“Challenge is that of climate change. Our young people are inheriting a planet in crisis and they need the older people, those in power, to acknowledge the crisis and address it,” said President Dan Lugo as he welcomed attendees to the event. “Queens University and the city of Charlotte are inextricably linked and we take our role in this ecosystem very seriously. Together we need to be a gateway for innovation, empathy and action.”
Following President Lugo’s introduction, he welcomed Pulitzer Prize winning author Jared Diamond, Ph.D., and New York Times bestselling author David Wallace-Wells to the stage and they addressed an audience of nearly 800 during a talk hosted by the Queens University of Charlotte Learning Society at the Sandra Levine Theatre in the Sarah Belk Gambrell Center for the Arts and Civic Engagement.
“I am going to push on the grounds for optimism,” said Diamond in response to a question from Wallace-Wells. “In the case of climate change, the biggest issue is political will, and particularly political will at the worldwide level. Most of the world’s greenhouse gases are produced by five entities- China, the United States, Japan, the European Union, and India. If those five entities reach an agreement about fossil fuel consumption, those five entities could force their position on the remaining percentage of countries that produce emissions.”
Diamond, an iconic figure of American science and history, has published more than six hundred articles, and his book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Wallace-Wells, an American journalist known for his writings on climate change, wrote the 2017 essay "The Uninhabitable Earth" which was published in New York as a long-form article and was the most-read article in the history of the magazine.
Both are known for their work focusing on the environmental crisis but have also offered a unique contribution to the discussion surrounding global health, immigration, emerging technology, and a host of other topics. Together they provided a fascinating dialogue about the current state of the world, how we got to where we are today, and the promise our future holds.
The talk concluded with questions from three Queens University students.
“Ten to fifteen years ago, people in the climate world didn’t like talking about adaptation or resilience because they thought it distracted from the need to cut emissions,” said David Wallace-Wells in response to a question from political science and government major Amina Begic ’24 about how the government can mitigate the impacts of climate change. “Climate impacts are here now. They are damaging now. As a result, we need a sort of climate politics that responds to that at all levels of government.”
Since 1988, the Learning Society has hosted renowned thought leaders for the semiannual series which is magnified by weeks of student engagement and immersion in the speaker's topic and background. The on-campus student discussion before the evening program has become a signature student experience.
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