 Good afternoon, my name is Alex Reich and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and at the second event of our new monthly webinar series, Climate Conversations Pathways to Action. The National Academies provide independent, objective advice to inform policy with evidence, spark progress and innovation, and confront challenging issues for the benefit of society. In keeping with this mission, we're excited to host these conversations about issues relevant to national policy action on climate change. Today, we won't be taking questions from the audience, however, we would like to hear your feedback and your ideas for future conversations, which I invite you to share after the event in the survey linked just above this video. There, you'll also find a link to register for our April 15 webinar on the cost of climate change and environmental justice in the United States. Our conversation this afternoon will be recorded and made available on this webpage tomorrow. But today, one year after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic and life changed around the world and at home, we will be reflecting on the pandemic and discussing the intersections between it and another global challenge, climate change. We'll also consider how the pandemic and climate change intersect with other long staining issues in the US, racism and equity. This has been a hard year, and I'm grateful you're here with us today to reflect on it and to talk about how we can continue to learn from it to inform policies that enable us to be more resilient to our ongoing and future challenges. We're honored to be joined by Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, who will introduce our conversationalists and moderate the event. Thank you again for joining the National Academies for Climate Conversations. Laura, it's all yours. Thank you very much. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us and thank you to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for holding this event and helping us talk about some of the biggest challenges of our time. Climate change and COVID are global catastrophes, but they play out at a local level, both quite shockingly fast. And we're here after just one year to talk about the connections between these two catastrophes. What can we learn from each one and how do they relate to one another? We've got a lot of ground to cover. So I'll introduce our panelists, our discussants. So today we're here with Georges Benjamin and Chris E. And they are Georges is the executive director of the American Public Health Association, which is the nation's oldest and largest organization of public health professionals. He's been there since December 2002. He's a health leader, a practitioner, an administrator and the former secretary of health for the state of Maryland. And he's a member of the National Academy of Medicine. And he's been very busy this year, as you can imagine, advising policymakers, journalists and the public about the pandemic and how to make communities safer and safe as possible in this disastrous year. And Chris E. by is a professor in the Department of Global Health and Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the University of Washington. She studies the impacts and adaptation to climate change, including extreme events, thermal stress, foodborne safety and security, waterborne diseases, vectorborne diseases. There are a lot of ways that climate intersects with health. And she's one of our leading experts in those. And she's also vice chair of the National Academy's committee to advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program. And just two days ago, they released an important report called the U.S. Global Change Research Needs and Opportunities for the next decade, which will advise the group that's making our climate change, our long term climate change plan for the next decade. And you can see that report in the link above the video. So it's a really important report. It's very interesting report. We'll talk about it some more over the course of this hour. So thank you for joining us, Georges and Chris, and welcome to the conversation. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you. And yeah, I'd like to start with Georges, if you could sort of lay the groundwork on the COVID side of things and talk about, you know, some of the biggest changes that have happened in the past year, and particularly the things I think that were the biggest surprises and how the pandemic has played out any important lessons, especially that might be relevant for how we think about climate. Well, let me just say that, you know, we in public health, we've been talking about the great pandemic for all of my time in health care. You know, I got out of medical school about 1978 and I've been hearing about the pandemic is going to come every year. And the big one, even though we've had some smaller ones, haven't hit. So this was the big one. It's the greatest that we've had in over 100 years. And as you know, it has totally disrupted our way of living. It we have over 29 million cases in the United States alone. And, you know, me, you know, hundreds of millions around the world. And over a half million deaths in the US. In fact, the number of people who have died in the US in the last year is more than the all of the six years of World War Two. And so I, you know, it has enormous impact. And we've had a reduction in life expectancy provisionally in our country by a year. And of course, people who know public health and issues around life expectancy is a big deal to lose a year of life expectancy. So it has really been a phenomenal disruptive event for the whole planet. