Episode description

Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D. is the founder and Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment. He is an internationally recognized expert on public climate change beliefs, attitudes, policy support, and behavior, and the psychological, cultural, and political factors that shape them and conducts research globally, including in the United States, China, India, and Brazil. He has published more than 250 scientific articles, chapters, and reports and has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Harvard Kennedy School, the United Nations Development Program, the Gallup World Poll, and the World Economic Forum, among others. He is a recipient of the Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education, the Mitofsky Innovator Award from the American Association of Public Opinion Research, the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication from Climate One, and an Environmental Innovator award from the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2020, he was named the second-most influential climate scientist in the world (of 1,000) by Reuters. He is also the host of Climate Connections, a radio program broadcast each day on more than 700 stations nationwide.

"Cities are going to be core to solving this problem. However, the whole world is vulnerable to climate change in different ways. So cities are going to be critical. Let's not forget we already have 8 billion people on the planet, and it's growing.

And so there is a lot that we need to do to both retrofit our existing cities, which is expensive and hard because they were laid down, sometimes, hundreds of years ago with different assumptions about how one should live. For example, L.A. was built on the highway and based on the automobile, so it's very difficult for L.A. as a city to now go, okay, we want to get back to providing rail transit for everybody. And they're doing it, but it's expensive, and it's hard to retrofit but essential work that has to be done.

But at the same time, the world is building new megacities that are going to house tens of millions of people, and we now have the opportunity to build them for the 21st century. We don't have to follow the same design patterns of the past. So, this now opens up enormous creativity, experimentation, and innovation. One study has found that the single thing that makes people most unhappy in America is commuting time, being stuck in traffic. That makes people more frustrated and depressed than anything.”

https://environment.yale.edu/profile/leiserowitz
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu
www.yaleclimateconnections.org

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