Combat Climate Change with Multisolving

The other really important thing here is to combine adaptation and mitigation. And this idea we call multi-solving, and I didn't invent it. It's due to my friend and colleague Beth Sawin, who was a co-founder of Climate Interactive. It's adaptation and mitigation together. It's actions that reduce emissions and simultaneously help us adapt by improving our resiliency, our individual, national, and global security, our health, improving equity, and ultimately, as I just showed you, improving prosperity. So, what might some of those actions be? Here's a tiny partial list, and I'm sure you can think of many more. Highly efficient buildings, but especially deep energy retrofits that dramatically improve the energy efficiency and lower the emissions of housing, and especially low-income housing. Why especially? Because the owners and the occupants of low-income housing don't have the resources to do it themselves. So, they're going to need some assistance. That improves resilience. That improves equity because it lowers utility bills while you're lowering emissions. If you combine that with microgrids powered by rooftop, community solar, maybe some wind where it's appropriate, and district geothermal, you've created a much more resilient environment.