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. And Chris, you know, we with climate change, we talk a lot about, you know, sea level rise and some of the kind of planetary scale changes that are happening. But it's also a health and a public health catastrophe. Could you tell us a little bit about what some of the biggest health impacts are currently from climate change and where the biggest risks are in the immediate future? Thank you. And it's a fairly long answer. I'll try to summarize it briefly. Any health issue that can be affected by the weather can be affected by climate change. Heat related morbidity and mortalities increasing in the US with more heat waves. We've seen devastating floods and we saw consequences of those floods for our health. But it's also issues of vector-borne diseases, for example, diseases like dengue is likely changing its range in the United States. We worry about issues related to air quality, both thinking about ozone and how ozone has a short term impact on our health. But there's also a very recent publication on how the pollen season has lengthened with climate change. So those of you with allergies and asthma, we've got a much longer pollen season. And in many places, it's more intense. Internationally, we worry significantly about food security. Food and water security will be major challenges throughout the century. And there's other issues as well that very directly connect with what George's was talking about. For example, we know that weather can affect people's mental health and we've seen the strong mental health impacts from covid. And there's a lot that we can learn from the research that we've done on covid and have done on climate change to make sure that we have the systems in place to protect mental health. Yeah, thank you. And let's let's start with the mental health. I mean, it's you know, it's an infectious disease, but it's also covid is an infectious disease, but it's also, you know, we're the biggest public health or the biggest mental health stressor in in our lifetimes. Are there, you know, as you see the intersection between climate and covid, you know, are there any any lessons for how to how to recognize, anticipate, mitigate the mental health burden that we're seeing? George, do you want me to start? Sure, go ahead. Well, I'll start with there are lots of mental health consequences of changing in weather patterns. And one thing that covid has really highlighted is there's so many underserved areas of our country and we don't actually know how many people suffer from a variety of mental health illnesses and being able to better understand what the current burden is and to think about how that could shift with changing weather patterns and making sure after a big disaster, whether it be covid or a hurricane or a flood, that there are sufficient services available for people who need them, that all of these are quite disruptive to our lives. And as we know very clearly now in mental health, all of us are being affected with with the changes we've seen with covid. George's. Yeah. Thanks, Chris, you know, and to build on what Chris said, you know, the the real challenge you have is that we certainly have some overt manifestations of mental health. But the real challenge we have is the fact that it is it is a very much a silent disease because people just don't recognize it. They often don't want to admit it. And it has a very, very long tail. So whether it's from climate change or there's from this kind of pandemic where we've been trying to uprooted our society and it's really changed the way we deal with one another. And, you know, we're all doing everything on social media or Zoom or pick another platform. The the the humanization of the way we engage with one another gets terribly, terribly disrupted in both of these activities. And then the fact that we don't have adequate resources makes it a big deal. And we often talk about resiliency. Well, the impact of mental health that we're seeing from both climate change and covid lays bear our inability, at least so far, to build a society that is as resilient as it needs to be. Now, communities can be resilient. People are very resilient. Kids are very resilient overall, but we can do better. And I think mental health is an example of where we need to build supports, resources and and build really a firewall so that people don't move up the escalation of mental health problems. We are seeing, for example, suicides that are up during this this covid for a variety of reasons. And we're going to continue to to see that as part of at least the covid outbreak. And it's just it's something, again, we know we know it happens and there are lots of preventive things we can do to to address it. And if I could, I'd like to really underscore, George, as your comment about the long term, there's excellent research done in the UK on flooding and comparing people who are not flooded, people are disrupted and people whose houses were actually flooded, showing a significant increase in a range of mental health issues. And after years of follow up, the people who are flooded still have mental health issues at a higher rate than the general population. So all of the structures that George is talking about need to be long term and not just put in place for the few weeks after the flood, after a particular event, but making sure that they're there for the long haul. Yeah, as you said, as you say, these the problem, you know, any disaster can be amplified and, you know, including mental health issues. And that seems like something we we saw after Katrina, too. You know, a lack of resources, including mental health resources, certainly a lack of financial resources and recovery, you know, led to still existing long term consequences that seem like, you know, that you can't stop a hurricane, but you can stop some of these just devastating long term consequences or at least mitigate them. And I think that's certainly mitigation is one of the key terms of the report that just came out two days ago that Chris was one of the directors on. And that really, so I think the emphasis on this report, how did it differ from some of the earlier advice that that this group has given to the global climate change research group? Thanks for the question. And the committee is designed to advise US global change research program and they produce Decadal research strategies or next research strategies in 2022. And the committee took it upon itself to think about what kinds of approaches, what kinds of issues do we think would be beneficial to include in that strategic plan? And we took the perspective of being about a 