Climate Leader Query: Katharine Hayhoe

The 2017 American Climate Leadership Summit (October 25-26) will feature conversations with prominent climate experts and advocates.  ecoAmerica offered some of our guest speakers an opportunity to answer up to three questions related to climate change and what we can do about it.

Katharine HayhoeKatharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist and co-director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. The host of the PBS series “Global Weirding,” she has been named one of Fortune‘s “World’s Greatest Leaders”and Time‘s “100 Most Influential People.”  She is also an evangelical Christian, known for her down-to-earth and highly effective approach to teaching and talking about climate change.

Dr. Hayhoe will speak on the “State of the Climate and Solutions” panel on Day 1 of the 2017 Summit. Here are our questions and her answers:

What do you wish more Americans knew about climate?

The most dangerous myth that the most of us have bought into is not the idea that climate isn’t changing, or humans aren’t responsible. It’s the idea that climate change doesn’t matter to me. We think it only matters to the polar bears or to future generations, when in reality we care about a changing climate because it exacerbates the risks we already face today — and the window of time we have available to prevent even more serious and dangerous impacts is closing fast.

What are current climate initiatives or efforts that inspire you/give you hope that we will effectively address climate change, even with the dearth of federal leadership on the issue?

What gives me hope is looking at how people are responding, being the change, all around the world: from China meeting its 2020 clean energy goals three years ahead of schedule, to India breaking records for cheapest solar energy, to the voice of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action to the political engagement of Citizen’s Climate Lobby through the Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, to what’s happening here in Texas. I made a video about that here:

 

 

 

 

 

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