Solving the Climate Challenge
Please join us Friday when our speaker will be David Cain from the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. He will give us a brief overview of the cause and urgency of the climate change crisis and sets the stage for a presentation on what can be done about it. A carbon fee and dividend approach is described as a solution candidate providing an opportunity for comparison with other approaches such as cap and trade. The presentation will conclude with updates on Citizens' Climate Lobby efforts to pass bi-partisan climate legislation in Congress, and what individuals can do to help. Then he will open it up for Q&A.
He will also be distributing Constituent Message Forms. Our members, if they wish to, could use these forms to communicate to their representatives in Washington regarding climate change.
Dave is Outreach Coordinator for the Silicon Valley North Chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) and is Co-Leader of CCL’s national Presenters & Schedulers Action Team. As a CCL member he lobbies members of Congress in Washington DC, seeking passage of bi-partisan national climate legislation. Dave has worked for over 30 years in energy R&D and co-founded a company specializing in environmental accounting software used by heavy industry enterprises worldwide. He is currently Senior Director, Environment, Energy & Carbon Products at HIS Markit, a dynamic team that includes more than 5,000 analysts, data scientists, financial experts and industry specialists. Their global information expertise spans numerous industries, including leading positions in finance, energy and transportation. He has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington and an undergraduate degree from U.C. Berkeley.
Dave is the author of “Climate Guardians — Thoughts and Actions for People of Faith.” Climate Guardians is a group of ordinary people banded together in the common belief that there is a moral imperative to stop climate degradation. Each one of them recognizes that continuing to foul our nest – the Earth – with greenhouse gas pollution is profoundly wrong.
They come at this conclusion from different persuasions: religious, spiritual, humanistic, and philosophical. But, regardless of their bent, they share the urgency of the moment. They refuse to believe that climate degradation is some other generation’s problem to deal with. The morality here is acute and in high relief. As Climate Guardians they have made the personal commitment to act because it is simply the right and necessary thing to do.
They feel that we live in a world of specialists. More than ever we tend to let others deal with issues that fall outside of our realm. In the case of climate change we assume environmentalists, politicians, economists, industry, and non-profits - they will somehow take care of the problem. But, it’s not happening soon or fast enough because of the absence of popular will needed to galvanize action.
Climate Guardians seeks to create that popular will – by appealing directly to the innate moral goodness in all people - to act.