2030 or about at the end of the next Decadal research strategy and looking backwards and thinking about what are the big security risks that we face as Americans? And one of those, of course, is health and and have some suggestions about how to approach these challenges, focusing very much on the fact that as you look at health and food security, water security, energy security, our infrastructure, national security, these all intersect in lots of different ways. Much of our research to date has been within sectors and we've done relatively little as a nation looking across those intersections and thinking about how the intersection of water, agriculture and health will not only interact within itself, but interact with a physical climate change, interact with ecosystems and making sure that the research is designed with user needs in mind. So we focus on what are the needs of users so that we can have effective decisions taken to increase resilience over the next decade. Nice. Yeah, thank you for, thank you for the report. And again, if you haven't seen it yet, it just came out Tuesdays an important distillation of knowledge for the public and certainly for policymakers. So, you know, one of the big things that has become more apparent through COVID, I think, is the unequal burden of disease and the unequal susceptibility to risk from a pandemic, from climate. And, you know, at Scientific America, we've published several stories with the headline that it's not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID, but racism. And I assume that that's that's the case for susceptibility to health consequences of climate change as well, is that systemic racism makes everything worse and certainly makes health threats worse. And I think Georgia's at the at your organization, APHA, you have a race and health. Well, I'm sure a lot of initiatives, but a big project. And could you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. Well, we certainly have published a very nice academic book on racism and health. And so that's my commercial announcement for the day. But we also have been cataloging all of the communities around the country that are have been declaring racism as a public health problem. And we're trying now to figure out not just how they're cataloged, but now what do we do to try to help those communities to empower those communities to make those declarations real? And we've got a project we're looking at putting together a policy database to figure out again, what policies work, what are the evidence that if you do X, then you get Y, which impacts racism. And if you just think about many of the structural racism issues that we have, whether it's redlining or not adding people access to capital, you know, policies around zoning beyond the redlining issue, access to access to good transportation. You know, our nation is about to hopefully, once again, invest in our failing infrastructure. And we're hoping that that is done in a way that not only improves the the core infrastructure in a way that, you know, makes our health and well-being better so that we we build things for health and not just to build them because they look good. We want them to look good. We want them to build them in a healthy way. We want them to do it in a more green way. But in doing that, we also want to make sure that it's done in a just and equitable way so that, you know, we when we build urban communities, for example, we try to deal with the heat island effect. We know that urban communities are eight to ten degrees hotter than our rural communities. Well, you can you can adjust that by putting light colored roofs on houses. Well, that's that's a homeowners association or a zoning issue by building porous pavement to hand the water runoff as an example. By the way, water runoff also helps you deal with your your standing water problem, which deals with dengue malaria and vector-borne diseases as well. More green space, again, more shade, more reflective surfaces, all those kinds of things that that result ultimately in cooler communities. So we think we can we can combine good structural investments in infrastructure. We're reducing health outcomes and do that in a way that addresses some of these health inequities that we have that result from just the way we design our communities. Nice. Yeah. And it seems like one of the big kind of health injustice issues is how what's the air like that you breathe? And, you know, during this year of an infectious disease pandemic that, you know, destroys people's lungs, seems like air pollution is one of the big areas of overlap between mitigating climate change and seeing the consequences for for lung health and for infectious disease pandemic. And is that, you know, when you're thinking about the overlaps between you, that may be one of the big ones. One of the big ones, the wildfires, we know that those wildfires were terrible. And of course, they impacted people miles away, you know, tragically these wildfires were pretty large. And of course, they don't respect geographical or political boundaries. And so people miles away were impacted by toxic fumes. And when you when things burn, they don't just burn grass and trees, they burn houses, they burn plastic so you get noxious fumes in the air. And then, of course, a lot of these things result in small particulate matter, which injure our lungs. And we know that there's a strong correlation between that and higher levels of disease and even there are some belief that some of those make people more impacted if they get exposed to COVID. I don't know, Chris, if you want to build on that. But I think that that's a that's another, you know, intersection between the environment and COVID. It is a really important intersection. One of the issues that we've talked about in health and climate change community, but the climate change community more broadly are that when you look at level of preparedness, that people are preparing for one thing at a time. And we saw very clearly during COVID, it's not one thing at a time. I live in Seattle, we had wildfires, we had heat waves, and we had COVID all at the same time. And it really highlighted