LISTEN HERE

If anybody has seen the big picture when it comes to climate, it’s Kathryn Sullivan.  As a former NASA astronaut and the first woman to walk in space, she’s gotten more than a bird’s eye view.

“When you get even a couple hundred miles away and look back the planet you get a really different sense of proportion,” she marvels. The atmosphere we depend to survive on looks “like the fuzz on the tennis ball. It’s remarkably thin…a little fluid membrane that envelops this ball of dirt and makes it habitable.  It’s very elegantly and finely structured.”

It’s an elegance that the public first glimpsed in the famous “Earthrise” photos, taken in 1968 by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders.  This new perspective on our home planet helped shape our understanding of the effects we humans were having on it, and spurred the environmental movement.

SPEAKERS

Louise Bedsworth

Deputy Director, California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research

Hunter Cutting

Director of Strategic Communications, Climate Nexus

Kathryn Sullivan

Administrator, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

“We are the first generation of human beings ever in the history of humankind that has the ability to comprehend and measure our planet with satellites and other instrumentation,” says Sullivan, who now heads up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  “We can essentially take a snapshot of global conditions, oceanic conditions, atmospheric conditions.  And this has what’s made it possible for us to have the kind of forecasting we have in weather forecasting and longer range outlooks. “

The outlook for California is sobering, according to Louise Bedsworth of the state’s Office of Planning and Research.  California has seen its share of recent extreme weather events, including the 2013 Rim Fire, which burned over 250,000 acres and impacted tourism and other businesses throughout the region.  And there’s more to come this year as the summer heats up.

“I think probably one of our biggest impacts of concern is going to be the effect on the state’s water supply,” Bedsworth warns.  While the amount of precipitation is hard to predict, “we’ll have more of that precipitation as rain than as snow, so that is going to really impact the state’s water supply.

We also know that we’ll see more extreme events, more large destructive wildfires, severe droughts and heat waves.”

And it’s not just California that’s feeling the heat.  According to NOAA’s latest National Climate Assessment, the frequency of extreme weather events, from hurricanes and floods to wildfires and drought, is on the rise across the country.  We know that climate change is causing this weather whiplash, but how?  Kathryn Sullivan describes it as “kitchen table science.”

“The energy that drives weather in our planet is the heat coming in from the sun, the moisture content of the atmosphere, and obviously the rotation of the earth all of the swirling that that introduces,” she explains.  “So we’re dialing up the extra heat in the atmosphere…when you heat up the water, the relative humidity in a hot atmosphere can be much higher than in the cooler and drier atmosphere.

“It’s really stovetop science working on the planetary scale.”

This global chemistry experiment has given birth to some familiar names in the news:  Superstorm Sandy.  Hurricane Katrina.  Winterstorm Juno.   While the practice of naming our weather has been criticized as media hype, Hunter Cutting of communications firm Climate Nexus says it’s actually helpful to the average viewer. “If you give something a name, it’s a character in the story,” he says.  “Scientists work with numbers and formulas.  Average folks tell stories…then that story can be expanded to talk about what causes storm, what changed the odds of the storm happening. That’s how you can bring climate change into the conversation.”

Human, plant and animal migration is an important, if less dramatic, part of the climate story, adds Kathryn Sullivan.

“Disease patterns are migrating.  The hay fever seasons have already expanded by up to 26 days” throughout North America, she says.  Biologists have observed growing seasons changing all around the globe.  “Human migrations are also being observed, and are very much a concern of national security officials in many, many, many countries.”  Sullivan cited a recent National Academy of Sciences study that draws a link between climate change, drought and the Syrian uprising.

When it comes to escaping disaster, Sullivan emphasizes that it’s not about location – it’s about community.  The word “resilience,” she says, has three strands:  “It’s societal, it’s economic and its ecological resilience.  You’ve got to be looking at all three, you’ve got to be weaving all three, or the notion is meaningless.”

So, “adaption or mitigation?” asked one audience member.  Which strategy will better ensure our survival?  Hunter Cutting believes that with the temperature projected to increase by up to eight degrees, we can – and should – do both.

“It’s a bit of a balancing act, right?” he replied. “Eight degrees may not sound like much.  But that’s about the amount of temperature change that we saw that ended the last Ice Age, and we’d have crocodiles living in the Arctic. So we really don’t want to go there.”   Reducing emissions will help keep that number down, but what’s a manageable number?

“Two degrees…we can adapt to that much,” he concludes.  “So I think we have to do both.  We have to mitigate to avoid the catastrophic, and adapt to what we can’t avoid.”

And change, Cutter points out, is one of the signature characteristics of our species.

“Adaptation is just going to be part of what we do now going forward in the future.”

Related Links:

2014 National Climate Assessment

The Risky Business Report

NY Times: Study Links Syrian Conflict to Drought Made Worse by Climate Change

Earthrise

LISTEN

(Transcript also available by clicking LISTEN link.)

This program was posted by ‘Climate One’, July 16, 2015.

Industrialize now, clean up later – that’s long been the philosophy behind Asia’s booming economies. Dirty air, foul water, and hellishly overcrowded cities have threatened to choke the region’s impressive prosperity. But the tide is starting to turn. “The dynamic in China is unbelievable,” says Mark Clifford. “Chinese manufacturers are changing the world in solar, in wind, in electric cars”.

Clifford is the author of The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia’s Environmental Emergency. In his book, Clifford writes about the environmental devastation that has come with Asia’s recent period of extraordinary growth, and what businesses in China, India, Japan, Korea and other countries are doing to lessen the impact.

“What is happening in China right now in the clean tech area, the environmental area, is real,” Clifford continues. “When one looks at the track record of China since 1978 reforms began, it’s extraordinary. Wind power innovator Goldwind and electric car maker BYD are good examples of companies that have embraced the opportunity of a green economy, he says.

Stella Li, Senior VP of BYD, agrees. “The difference is now China has money, China has resources,” she says. This gives Chinese companies both the technology and the will to pressure their government into moving off of coal and into wind, solar and battery storage. “It’s reliable, it’s working, the technology is ready. Change!”

As hundreds of millions of China’s citizens move out of poverty and into the middle class, BVD is poised to provide them with not only the personal EVs they clamor for, but also busses and trucks. “In the next ten years, China will be the biggest market for electric vehicles,” Li predicts, “So there’s a lot of opportunity. “

And the Chinese government is ready to lend its support. “China has got a lot of money, and they’re throwing it at clean tech,” says Clifford, “because they see this as an engine of growth for the future.

“This is a growth area; it’s jobs, it’s money, it’s leadership, it’s global leadership. And I think we’re seeing this in the policy area as well.”

Unfortunately, there’s still a long way to go to clean up the environmental messes of the past. “The problem confronting China is staggering,” says Orville Schell of the Asia Society.

“They had several decades of really reckless development, which did some destruction which is not going to be so easy to repair.” As much of 25% of the nation’s water has been made toxic, he reports. “That’s going to take a long time to clean up.”

The governments of some other Asian countries lag behind China, either unwilling or unable to back greener policies. India, for example, isn’t moving towards sustainable energy anytime soon. “India has a lot of really dirty coal,” Schell points out. “Cheap, easy and dirty. So I think India may have a very difficult time reaching this sort of initial phase of rapid development that we now see China sort of coming to the end of.”

“The private sector can really solve problems,” where governments can’t deliver, says Clifford. He cites the example of Manila Water, a Philippines company that stepped in to help supply water to the citizens of its fast-growing capitol. “If government policies can work with private sectors and work with civil society, private businesses can often solve really granular problems – like getting water to your house so when you turn on the tap water comes out.”

Economic growth aside, Asian nations face more existential threats from the effects of climate change. The Asia Society has mapped the effects of distant melting glaciers, says Schell, and “it’s not a pretty picture. You lose a good chunk of China, all of Shanghai, the Yangtze Delta… many people in the poorest countries will be affected, both by rising sea level and also by diminished flows of rivers. “

“This is no kind of a small-scale problem,” he warns. “This is basic plumbing for billions of people…this is why it’s so important that the US and China, if they do nothing else, lean into this one.”

Changing weather is also a matter of life and death for people in Bangladesh, Burma and the Philippines. “They are literally on the front lines of climate change,” says Clifford. “This is one of the great moral challenges of our time as well. And we forget that, that it is the people who are the poorest, who did the least to cause this problem, who are the most vulnerable.

Is there reason for hope? Clifford thinks so. “I believe in human ingenuity and human spirit,” he affirms. The newly formed partnership between China the U.S., and their dual commitment to reducing greenhouse gasses, is a promising sign.

“After we’ve tried everything else, we usually do the right thing. Not always…at least we’re starting to slowly turn the ship.”

RELATED LINKS:

The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia’s Environmental Emergency

The Asia Society: How would rising sea levels transform China’s coastal cities?

The Asia Society: ZhongXiang Zhang on Environmental Policy Reform

Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (Beijing)

Washington Post: Chinese documentary ‘Under the Dome’ goes viral, then gets censored

Mark Clifford

Author, The Greening of Asia

Stella Li

Senior Vice President, BYD Company Ltd.

Orville Schell

Arthur Ross Director, Center on U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society in New York

LISTEN HERE

Photo: http://climateone.org

Host: Greg Dalton
Guests: Jason Mark, Editor, Earth Island Journal; Kim Stanley Robinson, Author, 2312 (Thorndike Press, 2015)

Novelists and filmmakers have been mining the rich world of science for generations. Throughout the last century, science fiction has turned to real-world threats, such as nuclear war and plague, for its post-apocalyptic scenarios. More recently, environmental issues have moved to front and center in the narrative, in films such as Interstellar, Snowpiercer and Wall-E and best-sellers from Margaret Atwood, Nathaniel Rich and Jennifer Egan.

H.G. Wells foreshadowed this trend in his 1895 novel The Time Machine. But while the prospect of a devastated earth in a far distant future probably didn’t inspire many Victorians to recycle, today’s readers can clearly visualize a much more immediate threat. Climate change is more than a plot device – the signs are all around us. Can Cli-Fi help rally the troops in our battle to save the planet?

Jason Mark, editor of the Earth Island Journal, recently visited The Commonwealth Club to talk about the role fantasy can play in the climate change story. He was joined by Kim Stanley Robinson, author of several Cli-Fi novels, including Forty Signs of Rain and his latest, 2312.

Mark has taken note of the prevalence of climate change in novels and films. “I just started to notice it popping up more and more,” he told the audience. “Not necessarily always as an explicit theme; often as a plot point, something that [might] launch the novel or launch the story or launch the film…And that’s in some ways more interesting than, you know, a book about climate change.”

