Dr. Michael Mann on Climate Action: “The Voice and the Will of the People Still Matters”

Last month, Climate Reality chatted with world-renowned climatologist and geophysicist Dr. Michael E. Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, ahead of our recent Climate Reality Leadership Corps training in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Because we had a quite long and fruitful conversation, we wanted to bring you the conversation in its entirety, across several blogs on topics ranging from galvanizing climate moments and extreme weather to efforts to repeal America’s Clean Power Plan and much more.

Below, in the last entry in our series, Dr. Mann discusses how you can take action and Be the Voice of Reality.

Climate Reality: What action would you like to see the everyday activists reading this article take to do their part to fight the climate crisis?

Dr. Michael Mann: There’s so much that we can do, just in our everyday lives, and all of those things were laid out so eloquently in Al [Gore]’s first movie, An Inconvenient Truth. All of these voluntary actions that we can take that save us money, make us healthier, and they lower our carbon footprint. So why wouldn’t we do these things?

That having been said, neither you nor I nor any of us can levy a price on carbon. We can’t institute a carbon tax. We can’t institute cap and trade. Only our policymakers can do that.

It’s so critical that people make sure their voices are heard. We’ve seen how important that is. We saw it in the case of the health care debate – that the voice of the people still matters. Even in a system that’s been gamed by special interests, the voice and the will of the people still matters. And it still matters here. People have to make their voices heard.

We need to reject the notion that climate change is a hoax. We need to make sure that polluting interests aren’t responsible for our environmental policies. We’ve got to make sure that it isn’t the fox that’s guarding the hen house when it comes to the health of our environment.

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