NEO Youth Climate Summit Keynote with Sage Lenier

On Friday, April 11, over 300 high school students from across northeast Ohio gathered for the 2025 NEO Youth Climate Summit, hosted by Laurel School and Global Shapers Cleveland. The event brought students together to discuss and collaborate on solutions for climate change, sustainability, and environmental justice.

The summit was kicked off with a keynote address by a young climate activist, Sage Lenier. Sage was honored by TIME Magazine as a 2023 Next Generation Leader. She started teaching about climate change while still a student at UC Berkeley and has since founded her own non-profit, Sustainable and Just Future. 

In this episode, we share her message to the students. Hear what one Gen Z'er has to say to young environmental leaders about meeting the future with excitement and innovative solutions. And hear from Angela Yeager, a teacher whose students in Laurel School's Environmental Justice Semester planned the event. Organizers called it a "beaming light for young people demanding change in the face of the climate crisis." And it was. 

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Chapters

• 0:23 Episode Intro
• 1:27 Angela Yaeger on the Northeast Ohio Youth Climate Summit
• 4:34 Sage Lanier's Keynote Address
• 17:32 Moving from Awareness to Solutions
• 35:01 Building a Better Vision

Transcript

Diane Bickett: 0:04

You're listening to EcoSpeak CLE, a podcast for the eco-curious in Northeast Ohio. My name is Diane Bickett and my producer is Greg Rotuno. Together, we speak with local sustainability leaders and invite you to connect, learn and live with our community and planet in mind. Hello friends, On Friday, April 11th, hundreds of high school students from across our region gathered for the 2025 Northeast Ohio Youth Climate Summit hosted by Laurel School.

Diane Bickett: 0:34

The event brought students together to discuss and collaborate on climate change, sustainability and environmental justice solutions. The summit was kicked off with a keynote address by a young climate activist named Sage Lanier. Sage was honored by Time Magazine as a 2023 Next Generation Leader. She started teaching about climate change when she was just a student at UC Berkeley and has since started her own nonprofit called Sustainable and Just Future. I wanted to bring you her message to the students, so I recorded her keynote address for this podcast. Hear what one Gen Z-er has to say to young environmental leaders about meeting the future with excitement and innovative solutions. First up, though, I speak with Angela Yeager. She's a teacher at Laurel School and she gives us some background about this event. Welcome, Angela Yeager, a teacher at Laurel School who is instrumental in putting on the Northeast Ohio Youth Climate Summit. And hi, Angela, tell us a little bit about what's happening today here at the Cleveland Public Library in downtown Cleveland.

Angela Yeager: 1:43

Well, the Cleveland Public Library is buzzing with excitement this morning. We have 300 students from over 30 schools in Northeast Ohio attending a student-led and student-run conference around climate change and climate justice, and it's just incredible to watch all of the young people falling into their roles and doing their leadership roles and the excited high school students trickling through the door.

Diane Bickett: 2:09

So it's all high school students from all over the area and this is the third year you put this on.

Angela Yeager: 2:16

This is our second year. Second year so last year was the first and it was planned in a matter of three months with a cohort of graduates from Laurel School's Environmental Justice semester and they really wanted a way to further their engagement and advocacy and we had 100 students join at Case Western's Think Box and it was such a success that they were, by the time the summit was over, they were already talking about next year.

Diane Bickett: 2:42

Okay, and what do you want the students to get out of? Today was over. They were already talking about next year.

Diane Bickett: 2:46

Okay, and what do you want the students to get out of today? I really hope that they leave feeling inspired. I want them to feel like they're not alone in caring about the planet and people and our future together, and I want them to walk away with actionable things that they can do. There's a big surprise coming at the end of the summit and they're going to be invited to apply for mini-grants sponsored by Global Shapers, cleveland and the Climate Reality Project to get their ideas off the ground.

Diane Bickett: 3:17

Okay, and today is some presenters, but also like hands-on learning activities, Like. Can you describe a couple of those?

