CBS Sunday Morning’s David Pogue Brings Climate Hope to White Plains: ‘Start Saying Things’

By Tessa Wheeler 

David Pogue’s path to climate activism was anything but a straight line.

After graduating from Yale in 1985, he spent a decade arranging and conducting Broadway musicals. By the early 2000s, he had pivoted to tech journalism, writing for The New York Times and later Yahoo Tech. But over time, something shifted.

“It’s been a long and unexpected path,” he remarked. “My theory has always been [to] take the phone call and say yes.”

Now, Pogue is bringing his message of climate optimism to the area.

Tomorrow night, Thursday, June 26, as many seek relief from record-breaking heat in Westchester, the longtime CBS Sunday Morning correspondent will deliver his talk, “10 Reasons for Climate Hope,” at the White Plains Public Library, offering practical solutions and a rallying cry for community action in the face of crisis.

The event is sponsored by the White Plains Sustainability Committee, and for Pogue, it represents the latest turn in a career shaped by curiosity and openness to change.

In his writing for The New York Times and Yahoo Tech, Pogue focused centrally on developing technology, reviews of fads, and criticisms of human interactions with arising tech. 

However, his 2021 book, How to Prepare for Climate Change, signaled a departure from his previous work. Now, in his talk “10 Reasons for Climate Hope,” Pogue is continuing to explore practical solutions around the climate crisis.

“I went from being a tech guy to being a science guy,” Pogue said. However, “all roads led back to climate.”

One Person, Big Impact

Importantly, Pogue’s talk touches upon the importance of individual action in the face of climate catastrophe. In his interview with The Examiner, however, he dissected the nuance of the concept. 

“It is correct to say that an individual operating alone can have very little effect on [climate change],” he said. “There are some mechanisms where your actions have outsize effect, for example—there’s this concept of social contagion, where people see you doing something—skipping the beef at the restaurant, putting up solar panels, getting an electric car—and when other people witness that enough times they think, ‘Wow, everybody’s doing that!’ And they change their own ways.”

Even as Pogue acknowledges the significant role corporations have played in the climate crisis, he says they still have much work to do. However, he points to the actions of companies who’ve committed to carbon goals by certain dates as signs of progress—with Amazon among them. Amazon’s climate commitments were pushed by employees in what Pogue described as a “mutiny.” 

“They threatened Jeff Bezos disruption if there wasn’t some kind of change,” Pogue noted, “and then there was social contagion within companies. And Amazon adopted these really ambitious goals.” 

Community is vital for those pursuing individual action against the climate crisis, Pogue also emphasized. One person’s presence as an environmentally conscious person in a group can snowball into a mountain of change throughout that group—be it a sports team, a workplace, a religious organization, a book club, or a board of trustees. 

“I feel like many more people are worried about the crisis than are speaking up about it,” Pogue observed. “We need to get over the notion that it’s an unpopular subject, and we need to start speaking up in all of these larger institutions. And they’re the ones that have this big effect on the climate.”

Community-based climate action of any kind inspires Pogue. 

“These corporations who are embracing climate change, even though it is in the short term costly to them, it just fills me with hope,” he gushed. “Because their [carbon] footprint is obviously much larger than mine.”

‘Say What You Feel’

Especially now, Pogue said, it’s vital for citizens to communicate concerns to their representatives in government. He offers the app 5 Calls as a tool for those looking to do that—the app provides users with links to directly dial their representatives on the state and federal level. 

“Say what you feel,” Pogue remarked. “Make it known that you care and that you don’t like what’s going on.”

Not only does Pogue wish for people to be in contact with their representatives, he also wishes for them to have a part in choosing them. 

“Really, really, really, vote,” he stressed. “Don’t say ‘oh, my vote won’t count,’ really vote, because it has turned out that tiny differences really matter in elections.”

When asked how to balance individual climate actions like switching to solar energy, cutting out red meat, or using an electric vehicle with the more controversial actions of groups like Just Stop Oil (an international organization whose protests at art museums have drawn global acclaim and criticism alike), Pogue underlined the importance of protest as a method for social progress.

“Protests need to exist and they need to continue,” he said. 

However, the unpopular methods of Just Stop Oil seemed to give him pause: “I’m not sure that the destructive action does more good than harm, because people who are on the fence now think about people who care about the climate as vandals.”

Above all, Pogue hopes people would share their climate concerns with others as a way to inspire action and community. 

“Stop thinking things—start saying things,” he said.

Balancing Technology

Artificial intelligence promises more new tools and data processing capabilities to climate science than previously thought possible, Pogue outlines in his talk. However, some critics note how AI in its current stage has a reputation for being not-so environmentally conscious: AI processors require great quantities of freshwater for cooling, and the energy demand for such massive amounts of computing is colossal. 

When asked about the environmental handoff of using AI in solving certain climate issues, Pogue cautioned against technological fear mongering. 

“The original public reception to the phone, and the elevator, and the radio, and the TV—each of these was said to be the end of the world, that they would cause the collapse of society,” he explained. “Everybody instinctively reacts negatively to any new technology. It’s probably a healthy evolutionary feature. We fear the unknown—we learn not to go into that dark cave because we might get eaten by a bear, so, it’s probably healthy—but, it’s also healthy to remember that we have a long history of adopting new technologies, shaking out what’s wrong with them, making tweaks, and then adopting them as positive developments.”

Furthermore, Pogue made sure to underline that AI technologies have grown and improved rapidly in the past few years. He pointed to Chinese company DeepSeek’s claims to require significantly less power than other LLMs (Language Learning Models) as proof that AI companies are learning quickly how to adapt and improve their technology. 

“There will be progress,” Pogue said.

Holding On To Hope

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with heavy news and statistics in the 24-hour news cycle. When it comes to climate change specifically, Pogue references something called ‘crisis fatigue,’ saying that “every week is another thing to be upset about, and eventually for your own sanity you have to be less invested.” 

Additionally, Pogue cautions blind belief in news media. 

“Not everything we see in the liberal press is accurate either,” he said. “Both conservatives and liberals have their agendas, and sometimes problems are depicted as worse than they are because that’s what sells newspapers and gets you to click headlines. Outrage sells, as the saying goes, and in many cases it’s not truthful.”

Pogue acknowledges challenges in current U.S. climate legislation but encourages persistence. 

“It’s important not to take the present and assume that it’s forever,” he said, “because it’s not.”

Pogue will be speaking at the White Plains Public Library on Thursday, June 26th, at 6:30 p.m.. While all tickets have been reserved, you can join the waitlist here.