Science fiction, explains author Robinson, splits very neatly into two sub-genres, utopias and dystopias, both of which can help readers imagine where civilization might be heading. “Utopia is your hopes,” he continues, “if I do these things, and things go right, I’ll get to a good state.

“And dystopia are your fears – if I keep doing these bad things and bad things result, I’ll get to this bad state. So both utopias and dystopias are very, very useful.”

Mark recently published an Op-Ed in The New York Times in which he decries the solution put forth in Interstellar that mankind’s salvation is only a wormhole away. But he’s “cautiously optimistic” that film and literature can move hearts and minds in ways that think tanks and scientific journals may not.

“A big blockbuster motion picture film, it’s just popcorn, right?” Mark suggests. “It’s like people might not have their guard up as much. That would be my hope – that it might be able to come in from a side door and maybe get people to think about things differently.

“It might not move a denier to being James Hansen,” he adds, “but it might take someone who is maybe a little bit skeptical, say about the science of anthropogenic global warming and climate change, and get them to maybe think about things a little differently.”

Robinson credits Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia with kickstarting the environmental movement of the ‘70s. “It changed people’s lives, it changed their thinking,” he remembers. “I think it was the ‘60s generation, growing up in thinking ‘how do I live my ideals, how do I take care of my kids?” While the 80’s brought global changes that might have rendered the ideas in Ecotopia quaint, Robinson believes its message remains strong.

Science fiction – whether in novels, movies or comic books – is usually thought of as an escape. But immersing oneself in a fantasy world can be a powerful experience, as well as a tool for change, says Robinson. “For a while there, you’re living other people’s lives,” he tells the room. “It’s a very emotional business. And once you get to the emotional level, you begin to process in a different way than you do when you’re reading the news in a more cognitive sense.”

Such storytelling can help us identify with the struggles faced by future generations in an eco-dystopia. “That’s what fiction does,” he continues. “You are in a different world. It’s telepathy, it’s time travel. You come back to reality and you have a kind of double vision.

“I believe that if it’s done right it can change one’s view….And it helps you to make decisions about, what do I do today to help the situation for my grandchildren? So the science-fiction double vision… is really a useful tool for figuring out what to do now. It’s a philosophical tool.”

Here in the 21st century, the planet’s story has yet to be written. And while climate fiction might lean disproportionately toward doom-and-gloom scenarios, Robinson believes there’s still room for hope. “Life is robust,” he reminds the audience. “There’s many, many reasons for hope. It’s a natural human activity.”

LISTEN

(Transcript also available by clicking LISTEN link.)

Guests:

“Droughts come and go,” began Greg Dalton at a recent Climate One discussion on California’s water wars. “Is this one different, or do we ride it out and then go on with our lives?”

“This is the biggest wake-up call in modern times,” Felicia Marcus of California State Water Resources Control Board responded.  She went on to list the reasons for the severity: a serious reduction in snowpack, millions more humans turning on the tap, increased agricultural demand and endangered species and habitats are creating what amounts to a real-life, slow-motion disaster movie, “on just about every front you can think of.”

But, according to Ellen Hanak of the state’s Public Policy Institute, Californians are finally paying attention. Ina recent survey, nearly 40 percent say that the drought is a top concern.  That, Hanak says, means an opportunity to turn the tide. “This is a real chance for people to kind of heed the wake-up call and really make some changes that we need to make for the long-term.”

But who will make those changes, and how much they’re willing to sacrifice, is still a hot-button debate.  When it comes to water use, it seems there’s plenty of finger-pointing: farmers take more than their share. City dwellers flush their toilets too often.  Our neighbor’s lawns are too green, their cars too clean. Aqueducts are sucking our rivers dry and starving our salmon of their habitats.

The biggest bone of contention, and the subject of much breathless media debate, has been between agricultural and urban interests.

Paul Wenger, whose family farm produces almonds and walnuts, was on hand to give the farmer’s perspective.  His trees are getting by this year on a water allowance of 16 inches – down from 24 inches during the last drought over a dozen years ago. “We’re drilling our second well today,” he reported. “Because if I didn’t have the wells, my crop will dry up.”

Wenger was blunt about the economic costs the agricultural sector faces.  “I don’t know anybody that’s had to cut back watering their lawn that had to refinance their home.  I know a lot of farmers that are refinancing their farms,” he contends. “If next year is a dry year, they will be insolvent.”

But if agriculture represents 80% of California’s human water use, as the PPIC reports – doesn’t that seem unfair?  Marcus says those statistics are misleading, largely because agricultural use ultimately benefits the urban household.  “A person in L.A. has more of a connection on a day-to-day basis with the Central Valley farmer that grows the fruits and vegetables and nuts they eat than the jerk down the block who is overwatering their lawn,” she asserts, “but they just don’t know it.”

Because many people live hundreds of miles from their water source, Marcus says, they take it for granted that it will always come out of the tap.  “So…it’s easy for people to pick on almonds or something else.  They also don’t know where their food comes from.  Again, it’s a miracle of modern civilization that people can take for granted that there’s going to be food at the supermarket.  But the fact is a farmer grew it somewhere.”

The good news, says Marcus, is that Californians from all sectors are starting to come together to find solutions.  Recent drought regulations have kick started statewide conservation measures, resulting in a29% decrease in urban water use. “There are urban areas, in particular, all over the state that have phenomenal plans to integrate flood control, water supply, water quality, use their groundwater basins, recycle their water so that they’re more self-reliant,” she reports.

“And then there are these partnerships between urban and ag, and between fish and farmers and groups that are actually popping up all over. And we need to figure out how to encourage that.”

“The dialogue of division doesn’t really help us,” Hanak agrees.  With food security as important a global issue as climate change and population growth, California’s contribution to the world’s tables can’t be discounted.

“We should have folks in urban California really valuing what we have in California,” says Hanak. “This incredible bounty that we can produce for ourselves, and for the world.  It’s a great resource and instead it gets dismissed. ..It’s how we come together as Californians, which is something we can do.

“We won’t conserve our way out of it, we won’t store our way out of it – we’ve got to do all of it.”

Related Links:

PPIC: Water use in California

PPIC: Water and Drought seen as biggest California issue

California Drought Report — ca.gov

How water is used in California – ca.gov

National Geographic: The New Food Revolution

LISTEN

(Transcript also available.)

It might be a stretch to imagine most Americans giving up their beloved Malibus, Mustangs and Broncos. But for those who would just as soon leave the car at home, there are more options than ever. With a growing menu of ala carte wheels to choose from, it’s up to us to decide how we want to roll around our cities. See more.

Related links:

TransForm

SFMTA: Projects & Planning

SFMTA: Car Sharing Information and Resources

SFGate: Car-Sharing Firms Getting 900 SF Street Parking Spaces

SF Examiner: Report Says SF Taxis Suffering Greatly

The Metropolitan Revolution – Brookings Institution

Study: Fewer young people getting driver’s license

WATCH HERE

William K. Reilly;
Senior Advisor, TPG. Courtesy of http://climateone.org/

It also gets very close to the realm of policy and action. It calls out people who are not accepting climate change and suggest that indifference or excessive belief in the technical solution or just opposition to science is unacceptable on a moral plane,” said Reilly.

LISTEN HERE

As supply grows and demand decreases, oil prices are dropping by the barrel. Are we truly in a “carbon bubble”? What can we do to protect our investments?

Kurt Billick, Chief Investment Officer, Bocage Capital
Anthony Hobley, CEO, Carbon Tracker Initiative
Anne Simpson, Director of Global Governance, CalPERS

LISTEN HERE

Photo: Courtesy of climate-one.org

When Dr. Sylvia Earle, dubbed “Her Deepness” by the New York Times, began her undersea career in the 1960’s, female scientists were regarded as a novelty. In 1970 she joined Tektite II, an all-female research team living 50 feet below the sea surface in the Virgin Islands for weeks on end. A film clip from the era referred to Earle’s team of aquanauts, quaintly, as “the world’s first real-life mermaids.”

“I wasn’t trying to knock down barriers,” Earle remembers. “I responded to a notice that was on the bulletin board when I was at Harvard…it just didn’t say that women need not apply.” So while space travel and moonwalking was, seemingly, the province of men only, women were welcome in the world of undersea exploration.

Dr. Earle was visiting The Commonwealth Club to share the view from deep below the ocean, “the blue heart of the planet,” as she has called it. It’s a world where she seems to feel just as much at home as the rest of us do on land.

“The ocean is where most of the action is,” Earle maintains. “It’s not just where most of the water is, it’s where most of life on earth is. It’s where the greatest diversity of life is.”

Earle, who has led more than 100 undersea expeditions and spent over 7,000 hours underwater, traces her lifetime passion for science back to a childhood inquisitiveness that has never left her. Now nearing eighty, her current title is National Geographic Explorer in Residence, but “I think all kids start out as explorers,” she says. “I think even all of you, whoever you are or wherever you are, you don’t lose that part of being a kid, asking questions: who, what, why, where, when, how?

“That’s what explorers do. That’s what scientists do.”

Although the ocean may look much the same as it did sixty years ago, much has changed under the surface, Earle says.

“In that time, on the order of 90% of many of the big fish have been extracted from the sea,” she explained. Changes brought on by global warming, overfishing and pollution have taken their toll on the undersea environment. Coral reefs and kelp forests have been reduced by half, compromising the diets and habitats of the creatures who live there.

“The decline is heartbreaking.”

Asked how climate change is affecting the ocean, Earle turned the question around. “What impact is the ocean having on climate?” she countered. “Because climate is driven by the ocean.

“The ocean is earth’s great thermal regulator,” Earle explained. “It holds heat, releases it slowly, holds cold, releases it gradually…the ocean governs climate, governs the weather.”

So as the health of our oceans go, so goes the health of our planet.

“It’s important to recognize that earth has always been changing every day, every minute,” says Earle. “But the changes, generally, are gradual…what we’re witnessing now is accelerated warming. We’re accelerating the change of chemistry of the ocean with the acidification that has happened in the past.”

Even the fish on our dinner plate has an environmental cost, says Earle. “We think of fish as free. We have an accounting base of zero when they’re swimming around in the ocean, and that’s false accounting. We have to face up to the cost of what we consume really is when you put nature on the balance sheet.”

Dr. Earle urged those who are concerned about climate change and its effects to exercise their own youthful curiosity. “Become science literate, be science savvy,” she urged. “Do what you do as a kid – ask questions, demand evidence, don’t just take stuff for granted.” And then, she says, raise your voices, take action. “Let’s see what we can do, now that we know.”

