How do you convince a room full of influential people to care about climate change… in 6 minutes? 🎤

How do you convince a room full of influential people to care about climate change… in 6 minutes? 🎤

From WHAT IF WE GET IT RIGHT? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

November 7, 2025 · 10 min · Season 3 · Episode 10

About this episode

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson shares her acceptance speech for the TIME Earth Award, encouraging others to engage in climate solutions.

Last week, I received the TIME Earth Award at the TIME100 Next gala. I worked really hard on my acceptance speech because it was an opportunity to recruit those 100 culture-shaping rising stars to get more involved in climate solutions. We need them! I’m sharing this speech with you in the hopes that hearing the way I speak about climate issues in rooms of power will encourage you to also speak up. Because the truth is that every one of us has a sphere of influence we should be activating. For the transcript, video, and photos head to my newsletter: ayanaelizabeth.substack.com . And while you're there, I'm curious: What would you have said if you had that microphone? Let me know in the comments. Thank you to Future Being for keeping this podcast ad-free, to Remoy Philip for producing this episode, and to assistant producer Jenisha Shrestha. Okay, Earthlings 🌎, that’s it for now. We’ll be back next week with a piping hot new interview episode. Stay tuned… Get full access to WHAT IF WE GET IT RIGHT? at ayanaelizabeth.substack.com/subscribe

People in this episode

Host: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Topics covered

Keywords

Sponsors

Future Being

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: TIME

More episodes of WHAT IF WE GET IT RIGHT?

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the WHAT IF WE GET IT RIGHT? podcast page.