You Can Do More than March on Washington to Fight Climate Change…
Hal Harvey, Justin Gillis with Special Guest Al Gore
Forty years after a freshman congressman named Al Gore held the first committee hearing in the House of Representatives on global warming, Washington has finally taken serious action to counter the threat, the new bill that Joe Biden just signed expected to unleash a clean-energy revolution.
But it is not enough. Biden promised that America would cut its greenhouse emissions 50 percent by 2030. The new legislation won’t get us the whole way there.
And can we wait another decade when devastating floods, punishing droughts and wildfires are destroying lives and livelihoods? When cities are getting so hot that train tracks buckle? When the specter of climate-driven famines is on us?
We as citizens need to do more, more than yell at the TV or turn down our air-conditioners. That’s thinking too small. Ask investigative journalist Justin Gillis and energy policy expert Hal Harvey, who lay out an action plan to drive America’s greenhouse-gas emissions down to zero in The Big Fix.
The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is honored to welcome them and Vice President Al Gore to launch this important book during NYC’s Climate Week and to share stories of the thousands of Americans who aren’t waiting for Washington, who are organizing locally and thinking BIG about the planet’s future.
Engineer Hal Harvey is the CEO of Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan climate research and policy firm, as well as a senior fellow at the Paulson Institute. He has been appointed to national and international climate panels by Presidents Clinton and Bush and received the UN Climate and Clean Air Award, the Heinz Award for the Environment and the State of California’s Haagen-Smit Clean Air Award.
Justin Gillis is an award-winning journalist who spent nearly a decade as The New York Times’ lead reporter on climate science after writing for The Washington Post and The Miami Herald. The winner of the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, he is currently a fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
Al Gore entered the US Congress at the age of 28 and remained there for 16 years before becoming the 45th vice president of the United States. As a freshman, he held the first congressional hearings on climate change and has remained an environmental activist ever since. The documentary about his work, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar and Gore was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. As the founder and current chair of The Climate Reality Project, he speaks and writes regularly about climate change.