After winning a TED prize in 2009, Earle established Mission Blue, an initiative to establish marine protected areas (or “Hope Spots,” as she calls them) around the globe.

And she had nothing but encouragement and enthusiasm for the youngest members of the audience, many of whom came armed with questions. “What was your favorite part about the ocean?” asked a girl named Cassidy.

“I love the fact that the ocean is alive…that there’s life in the ocean, and it’s endless,” Earle told her. “There is so much out there yet to be seen that everyone can be an explorer. And even though you’ve been to the ocean a thousand times, and I have, you never know what you’re going to find the next time!”

For a high school student who said she aspires to a career in marine biology, Dr. Earle had some important advice: “Go get wet!” she laughed.

“Choose something that you really love and become as good as you can. Follow your heart…and don’t let people say you can’t do it because you’re a girl!”

Related Links:

Mission Blue

Sylvia Earle TED Talk

Oceana: Protecting the World’s Oceans

The Blue Carbon Project

The Tektite Documentary Trailer

LISTEN HERE

A sociologist, a linguist and an economist walked into the Commonwealth Club, and…it sounds like the first line of a joke, but it was actually the start of a wide-ranging discussion of the sociological, psychological and economic underpinnings of climate awareness – and denial.

In her book “Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life,” sociologist Kari Norgaard profiled a rural community in Norway during an unusually warm winter. Ice fishing and the ski industry were both negatively impacted, yet its citizens did nothing collectively to respond to an economic disaster that was clearly the result of global warming. Norgaard finds this sense of denial paralleled in other well-off, well-educated Western nations, including the United States.

“It’s the most serious, very complex problem,” Norgaard says about climate change. “It’s threatening to our fossil fuel based economy, it’s threatening to our political systems…it’s threatening to our sense of the future, meaning, cultural norms, so many different things.” And yet it appears we as a society have failed to develop any meaningful response.

It was during one of her classes at the University of Oregon that Norgaard got the inspiration to explore the way society has responded to climate change. She observed the way some students reacted emotionally to a disturbing film, while others remained impassive. “It got me thinking about how it is that we receive and process really disturbing information, and the idea that in fact when information is really disturbing, one of our reactions can be to shut down.”

Linguistics professor George Lakoff believes that for each of us, our own personal world view gets in the way. For many, this leads to climate denial. “When you have facts that come in that won’t fit the way that you understand the world, then the way you understand the world is not gonna change. The facts will be either ignored, ridiculed or attacked…it’s like it’s not even a fact.”

Surprisingly, “people were actually more concerned about global warming in 1989, twenty-five years ago, than they are today,” says Per Espen Stoknes, an economist and psychologist. Since then, he says, the scientific narrative has put distance between us and climate change, dulling our sense of urgency. “It’s distant in time, distant in space and then distant in social impact. It’s always impacting somebody else that I don’t know …and we know that empathy is decreasing with increasing social distance.”

Perhaps distance leads to denial. But no matter the reason, Norgaard sees a problem more serious than that: climate awareness combined with inaction. “The fact that people who do get it, who do see what’s happening and believe it, are not mobilizing to a greater extent. I think that is by far the more serious problem.”

“We do need a political leadership,” she continues, “but we also need discourses about how we can be citizens and enact that caring, responsibility towards each other and the kinds of things that all of us can do to move our society forward.”

There are those who don’t believe that individual action matters. And in Stoknes’ view, they’re right. “Individual actions will never solve the climate problem, that’s what I’m saying as a psychologist,” he asserts. “However, it does have huge social ripple effects.” By acting as individuals, and getting acknowledgment from others, he says, we reinforce the idea of effecting change as a social norm. “So it does have a social, cultural effect, even if individual action will never solve the climate problem itself.”

Taking the conversation public is one way to move the needle, says Norgaard. “We need to have discourses about what it means in our place, how the things that we are seeing are about climate change…all of these different ways that we can make climate change visible in public space: letters to the editor, all of these kinds of things matter. Just talking about it in simple conversation helps to make it real, which is part of how the democratic process needs to work.”

For those who have a hard time framing that conversation, Stoknes suggests several approaches. One topic that hits home for nearly everyone is health. “Health of people, your family, your children, the community and also health of the forests or the health of the water system,” he adds. “That really makes it feel personal, near, urgent and here.” Ethical and economic issues also push buttons and prick up ears. Pope Francis himself has spoken out against the moral perils of global warming. And while climate change and the disasters it spawns mean billions of dollars lost, there is also opportunity around the corner for those who would dive into the new energy economy.

“Health, risk, morals and opportunities, these are the ways to speak about the climate,” Stoknes concludes. “So please join us!”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:George Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley; Author, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (Chelsea Green, 2004);
Kari Norgaard, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Oregon; author of Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2011);
Per Espen Stoknes, Economist; Psychologist; Author, What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming (Chelsea Green, 2015)

Related links:

Kari Norgaard: Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life

Per Espen Stoknes: What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming

George Lakoff: Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

LISTEN HERE

Imagine Superman flying through the clouds, spraying a mist that reflects the sun’s rays and cools the earth.  Sounds like science fiction – but scientists are indeed studying this and other ways to alter the atmosphere and fight global warming.  Whether you call it geoengineering, comic book fantasy or “hacking the sky,” the idea is getting serious consideration.

Stanford geoengineering expert Ken Caldeira first heard the concept broached during a climate summit in 1998, by astrophysicist Lowell Wood. “His idea was to offset the effects of increased greenhouse gas concentrations by reflecting some of the sun’s warming rays back to space,” Caldeira remembers.  “And I thought that this would make no sense and wouldn’t work…And we came back and did some computer model simulations using climate models. It turned out, much to our surprise, that it worked quite well!”

Jane Long co-chairs the Task Force on Geoengineering at the Bipartisan Policy Center. She explains that the panel was formed at the request of the US government, “because they wanted to hear from scientists about whether or not this was a good idea…and lo and behold, it wasn’t just scientists actually. We had people that were diplomats.  We had political scientists.  We had ethicists on this panel.” The unanimous conclusion, she reports, was “that we needed to start looking into this technology.”

Physicist Armand Neukermans is part of a team that has been exploring what he calls “marine cloud brightening,” based on an idea by atmospheric scientist John Latham.

Adding water droplets to clouds makes them brighter, Neukermans explains, enabling them to reflect more light. “The idea is that if you would help by a natural means to bring more droplets in there, nuclei as they call it, they will become droplets too. The clouds will lighten…this is a relatively simple idea that basically uses the clouds like a mirror.”

It sounds clever enough. But even if it does work, could there be unexpected complications?  What are the technical, moral and political implications of tinkering with Mother Nature?

Albert Lin, professor of law at UC Davis, says the idea is definitely controversial “because it’s talking about potentially trying to affect, influence the climate at this very broad scale, akin to perhaps you could say playing God. And the question is, of course, who would do this?”

The question of who would control the technology – and be responsible for its consequences – should be made by the international community as a whole, says Lin.  But the controversial aspect may be one reason that spray-painting the sky remains in the experimental stage.  Are researchers waiting for a “social license” in order to move ahead?

According to Long, it all comes down to funding. “I think there’s quite a few people who are ready to do small scale, very low risk experiments that are looking at actually how the chemistry and the physics actually occurs,” she says.  “They’re ready to go, but there’s no money.  It’s the government that is holding back on the social license.”

Private funding could save the day — Bill Gates has reportedly expressed interest in putting money towards the geoengineering of climate solutions.  But, Long cautions, it’s important to keep such research in the public eye.

“Because as we move from very, very small-scale research with literally no physical risks associated with it,” to larger-scale operations, “say over 1,000 kilometers or something like that, 1000 miles — you wouldn’t want that kind of research to be done unless it was publicly available, publicly governed and was totally transparent to the public about what was being done and why it was being done.”

Some see a risk that this technology, like nuclear power, could be turned against us if it falls into the wrong hands. “There are some parallels with nuclear technology,” Lin agrees. “You could see some of the technology that’s being developed here potentially being used in a military way, or at least in a way to disadvantage one’s neighbors whom one disagrees with.”

And while the potential hazards to our atmosphere might give pause to some, others might argue that our very presence on earth is already affecting the planet. “We all changed the climate a little bit today in our activities, but we did it unintentionally,” says Long.

“But the fact is that we are entering a time in the earth’s history where we can’t avoid that intentionality.  We know now that we’re changing the climate. And so the idea of thinking about this…may bring us to a place where we actually do a better job of that intention, of managing this planet.”

“I think there’s often an assumption that deployment of these technologies will be widely unpopular,” says Caldeira. “But if you’re in Phoenix and it’s getting to be 120 degrees and there is no rain, and somebody spraying some seawater off of Los Angeles can make you have cooler weather and moister weather,” there’s many who would welcome it.

“We don’t really know how bad climate change will get,” Caldeira continues. “But if it really does turn out to be catastrophic, there could be real demand to do something quickly.”

On the question of morality, Long is adamant. “I think it’s immoral not to do it,” she asserts. “I think we have to take responsibility for the earth, because that’s where we all live and because that’s where our children and their children are going to live.  And so the need to learn how to take responsibility is paramount in our survival.

“Are we doomed?  We’re not doomed — if we take responsibility.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests: Ken Caldeira, Atmospheric Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford University;
Albert Lin, Professor, UC Davis School of Law;
Jane Long, Co-chair, Task Force on Geoengineering, Bipartisan Policy Center;
Armand Neukermans, Physicist and Inventor

Related Links:

National Academy of Sciences Report: Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth

Bipartison Policy Center Task Force on Geoengineering

SF Gate: Looking to Sky to Fight Climate Change

Policy Report: Start research on climate engineering

LISTEN HERE

2015-05-17 Hank Paulson: Dealing with China

Hank Paulson believes that climate change is the biggest risk we face, and not just because of the environment. “It’s the biggest economic risk we face,” says the former treasury secretary and co-chair of the Risky Business Project.

But unlike the financial crisis of 2008, he warns, the government won’t be able to bail us out of global warming at the last minute. “We tend to deal with issues nationally when there’s an immediate crisis, rather than a longer-term issue,” Paulson points out. “And the terrible thing about climate change risk is that carbon emissions, essentially for all practical purposes stay up there forever, so it’s accumulative. The longer you wait here, the more costly and the more difficult it’s going to be to avoid the worst outcomes.”

