<p>Chris Mooney writes about energy and the environment at <i>The Washington Post</i>. In May of 2020, Mooney and his staff won the Explanatory Reporting Pulitzer Prize for their groundbreaking series that showed with scientific clarity the dire effects of extreme temperatures on the planet.</p><p>Mooney previously worked at <i>Mother Jones</i>, where he wrote about science and the environment and hosted a weekly podcast. Chris spent a decade prior to that as a freelance writer, podcaster and speaker, with his work appearing in <i>Wired</i>, <i>Harper’s</i>, <i>Slate</i>, <i>The Los Angeles Times</i>, <i>The Post </i>and <i>The Boston Globe</i>, to name a few. Chris also has published four books about science and climate change.</p><p>As part of his reporting on the changing climate, Chris has traveled from the sweltering Amazon to the Petermann glacier at 81 degrees North Latitude in Greenland, where he slept on a floating ice sheet hundreds of miles from civilization. He has reported from the negotiations for the Paris climate agreement and struggling native villages in the Alaskan Arctic, watching the planet slowly unravel. </p><p>Chris is also a specialist in the relationship between politics and science, having tracked the topic for over a decade and pioneering coverage of the beat itself. He has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for his shorter writings and some of those have been included in the volumes Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006.</p>
Pulitzer Prize Winning Writer at <em>The Washington Post</em>, specializing on Energy and the Environment
<ul><li><strong>Why Science Gets Politicized</strong></li><li>We hear great concerns today about the "politicization of science," or political interference with science, especially on the subject of climate change. But what does that really mean, and why does it happen? In this lecture Chris Mooney explains what it means for science to be undermined politically, how to protect against it, and why different U.S. governments have developed different approaches to this problem. He also explains why from the perspective of human psychology, the desire to bend science is likely inevitable, necessitating strong safeguards to ensure that these tendencies do not affect policy and decision-making.</li><li><strong>Climate Change: The Race Between Politics and Physics</strong></li><li>Countries of the world are now racing to try to cut their greenhouse gas emissions (with the role of the U.S. remaining, for now, unclear). Meanwhile, the physical climate system is showing clear signs of the first major impacts of warming -- dying coral reefs, thawing Arctic permafrost, mounting losses from the world's enormous ice sheets, and more. Knowing this, this talk goes to the heart of the question that matters to future generations -- how fast is change coming, and can our political systems still move to stop it?</li></ul>