Monday night, Texas Tech professor Dr. Katherine Hayhoe took center stage with President Barack Obama and actor Leonardo DiCaprio to discuss climate change.  The discussion was part of the first-ever South by South Lawn (SxSL) event at the White House.

The president, Hayhoe and DiCaprio spoke for about 90 minutes on climate change, what can be done to prevent it and how to get more people involved in the movement.

Concerning stopping climate change, Hayhoe said, "It's true, when we think of global issues, we think of poverty; we think of hunger; we think of disease; we think of people dying today from preventable causes that no one should be dying from in 2016.

"And when we're confronted with these situations head on -- and I, myself, spent a number of years as a child growing up in South America, so I know what this looks like -- we think to ourselves, climate change, it's important, but we can deal with it later.  We can no longer afford to deal with it later.  Because if we want to fix poverty, if we want to fix hunger, if we want to fix inequality, if we want to fix disease and water scarcity, we are pouring all of our money, all of our effort, all of our hope and prayers into a bucket, and the bucket has a hole in the bottom.  And that hole is climate change.  And it is getting bigger and bigger.

"To fix the global issues that we all care about, including environmental issues, including humanitarian issues, we can no longer leave climate change out of the picture because we will not be able to fix them without it."

White House Hosts Innovators At First "South By South Lawn" Gathering
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The complete transcript of the discussion can be read by clicking this link, or a video of the discussion can watched at the beginning of this story.

In addition to the main discussion about climate change, there were also secondary discussions in separate tents covering a variety of topics, musical acts performing at the White House, technology booths and art on display.

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