Climate activist Xiye Bastida, RMI CEO Jon Creyts, author Ashlee Piper, and analyst Michael Barnard preview their talks for Green Builder Media's Sustainability Symposium 2024, covering climate communication, the accelerating pace of solutions, consumer trust and greenwashing, and emerging clean technologies.
00:00:05:08 - 00:00:29:06
Xiye Bastida: There is such a beauty in the fact that we are an intersectional movement, that we are focused on everything. We're focused on litigation, we're focused on climate justice, we're focused on in negotiations. But something that I'm really interested about right now as I'm studying this in school, is the issue of communications, because I think that the climate crisis is a crisis of communication.
00:00:29:06 - 00:00:51:15
Xiye Bastida: And that gap that we have from actually telling the general public what the climate crisis is and where we can do about it. So I will be talking mostly about how movements develop the power of language, what prevents us from acting so that we can get to the other side. And this is something that we employ in almost every single space that we go into.
00:00:51:16 - 00:01:00:04
Xiye Bastida: And I'm excited to share it with all of you. You know, we we I think in language and we change language. We change how we think.
00:01:00:06 - 00:01:46:14
Jon Creyts: When we think about where the world is today, there is a narrative that we're all familiar with that the planet has reached scary tipping points, right? That we've hit up against one and a half degrees, and that we are seeing the consequences of climate change in ever escalating form. I think there's a counter narrative, though, that most people aren't aware of, that we're actually moving faster with solutions than we ever have that are actually growing at a scale well beyond what's what most people are aware of and that are responding to this climate crisis in ways that where we can see solutions emerge to this pressing environmental challenge.
00:01:46:17 - 00:02:12:15
Ashlee Piper: Well, I'm really excited to be at the symposium again this year. I think there's so much to continue to unpack and to learn from each other as we get into 2024. And how did we get to these historically low levels of consumer trust? As a is a pretty broad question unto itself, but I think it really boils down, especially with younger generations, to the commodification of sustainability.
00:02:12:15 - 00:02:45:02
Ashlee Piper: If we're just talking about low levels of consumer trust around perceived greenwashing or the sustainable cred or value of products and services, we've really have seen a pretty savvy consumer group come up who have become much more well-educated about climate change, not just because the information is more widely accessible out there, but also because this is these are younger generations that are starting to see the physical manifestations of climate change.
00:02:45:04 - 00:03:18:19
Michael Barnard: We're seeing autonomous delivery of electric vehicles. We're seeing vehicles, amazing emergence of electric vehicles and demand management solutions enable us to manage those new demand centers without raising pricing electricity. We're seeing the rise of complete streets and modular developments and building programs globally that are really transforming some of those things, and I'm seeing clearly embodied carbon standards emerging in multiple countries, and, of course, heat pumps with and without thermal storage.
00:03:18:20 - 00:03:19:27
Michael Barnard: Great stuff coming.