Angela Yeager: 3:24

Yeah, the students really. You know it's everything and but the kitchen sink right. The students really wanted to do it all, so there are, you know they have crafted opening remarks, there's a climate science 101 session happening. They have invited and flown in a keynote speaker, sage Lanier from New York, and then in the afternoon we'll have breakout sessions. There are 14 unique breakout sessions planned by students, with students, in partnership with outside organizations, so they're the ones teaching it. It's really exciting.

Angela Yeager: 3:59

And then, to top it all off, there's an opportunities fair, where over 30 organizations from Northeast Ohio are going to share opportunities that students can participate in right now, wow, well, I just love that you're bringing all this together and Sage Lanier is going to be the keynote and we're going to record that for this podcast. So, listeners, I wish you all could be here, because there's so much energy already and it's only 830 in the morning. It's going to be a great day, so thank you for allowing me to come in and try to capture some of this.

Sage Lenier: 4:34

Hi everyone, good morning. There you go. I loved a lot of those responses that I just heard. I heard a lot of. I really want to learn what we're supposed to be solving. I'm your girl, let's do it, you and I. I'm about 10 years older than you and I've been spending a lot of time lately actually thinking about that, because the idea of 10 years is huge, but really you and I don't look all that different in terms of age. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what 10 years means, because it's been 10 years since I was 16 and I was sat in your shoes, in your seat, basically, and on my own journey of discovery, and on my own journey of discovery Ten years ago, we didn't actually really talk about climate change really largely, I only learned about it in AP Environmental Science.

Sage Lenier: 5:34

I was already very passionate about social issues. Coming to this, though, I realized that it kind of eclipsed all of the other struggles that I was already very passionate about, because how can you have human rights on a dead planet? I think the curriculum that I was learning, too, was so alarmist. It was so good at raising awareness of the problems. I started having panic attacks. Basically, we were learning about topsoil collapse and how food system yields where food agricultural yields were going to fail in my lifetime at the same time that we were going to add 3 billion people.

Sage Lenier: 6:11

And I was looking around at, for example, hundreds and hundreds of new homes being built in Southern California, where I grew up, and I was like this is Tinder. This is a terrible idea and everyone thought I was crazy. Really, but being able to hold that truth for 10 years personally and to have been right about it, it's not. It's not something I want to be right about, but, like, in January, we saw 12,000 buildings razed to the ground in Los Angeles. That's not the first fire. It won't be the last. It was just the biggest ever in American history. I think. Lately I've been sitting with that truth of like I've been right and I'll continue to be right. And so what kind of planning do you, can you and I do now, so that when the world, when, when, the, when, everyone writ large finally is like oh my God, wait, this is so bad, you guys are right about this. Who has a plan? We can be standing there like I've got?

Sage Lenier: 7:15

blueprints.

Sage Lenier: 7:17

I actually have scenario A, B, C. I've got scenario K. You and I were born into a world that feels like it's constantly breaking, especially lately the news, even the weather, the rules, the correlation between hard work and payoff. We are looking at an economy where you can work 35, you can work a grueling blue collar job for $35,000 a year, or you can become an influencer and make that in a single post, or you can make a lot more than that if you learn how to do a crypto rug pole. So the correlation between hard work and payoff is eroding. Hard work and payoff is eroding and it feels like nothing makes sense for us. I think a lot of us feel each day like we're trudging through a lot of just uncertainty and just chaos, confusion. So the world is breaking in many ways. That's not our fault, but it is our opportunity, Because when everything starts to crack, new ideas have the ability to finally break through. The momentum of the old system is eroding. It's slowing down system. A new momentum so that we can start, so that the path towards progress is a momentous force of its own. So this is not about fixing just one thing. It's about rethinking how everything fits together.