challenges that we're facing in trying to deal with multiple events and and COVID really laid bare that these compounding events are going to be more frequent. We've been saying this on the climate change side and our level of ability to deal with these at the moment isn't where it has to be. And we have to think of solutions at all scales. A simple one, I live in Seattle, which has a very low penetration of air conditioning. We had very high levels of air pollution from the fires. So when you look at the air quality index over 120 is really considered quite hazardous. My neighborhood was over 250. People don't have air conditioning. It's really hot. What do you tell them to do if you close your windows and doors to keep out the air pollution? Do you tell them to open their windows and doors? They can get fresh air in. The city closed our public pools because the air quality was so bad. And the cities now come up with some solutions for what we can do the next time around. It would be nice if we were more proactive. It would be helpful for the health of everyone to think in advance of these kinds of intersections, where they're going to challenge us and what kinds of structures we can put in place to help prevent avoidable morbidity and mortality. And let me build on that. I mean, if you think about the intersection, just we just we had in the South principally, Texas, what we had obviously significant ice storms and weather. We had very cold freezing, knocked out the power systems. And we had people that died because of that. And we did that during the COVID outbreak, which again, also disrupted not just in Texas, but really nationwide, the distribution of vaccines. So it slowed up our response. Unfortunately, not for many days, but long enough to have a huge human cost. And we there, as I understand it, we were minutes away from their whole power grid failing, which would have put people out of power for a long time. And of course, we also have the Jackson, Mississippi problem right now. I don't know if they're up their water systems up and running yet or not, but they still are having water problems there, which tells you again, the fragility of our infrastructure. And again, another correlation, you can't wash your hands if you don't have clean water, if you don't have clean water, you can't wash your hands. And you're much more likely to get an infectious disease like over. So these disasters cannot be, as Chris pointed out, they cannot be addressed one on one. We have to think of these overlapping disasters and we need to build a cohesive, all hazards approach to dealing with these things, both on the adaptation side and on the mitigation side. And then on the emergency response side of what we're doing. And one of the challenges that I see sitting in the climate change arena is that health is not very good at looking into the future. And when you tell somebody to do all hazards, think about the all hazards that occurred over the last few weeks. And then people like me come in and say, the future is not going to look like this. The future is going to be a lot hotter. It's going to be more humid. There's going to be more extreme events. We're going to have more opportunities for vector-borne diseases changing their range that you need to think beyond history and start thinking about what the future could hold, which is a challenge for human beings in and of itself. But it's also a big challenge when you've got so many constraints on your resources. And what do you put into preparing for an uncertain future when you need to solve problems today? And there is a challenge there with just not sufficient resources to be able to plan for a very different future. Yeah. And let's let's talk about some specifically some specific policy approaches, you know, either specific policies or a way of thinking about policies that take into account what we've learned from COVID and are and what we know is coming with climate changes here and is coming in the future. And, you know, are there, you know, Chris, you just to follow up on the report, what are some of the biggest pieces of advice that you both would have for policymakers about how to protect us from the next disasters, how to prevent the next disasters or make them less disastrous when they come? It's a very good question and something people spend a lot of time trying to work through. Basically, everything is connected to everything else. And so it's having a really big tent. Think back at the very beginning part of COVID. The focus on advice was coming from people in public health, was coming from medicine and from public health professionals. And at some point, the economists what hang on where you're talking about is going to have a significant impact on the economy. And so there was good collaborations in many cases between people in public health and people in economics. And when we think about a complex challenge like climate change, what the report keeps emphasizing is we have to talk across the disciplines. That can be facilitated by the federal agencies, ensuring that the research is more multidisciplinary. When you think about the way the research is funded in Europe, it is across disciplines and it needs to be grounded in what the users need. So there needs to be engagement with the users of this information to make sure that whatever is produced is usable, usable and easily used. And so thinking differently about research, making sure we've got more co-production of that research. And so in the end, we do produce what is going to be helpful for moving our policies forward. Georges. Yeah, I would argue that we need to make sure that science and the evidence informs policy. And I'm not just talking about the medical health sciences, but I'm talking about the environmental sciences. I'm talking about political science. We need to understand how we how we get people to understand some of the messages. I think one of the more important things is understanding how people respond when they give a message, who listens, who doesn't listen, who has concerns, who doesn't have concerns. You know, we spent a lot of time selling people a whole range of products