Climate change was just one of the topics Paulson touched on while visiting The Commonwealth Club to talk about his new book, “Dealing with China.” The title is apt — as chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Paulson spent much of the 1990’s doing just that. It was a time of great economic and political reform for the country, and Paulson was allowed rare access on his many visits. He brought the Climate One audience up to date on a wide range of issues, from China’s economy and government leadership to its evolving stances on human rights, the environment and US-China relations.

“I believe that this is the most important bilateral relationship we have in the world,” says Paulson. Despite – or perhaps, because of – the fact that China is becoming our biggest competitor, Paulson believes that working together is the only way to solve the world’s problems.

“So we’re partnering with them in some things and competing in others,” he continues. One issue both countries have publicly agreed on is the need to address climate change. “There, it’s impossible to avoid the worst outcomes if major developing countries, and particularly China, the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, aren’t taking the necessary actions. And they, more than any other of the developing nations, understand the problem and are committed.”

China’s leaders, says Paulson, are focused on air pollution big time. But can China hope to reduce its carbon footprint while struggling to lift the majority of its citizens out of poverty? In other words, is it possible to balance economic growth with environmental responsibility?

“I have always believed that the two go together,” Paulson asserts. “No growth is going to be sustainable, no prosperity is going to be sustainable, if we don’t have a clean, healthy environment. And unless you have a certain amount of economic success, it’s going to be hard to have the ability to do the things you need to do.

“So these are the opposite sides of the same coin, rather than being in conflict.”

Paulson predicts that urban growth, and its attendant environmental hazards, will be a major issue for China, as millions of rural poor flock to its cities. “This country produces and consumes half of the cement, half of the steel, half of the coal — half of all new buildings on earth go up in China. And the urbanization model they have right now doesn’t work, they know it. They built cities for cars, not people.”

The Beijing arm of the Paulson Institute is helping to address some of those issues, by partnering with China’s cities to introduce more sustainable and energy efficient building practices.

But it’s not just a one-way street – there’s plenty that we can learn from the Chinese as well, Paulson notes. “I would cite one in particular: these leaders are very, very pragmatic. They look everywhere in the world for the best practices and then they look to implement them. And…they’re very candid about their problems.

He recalls a conversation in which one Chinese mayor cited his admiration for Reagonomics, to Paulson’s surprise. “I thought, I can’t imagine a US mayor being aware of what the Chinese problems were — and having some views on how to fix them. That’s to me the biggest positive – a practical, pragmatic leadership that recognizes that they’ve got problems, and is going to look everywhere and move to solve them.”

Recognizing their country’s challenges and addressing them head-on has led to visible improvement in the lives of China’s citizens, says Paulson. He has even seen progress in the politically charged area of human rights.

“I view economic issues, I view environmental issues, there’s a whole set of issues that are human rights issues,” he told the audience. “And you have to acknowledge that in the time I’ve been going to China, the living conditions, the lifestyles, the basic rights that the Chinese have, in terms of traveling internally, externally, have just improved dramatically.”

There was one aspect of ‘dealing with China’ that teetotaler Paulson never embraced – the drinking of maotai, a notoriously potent Chinese liquor. How did he sidestep the social pressure to imbibe with his hosts?

“I had a ‘designated drinker,’” he laughs. “I’ve never tasted maotai, and I’m glad I haven’t!”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guest: Henry Paulson, Former United States Secretary of the Treasury and author of “Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower” (Twelve, 2015)

Related Links:

The Paulson Institute

Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change

NY Times: The Coming Climate Crash

Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower

LISTEN HERE

Since the late 18th century, when it emerged as a source of heating and, later, steam power, coal has brought untold benefits to mankind. Even today, coal generates almost 45 percent of the world’s power. But now, the coal industry is at a crossroads, faced with pressure from environmental groups, public health and safety concerns and dwindling support from congress. Churches, universities and other large institutions have publicly divested from coal company stocks, threatening their toehold on Wall Street. With coal painted as the black-hatted villain of carbon emissions, it’s easy to forget how essential it was to fueling prosperity during America’s industrial age.

“Cheap energy certainly is one of the ways that we lift people out of poverty,” says Frank Wolak, a Stanford economist. Wolak points out that between 1870 and 1915, the increased consumption of coal in the United States directly correlates with an increase in GDP. “If you fast-forward to 100 years later, you look at China, you see exactly the same pattern, which is a rapid increase in coal consumption and a rapid increase in GDP in China,” he adds. “It does deliver essentially rapid economic growth, simply because it’s a very cheap source of energy.”

But as we’ve seen over the past 100 years, coal production also delivers greenhouse gases, lung disease and environmental devastation. It’s clear that it’s time to wean ourselves, and our planet, off of coal.

Bruce Nilles heads the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign to stop coal production and exportation. “We have 13,000 people a year dying prematurely from relying on an old, dirty, inefficient fuel source,” he told the Climate One audience. “Today, the choice is between clean, affordable electricity, like wind and solar, which is actually developing and providing more jobs today than in the coal mining sector. So our job ahead of us is overcoming the political barriers that the coal industry has put on our political process to make this transition as fast as possible, so that we don’t have to trade-off providing electricity and people’s health.”

But even as Americans are pushing for cleaner energy, demand for coal has been growing in other parts of the world, particularly China and India. One survival strategy for the industry could be for coal producers to cut their losses here, and focus on shipping their product overseas to power growing nations. But that solution will come back to haunt us, warns Nilles.

“We sit on top of 25% of all the coal in the world,” he says. “We know that if we burn that, our planet is toast. So we have a simple responsibility. Do we allow that to get mined at enormous cost to us? Shipped through our communities with a lot of coal dust along the way, and then ship it overseas so that we have the situation today where coal being burned in China is polluting us here in California?…it makes absolutely no sense for us to be thinking about shipping coal overseas and hurting ourselves, hurting the planet, and obviously contributing to air pollution in China as well.”

Frank Wolak vehemently disagrees, warning that if we ban exports, China will just get its coal from somewhere else. Instead, he believes, what the U.S. should do is put a price on carbon. “If you price carbon, you will certainly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If you prevent coal exports, you’ll do nothing to stop greenhouse gas emissions globally.

“I mean, simply jawboning and saying, ‘you can’t export’ is not going to change the fact that all the coal is going to get consumed. And there’s many other countries in the world willing to sell China the coal.”

The good news is that China may already be curtailing its coal dependence, as author Richard Martin points out. “In fact, China’s coal consumption was flat last year, after growing at a high percentage rate for decades,” he says. “And there’s a report [that came out] last year called Peak Coal in China, saying that actually the use of coal in China could peak by 2020 or so.”

Martin is the author of “Coal Wars: The Future of Energy and the Fate of the Planet.” Martin traveled from the Appalachias to rural China to interview those involved in the coal industry, from workers to coal barons, and those affected by its production. Martin reports seeing a shift in attitude, away from coal and towards renewables — even in coal-dependent communities such as Craig, Colorado. That town recently built a solar garden, he says, “that is literally in the smokestack of the big 20-mile coal plant, right there in the middle of Craig.”

Any discussion of the demise of coal leads, inevitably, to the issue of jobs. In researching his book, Martin talked with families of miners who go back generations. “Certainly, the miners are angry, the miners are defensive. They see this livelihood that has supported them for generations evaporating, and they don’t know what they’re going to do.”

To make matters worse, the industry itself is abandoning its workers. Mechanization has resulted in layoffs. And as the market for coal is shrinking, the coal mining industry has eviscerated the unions, leaving workers nowhere to turn for support. “These workers are being laid off with no pensions and no rights, and a lot of healthcare costs,” says Nilles. “We, as a country, owe it — just as we did to the loggers in the Pacific Northwest, the tobacco farmers in the south. We need, as a country, to come together and help Appalachia and the workers make this transition with healthcare and pensions and say, “Coal may have served us well over the last hundred years, but it is time, it is long due and over time, to move on as fast as we possibly can.”

What’s next for the coal industry, and the thousands of workers it employs? Having burned bright for nearly 150 years, is it time to close up the mines, shut down the plants and let renewables fuel the planet’s future?

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests: Richard Martin, Author, Coal Wars: The Future of Energy and the Fate of the Planet (Palgrave Macmillan Trade, 2015);
Bruce Nilles, Senior Director, Beyond Coal Campaign, Sierra Club;
Frank Wolak, Director, Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, Stanford University;
Brian Yu, Senior Analyst, Citi Research

Related Links:

Sierra Club: Beyond Coal

Peak Coal in China

Universities Price Carbon

Coal Wars: The Future of Energy and the Fate of the Planet

LISTEN HERE

Conservation begins at home – literally. And the ultimate in energy conservation, of course, is a home that produces as much energy as it uses. Net Zero homes are designed from the ground up to do just that, from insulation material (New Zealand sheep’s wool is optional!) to light fixtures to rooftop solar panels. But is there a tradeoff to energy efficient home ownership?

For Sven Thesen, Net Zero living doesn’t mean giving up the comforts of home. He recalled his family’s decision to make their dream house a Net Zero house: “My wife’s requirement was it had to be beautiful,” he told the audience at a recent Commonwealth Club gathering, “and so it was beautiful. And then, it has to be functional and comfortable. And let’s see how energy-efficient we can make it.”

Powered by a 5.9 kilowatt photovoltaic system, the Thesen’s house uses roughly a quarter of the energy of the average Palo Alto home – as well as powering a curbside EV charger, available free of charge to anyone who wants to pull up and plug in.

Indoor temperature control is not an issue. “I don’t have an air-conditioning system,” Thesen says proudly. “All I have is good building orientation, a heck of a lot of insulation and some shading on the sunny side. That’s it.”

Daniel Simons of David Baker Architects has designed many a Net Zero home. He says the reality is simpler – and less costly — than many people believe. “I think the key with getting to Net Zero, or just being efficient, is trying to figure out how to reduce the loads,” he says. “The goal is really to make the buildings use as little energy as possible.”

Of course, not everyone can afford to build an entirely new house, or remodel an existing home. But as Simons points out, reducing your energy load is still within reach. Switching to LED light bulbs, upgrading appliances and replacing windows are just some of the steps homeowners can take to reduce their carbon footprint – and their energy bill.

These hum-drum modifications may not have as much curbside cachet as displaying an array of solar panels on your roof. Who gets excited about caulking and insulation? “Some of the most effective things we can do are the least sexy,” admits Ann Edminster, author of Energy Free: Homes for a Small Planet. “But it has tremendous paybacks in comfort, energy reduction and so forth. So there are a lot of good reasons to do it.”

