As U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of the fatal consequences of humanity’s “suicidal” war on nature on Wednesday, college teachers and students in New York started a three-day conference on how to save the planet through social equity, science and education.

Bill Nye “the Science Guy” said he likes to think of three big ideas to help sustain civilization, “and the first big idea is to raise the standard of living of women and girls, for when you raise the standard of living for women and girls, everybody’s life is better.”

Nye made his remarks Thursday at the 10th annual State of New York Sustainability Conference hosted by Cornell University, Ithaca College and the New York Coalition for Sustainability in Higher Education.

A 1977 Cornell graduate in mechanical engineering, Nye said his second big idea is science, in this case “electricity, which is magical. Electricity enables this electronic conference that we’re having today, and electricity can make toast. It’s this amazing source of energy. And when you think about the way we use energy right now, at least a third of it goes to the transportation sector. By some estimates half of it goes to the transportation sector.”

Electrifying all ground transportation and coming up with a better fuel for airplanes can eliminate an enormous amount of fossil fuel consumption, which will lead to cleaner air for everybody, Nye said.

“And the third thing is access to the internet, for when everybody has access to the internet you can have education for everybody in the world,” Nye said. “And when we have that you will not have this extraordinary anti-science movement, this anti-vaxxer movement, this weird denial of climate change point of view.”

When everybody shares this common vision of the future, “of science and our place in the cosmos, we’ll move forward very, very quickly. That’s my claim, based on history. Once things get going, things move really fast,” Nye said. “And so I am very excited about the future. If there are engineers out there listening, I want you to come up with better transmission lines for electricity, better ways to store electricity, along with electric vehicles, electric trucks and some new kind of airplane propulsion. It’s going to be fabulous.”

Policy Work

State Sen. Rachel May (D), representing Central New York’s 53rd District, said that almost everything she’s worked on in the senate has to do with quality of life.

“I want to focus on three areas where there isn’t enough research and teaching being done at the higher ed level, and not enough policy being done at the legislative level, where I hope to see more collaboration and more interdisciplinary collaboration so that we’re bringing all the minds together, and the areas are reducing and eliminating waste, respecting our relationship to other species and the world around us, and questioning commodification.”

Anne Reynolds, executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, said the Climate and Community Investment Act (S 3616) now in committee is probably the most aggressive in the country and is economy-wide, requiring 85% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050.

The state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act passed last year has very specific provisions for electricity — 70% from renewable sources by 2030. In contrast, its transportation provisions are very general, Reynolds said.

“The electricity portions are more specific and more detailed because New York state has so much experience there,” she said. “For the last 20 years you all, if you live in New York, have had a charge on your electric bill that’s been a dedicated source of revenue paying for a whole suite of programs related to energy efficiency … and the state has had renewable energy goals since 2003 … and increased to 30% by 2015, a goal we did not meet. That’s important to know. We’re aiming for 70% renewable energy, but we’ve never met the goals we set before, so we have a lot of work to do.”

The clean transportation provisions are relatively weak because New York state has less experience in that area, Reynolds said. “There is not a dedicated source of revenue for transportation electrification, transportation alternatives, things that would reduce emissions.”

“The Department of Transportation always is going to have the priority of keeping the roads and bridges safe, as they should, whereas the [Metropolitan Transit Authority] is always going to have the priority of keeping the trains running on time in New York City,” she continued, arguing for the state to change the way it approaches the issue.

Map Your Magic

Shorna Allred, associate professor of natural resources and the environment at Cornell, introduced marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and quoted from the anthology “All We Can Save,” which Johnson co-edited with Katharine Wilkinson.

“There’s a quote in your book that the climate crisis is not gender neutral, and that we have to really pay close attention to not just the science, but also to policy and justice,” Allred said.

“I think a lot more about the flip side of that, about what are we missing as far as opportunities for solutions,” Johnson said. “It is no surprise that the people who are already marginalized in society bear the brunt of the impacts of climate change. That is intuitive and there are lots of numbers to back that up, whether it’s people who are exposed to pollution from coal-fired power plants or people who are dealing with the impacts of hurricanes, and often the burden is on women and communities to help their families.”

Johnson said she much prefers to focus on solutions than detailing the problem, which is overwhelming.

The Brooklyn native co-founded The All We Can Save Project and recently co-created a roadmap for including the ocean in climate policy, the Blue New Deal, working with U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) staff.

A contrarian, Johnson has a way of looking at things from a fresh perspective, saying, for example, that “even people who deny climate change are on board with most of the solutions,” so why waste time arguing with them?

She is working on a book called “What If We Get It Right?” that says it’s important to know what you’re aiming for and touts diversity of opinion as important too, because “people [who] go to Bill Nye for [information are different] from people who want to hear me.”

“I think the first thing to always remember is that we each have a different role to play, and I encourage people to actually sit down and map what are you, what is your magic, what are the special skills that you can bring to the table when it comes to accelerating the implementation of climate solutions,” Johnson said.