The climate crisis ends up touching on all of those issues, as CNN’s chief climate correspondent Bill Weir told me. His new book, “Life As We Know It : Stories of People, Climate and Hope in a Changing World,” comes out on April 16. We talked on the phone about his recent trip to Massachusetts, where some beachfront homeowners who want the state to do more to help protect the area from erosion and rising sea levels also deny the climate is in crisis.
I went down to Florida and met with a couple of inspirational developers. One is Syd Kitson, a former NFL player, who built the first solar power town in America. It’s called Babcock Ranch, Florida. I was riding out Hurricane Ian a few miles away where everything was plunged into darkness and flooded. But because of his designs and ideas, they never lost power and never flooded, and as a result, the demand for people to buy homes in Babcock Ranch has skyrocketed.
Oh, absolutely. A story that I don’t get to tell enough is just this massive boom in renewables and clean energy and clean water tech. I think the most recent analysis was for every dollar spent by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, five-and-a-half bucks in private investment has chased that.
The hardest thing for most folks to grasp – I still have a hard time grasping it even though I live in the space every day – is that the record-shattering year that we just had isn’t just the hottest year in 120,000 years or so. It’s among the coolest years of the rest of our lives. And there has been no meaningful reduction in emissions. The human hand on the global thermostat still has it cranked all the way up.