Leo Szilard Lectureship Award: The Right Path to Decarbonization

Human-caused climate change is arguably the greatest threat we face as a civilization. Efforts to attack and deny the scientific evidence have constituted a major impediment to action over the past two decades. At a time when we appear to be moving past outright denial of the problem, we face a multi-pronged strategy by polluting interests to distract, deflect, attack, and divide the climate activist community. Among their tactics is the promotion of risky, unproven mitigration strategies that seek to enable the continued burning of fossil fuels that is at the very root of the problem. There is still time to for us to avert the worst impacts of climate change if we act now and we act boldly, but there is no time left for dead ends and wrong turns. I will discuss what we need to do, emphasizing the importance of both urgency AND agency in addressing the climate crisis.