So, Net Zero Energy homes may be in our future. But what about Net Zero waste? The average Californian produces more than four pounds of trash per day, and San Francisco, among other cities, has set a goal to reduce that to zero. Is it an impossible goal? And where do we start?

According to Climate One’s next panel of guests, outreach and awareness are the first step – and the more creative, the better.

Four years ago, radio host Diana Dehm started Trash on Your Back, which challenges participants to carry their entire trash output with them for five days. The movement quickly picked up steam, going from 17 participants the first year to over 2,500 in six countries the next. “We’re really trying to help everyone understand that we can create a zero waste world,” Dehm says. “You mentioned the 4.4 pounds of trash average per person, per day. Well, we were able to knock to that down to 0.8 pounds per day, just by doing this.

“The U.S. spends $12 billion a year in waste management, right?” Dehm continues. “We take 50% in one week…and it’s a $6 billion opportunity for the nation. Wouldn’t we rather put that in schools, in compost facilities?”

Lauren Hennessy of Stanford’s Sustainability Office found a novel way to boost campus participation in the nationwide “RecycleMania” college competition. Stanford’s catchy “All About No Waste” video, a parody of Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” has garnered nearly five thousand YouTube hits to date. “That’s 100 times greater than any of the other videos in the competition,” Hennessy reports proudly. And while Stanford didn’t best arch-rival Harvard in the contest, she adds, “we far exceeded our waste minimization in the competition than in years past. And we doubled our participation in the competition than last year. So it really went far in spreading awareness.”

Kevin Drew, of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment, is in charge of meeting the city’s zero-waste goal. He admits that it might seem like an impossible dream. “But you can’t get halfway there, you gotta just go for zero,” he says. “And if we get to 99, that’s doing really well.”

Recycling and composting the city’s trash is one important piece of the puzzle. But to truly get to zero, everyone needs to find ways to reduce what goes in the bins.

“It’s going to take a million little ways to get there,” Drew continues. “Zero waste is really a beautiful kind of a biological construct that we still have to invent. Everybody’s asking us, how are you going to get there, do you have a precise plan? No, we’re making up as we go along, frankly. And for God’s sake, let’s get out there and do it.”

The takeaway? Being mindful of what we use, and how we re-use it, will go a long way toward reducing the trash on our backs — and in our backyards.

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:
Ann Edminster, Author, Energy Free: Homes for a Small Planet (Green Building Press, 2009); Daniel Simons, Principal, David Baker Architects; Sven Thesen, Owner, Net Zero Home; Diana Dehm, Founder, Trash on Your Back; Kevin Drew, Zero Waste Coordinator, San Francisco Department of the Environment; Lauren Hennessy, Sustainability Outreach Manager, Stanford University

Related Links:

Net Zero Homes
Project Green Home
The Well Building Standard
California’s Zero Net Energy Policies and Initiatives
Trash On Your Back Challenge
All About No Waste
SFEnvironment Zero Waste FAQ

LISTEN HERE

One more hungry mouth to feed? Try 9.6 billion — that’s the earth’s projected population by 2050, according to a United Nations report.

Dinner was on the table, figuratively speaking, at a recent Climate One event at The Commonwealth Club. It’s estimated the amount of food needed to feed the planet will double by mid-century, so how will we manage the world’s food supply? Is the solution to simply produce more food?

“In a word, no,” says Jonathan Foley, author of National Geographic’s recent cover story A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World. While food production has reached the equivalent of “drill, baby, drill – let’s just get more stuff,” he continues, “we’re now exhausting the ability of our agricultural system to simply produce more and more and more. We’re going to have to be more thoughtful about the food we actually grow today, and the nutrition and opportunity delivers for people around the world.”

Karen Ross, California Food and Agriculture Secretary, agrees that with thoughtful management, “every acre itself can be more productive, without tearing out more land, without using more water, without using more fertilizer.” It’s about optimizing our resources, says Ross, “to get the best crop per drop, best crop per acre, thinking differently about what we grow and how we grow it and maximizing what we have, instead of the traditional way which has been, let’s go tear out another 50 acres of pristine land and irrigate more and add more.”

Climate change is exacerbating the problem, says Foley — but there are two sides to that coin. Many people don’t realize that agriculture contributes more to climate change than the energy or transportation sectors. “It turns out agriculture releases about 30% [of greenhouse gas emissions], mostly from deforestation, methane coming from cattle and rice fields, from nitrous oxide…so on one side climate change is crucial to the future of agriculture, but agriculture is also critical to the future of addressing our climate problems.”

Nurturing a sustainable food system would seem to be one solution. But, asked host Greg Dalton, what exactly does that mean? Jonathan Foley offers this definition: “Agriculture is such a basic human enterprise. It’s about feeding our world, about creating opportunity for farmers and everyone through the supply chain, all the way to the restaurant or who serves the food, and of course about the environment. So I think we have to think about those three dimensions: nutrition, about the economics of agriculture and certainly about the environment. And a sustainable agricultural system would be the one that looks at all three dimensions simultaneously.”

As Bon Appétit’s Director of Google Global Foods, Helene York designs workplace menus and coaches chefs on the definition of “sustainable.” She described the Bon Appétit philosophy: “You start with deliciousness. More and more we’re introducing plant-centric food. And we start our lines in a café line with three different wonderful vegetables. And by the time you’ve filled your purposefully smaller plate, you are mostly full on that plate and you say, wow I have a delicious three colored meal here. I’ll take a little bit meat or fish on the top. It’ll be our garnish.”

Humans don’t need to consume 16 ounces of meat protein a day, she says, but in the United States, we often approach that number. “But if we dial that back, because there’s so much more energy needed to produce proteins, then we leave a lot of resources to provide and grow vegetables that are delicious.”

Food waste is a major problem; according to Foley, the numbers are “astonishing.” Roughly 40 percent of the food produced in the world isn’t consumed, and loss occurs at both ends of the food chain. In richer countries, he says, it centers on the consumer, “in a restaurant, maybe in a cafeteria, maybe in our refrigerators and our Tupperware with lots of good intentions, but it just doesn’t get in our tummies.

“But where we have food loss in a lot of developing countries is near the farmer,” he continues. “They grew the food, but maybe it couldn’t get harvested in time, maybe the insects got to it or maybe it rotted in storage because the trains weren’t on time or the truck didn’t get where it’s supposed to go. So it’s more of an infrastructure problem, not an overconsumption problem.”

And waste, Foley points out, is a purely human invention. “There’s nothing in nature called waste. It doesn’t exist — it’s just food for something else. And so we have to think a lot more in our food system like ecological systems do: what’s not used one place is used somewhere else. Whether it’s repurpose food or repurpose organic matter for energy or for rebuilding the soil. We just got to be smarter than we’ve been. That’s certainly where we have room to grow.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests: Karen Ross, California Secretary of Food and Agriculture; former Deputy US Secretary of Agriculture; Jonathan Foley, Executive Director, California Academy of Sciences; Helene York, Director, Google Global Accounts at Bon Appétit Management Company

LISTEN HERE

You might not expect a billionaire to pick up hitchhikers on his plane, but T. Boone Pickens is no ordinary billionaire. The CEO of BP Capital, who made his first billion in the oil business, recently visited the Commonwealth Club for a discussion on the future of the oil industry.

But first, he had a story to share, one that belies his humble Oklahoma roots. The last time he visited the Commonwealth Club, he remembered, he issued a blanket invitation for anyone in the audience to join him on his plane. Ordinarily his offer has no takers. “You aren’t going to find one or two people to go to Amarillo, Texas,” he laughed, “But then this guy raised his hand.” Turns out, it was the son of an acquaintance of Pickens’ whose mother in Amarillo was ill. “I said, “Yeah, come on. Jump in.”

At age 68, Pickens left the company he founded, Mesa Petroleum, and has since devoted his time to a crusade to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. His “Pickens Plan” advocates for natural gas production and the development of renewable energy sources — including wind power, an industry in which he’s invested millions of dollars.

Over the past ten years Pickens has become known for his uncanny forecasts on the price of oil, leading CNBC to dub him “the Oracle of Oil.” But at The Commonwealth Club, he revealed the secret to his prescience: “That guy that works for the Saudis, Naimi,” he said, referring to their oil minister, Ali Al-Naimi. “I watch what he says, and two weeks later I say the same thing he did.”

Recently he’s gone on record saying that oil prices will climb again, reaching $70 a barrel by the end of this year. In response to a question from the audience, he predicted that prices would reach $100 a barrel by the end of 2016.

In his years in the oil business, Pickens has seen a lot of ups and downs. The current down cycle, he notes, is different from what happened in the 1980’s in one significant way. “This time, the United States is the one that overproduced,” as opposed to the Saudis, “which is incredible.” Saudi control of the oil market, says Pickens, is a thing of the past. “The cartel is not a cartel any longer. OPEC is a trade association, is what it is.”

And the U.S. has the resources to stay on top of the market. “Every place but here has peaked,” Pickens continues. “There are no additions from any other countries except Iraq…if you go back and look at the last five years, you’ve increased demand by seven million barrels a day and the United States has provided five of that. So the rest of the world is pretty well peaked.”

One reason? Oil production in the U.S. has benefited from new extraction techniques, such as fracking and horizontal drilling, that allow for greater production from shale oil fields.

“You have to assume that if you have oil fields, you have source rock,” explained Pickens, who majored in geology at Oklahoma A&M. “Meaning, that’s where the oil and gas were formed. And due to heat and pressure, they were squeezed out and into what we call conventional reservoirs – sandstones, limestones and dolomites.

“We’ve found all the big ones in those conventional reservoirs,” he went on, “and we pretty well have in the United States. But then we showed up with all this shale.”

Despite public opposition to fracking in the state, Pickens believes it’s only a matter of time before California’s Monterey Shale is plundered for its oil – and its profits. “Because those landowners, they will start suing,” he predicts. “If they have a farm or a ranch, the acreage there, if it has Monterey shale under it, it will be productive, and they’ll want income from it.”

Unlike many in the oil business, Pickens has come out publicly on the dangers of climate change. “I’m a believer in global warming,” he says at the beginning of his 2012 TED Talk, in which he advocates for a switch to reliance on natural gas over oil.

At the Commonwealth Club, Pickens confirmed his stance. “Yes, we have done some things to the atmosphere,” he told host Greg Dalton. “We’ve had a lot of emissions out of these vehicles and everything else.”

“We shouldn’t wait until it’s confirmed that we messed it up,” added Pickens, eliciting spontaneous applause from the audience. “Go ahead and start doing something. “

But when pressed by an audience member, the former oil tycoon admitted he’s not ready to close the book on fossil fuels – not just yet.