and they're very, very good at getting you buying to buy stuff that you may not quite wanted to get on Monday, but it looks so exciting that you get it and on Tuesday. And yet we haven't figured out how to get people to respond effectively to protect themselves when they know that last year we had 30 named storms, you know, that we know that 12 of them, you know, had landfall, that six of these were major hurricanes. You know, the Gulf got hit numerous times. And yet getting people to build differently, move and live in different places. Think about, you know, the the issues involved in that we haven't done it. And it's it's amazing that we just don't use what we know about human behavior and the way people think about things to to address problems that we know are going to occur. And then we throw billions, not millions, billions of dollars to fix things that millions of dollars would have prevented. And I think that's one of the lessons that we've got to learn from a policy perspective that Benjamin Franklin was right, you know, about prevention. He absolutely was right. Yeah, and it seems like climate and and pandemics are the two biggest example, two of the biggest examples of that. I mean, you know, one of the reasons that the pandemic has played out so differently in different places is, you know, just a function of how well funded and resourced public health departments were across across the country and around the world. And I assume would you both say that, you know, investing in prevention pays off many, many fold for both of your areas of expertise. So, you know, during the COVID pandemic, people's behaviors changed drastically. Has that informed any kind of thinking about, you know, what what the possibilities are for rapid action against climate change and preparing for climate health consequences? Do you see connections there? I've got two particular comments on that. One is particularly people who sit in the climate science part of the research enterprise have looked at the massive interventions around COVID and the meager interventions on climate change and have listened for years for politicians saying we can't make those kinds of investments. And there are hundreds at least of editorials saying you did that. You just did that for COVID. You could do that if you had the political will. The second perspective, I think, is important to bring forward is that when you look at mitigation policies, you look at ways to to reduce emissions from coal fire power plants, reduce emissions from tailpipes, have people eat the kind of diet their doctor recommends. All of those are associated with significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. They're also really good for our health. And if you if you find ways to count how many avoided hospitalizations, how many avoided premature deaths and then you value that the value of that of those changes for our health is of the same order of magnitude, if not larger than the cost of mitigation. And yet when we hear about mitigation, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it's all about the cost. And I'm only talking about the health benefits or benefits for our ecosystems as well. And so the benefits for us as individuals and for our society are incredibly large and the discussion needs to shift to the benefits of mitigation for everybody. Georges, yeah, you know, one of the one of the things that I spent my time doing when I was in the District of Columbia was actually spent 10 months as a deputy fire chief running the EMS system in Washington, D.C. And one of the things you learn about in the fire department is that you know, there's there's a standby cost to to to have in a fire department. But if you have a fire, you absolutely want it. I spent a lot of time as an emergency physician practicing the hospital emergency departments. And there is a standby cost when there's not a cardiac arrest or a bad asthmatic or someone really sick in the emergency department. But if you don't have it, you know, you you you wish you did when something bad happens. And I think the challenge we have in both climate change and and and, you know, these kinds of health emergencies is that when we do our best work and nothing happens, no one wants to invest in it. So you have the, you know, the the the frog in the water phenomena with climate change, where every year gets a little hotter and every year gets a little hotter and then all of a sudden we wake up one morning and the water is is tepid and then it's boiling. And people kind of ignored it, even though someone said, you know, it's a little hotter today, it's a little hotter today. And nobody paid attention to that. Now, you know, we're running around debating about who caused and how climate change is caused, whether humans have caused it or not. I believe that humans have caused climate change, that fossil fuels is the major culprit. I don't have any doubt about that. But I don't think anyone disagrees that the planet is hotter. The storms are more severe that we're worried about the what's happening with the the ice melting at our polar our ice poles and, you know, the North Pole and the South Pole. And we know what happens when we don't invest in addressing that more effectively. So I, you know, I am perplexed that we have a problem that is right here in front of us that we can see it happening. And yet the amount of extraordinary denial. Is there. And by the way, there is a lot it will cost us money to do this. No doubt about it. But a lot of the stuff is really pretty simple. And some of it is is really pretty cheap. You know, just political leadership to encourage us to turn our thermostats down to make sure that we cut off the lights when we leave a room. Over time, as we're renovating facilities, convert to, you know, what, you know, systems that turn on and off when we walk in a room or we want to flush a toilet. I mean, the systems that we know and the science that we have to reduce our carbon footprint are there. They're right here in front of us. We just have the leadership to put them in place. And what we know is that if we do that, it will take time. But if we do that, we can change the