanding.