HOUSTON — A week-long conference aims to bring together voices across government, business and academia to confront climate and energy challenges in Houston and other parts of the world are facing and will continue to face in the future.
The first day of Houston Energy & Climate Week, organized by the nonprofit Allies in Energy, featured discussions among leaders in the field.
That included leaders like Angela Blanchard, the City of Houston’s Chief Recovery and Resiliency Officer.
“Taking a look at how we guarantee the functionality of the city's critical infrastructure assets that grounded, basic, focused attention to what everyone relies on is square at the middle of our priorities,” Blanchard said.
Organizers said it was their goal to bring together groups that, on paper, may appear on different sides of the issue. But they said overall those participating have shared goals of addressing the climate issue.
“To solve climate change, you need to solve the energy system in a holistic way,” said Julianna Garaizar, the co-chair of Houston Energy & Climate Week.
“It's about both and not either or,” Houston Energy & Climate Week co-chair Katie Mehnert said. “Oil and gas is going to be needed for the foreseeable future, we need to make it lower carbon, but we also need to embrace new technologies.”
Event leaders said they hoped to measure the success of the conference and continue to build it better in the future.
“We want to have an impact report at the end of this says what did Allies in Energy as a nonprofit do with this event?” President of Allies in Energy Lindsay Roe said. “And then what are we going to do to continue the efforts into 2025?”