Sage Lenier: 8:59

I started off asking questions about how the world works, to go into asking how it could work when I was 19,. So my sophomore year in college um, you know, I I like I said I learned about this in high school and realized, all right, like sounds like we're all going to die is probably the biggest, most important thing that I could spend my career working on. Let me, let me do a degree in it. And it was the same thing. Every class I went to was doomsday sermon after doomsday sermon about how everything was so bad and the nuances of the problem and the depth of the problem.

Sage Lenier: 9:39

And I was looking around myself at all these passionate young people who had come to one of the best environmental programs in the nation in the world, and we were all so jazzed up, we were so energized and people were starting to wilt. People were changing their majors, People were giving up. A lot of the people who I went to school with are not working in the environmental field professionally now. Um, a lot of that because they don't feel like there's something that can be done. Um, a lot of that because they don't feel like there's something that can be done. And so I realized since the seventies and this is not this is not anyone's fault, but since the seventies these people who are now professors or climate scientists or academics or policy writers they've been fighting an uphill battle to try to convince people that it's even happening Right, so they've developed this scare to care model.

Sage Lenier: 10:24

What they're not seeing, though, about the way that things are different now is that we're the first generation to grow up.

Sage Lenier: 10:30

Accepting climate change is just like axiomatic. We're like, yeah, I can see it, I can feel it. There wasn't fire season when I was little. Now there's fire season. It's pretty bad. We don't have to be convinced right, and so continuing to pile it on is not productive. And I was also hearing about all these disparate crises. I was like plastic pollution and fast fashion and I never really understood that. I thought that you know Amazon and hyper-consumerism and Shiam. I was like these Shiam actually wasn't even a thing. When I was in college I've written, I've given several speeches on that I knew that hyperconsumption was a problem.

Sage Lenier: 11:11

I didn't really see anyone making the connection with that. On climate change, I was still really concerned about this whole topsoil degradation thing that I learned about in high school, still felt like no one was talking about that and I was like I feel like food is maybe the first priority, even if the climate system breaks down, like food, food feels like the first priority. And so I was like none of these things are connecting in my brain, none of these things are connecting in my classes. I want to know the truth about everything. I want to know what, how we should even be prioritizing these things. Is plastic pollution really important? Is that a waste of time? So I started going around the university and I started taking classes in every college. I studied a little bit of like. I took classes in the business school. I studied policy, food systems. I took a couple engineering classes. I did really, really badly in them. I was really just trying to learn the truth about everything. And as I went I started writing. I started writing this curriculum and I ended up titling it Solutions for a Sustainable and Just Future. I wanted it to be solutions oriented, I wanted it to be action focused and it was kind of just my attempt at cutting through all that chaos, all that noise, all that, the breakdown of correlation that we feel as a generation, and just having something that felt clear and like it made sense.

Sage Lenier: 12:36

And so then I started teaching it the next semester. And so I started off with 25 students and I was 19 years old and the first time I ever got in front of a classroom my face was like beet red and the lesson plan that I prepared actually only lasted me 20 minutes and I had 50 minutes to teach. And I was really, I was really panicked. So I figured it out for the rest of the class and I kept going. I kept signing myself up to teach this class every semester. But the next semester I was so surprised because my wait list was actually maxed out. I had signed up to have a classroom of 50 students and I had 50 plus 25 on the wait list.

Sage Lenier: 13:19

To have a classroom of 50 students, and I had 50 plus 25 on the wait list. And so then the next semester I got a class of 85 students and it maxed out the wait list. And then the next semester I went to them and I said, can I have 150? And they were like no, that's not allowed. And I was like, yeah, but I had a maxed out wait list here and they were like no one's ever done that before and I was like, yeah, but why not? And so we got 160 seats that semester. We filled every single one. And then my senior year, when I was 21, I had 300. Which had never, never, never been done before. It was way too much pressure. Way too much pressure. I was 21. It's a lot.

