Geoffrey R. Pyatt

"Not at all. Even during the period that the United States was out of the Paris Agreement, our companies continued to innovate. We continued to reduce our carbon output. I’m from California which has two important roles. One, it’s a state like Greece with a strong grassroots focus on the quality of the environment. It’s also a state, because it is the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world which actually has the ability to set the standards on its own in our federal system, which then ripple out across the United States and across the rest of the world. California has moved very aggressively on energy transition, very aggressively on deployment of wind power and solar, and frankly, is a perfect match for Greece because we have a very similar geography, we have a very similar climate, and we also face the same imperative to protect our climate. For me, it was so poignant that at exactly the moment that I was looking through the smoke-filled skies of Athens, I was also reading the stories from home in California where we have literally the largest fires that my home state has ever confronted, driven by exactly the same extreme weather events which are a consequence of manmade climate change."