“Let’s just say that, yes, we start to prepare for climate issues and everything else…I’m ready to do that. But you will decline and deplete on the oil and natural gas. You’re going to have to go to some other form of transportation fuel or whatever in time.

“I would move in that direction. I want to do that,” Pickens continued. “But listen, I’m a patriotic American, I want American fuel. I don’t want OPEC oil. The battery, the wind, the solar — all of it, anything American is what I want. But it just so happens, you’re stuck with fossil fuel right now.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guest: T. Boone Pickens, Chairman and CEO, BP Capital

LISTEN HERE

Do you believe in climate denial? To hear climate scientists tell it, there is a war being waged on science by government opponents and special interests, designed to fuel skepticism and discredit their work in the eyes of the public. Two of them told their stories recently at The Commonwealth Club.

Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory says that being a climate scientist today feels “a little scary.” He’s been targeted by congress and threatened with referral to the Justice Department; threatening emails from strangers have filled his inbox. Michael Mann, a professor of Meteorology at Penn State who has written on the climate wars, tells of having his emails hacked and used out of context to malign him, his colleagues and climate research. “I see that as a direct assault,” he told the audience.
“Not just on us, but our children and grandchildren, who stand the most to lose if we fail to act in time.”

Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes has charted the history of climate denial, which, as she explains it, has its roots in the final days of the Cold War. Physicists who had previously used their degrees to downplay the dangers of tobacco use now turned their attention to the climate awareness movement. “And not just climate science,’ she continues. “Acid rain, the ozone hole, the role of pesticides in harming the environment, they begin to challenge the scientific evidence on all of these issues…and they pursued that strategy successfully for more than 20 years.”

Oreskes says such spin doctoring is designed to distract the public and cast doubt on the scientific evidence of global warming. “This is about an organized campaign to undermine the work that we do and to make people think that the science is unsettled.”

It’s a technique that goes back to the Greeks, says Joe Romm, author of ‘Language Intelligence.’ “The key to being persuasive,” he says, “is to be memorable. And modern social science basically shows the stuff that’s easier for you to remember, you’re more likely to believe is true.”

But how good are scientists at being persuasive? Popular wisdom has them squirreled away in labs, focused on the pursuit of knowledge yet collectively tongue-tied when it comes to championing their work. Oreskes says the notion that scientists can’t communicate with the public is a fairly new one — as is the idea that the public isn’t aware of, and hungry for, their information.

“In the late 19th and early 20th century there was a great tradition of scientists reaching out to the public,” she relates. “The British Association had public meetings in which thousands and thousands of ordinary British citizens would come to hear lectures on geology. Thousands of people would come to hear Michael Faraday lecture on electricity and magnetism.” Twentieth century scientists, she says, frequently published best-sellers, which were gobbled up by the public; one of her favorite examples is William Bowie, who also had a Sunday radio program on geodesy – the study of the shape of the earth. “Now, if you can make geodesy fun,” Orestes laughed, “you can make anything fun!”

As to the question of whether social activism can discredit a scientist’s reputation, Oreskes dismissed that notion out of hand. “Some of the greatest scientists of the 20th century became very active after 1945,” she reminded the audience, “I don’t think anybody ever said that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity lost credibility because he spoke up about the dangers of atomic weapons.”

Fast forward to the 21st century: how to counter the pervasive message that the science of climate change is “inconclusive?”

Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education agrees with Romm that “the best way to communicate is to tell a story.” Conveying a personal message, she says, resonates with listeners, whether you’re at a cocktail party or in a public forum.

“When you go on that talk show, when you go to that school board meeting or that congressional hearing, you tell the stories. You try to make that personal connection just like you would if you were an accountant or a plumber or a ballet dancer. It’s nothing that’s specific to scientists,” she continues, “it’s specific to people who want to get something accomplished. You have to talk in the language of the people that you’re talking to.

“You’ve got to repeat your message frequently, have it come from a trusted source, have a message that assuages the concern of the person that you are trying to convince, and then the science has a chance to be heard.

And getting the science heard, I think, is what we’re all about.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests: Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard; Co-Author, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming (Bloomsbury Press, 2011); Joe Romm, Founding Editor, Climate Progress; Author, Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga (CreateSpace, 2012); Eugenie Scott, Chair, National Center for Science Education

LISTEN HERE

If you’ve got fossil fuel stocks in your retirement account – and most of us do, whether we know it or not – you could be in for a bumpy ride. England’s Central Bank has said that coal, oil and natural gas reserves that determine the future earnings of those companies, and therefore their stock prices, may be overvalued. And as supply grows and global demand decreases, oil prices are dropping by the barrelful.

So how do financial managers and investors plan to ride this one out? Several of them joined host Greg Dalton for a Climate One discussion of what the carbon bubble means to our financial futures.

Anthony Hobley is CEO of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, which monitors the risks of fossil fuel investments. The cost of finding, developing and delivering oil is rapidly rising, he reports. “So fossil fuels are going to become more expensive, at the same time as we’re seeing renewables, things like wind and solar, are becoming cheaper,” says Hobley. “We call this ‘climate swerve,’ and we know which side we want to be on.”

As director of global governance for CalPERS, California’s public employee pension fund, Anne Simpson keeps a sharp eye on the energy market. With $300 billion in assets to manage, she believes the way to protect her client’s assets is not by divesting from fossil fuels, but by applying pressure to corporate boardrooms. “We turn to these boards and say, ‘well, your boards of directors are there to act on our behalf,” she says. “And that means you need to tackle these risks…you have to understand how to navigate these complex and profound changes in the energy market. You can’t just shut your eyes, cling tight and hope for the best.’…We need people in boardrooms who get this, who can think long term and who can understand complex challenges.”

Financial transparency and reporting, she continues, is essential to navigating the risky energy markets. “These companies need to adapt,” says Simpson. “So the question is, who’s on the boards of these companies? What sort of reporting are we requiring them to make?

“We don’t at the moment have financial reporting which captures these risks and these issues. So, I think climate change is making the big investors and the big investor community rethink the notion of who’s on boards, but it’s also making us rethink what sort of financial reporting are we getting and what’s being missed. We’ve got risks that aren’t being exposed, and then they’re not being managed.”

And it’s not just the big investors who need to be aware of the risks. You may not feel you have much control over your 401(k) or pension plan, but individual investors wield more power than they know, says Hobley. He recalls one recent conversation with the manager of a large pension fund in the U.K., representing thousands of investors. “He said ‘I got six letters [from investors] last year,” Hobley relates. “If I got 20, or 50 or even 100 letters from people asking how am I addressing and dealing with climate risk…I would take that seriously.’” Even five letters from stakeholders would make a difference, the manager told him.

“So, I think you can engage with them. It’s your money, and they manage on your behalf.”

Kurt Billick, CIO of Bocage Capital, disagrees about investor engagement – and he didn’t mince words: “I think it’s a nuisance that they swat away, quite frankly,” he said. Portfolio managers, after all, are incentivized to produce financial results – and quickly. In order to make the system work, he believes, energy issues must be addressed from the demand side. “So the price on carbon is probably the way that you’re really going to change things,” he says, “by creating a market environment where people can actually react to the incentives that they’re seeing.”

One thing seems to be certain, according to Hobley; while energy demand is on the rise, coal and fossil fuels are not the only way to light up the world, as those companies would have you believe. “We did analysis to look at the financials of delivering energy to the world’s energy poor via coal or via solar,” he reports, “and it’s clearly cheaper to provide energy and electricity to the world’s poor via solar, for a whole range of reasons.”

The energy industry, Hobley says, is in a time of massive transition – which doesn’t bode well for the dinosaurs of the sector. “When you look back on all of the big technological shifts, from steam to automobiles, from traditional cameras and film to digital cameras and you could go on, the incumbents almost never make that transition and they go out of business.”

Not necessarily. Anne Simpson points to recent research by the World Development Report, which projects how different sectors could respond to a climate increase of four to ten degrees over the next 30 years. Their adaptation strategies include energy efficiency, development of renewables and carbon capture.

“So that plan’s there,” she concludes. “What we want to do as a global investor who’s part of all those sectors is make sure that the strategies of those companies and the people running those companies actually line up with that plan.

“I’m not in a doom-and-gloom mode about this, but it does mean investors paying attention. So, everybody who’s a saver through a pension, through 401(k), through a mutual fund, really hold your manager’s feet to the fire. Because you ultimately are the owners of this system.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests: Kurt Billick, Chief Investment Officer, Bocage Capital; Anthony Hobley, CEO, Carbon Tracker Initiative; Anne Simpson, Director of Global Governance, CalPERS

LISTEN HERE

As the web moves to the cloud, more and more of us are asking what powers the data centers that fuel our browsing. How much carbon is being consumed when you stream from Netflix, surf Youtube or weigh in on “what color is this dress?” And is there a way to take some of the pressure off of the grid – and off of the climate?

Those are questions Greenpeace began asking several years ago, says senior policy analyst Gary Cook. “The IT sector has a huge energy footprint,” says Cook, “and it was growing very rapidly. If you aggregate all the demand of electricity from the cloud, for the data centers and the networks, ranking among countries, we would rank in about 5th or 6th in the world. So it’s quite significant.”

As a result, Greenpeace issued a challenge to Silicon Valley companies to reduce their carbon consumption, and began grading corporations like Apple, Microsoft and Google on their progress. They started things off with a campaign for Facebook to “unfriend coal” – a campaign waged on Facebook’s own pages.

Facebook subsequently committed to go 100% renewable; other IT companies soon followed suit. Many now employ fulltime sustainability directors to keep them on the green and narrow. They’re tasked with reducing the company’s carbon footprint on all fronts, from siting to power sourcing to monitoring the life of the gadgets they sell. Several of these ‘designated pests,’ along with Greenpeace’s Cook, joined host Greg Dalton recently for a Climate One forum on keeping Silicon Valley green.

One company that has gotten low grades from Greenpeace is eBay. But, as eBay’s Global Director for Green Lori Duvall explains, the company is taking steps to improve its grade even as it grows exponentially. “A lot of effort went into data center consolidation,” she says, “really pushing the envelope on how you measure the efficiency, not just of the entire building that houses the entire data center, but actually looking at what kind of work your data center is doing and how you can optimize.

“You know, when you buy something on eBay how much carbon does that use? How can we change our coding infrastructure to make things more efficient?”