Sage Lenier: 13:57

I have a lot of criticisms about the whole, like youth can save us, youth must leave, kind of thing. Like we're. Like we're kind of too young for that, honestly, um, I'm old enough for it now. But I want you guys to enjoy your lives and enjoy the rest of your youth. And that program was so popular because I think there was such a demand. Everyone was feeling the same thing as me I want solutions, I want action, I want to feel optimistic, I want to know what there is I can do. And the testimonials coming out of that program were like this completely changed my mind.

Sage Lenier: 14:31

I went from knowing nothing about climate change having a small, you know a small curiosity about all that doomsday stuff I was hearing about, to now I feel like I know everything I need to know. I'm just going to go dark, that's fine Moodlighting, okay, I like moodlighting, we can make it a little serious.

Sage Lenier: 14:53

All right, kill the ongoing, that's why I don't. Andreas. All right, kill the on-go, that's why I don't. And so these testimonials of people saying, like I know what my role to play is, I was like, okay, I think we might have done something here. Like I think that this, this, I didn't really believe in it. I didn't really believe that in the power of what it was. But those testimonials were this constant reinforcement of no, you're right, no, you're right, no, you're right. Like this is what people need.

Sage Lenier: 15:24

And so, coming out of college, I was trying to figure out what to do with that, because, you know, we had this framework where we're doing things that hadn't been done before, but there wasn't really a clear path forward, and that's what a lot of people don't talk about quite a bit when it comes to leadership. Like you're really making things up as you go, you don't know what your options are, and it's really scary and uncertain at times. I ended up turning it. I ended up launching as a nonprofit and, with the nonprofit launch, within like three months, time Magazine had reached out and they wanted to do this huge feature on me and I was just like what? And when I tell you that that legitimized me to other people so much, like I was the same person before and after, having a Time Magazine award next to my name, but all of a sudden the world wanted something for me, right, I was being invited to Paris to speak and I was going, honestly, all around the world, to different countries, to different cities across the United States, and I was. I was so surprised that that legitimized me because I was like I'm the same person I was yesterday and also I think you know there's an effect People see you on stage once, or they see a viral video once and then maybe it just kind of happens from there. But so now where I'm at with it, with the work, is we're working on a pre-production process for a Hollywood docuseries to try to convert that curriculum into a big picture format and hopefully bring it to the world so that people can buy into this vision. For what about our world could look like? We're launching a podcast, because that's, I guess, the way to reach people. We're doing a lot of big media things this year, but separately. I'm also very interested in being an operator, so I'm helping businesses that I believe in. That could change the economy, that could solve environmental problems, to grow. And so that's my personal balance between talking about the thing and doing the thing. So I want to take you all along a little bit with what the process actually was.

Sage Lenier: 17:41

So the first thing I started to realize was climate change is not the problem that we're trying to solve. I like to use this analogy Trying to solve climate change is like trying to cure a cough when you have bronchitis. That is not the problem. That is just a symptom of the problem.

Sage Lenier: 18:00

I was trying to go deeper. Why is climate change happening? Because of energy emissions. Why do we use so much energy. Why do we burn so much carbon? Because it's profitable. Why is it profitable? Because we have a system of extraction. And so when I started to peel back the layers, I started to realize that the problem was actually economic. We have a system of, we have a linear economy. We extract resources from nature, we turn them into things, we ship those things all around the world, we consume them and then we throw them away and we start all over again, and this process happens faster and faster and faster every year, where everything from our jeans to our phones, to our cars to our houses gets cheaper and cheaper, so that it gets unusable quicker and so you need a new one. And that's actually where the majority of our carbon emissions are embedded in.

Sage Lenier: 19:01

7% of global emissions come from mining. That's called a hard to abate sector. I would say it's more like impossible to abate. And so I was like okay, so how do we solve the mining problem? Well, we're actually landfilling the majority of what we mine. So if we could increase metal recyclings, we could stop mining. And this is not the answer that is comfortable for the economic forces at large. So it's not the answer that we go for. We try to say you know, we have to build more solar panels and build more wind turbines, and that is, of course, true. But when you actually look at the numbers, we can see that just mathematically, factually, logistically, because these are tremendous feats of infrastructure that also require a fair amount of mining, we cannot build enough renewable energy fast enough to stay under two degrees Celsius.

