Episode 019 | Craig Applegath: Pulling Back From The Brink of Climate Change Catastrophe – We can do it but time is running out!

In this podcast episode, in place of our typical interview format, you will hear the keynote presentation I gave to the American Institute of Architecture StudentsConference in December 2019.This presentation sums up the key ideas that I have been exploring with our podcast guests over the past two years, as well as background research for those interviews.  

 For all of you who have been following the science of climate change, you will know that this will be no ordinary decade! It will most probably be the last opportunity our species has to pull back from the brink of climate change catastrophe, and hopefully save ourselves, and the rest of the biosphere, from run-away global warming.

 The good news is that we now have all the tools and technologies at our disposal to stop global carbon emissions if we decide to do it! And we’ve done this before. We did it in the Second World War, in 1940, where in 2 years under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the United States instituted their “Arsenal of Democracy” program, and went from producing no planes, no tanks, and no arms, to producing hundreds of thousands to supply all the allies in their fight against Nazi Germany and then Imperial Japan. However, instead of gearing up to produce planes, tanks, and guns, we will need to build millions of photovoltaic panels, thousands of wind generators, and plant billions of trees.

 It is no exaggeration to say that we now need to be making serious preparations for an all-hands-on-deck, heroic, last-ditch effort to save ourselves, and the biosphere as we now know it from global warming catastrophe. From what we are hearing from the most knowledgeable and expert climate scientists, we have ten years – and possibly less, depending on how the quickly the global warming  positive feedback loops accelerate the warming process – to stop emitting CO2 into our atmosphere, and to find ways to reduce existing atmospheric concentrations of CO2. In this keynote presentation I lay out how we can most effectively do this, and I introduce what I have called the “Architects N.E.W. D.E.A.L.” – an acronym for the seven key things that I think architects, engineers, and planners can do to make a significant contribution to this effort.

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You can read more about this podcast in the podcast Show Notes.

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