I gave a talk at UNC yesterday on climate change from a national security perspective. This wasn’t an official “Operation Free” event but it came about from my association with Operation Free. I was invited by the North Carolina Conservation Council to speak to interested students on climate change. The talk was sponsored by Earth Day Revolution.
About 40 students showed up: pretty respectable considering it’s finals week! I was a panelist with three experts (I was going to say “other experts” but that would put me in their league). My ten-minute talking time was taken up with five minutes of the Pew Climate Patriots video, leaving me five minutes to tell my story. Well, it turns out five minutes isn’t enough – I had so much to say that when I returned to my seat I was kicking myself for not covering some items. Still, my speech seemed effective and I was told later that I did an outstanding job.
During the question and answer session I assumed I would be left out (see the “experts” part above). Instead, I fielded two or three questions – very good questions, I might add. This gives me hope that the younger generations really do get it. That the problems we face with our warming planet and our energy dependence are being taken seriously by the generations who will most feel their effects. Maybe some bright mind in the room has the solution to it all: I don’t know. But I certainly enjoyed stimulating their thinking for an hour last night.
If you were hoping for a bright mind in the audience that could help fix the “problem”, that talk should have been at State
Fortunately, three out of four panelists were State alumnus! 🙂
awesome! Actually, I didn’t mean that as a dig at UNC (well, maybe a little) but more to the fact that State has the engineers and tech people to pull stuff off. UNC students seems they’d be more on the policy side.