If anyone who got my card reads this, then this is what I have to tell you: Keep going. Reach out for help. Ask for what you need, and assume the resources are there for you, because they are, you just need someone to help you find them and support you while you pursue them. We’re out there. You can drop me a line.

And to the young man who spoke today about villages in Canada, deep-water wind turbines, and the village plan, you killed it-I can’t wait to see where you’re at in ten years.

The first event will be on Sunday March 1st-we’ve covered the science of sex and attraction, the intersection of science and politics, a crash course on the science of taste…are you curious about what’s next?

Good.

The economy and climate are intertwined, and the war in Iraq was largely driven by our dependence on foreign oil. Twice in ten years we’ve engaged in wars in the Middle East, and this is strongly linked to our dependence on foreign oil. There are ideas whose time has come, and there are ideas whose time has passed, and their collapse has come. Our dependence on foreign oil is one such idea. How quickly can we shift to alternative fuels and renewable resources? We now have carbon waste sitting around. We are in the midst of a global recession. The burden falls on fiscal policy, and we currently need a global, synchronized stimulus. The economy, national security, and climate crisis have a common thread-our dependence on carbon sources.

We need to use this crisis as an opportunity to shift to free, clean, renewable sources of energy. When you look up at the sky, it looks limitless, we tend to think that there is no way we could impact that limitless sky. What we know, however, is that the sky is shockingly thin, and we can impact it.

Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared energy, which is essentially heat. Earth and Venus are the same size, and at one point they had similar levels of carbon dioxide. Over many years, carbon dioxide was removed from earth’s atmosphere, and Venus is now 855 degrees and rains sulphuric acid, while earth is 59 degrees, on average, so you can see the importance of controlling the levels of carbon dioxide in our environment. As carbon dioxide grows in our environment, IR is trapped, and the last eleven years have been the hottest years in recorded history.

In 2005, the polar ice caps melted such that an area equal to 1/3 of the Eastern United Stated were lost. The ice caps are like a beating heart, expanding in the winter and contracting in the summer. More and more is lost each summer, and less and less is restored in the winter. It’s predicted that the caps will disappear completely within our lifetime. Additionally, there is frozen carbon in polar ice that is released and processed by microbes, converting it into methane, and it could double our atmospheric carbon dioxide.

[I should mention that at this point, Mr. Gore showed terrifying footage of the ocean basically boiling as methane gas was released from the deep as a result of this process. More terrifying was the footage of the researcher who dug a hole in ice, put a flame source near the hole, and was blown back by a large, blow torch-like jet of flame, resulting from the ignition of methane escaping from the ice.]

To put things in perspective, as the polar ice caps melt sea level rise. For every meter of rise in sea level, there are and will be 1,000,000 climate refugees on the move.

When the ice is gone, water is gone, and drought results. 40% of the world’s people get their drinking water from rivers fed by glaciers. The loss of the ice caps has numerous impacts in this respect.

There are numerous ad campaigns that are deceptively promoting dirty energy. The Alliance for Climate Protection is doing a good job of promoting genuinely good environmental policies.

When a man went to the moon, the entire control room cheered. The mean age in that room was 26 years old. That means that they were eighteen when Kennedy announced the possibility of putting a man on the moon in the first place. Our young people do hold the key to the future.

Upton Sinclair said that, “It’s difficult to get someone to understand something when his salary is dependent on him not understanding it.” We need to make polluting our environment unprofitable.

We as a species must make a decision. We can continue out present course, which will threaten human civilization, or we have about ten years to make major changes. There is no line between the work you do and the civilization in which you live. The time to get involved is now.