KPBS Midday Edition

Environmentalist Offers Hope For Climate Restoration

By Pat Finn / Producer , Mark Sauer / Host, The Roundtable

Published September 28, 2020 at 12:10 PM PDT

This story was published more than 3 years ago.

The orange haze covering the San Diego skyline on Sept. 15, 2020, because of smoke from wildfires across California, including the Valley Fire in rural East County.

The news is relentlessly bleak and scary: Record heat and wildfires in California and the West; a parade of deadly, destructive storms in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico; 100 degree temperatures in the Arctic; massive ice sheets breaking up in Antarctica and Greenland. All happening amid a pandemic. Yet in the Washington Post comes a headline of hope … “Stopping Climate Change Could Cost Less than Fighting Covid-19.”

Reading of record heat and wildfires in the West; deadly, destructive storms in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico; 100-degree temperatures, peat fires in the Arctic; and massive ice sheets breaking up in Antarctica and Greenland, it can seem as if the climate apocalypse is just around the corner.

But it doesn't have to arrive, say Rick Parnell and Sir David King writing in the Washington Post.

Parnell, president and chief executive of the Foundation for Climate Restoration and former chief operating officer of the United Nations Foundation, told Midday Edition on Monday the world can make a very real difference in climate change — can actually reverse the damage and restore the climate — for less than what it has spent already fighting COVID-19.

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Parnell notes that more is needed than mitigation efforts such as solar and wind power and carbon-neutral vehicles. What must happen is the removal of the carbon already in the atmosphere, and the technologies already exist to do that.

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KPBS Midday Edition Climate Change

Pat Finn

Pat Finn previously served as a producer for KPBS Midday Edition and KPBS Evening Edition. Finn began her career in broadcasting at KTLA and KCET in Los Angeles. In 1979 she became KPBS’ Public Information Director, then Director of Advertising and Promotion, Program Director, and Director of Broadcasting. She oversaw the station’s local and national productions, including the one-hour documentary Los Romeros: The Royal Family of the Guitar, and Child Protective Services, a one-hour look inside the San Diego County agency responsible for the welfare of at risk children. Both programs also aired on public television stations nationwide. Finn has earned honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

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Mark Sauer

A newspaperman for more than 30 years, Mark Sauer joined KPBS in October 2010 and previously served as the host of the KPBS Roundtable. He spent 27 years as a reporter and editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune after stints at The Houston Post and at two papers in his native Michigan. A features/human-interest writer in the UT's Currents section for many years, Mark also spent about a third of his UT career as an editor and reporter on the Metro Desk. He has covered a wide range of events: Wild fires in Southern California and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast; Super Bowls and the World Series; foster care and child-abuse issues; the Roman Catholic Diocese's sexual-abuse scandal and bankruptcy; royal visits of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Princess Diana; Republican and Democratic national conventions; high-profile criminal trials; and many other stories, from the silly to the sublime. Along the way, he interviewed everyone from presidents to pan-handlers. His work exposing the false accusations and prosecutions of several San Diegans for murder, rape and child abuse garnered Pulitzer Prize nominations and many regional and local journalism awards, including Best in the West, the Sol Price Award for Responsible Journalism and several San Diego and California bar-association awards. Mark has a degree in journalism from Michigan State University.

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