Sage Lenier: 19:54

It is completely impossible. So we have to use less energy. And so how do we use less energy? We have to build a different economy, but there's so much opportunity Once that's clear for us. There's so much opportunity for excitement and innovation there.

Sage Lenier: 20:12

So for me, it was the realization that climate change is not an isolated issue. It's tied into how we grow our food, how we build our cities, how we power our lives, how our culture prioritizes individualism and consumption luxury goods right, I was realizing that the economy was driving overconsumption. Overconsumption was driving waste, and waste was driving environmental collapse. And so if the system is the problem, then we need new systems, not just better slogans. Right, this is bigger than keeping it in the ground. This is bigger than protesting oil companies.

Sage Lenier: 20:54

What we need is to really creatively reimagine not just what a better world could look like, but what does a better world look like while systems are collapsing? Because it is true that food systems are going to be disrupted, and so that is why we need a plan A, b, c, d, e and all the way through, k, and it feels daunting, but that's the work of your and my lifetime and there's kind of nothing else that we can do. You and I have. You know, the cards were dealt before we were born and the arc of our lifetime where we might see three degrees Celsius in our lifetime and you're in my lifetime is to basically try and keep every single mouth fed and communities intact and kids in schools, while globally, people are displaced and crisis is escalates right and that might sound scary, but it's also the truth, and when you can really accept that, it stops feeling as scary because it's just the work.

Sage Lenier: 22:01

There's nothing to be afraid of. There's work, work to be done right. Every single day is a new opportunity for building more resilient, more flexible systems that make it so that the people who would be our grandchildren are inheriting a world where they can hopefully not just survive but thrive. That's the work every single day. There's no apocalypse coming right. This is something that I have, that I say to myself all the time, and it centers me In 2500, in the year 3000, there will still be several billion people on this planet. Right, there's no extinction of that happening. There's no asteroid. But what state those people live in? You know how well they are capable of navigating the world that they inherit is up to us truly, and that makes me feel better actually about our ability to create change. So what do solutions look like? What do solutions look like, the biggest thing that we need to be normalizing, mainstreaming and talking and thinking about outside of just climate action, outside of just renewable energy?

Sage Lenier: 23:12

very very important things understood yet, so we're not working on the solutions yet because we don't understand them. Is the circular economy? The opposite of waste is not recycling, even though it is for mining, it's designing waste out. E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream on the planet, and so that's everything from phones to, honestly, cars at this point, because they're becoming very technological, phones to, honestly, cars at this point, because they're becoming very technological, and so every single year are okay. Let me give you an example.

Sage Lenier: 23:51

Actually, when I was five, my parents gave me a phone Terrible idea. It was a flip phone, and maybe some of you have had flip phones, but probably most of you haven't. But that's what was around when I was five. With the flip phone, you were able to take the back of the phone off and pull out the battery and then you could replace the battery, and so we didn't actually really carry around charges back then, or my mom, Like my mom, had it in her purse. My mom would carry around an extra battery, and so what that meant, because of the design of the phone, was that you didn't have to replace your phone when the battery started dying, as most people do now today. But obviously that's a little less good for profit than selling people a whole brand new phone. So they started designing phones in ways where there's really really tiny screws. It's really really hard to access. The battery is hidden underneath all of this tech and if you open it, you void your warranty. And so now I hear people all the time say my battery is like crap, now I need to get a new phone. And so that's a small. It's a very micro example, right, but that's happening on every single scale in our economy and in our world, and it increases the rate at which we extract resources and have carbon emissions, increase our emissions, and so designing for circularity doesn't mean having the same crappy designed phones and just recycling them. It means designing phones that last forever, that you can take the battery out, that you can take the camera out, so you can upgrade it. Small example but get creative, think about it. It. There's ways to do this in every industry and in every facet of our world.