trajectory of our planet. But if we don't, you know, it's going to be trillions of dollars or pick a disaster movie that's going to be real. You know, we've had several amazing disaster movies about pandemics and we kind of watch them with somewhat fierce, somewhat, you know, entertained. Well, I can tell you, COVID-19 was a horror story. And I think most of us now know that to be true. Pick pick one of those horror stories on climate change and then bring those two together. That's our future if we don't do something. Yeah. And that seems like a powerful message. You know, as as you've said, it was completely was predictable. It was predicted. You learned that this pandemic was coming, that the big one was coming in medical school. Do you think, you know, is this a a useful connection to make? Is this something that policymakers can maybe work off of or communicators to say, look, you know, we told you this was coming and it happened exactly as predicted. And we're telling you that you need to prepare for hurricanes. You prepare for climate change. And, you know, do you feel like COVID might make people who are resistant or just thought, oh, you know, it's a problem for later. It's not my problem. Do you think it'll make people recognize more that it is a problem that everybody has to deal with? You know, we in the sciences are always too timid to say I told you so. But I think we ought to break that pattern. And I'm going to say for COVID, we told you so. We've been telling you that for years. You didn't listen. It's a tragedy. And we need you to listen now. Not that we got your attention and business community, economics, folks, you know, all the various sectors. We got your attention now. We told you so. And we're giving you some advice on how not to be as unprepared, because if we think that this is the last pandemic, that this is going to be a hundred year pandemic, you know, we don't have to worry about this for another hundred years. I just remind folks, West Nile virus, Zika, monkey pox, H1N1, SARS-1, Ebola. Those those were those were red flags and warnings that the bad one was coming. And I think most of us when we saw the SARS-2, we were worried. But once we once we saw the the number of cases in China exponentially growing, I can tell you that in January, you know, and once we realized the way it was spread, much, you know, my staff and I said, oh, no, this is a bad one. Now, we none of us thought it would be this bad. All right, none of us thought that, but it can fool you. And let me take climate change again. We had two and a half times the normal number of storms last year and that we've had that we've had accelerating storms, more severe storms the last few years. I don't know what it takes for us to, you know, to be slapped around to recognize that the environment is changing, climate change is here. It's impacting our health today. It's been attacking our water quality today. If we don't act today, we're we're going to regret this not 20 years from now, not 50 years from now, but every year to come at an increasing cost. And I just got to continue to iterate. It's preventable. We can mitigate a lot of this. No, thank you. Yeah, that's a powerful message. And I think at this stage, we can pivot towards what what should what should the next steps be? What does what does solutions look like? What what if you if you think about climate and public health and pandemic preparedness and the lessons of covid? You know, what do you think are some of the opportunities to make the world a better place as we try to recover from the pandemic? Within adaptation, we have a whole set of tools that are being used in health or being used in other sectors. They're called vulnerability, capacity and adaptation assessments. And they help communities, states, regions to to look at. Where are we now with respect to being able to manage our current climate? And what do we think is likely to happen with additional climate change? What changes do we need to make? We are relatively fortunate in health in that all of the health risk of a changing climate are current problems. So thinking about dengue fever, for example, changing its range. There's a lot of information about how one can control dengue. It's very difficult, but there's lots of information about how it can be done. Nobody needs to die in a heat wave. We've got lots of information about how to keep people safe during heat waves. And there is a program at CDC, the Brace Program, Building Resilience Against Climate Effects that is working with a very small number of communities and states to go through and do these kinds of vulnerability assessments to take a look at their policies to see what needs to be implemented. And it's excellent that CDC is doing it, not only for these communities because CDC can also capture the lessons learned in the best practices. We need to implement this across the US. We need for everybody to be able to engage. And as I said before from the report, we need to engage in ways that we engage with the people who are the most vulnerable. When you look at our federal agencies, for example, NOAA has got regional integrated science for assessment. They're basically centers of excellence where there's partnerships between universities and the local community to move forward on a range of fronts at the same time. So we've got lots of tools around. We need to really move forward and upscale what we're already doing and making sure that we can reach out and work with the communities. And as George has talked about so passionately at the beginning of making sure we protect the most vulnerable, that has to be the focus of where we put our efforts and these partnerships that we need to strengthen and further develop. George's. Yeah, yeah, you know, we're going to certainly begin looking at how to make a just transition to a much more green economy. And we have to recognize that particularly for low income individuals, they spend a lot larger percent of their dollar on energy than those of us who are more fluent. And so as they transition and they have to to a more green economy, we have to find ways to to rebalance that equation so that they