It's the Brian Laira show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now our climate story of the week,

which we're doing every Tuesday on the show all this year. This week, what if we get climate policy right?

There's always so much talk of catastrophic worst case scenarios, and rightly so.

But what if humans do enough of the right things in response to the threats?

With us now, marine biologist and climate activist, Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson.

She was one of the co-chairs, some of you may remember, for the March for Science in 2017,

when she joined the show to talk about why scientists marched on Earth Day in Washington, D.C. that year.

She's also the co-founder of the nonprofit think tank, Urban Ocean Lab, and she's out with a new book, simply called What If We Get It Right?

Visions of Climate Futures. It's a collection of interviews in which each conversation showcases a different potential climate solution.

Hi, Dr. Johnson. Welcome back to WNYC.

Hello. Thanks for having me.

Congratulations on the book. And why that frame for the book? What if we get it right?

I feel like most of what we see in popular culture are these visions of apocalypse, of getting it wrong.

And for a lot of folks, myself included, that's not really enough.

I mean, it's great to scare us away from the bad stuff, but if we don't know what we're working towards or for, it can be really hard to motivate ourselves for the kind of level of transformation in terms of our society and economy that's really needed in order to address a crisis of this magnitude.

So this book aims to give people some glimpses into what the future could look like if we deploy all the solutions we already have at our fingertips.

We already know how to transition to renewable energy. We know how

to green our buildings, to improve public transit, to lower the carbon impact, the climate impact

of our food systems, to restore and protect ecosystems that are doing so much through the magic

of photosynthesis to help keep our climate imbalance.

But we don't really think about the solutions as much as we think about the problem.

And so this book is an effort to answer, I guess, the challenge.

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