Sage Lenier: 25:28

With food, you know, someone mentioned composting earlier. Composting is the way that we've actually just done things forever. Composting is is the alternative to landfill. For all of human history, we only composted. There wasn't such thing as trash. Everything was compostable. You either made things out of leather you know animal skin or you made them out of animal, of plant fibers like cotton. Um, stone, iron maybe, but anything that we created as humans could biodegrade into the earth. It could just just turn. If you lost it, if it disappeared, it would just turn back into something. And my grandma can talk to you about how she remembers when polyester came out, which is crazy, because the shirt I'm wearing is polyester and the shoes I'm wearing are made of polyester, and this is a. It's not polyester, but this is a petrochemical byproduct. So quickly did our world become designed with petrochemical byproduct? So quickly that did our world become designed with petrochemicals? With petroleum we can.

Sage Lenier: 26:29

It's like unfathomable to us, but there are people living with us today who remember when it wasn't so, and it is so possible to design that out, design out fossil fuels. So this isn't hypothetical. It's already happening in pieces and there's a long way to go. But if we look at it as an economic transit formation, then we can solve the polycrisis of climate change and resource over-extraction and ecosystem degradation and over-pollution. And we can just simply keep the clothes that we have, because I think we make 80 billion garments of clothes a year right now and there's only 8 billion people. I think we landfill like 10 billion a year. If we could just keep all the things that we have cycling, we can cut out the 10% of carbon emissions that come from the fashion industry. We can stop polluting the rivers in Bangladesh and Pakistan. We can stop polluting the rivers in Bangladesh and Pakistan because H&M is pouring polluted dyes into their rivers. We can stop destroying ecosystems to grow more cotton. We can stop extracting oil to make more petroleum. But it's a system redesign that we have to look at in order to really see solutions. And so there's two types of people. There are people who I don't want to say complain, complain about the system. I don't want to sell our four mothers in the environment movement short, because most of them are women. I think it was really important.

Sage Lenier: 28:00

For the past 55 years, people have been sounding, slamming the alarm and trying to say this isn't working. This is scary. Something is really deeply wrong here, and they were right, but it behooves us now to move on and to start thinking about what a better world could look like, to start offering people a vision for what a better world could look like. So I think that's the issue too. We I'm including all of you in the climate movement, because you are and never can leave sorry. We as a movement are pretty bad at reaching people. We reach them with this alarmist narrative, but the way to win the culture war is to offer people a path out right.

Sage Lenier: 28:43

Consumption doesn't make us feel good. It makes us feel empty, and everyone feels broken over the cost of living. A lot of people feel that they lack dignity in their lives because they can't afford to have kids and pay rent and have a dignified life, and so we can't just say hey, yeah, there's microplastics in your blood stream. We have to say, right, and what if there were companies here, here in our country, or global, international companies that worked for the people that made ecosystems better, that turned a profit, that offered a living wage and that you were proud to work for. This is something that's really interesting. That's a few years out from where you're at right now.

Sage Lenier: 29:35

People talk about how young people go to, you know, harvard or UCAN or wherever, and you come in with these essays where you're saying I want to be a doctor, I want to solve climate change, I want to solve HIV, I want to cure cancer, and you leave, especially the really prestigious schools as a consultant or in the finance industry, and it's because there's a lack of options. And so I'm at this really interesting age group where a lot of my friends who were idealists a few years ago are now giving up a little bit, or they feel like they're being, they're selling out, selling themselves out a little bit, and they haven't given up hope, though, and so the challenge is to create opportunities, create the types of income streams, companies, challenges where we can use those brilliant, brilliant, brilliant minds for better, and I'm really excited about, for example, there's this company called Synonym I always like to use real life examples. There's this company called Synonym, and they are building the biomanufacturing economy, and what does that mean? So, basically, if I want to make this shirt or if I want to make a shirt that says EJ on it, got some in the crowd. There are hundreds and hundreds of factories all over the world that I can place an order in really easily and you can maybe get like a nice 100% organic cotton. But if you want to do it cheaply as possible, you're going to get 100% polyester, which again petrochemical right, it's from petroleum.