spend less of their dollar on energy. We're going to have to figure out as we begin to build differently in this country. You know, homes in the south, they're going to have to be winterized. No, they didn't have to be winterized before. We're going to have to figure out how to do that. Guess what? That means winterizing the the wind fans in your community. It means protecting your generators from ultra cold weather. It means following the advice when you get, you know, a review of your your risk capacity. There are sometimes where you could decide, well, I'm not sure I want to take that risk to put that investment in now. I'm going to tell folks they need to make that investment as a matter of policy much more effectively. I think there's going to be important that we as we move more and more to getting all of our sectors involved. You know, the health care sector is a energy hog, right? We spend about what 10 percent of at least the industrial part of our our green green green green gases are put out by the health system. We are we are a hog for energy and we need that we need that energy. But we need to find more ways to green our facilities. That means hospitals. That means replacing old power plants. That means thinking about also how we deal with our trash. You know, we we have a lot with you. A lot of plastics, a lot of rubbers, a lot of rubber goods. We need to figure out how we deal with that as well, because that's also another environmental problem we have to deal with. So I think from a policy perspective, all sectors have to be involved. We have to think of long term investments. And I think we have to add in in our calculations around what we're going to do, something we have to make sure that we count the the health investments, the downside of health as part of that. So far too often we segregate and make this false choice between jobs and our health. And I would argue that you can't do a job unless you're healthy, you certainly can't do a job if you're dead. And far too often we make this stark argument between jobs and our health. And we need to find a way because it's important to do both. So as we do this transition, we need to do it equilibrately. We need to do it in a just manner. Equilibrately injustice aren't aren't equal. They aren't the same thing. And we need to make sure that we do it in a way that is healthy. Because at the end of the day, we want to move people from one point to another, not just cars from one point to another, not just burning something to burn it. We need that we need to come up with energy solutions that that that advance the well being of our economy. And by the way, we also need to make sure that that we don't do climate change nationalism that we're only worried about ourselves because you know, we live on this thing called the planet. And again, the climate does not represent does not recognize geographical or political boundaries. Yeah, and pandemics don't either. I mean, of course, their closing borders can slow things down, but microbes are going to win. They'll go where they go and don't don't stay put. And if I could add one perspective to what George has had to say, incredibly well spoken and incredibly important is one of our resources that we really should start counting on our youth. Students are so impassioned about climate change. The size of my classes has grown enormously over the last few years. They want to really engage in this issue. They're energetic, they're enthusiastic, they're creative. And one of the questions that I always ask my students is what is the one most important thing that you can do? Which is always unfair to ask students because they have to read my mind of what's the answer. And the answer is, of course, vote. That ensure that each of our communities has people that represent your values and vote for your values, vote for what you think is important so that we have the leadership in place that can take on the challenges that George has so clearly outlined. And let me add to that, you know, my good buddy and Chris's good buddy, Ed Marback at George Mason University, who does a lot of survey work on community values and what people think, points out that two-thirds of all Americans say we should take action on climate change. So while our political leaders may not be there, as many of them as need to be, the public is there. They understand that we need to move this agenda. So we need to use that to build that movement and grab that movement and let people, you know, call their elected officials, send letters, you know, let them know how you feel that we want action on climate change. We want it now. And one of the really interesting results from Ed's last survey was, again, three quarters of the US public agrees that the climate is changing. They think it's affecting our health. They want something to be done. And then there was a question of, do you talk to your family and friends about climate change? There's only about a third of the survey responses. Talk to about climate change. They're worried about it. And they don't talk to other people about it. And so finding ways for people to start those conversations because that is a way that we can build more of the political will that we need to make the changes that the American public agrees we should be making. And it seems like this is a good time now that everybody's talking about COVID. Part of that conversation could also be, you know, why was it so bad here? What went wrong? What can we do better next time? What what systems do we need? And that, you know, that's a communication issue also to build support and to follow up on. Chris, you mentioned more and more young people interested in climate and stat news just had a nice nice piece the other day about more and more young people going into public health programs or applying to public health programs. So the youth are coming and also apparently science and health reporting journalism programs too are also seeing a lot of interest. So that's one thing this this horrible pandemic has kind of shown the importance of of public health and and also of how to intersect with climate. Yes, so so everybody listening, you