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For seven hours on Wednesday, my colleagues and I interviewed world leaders, chief executives, scientists and activists in front of a live audience at our annual Climate Forward event in New York City.
Somini Sengupta talked with Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s interim leader and a Nobel laureate, and President Mohamed Irfaan Ali of Guyana, about how the developing world is coping with global warming.
Catrin Einhorn spoke to scientist Jane Goodall about her storied career. Astead Herndon interviewed North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper about the politics of the energy transition.
And I spoke with Ali Zaidi, President Biden’s climate adviser; Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation; and R.J. Scaringe, the C.E.O. of electric truck maker Rivian.The full interviews are available on YouTube.
It was a diverse set of perspectives that offered a nuanced view of the problems posed by climate change, and the emerging set of solutions.
Some of the interviewees presented diametrically opposing viewpoints. While Zaidi touted this administration’s efforts to reduce pollution and support clean energy, Roberts questioned climate science and argued that Biden’s policies were harming Americans.
That was by design. Our mission at The Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world, and we do that by asking tough questions and letting the facts speak for themselves.
The event had gone off without a hitch until I was about to begin one of the final interviews of the day, a conversation with Vicki Hollub, the chief executive of Occidental Petroleum.
Just after 4 p.m., as we walked onstage, a protester leaped from the audience, taking the stage just feet away from us, and began yelling. Within seconds, other protesters emerged from the audience and began to chant attacks at her.
I ushered Hollub offstage. As we retreated to the green room, about a dozen protesters took the stage, unfurled banners and continued to chant. The banners indicated the protesters were part of Climate Defiance, a youth-led activist group that focuses on disruptive, nonviolent protests. Officers from the New York Police Department soon arrived, and the protesters were handcuffed and arrested.
At that point, I would not have been surprised if Hollub wanted to leave. In recent years, climate protesters have become increasingly confrontational, disrupting major events and personally targeting oil and gas executives.
But Hollub was still ready to talk. “As long as there’s a chance of doing this interview, I’m not going anywhere,” she told me. And after a roughly 40-minute delay, we walked back onstage. The theater was empty, but the livestream was on.
For the next 30 minutes, we resumed the conversation. Hollub called climate change “the greatest crisis our world has ever faced,” and offered personal reflections about living on the Gulf Coast, where sea-level rise is threatening vulnerable communities.
“I care about our planet,” she said. “And I care about the people that are impacted by climate change.”
At the same time, she said she believed that the world should continue producing and burning oil and gas until every last molecule had been extracted from below the ground. When I asked her when the world should stop using oil and gas, she replied: “The day that should happen is the day when we run out of oil and gas.”
Those two statements would seem to be at odds. Hollub acknowledges that man-made climate change, largely driven by the burning of fossil fuels, poses a catastrophic risk, a view shared by the overwhelming majority of experts and climate scientists. At the same time, she wants to continue using those fossil fuels for as long as possible.
Hollub tried to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory views by arguing that it will one day be possible to use oil and gas without producing planet-warming emissions.
Occidental is investing in some of these nascent technologies, including direct-air-capture, which is pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. “If we can deal with the emissions, we can continue to produce oil and gas,” she said.
The promise of oil and gas that produces no planet-warming emissions is alluring, especially to an energy executive. However at this point, there are few signs that carbon-capture will be able to scale at anywhere close to the size needed to offset all the emissions produced by fossil fuels.
It wasn’t the usual climate conversation: an oil company C.E.O. was frankly acknowledging the threat posed by global warming, while saying her company could be a part of the solution.
But our exchange, and her frank remarks, were a reminder of why it’s so important to have these conversations.
Your most pressing climate questions
In the previous edition of this newsletter, we asked you to submit your most pressing questions about climate change. Your response was overwhelming: We received more than 700 questions.
While we weren’t able to ask any of them onstage at the Climate Forward event on Wednesday, they did help inform the conversations. And your questions will help guide our coverage in the future.
We’ve collected some of the best questions below, some of which have been edited for style and clarity:
As an environmental science and A.P. Biology teacher, I witness climate despair in this generation of high school students everyday. What would each guest say to my students right now about their future?
The government has successfully passed a lot of carrots in climate policy, with the Inflation Reduction Act being the biggest example. It’s largely failed to pass any meaningful sticks and carbon taxes have flopped nationally, and even New York City can’t pass congestion pricing. The gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993. In your view, will an all-carrots approach be enough to reach net zero on a time frame that averts as much damage as possible? Do we need sticks, and if so, how can we pass them?
How to convince people to use solar for their homes and E.V.s to drive? I know these planet-saving items can be expensive but are essential to avoiding fossil fuels.
I am an old grandfather, at 80 years old. I wonder about the life my toddler grandchildren will have, along with their children, long after I am gone. The choices we personally make (electric cars, heat pumps etc.) and the decisions we vote for, like climate policy, will have a grave or joyous impact on them and all other children worldwide. What do you project, based upon current trends and knowledge, that life will be like for kids in 50 years, based on our actions now?
To Kevin D. Roberts: How do you see government subsidies playing a role in the future of climate change? Which sectors should be receiving the most governmental support? How might we redirect subsidies from (for example: corn) to human/climate-conscious fields?
For Ali Zaidi: Is the climate crisis an existential threat? Is it an emergency? Do we need to take urgent action today? Should President Biden declare a climate emergency today? Should Kamala Harris declare one if she’s inaugurated in January?
Why aren’t we tracking and reporting on a national level the incidents of deaths, heat strokes and dehydration caused by the increased outdoor temperatures? Isn’t this another epidemic, a hidden problem and another inconvenient truth of climate change?
I am a teacher of a high school environmental science and sustainability class. My students were recently assigned a debate as a class activity. They were debating the use of artificial intelligence as a tool to help combat climate change versus the negative environmental impact of AI. Both sides presented excellent arguments, and there was no clear-cut “winner” of the debate. We wondered if the panel could weigh in with their thoughts about A.I. as a tool to help combat climate change or if they felt it was an emerging technology with too high a cost to our changing climate.
How many of today’s panelists took a limousine/car service to this event, which is being held in the most walkable city in the U.S.?
Helene’s Intensification Could Be ‘Aggressive.’ Here’s Why.
What was once a broad cluster of storms in the Caribbean on Monday slowly coalesced into a hurricane on Wednesday. On Thursday, the intensity was ramping up.
In the span of 12 hours, Helene is expected to transform from a Category 1 hurricane Thursday morning to a Category 3 storm by Thursday afternoon, and forecasters warn it could intensify even more before landfall.
If the storm develops the way forecasters are predicting, it would signify “a pretty aggressive intensification,” Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, said this week. — Hank Sanders and Judson Jones
Read more here. And follow the latest updates on the storm here.
More climate news:
Bahamas is looking for help from rich nations and companies to help pay its ballooning debt brought by storms fueled by climate change, The Associated Press reported.
Mexico’s booming data-center industry is stirring concerns over its effect on dwindling water supplies, according to The Guardian.
Federal officials want to turn N.F.L. stadiums into disaster shelters, The Washington Post reported.
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