Sage Lenier: 31:15

Right now there is no biomanufacturing capacity, so we don't have. If I want to start a plant-based meat company or a plant-based plastic company that biodegrades and is safe for the earth, I have to build my own factory, which makes the cost, the startup cost, for those companies really, really high. Anyone tomorrow can start a hoodie company, right? A hoodie with their little slogan on it. You see an influencer, they go viral. You know what was that? One Demure she had merch within like a week, right? One Demure she had merged within like a week, right? So there's an existing manufacturing capacity for that. And so this company Synonym I'm friends with the CEO in New York. He wants to build the biomanufacturing capacity that we don't have, so that I can start the same companies, but better for the planet right. So there's this really wonderful opportunity for innovation and starting new companies and being entrepreneurs and building good things.

Sage Lenier: 32:05

That isn't just don't fly, don't eat meat, don't do this, don't do that, which I think is a lot of the narrative that we push as the environmental movement. That's a lot of the narrative that we absorb every day. There is a lot of things that we do need to change. It's not going to be painless. You are going to have to give up a little bit of steak Okay, maybe a lot, but there are really cool alternative steak companies.

Sage Lenier: 32:29

There's really cool, exciting opportunities here, and if we can win that culture war, we can get people to believe that our, our way would be better, would be happier, would be more joyful, would be more sophisticated. That's how you win, not by telling, not by shaming, not by telling people don't do this, don't do that, and so that's a lesson for us as communicators, but it's also, you know, an opportunity for us to filter out what we're digesting, whether or not the headlines that you're reading fit in with the narrative that you want about. Right, how can you be more excited? How can you be more visionary? Builders aren't just coders or CEOs, though, right. Builders are students, they're artists, they're entrepreneurs, they're organizers, they're engineers.

Sage Lenier: 33:15

This is going to take people coming from every single part of society. This is going to take architects. This is going to take farmers. You can do this from every single angle. I swear to you, I even have friends who are climate venture capitalists. It's real. Okay, it's real. You can do that. That's really your calling in life. You can be a climate venture capitalist.

Sage Lenier: 33:37

And so one of the things that I really want you all to walk away with is the idea that rebellion is not just resistance, it's creation. We have to architect a vision for what a better world could look like. We have to get into engineering something that's brand new, and we have to convince the general public, the world, that our way would be better. It's not enough to just point out the problem and say this sucks. We have to sell people on an idea for what would be better.

Sage Lenier: 34:13

So the future right now feels incredibly uncertain. The news is breaking, the rules are breaking, the weather is breaking, but there's a very exciting opportunity there. When the old system stops working, the future is no longer something to be inherited, it's something to be written. We can imagine cities that feed themselves and clothes that never become trash, and an economy that heals more than it harms. We can imagine the type of world that doesn't engineer ecological crises in the first place. We don't have to regulate it out, we don't have to fight the polluters. It just isn't there. We are in a very strange moment, especially as a generation who's coming up, who doesn't have the institutional power, who doesn't have the money that our grandparents do, who doesn't have the media control. But I think what we can do at this very fragile moment in history, where nothing about tomorrow, is certain.

Sage Lenier: 35:27

That's scary, but it's also wonderful. It's also wonderful because in the last 10 years, as someone who's been in the climate movement, it's just been working against this system that had so much momentum. It was, you know, these big parties and this extravagance, this overabundance, this hyper consumption, and I was fighting to just be heard in the midst of all that noise. But all of that is breaking, and so there's an opportunity to be heard now. Every generation of people in their youth has a movement, every single one. That's not unique to us as young people or Gen Z, that's not unique. Young people are always idealists. That's our job. But in this very fragile moment, where nothing is certain, so we could lead next, we could be the generation that did not just fight for a future, we could be the generation that built one.

Greg Rotuno: 36:30

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