know, vote talk about it. Yeah, let's see. So are there, you know, one of the the issues we're dealing with immediately right now is vaccine, the vaccine rollout, how to get them to people, how to do that equitably and justly and how to kind of build trust. And climate is also a trust issue, it seems like, because it's not something that any individual can fix. We have to kind of do it together. Do you have, we're getting near the end of the hour. Do you have some kind of final thoughts about how to to build trust and cooperation to to deal with some of these incredible global issues? Well, let me start by just acknowledging that it's OK for people to have concerns and to ask for for for information. So that's first thing we have to acknowledge that we also acknowledge historical warner wrongs that have occurred for various populations that we have. We have to recognize that this has been politicized, which I wish it had not been, but it has. We should acknowledge that. But we also acknowledge that this has been one of the most amazing scientific developments of my lifetime. And we've used over 10, 15 years of amazing work. Understanding, going back to understanding the genetic code originally to make this vaccine which is highly, highly effective and has been demonstrated to significantly reduce the morbidity and mortality from this disease. So we encourage people to to to ask questions, you know, talk to trusted messengers. So it's not only the message, but the messenger. And if we can do that on climate, the lesson I think for climate change is that we need to figure out better who the trusted messengers are and send them out to talk to their family members and loved ones about climate and give them things that they can do so they don't think this is just too overwhelming a problem to be solved. And one area where I have some encouragement is I've. I still watch mainstream media. I know I'm pretty old fashioned to do that. They have switched and you turn on your media these days. And what I see more accurately reflects the U.S. than it did a year ago. That you're seeing a range of people, you're seeing a range of voices and it's really encouraging for people to be able to see that there are people from all different perspectives that are engaged in covid, they're engaged in climate change and being able to reach out and talk with people that that you individually trust, whatever your criteria are and we're really starting to see that shift. I'm I'm very encouraged by that because it is the way we're going to start shift the discussions. We're going to start seeing greater uptake of vaccinations in places where there's hesitancy for very good reasons and continuing those trends is incredibly important. Are there lessons either from other countries or different parts of the United States of in the covid response or in the climate response where there are things that worked that should be implemented more broadly that policymakers should know about that you know that you want to endorse in the little bit of time we have left or just encourage people to know about and pay attention to. All the endorsements going on in the state of Washington we had the first outbreak and Governor Inslee has taken a science based approach. He's talked with a scientist. He's very much informed by the science and now we've got pretty much the lowest one of the lowest rates of covid overall and some of the highest rates of vaccination. One of our representatives is a pediatrician and she volunteered the other day. So you go get vaccinated by your representative. We've got sports people who are coming out and helping with vaccinations and we're having very high uptake pretty low rates of disease compared with other places in the U.S. and it's all informed by the science and it's a community effort. Thanks. And let me just say that, you know, for me leadership matters. Science matters and good policy follows good science and good leadership and it all matters. Great. Thank you so much. I'm going to turn it back over to Alex Reich of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. I want to thank both of you so much. Chris E. Bay and George Benjamin for a really stimulating important conversation. Thanks to NASA for hosting this and for convening us today and thanks to everybody in the audience for caring about these issues and for doing what you can to help us recover from COVID and adapt and mitigate climate change. And I'll turn it back over to Alex. Alex, thank you so much for bringing us together today. Well, thank you. Thank you, Laura. Really, really appreciate your moderation and thank you, George and Chris for sharing your perspectives. And thanks to everyone for joining the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for our second climate conversation. The conversation was recorded and it should be available for viewing on this same webpage starting tomorrow. For our April 15th climate conversation, which you can register for by clicking the link above or going to costofcarbon.eventbrite.com. We will talk about the social cost of carbon and environmental justice in the United States. Richard Newell, the president and CEO of Resources for the Future, will help us understand the social cost of carbon, its importance for addressing climate change and how it can help advance just and environmentally sound policies. We'll announce the moderator and second conversationalists soon. Again, that's costofcarbon.eventbrite.com or the link just above. And we'll also share that information through our climate at the National Academies Newsletter, which you can also sign up for above. As a final reminder to share your feedback on today's event or your ideas for future events, please see the survey link also above. And thank you all for joining us today and again to Georges, Chris and Laura for sharing their expertise and time with us. Lastly, thank you to the Climate Communications Team at the National Academies and to everyone behind the scenes who supported today's event. We're excited to continue the conversation through future events like this. And I want to ask you to stay safe and have a great day. Thanks for joining us.