Minnesota to D.C. Carbon Free — Final Day of Preparation
Today was the final day of preparation before Lobby Day. We started the day by attending the plenary session to see the keynote speaker, Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University. She is a great public speaker and communicator of scientific data and the girls could follow along well, together with the other 1,500 people in the room. Check out her TED talk if you want to see her in action. It is well worth it!
After the keynote speaker, we finished preparing for tomorrow’s meetings with our local Minnesota team. Both Aryanna and Elena were assigned a role by the team leader and did a great job practicing their assignments. It was fun to see them so engaged. They had a lot of questions about one of the key policies Citizens’ Climate Lobby is promoting, the “Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act”. Questions like: What is a dividend? What does revenue neutral mean? What does bipartisan mean?
In the afternoon we were able to squeeze in a quick two-hour tour of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. It is incredible to see how much progress we have made from the Wright brothers’ plane to the first transatlantic flights to today’s exploration of space travel. The first powered flight in 1903 was only 12 seconds long, and, just 24 years later, Charles Lindbergh was crossing the Atlantic. There’s nothing like a seemingly impossible challenge to spur the human imagination …
Tomorrow is the big day. We will have a morning of meetings with our elected officials and then we will start the drive back. Wish us luck!