Christina Page of Yahoo! says that despite corporate ups and downs, they have made strides in lowering their energy use. “In 2008, in the middle of the recession, we built and designed our most efficient and energy and water efficient data center to date,” she reports. “It runs on about 40% less energy than a conventional data center does. “ How did they do it? This high-tech company found a surprisingly low-tech solution: they opened the windows. “Basically, it’s a passively cooled data center,” Page explains,
“It’s a long narrow building, looks kind of like a chicken coop. And we opened the windows 90% of the year.”

But as Bill Weihl, Sustainability Guru for Facebook, points out, it’s not just about lowering the footprint of large corporations. “In the end we have to decarbonize the grid if we’re going to deal with climate change. And that means we need utilities and other companies that use energy to change what they are doing.” To that end, Facebook and other companies are working together to identify and implement policies that would make it easier for corporations to buy renewable energy. Using their collective economic clout doesn’t hurt the cause. “That’s a place where we have real power in the marketplace,” Weihl notes.

Gary Cook says Greenpeace has noticed a surprising trend: in red states across the country, tea partyers are joining with environmentalists to advocate for renewable power. “From the governor’s office on down, everyone wants to be the one that gets Facebook or Microsoft or whoever to come to their state,” says Cook. “That’s a big win for them politically, it creates jobs, adds to the tax base. So it’s real opportunity.”

In other words, green energy isn’t just for lefties anymore – it’s become a team effort. “They’re really tired of the utility bills going up and up, and they want clean energy,” Cook says. “They’re actually pushing from the right and from the left for the same thing, which is great.”

In 2012, Ebay teamed up with Republican lawmakers and local stakeholders to help change Utah law, deregulating the power grid and making alternate power sources a possibility. “Now you can buy clean power,” says Duvall. “Not just us, but anybody in Utah.

“It really shows you have to stay flexible in these conversations,” she continues, “whether it’s taking the business case to the CFO or taking the kind of broader societal business impact story to a red state legislator. There are a lot of good reasons to make these changes. It’s not just because it’s the right thing to do for the climate. That’s a great reason, but it’s not always the reason that motivates everybody.”

Whether motivated by consumer pressure, bottom line or the fear of getting a ‘D’ on its Greenpeace report card, companies in the IT sector appear to be working toward a cleaner, greener digital world. To see how they’re doing, track their progress at Greenpeace’s Clicking Clean website.

Host: Greg Dalton
Guests:Gary Cook, Senior Policy Analyst, Greenpeace International;
Lori Duvall, Global Director, Green, eBay;
Christina Page, Global Director, Energy and Sustainability Strategy, Yahoo!;
Bill Weihl, Sustainability Guru, Facebook

LISTEN HERE

SPEAKERS

Louise Bedsworth

Deputy Director, California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research

Hunter Cutting

Director of Strategic Communications, Climate Nexus

Kathryn Sullivan

Administrator, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

LISTEN HERE

For the past few years, skyrocketing oil prices have had Americans on a gasoline diet. We’re walking more, using public transportation, opting for weekend “stay-cations,” even trading in our gas-guzzlers for hybrids. Ten years ago, the consensus was that oil demand would go up as supply went down, and prices would follow. But as it turns out, the opposite was true. So, what happened? That was the first question host Greg Dalton put to his guests at a recent Climate One forum.

The last five years have seen a significant – and unprecedented — shift in American’s driving habits, says Bill Reilly, a former head of the EPA. “We leveled off in terms of vehicle miles traveled,” he says, “Now, there are more of us, there are more cars that are being sold and manufactured every day, but at the same time we’re driving less.”

One reason? Both millennials and retiring baby boomers are moving towards urban centers, choosing ride-sharing, public transportation and bicycles over long commutes from the suburbs. “That has profound consequences, I think, for the future,” continues Reilly. “I think we’re going to see a continuing reduction in demand.”

At the same time, the global balance between oil producers and oil consumers is changing, says Jason Bordoff, director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “So the places we thought of as the producers of oil, the Middle East, Venezuela, these are rapidly growing demand centers,” he says. Meanwhile, major consuming countries, such as the U.S. and Canada have become major suppliers. “US oil production is up four million barrels a day since 2008, I think… imports have gone from 60% to 20% of our consumption.”

And Reilly points out that China and other countries also have their own untapped supplies of shale gas. “I think they will find ways to develop it,” he predicts. “And once that happens, it’s very possible that we could see a cascade of new supply at the same time as we see the decline in demand. And we will then I think see the oil price follow the gas price, the natural gas price in the United States, which is trending down.”

So despite its inherent volatility, Bordoff doesn’t see oil returning to $100 a barrel anytime soon. “We’ll probably be on this range of $60 to $80 for several years,” he told the audience. “But it’s easy to see it dipping further before it comes back up. So could it go down to $30 or $40 before it comes back? I think that’s definitely possible.”

Good news for consumers, not so good for Big Oil – and its investors. What do falling oil prices mean to Wall Street? Kate Gordon keeps a close eye on the fossil fuels market as senior policy advisor to The Risky Business Project. “The one thing that is predictable in oil markets is that they’re volatile, and we will see unpredictability going forward,” she warns. And the way to ride this boom-bust wave is by continuing to reduce consumption.

“The key to me for policy makers and consumers is keeping our eyes on policies that do reduce that vulnerability to volatility,” Gordon advises. For example, “pushing electric vehicles, trying to move the vehicle fleet more into electricity side, which has become far more renewable.”

As Willie Nelson sang, “I just can’t wait to get on the road again,” and most Americans are ready to do just that. But environmentalists fear that lower prices at the pump could spell trouble for the climate. Could cheaper gas mean an end to carbon consciousness? Will we see the return of the Hummer this summer?

“Carmakers respond to consumer demand,” says Bordoff. “So if consumers decide that cheaper gasoline is here to stay…they’ll respond to that.

“From an oil demand and emission standpoint, lower prices are not a good thing,” he adds. “You’re going to drive a little bit more, maybe make a different choice about what kind of car you would buy.

“That’s why I think policy is so important. And I think what prevents us from returning to the Hummer is the fact that we have aggressive fuel economy standards…policy is going to be the key driver.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests: Jason Bordoff, Founding Director, Center on Global Energy Policy, Columbia University; Former Special Advisor to President Obama, National Security Council Staff; Kate Gordon, Senior VP and Director, Energy & Climate Program, Next Generation; Bill Reilly, Former Board Member, ConocoPhillips, Senior Advisor, TPG Capital

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“We live in a 21st-century climate with a 20th-century infrastructure and 19th-century laws and policies.” That’s how Peter Gleick of The Pacific Institute summed up the issue at hand during a forum at the Commonwealth Club last fall.

Gleick and his fellow panelists were discussing the problem of how to manage “water whiplash.” Climate change has exacerbated the effects of both drought and flood conditions worldwide. California’s lakes and reservoirs are shrinking even as the sea encroaches on its shoreline, while floods and hurricanes plague the Midwest and the Atlantic Coast.

How can countries and communities make sense of a dearth of water, then suddenly too much? What can be done to guarantee water as a basic human right for all, while enacting regulations that encourage conservation? And how to avoid the inevitable conflicts that arise around this precious resource?

As Gleick points out, water has been a source of human tension going back centuries. “The earliest examples, three or four thousand years ago, were in ancient Mesopotamia, the Tigris and Euphrates River; today Turkey, Iraq and Syria,” he tells the audience. “And, again unfortunately, the most recent examples are in the same region, where there are tensions over ideology and religion and politics and access to resources…water is a tool of conflict, water is a target of conflict, water is a weapon of war. It’s another example of our inability, really, to separate politics and water.

“I think as the world grows, as populations grow, as the economy grows, as demand for water grows, the scarcity of water is more and more likely to lead to conflicts of one kind or another,” Gleick continues. “We see conflicts in the Western US, and hopefully they won’t be violent conflicts, but they’re political conflicts.”

Some believe market forces can be harnessed to control the flow of water. But what does that mean for the environment, as well as the needs of underserved communities? Brian Richter of The Nature Conservancy feels it’s possible to strike a balance. “We can have all those things together, but they depend very heavily ultimately upon having good governance, having the institutions and the capacity to manage the water well to meet all of those benefits.”

The notion of ownership of water, Richter points out, is a fallacy. “The government actually retains the ultimate ownership of the water…and what they do is they issue the right to use the water. So when we’re talking about a water market, what we’re talking about is trading in the rights to use water, rather than trading water itself.”

That distinction, he says, is an important one “because it highlights the really critical role that government has to play in that in regulating a market, in setting the rules and making sure the environment doesn’t get left out, in making sure that human access to water is provided.”

One audience member brought up the effects of climate change on our future water needs. Whether climate change is causing the current drought, says Gleick, isn’t the issue. “The issue is whether or not the extreme events, droughts and floods that we are experiencing, are now influenced by climate. And the answer to that is unambiguously yes. So would this drought have occurred anyway? Maybe.”

The last three years have been both California’s hottest and driest years on record, “and that alone is an influence of climate change on drought,” says Gleick.

“It means demand for water goes up. It means pressure on the existing reservoirs goes up. It means evaporative losses goes up. Hurricane Sandy – caused by climate change? Wrong question…The flooding caused by Sandy was worsened by climate change. That’s the issue. It’s the influence of climate change on these extreme events now.”

Gleick says there are lessons to be learned from Australia. Starting in 2003, that continent experienced a “Big Dry” lasting nearly a decade. The Australians were slow to respond to the crisis. “They did what we did, they muddled through,” he says. “They overpumped their groundwater…they did minor things.”

By the end of ten years, “they were doing things that we frankly should’ve been doing a long time ago and still are not doing; rethinking water rights, aggressively figuring out how to restore our ecosystems while maintaining some form of a healthy agricultural economy.” Californians will have to adopt similar reforms, Gleick warns, if we’re going to weather our own “big dry.” “We may be in a long-term drought, as was Australia, and we are not yet doing the things that they learned they had to do and could do to be successful.”

Unfortunately, says Gleick, “we haven’t learned the main lesson, which is it’s smarter to do these things in advance than in a crisis.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests: Brian Richter, Chief Water Scientist, The Nature Conservancy; Author, Chasing Water: A Guide for Moving from Scarcity to Sustainability (Island Press, 2014); Peter Gleick, President, Co-Founder, The Pacific Institute; Author, Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water (Island Press, 2011); Brooke Barton, Director, Water Program at Ceres

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Novelists and filmmakers have been mining the rich world of science for generations. Throughout the last century, science fiction has turned to real-world threats, such as nuclear war and plague, for its post-apocalyptic scenarios. More recently, environmental issues have moved to front and center in the narrative, in films such as Interstellar, Snowpiercer and Wall-E and best-sellers from Margaret Atwood, Nathaniel Rich and Jennifer Egan.

