CPR for an Ailing Planet

At the April 2021 Innovation Hour, Hertz Fellow Michael MacCracken discussed the rapidly intensifying impact of climate change and the steps necessary to minimize its damage to the planet.

With the relatively limited international actions to date to shift away from fossil fuels, successful climate protection and restoration (CPR) will require much more aggressive action. This includes a clean power revolution (CPR) across all energy sectors and, quite possibly, climate intervention to minimize essentially irreversible losses to biodiversity, mass of the ice sheets, and damages and loss of life from extreme weather events.

This Hertz Foundation Innovation Hour will take place live on Tuesday, April 20, 2021, from 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. Pacific, using the Zoom video conference platform. You can attend on a desktop, mobile device, or by phone. Please register using the form below, and we'll email you the Zoom meeting information.

Dr. Michael MacCracken is Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs with the Climate Institute in Washington DC and a member of its Board of Directors.

Michael received his B.S. in Engineering degree from Princeton University and, with the support of a Hertz Fellowship, his Ph.D. degree in Applied Science from the University of California Davis/Livermore. 

Following his graduate work, he joined the Physics Department of the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as an atmospheric physicist. His research in the ensuing 25 years included numerical modeling of various causes of climate change and factors affecting air quality. From 1993-2002, Dr. MacCracken was on assignment as senior global change scientist to the interagency Office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) in Washington D.C., also serving as its first executive director

Michael is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Society, and IUGG and also as a long-term member of the Oceanography Society and the American Geophysical Union. His legal declaration relating global climate change to the impacts on particular regions was cited favorably by Justice Stevens in his majority opinion in the landmark 2007 decision in Massachusetts et al. versus EPA.