H.G. Wells foreshadowed this trend in his 1895 novel The Time Machine. But while the prospect of a devastated earth in a far distant future probably didn’t inspire many Victorians to recycle, today’s readers can clearly visualize a much more immediate threat. Climate change is more than a plot device – the signs are all around us. Can Cli-Fi help rally the troops in our battle to save the planet?

Jason Mark, editor of the Earth Island Journal, recently visited The Commonwealth Club to talk about the role fantasy can play in the climate change story. He was joined by Kim Stanley Robinson, author of several Cli-Fi novels, including Forty Signs of Rain and his latest, 2312.

Mark has taken note of the prevalence of climate change in novels and films. “I just started to notice it popping up more and more,” he told the audience. “Not necessarily always as an explicit theme; often as a plot point, something that [might] launch the novel or launch the story or launch the film…And that’s in some ways more interesting than, you know, a book about climate change.”

Science fiction, explains author Robinson, splits very neatly into two sub-genres, utopias and dystopias, both of which can help readers imagine where civilization might be heading. “Utopia is your hopes,” he continues, “if I do these things, and things go right, I’ll get to a good state.

“And dystopia are your fears – if I keep doing these bad things and bad things result, I’ll get to this bad state. So both utopias and dystopias are very, very useful.”

Mark recently published an Op-Ed in The New York Times in which he decries the solution put forth in Interstellar that mankind’s salvation is only a wormhole away. But he’s “cautiously optimistic” that film and literature can move hearts and minds in ways that think tanks and scientific journals may not.

“A big blockbuster motion picture film, it’s just popcorn, right?” Mark suggests. “It’s like people might not have their guard up as much. That would be my hope – that it might be able to come in from a side door and maybe get people to think about things differently.

“It might not move a denier to being James Hansen,” he adds, “but it might take someone who is maybe a little bit skeptical, say about the science of anthropogenic global warming and climate change, and get them to maybe think about things a little differently.”

Robinson credits Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia with kickstarting the environmental movement of the ‘70s. “It changed people’s lives, it changed their thinking,” he remembers. “I think it was the ‘60s generation, growing up in thinking ‘how do I live my ideals, how do I take care of my kids?” While the 80’s brought global changes that might have rendered the ideas in Ecotopia quaint, Robinson believes its message remains strong.

Science fiction – whether in novels, movies or comic books – is usually thought of as an escape. But immersing oneself in a fantasy world can be a powerful experience, as well as a tool for change, says Robinson. “For a while there, you’re living other people’s lives,” he tells the room. “It’s a very emotional business. And once you get to the emotional level, you begin to process in a different way than you do when you’re reading the news in a more cognitive sense.”

Such storytelling can help us identify with the struggles faced by future generations in an eco-dystopia. “That’s what fiction does,” he continues. “You are in a different world. It’s telepathy, it’s time travel. You come back to reality and you have a kind of double vision.

“I believe that if it’s done right it can change one’s view….And it helps you to make decisions about, what do I do today to help the situation for my grandchildren? So the science-fiction double vision… is really a useful tool for figuring out what to do now. It’s a philosophical tool.”

Here in the 21st century, the planet’s story has yet to be written. And while climate fiction might lean disproportionately toward doom-and-gloom scenarios, Robinson believes there’s still room for hope. “Life is robust,” he reminds the audience. “There’s many, many reasons for hope. It’s a natural human activity.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests: Jason Mark, Editor, (Earth Island Journal); Kim Stanley Robinson, (Author of 2312,Thorndike Press)

LISTEN HERE

The American Dream may no longer mean a sprawling house in the suburbs, with heated pool, an endless lawn and two SUVs in the driveway. But that doesn’t mean the dream of home ownership has died. “Hopefully in the years to come, part and parcel of that American dream will be a home that is more energy efficient,” says Julián Castro. “So it’s still I think at its base the same American dream. But we can be smarter about the impacts on our climate when we achieve the American dream.”

US Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro stopped by The Commonwealth Club on a recent visit to San Francisco to talk about his plans for bringing energy efficiency to every American household. “Folks tend to think that, well, that’s something for people that have a lot of resources — driving electric cars or installing rooftop solar,” he says. “The fact is that… the declining cost of being energy efficient in general is making that more and more affordable for middle-class Americans and folks of modest means.”

The former mayor of San Antonio, Texas has long been seen as a “rising star” among Democrats. His record of championing affordable housing, strong communities and revitalization of older neighborhoods led to him being chosen to join Barack Obama’s cabinet last year. In his new post, Castro is bringing that spirit and dedication to effect change on a national level.

The HUD secretary was in San Francisco, along with Governor Brown, to announce a partnership program to encourage energy efficiency in California’s multifamily housing. About a quarter of the nation’s households live in multifamily units. Retrofitting HUD buildings, Castro estimates, could lead to a twenty percent reduction in energy consumption that would save $7 billion yearly in energy costs. “People of all economic classes are being impacted by this,” says Castro. “So it really is a new era where everyone can participate in combating climate change.”

But many American communities have already felt the effects of climate change, in the form of hurricanes, floods and drought. Castro says government agencies such as HUD and FEMA are evolving in their approach to disaster relief. Lessons learned from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, he says, have shown that simply rebuilding communities the way they were before isn’t the best way to go. “That’s what people are used to,” he says, “but there wasn’t as much forward thinking about, you know, how can we redo the infrastructure in a way that creates more resilience for the future?”

To that end, Castro’s office has instigated programs that encourage rebuilding with an eye towards resilience, not replication. “Our hope is that…the example that they’re setting will set best practices that are then adopted by states throughout our country,” he says. “Our focus is ensuring that…communities are more sustainable, and they can withstand natural disasters better in the future.”

A wide range of topics were covered during the hour-long visit, from education to economics, immigration to the environment. Castro didn’t hedge when it came to expressing his opinion on fracking – arguably, an unpopular one among the Climate One audience. “I’m not against it,” he stated. “I do believe, from the evidence that I have gone through and read, that it can be done safely….I believe that there is a utility to it and that it has a strong economic value, that natural gas is an important component of our energy future. And at the same time, keeping an open mind as research continues to come in.”

The inevitable Texas-California comparisons came up for discussion as well. Castro, a Stanford graduate, admitted that California had the advantage in one area. “What California got right historically was that it invested in brainpower, in being innovative and educating people through the university system,” he said. “That was really, you know, I think what California did well in the 20th century, and what Texas in the 21st century is not getting right in the way that it needs to get right.”

He called former governor Rick Perry’s tenure “a missed opportunity.” Despite his record of job creation and economic growth, Castro says, “what Governor Perry did not get right is investing the infrastructure of opportunity, in strong schools and strong universities. In making sure that people of different walks of life can prosper and be a part of the American dream.”

There’s speculation that Castro’s rising star could rise much higher. He has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential pick; former Bush advisor Mark McKinnon has said that “Julián Castro has a very good chance of becoming the first Hispanic president of the United States.” While Castro admitted he was flattered by the quote, he added, “I seriously doubt that that’s going to be the case.”

Host: Greg Dalton
Guest: Julián Castro, Secretary, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

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“Hamburgers in a hot world,” is how host Greg Dalton summarized a recent Climate One discussion on cattle and their carbon hoofprint. The negative effects of the meat industry on our climate have been food for debate ever since the publication of the 2006 report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Association. But could there be a “grass-is-greener” side to this environmental fence?

“Agriculture also has a chance to be part of the solution,” says ecology professor Whendee Silver, who studies climate and land-use relationships at UC Berkeley. The FAO’s report, she says, was one sided. “It gave very little space and consideration to good management practices, how widespread those are, what the potential sustainability questions are with regard to management.”

Nicolette Hahn Niman is a vegetarian who raises cattle. In her book, “Defending Beef,” she explores sustainable animal agriculture practices, advocating for a holistic, humane approach to meat production. She also finds the report fell short, especially in calculating the environmental impact of the industry. “It treated very specific problematic, ecological behaviors to the entire sector,” says Niman. “There are certain parts of the world that are really hotspots for deforestation. Those were attributed to the entire meat sector, and it’s really inappropriate…it has no connection to what ranchers in the United States are doing or the beef that Americans are eating.”

In telling their own food stories, all three guests said they had turned to vegetarianism as teens, for various reasons. But Diane Donlon, of the Center for Food Safety, admitted that as a young mother of two, she found herself exhausted. She was “really shocked,” she said, when a nutritionist recommended she add red meat to her diet. “I still only eat it on occasion,” she says. “But I do find that I have better health, and just always know who raised the meat, and where it came from, and seek out pasture-raised.”

Donlon runs the CFS’ Cool Foods Campaign. She says there’s a world of difference between factory and pasture-raised beef. “In the confinement model, that’s when you get the heavy dosage of antibiotics that leads to antibiotic resistance, to antibiotic residue in the meat, to the manure lagoons, to the loss of biodiversity to the ground water contamination, to a whole suite of issues that are not associated with the correct pasture management.”

It was the post-war switch to industrialized farming, adds Donlon, that signaled a change in attitude towards animal agriculture. “We went from thinking about…shepherding animals and taking care of them, to thinking of them as a commodity, the way we would a widget, a car, a refrigerator or what have you,” she says. “And I think that that’s partially what got us into this mess.”

Donlon recommends that consumers who do choose to eat meat “absolutely stay away from the factory stuff, to the extent that you can. Just draw a line in the sand and say I’m not going to do it. Because that’s the system that needs changing.”

Some might still refuse to eat meat altogether, for a myriad of reasons. But “boycotting an industry does not change it,” says Niman. Rather, consumer awareness will dictate the direction the industry takes, as it has in other food sectors. “You’ve seen transitions towards organic from conventional. And I think that’s exactly what will begin to happen in the meat industry. It’s already happening, because the grass-fed beef sector is the fastest growing sector in the beef industry.”

For an audience member who wondered about how to make better informed decisions about meat consumption, Silver recommended the Meat Eater’s Guide, published by the Environmental Working Group, to which she had contributed.

What about the claims that cows contribute heavily to climate change through methane gas emissions? While that is true, says Silver, there is another cattle-produced emission that can help to mitigate its effects – manure. “And so the poop, that we don’t really like to think about, but the bottom line is it’s a huge emission source and also a huge potential offset, if we can convert that to things like fertilizer, organic fertilizer.”

While some might see cow manure as a nuisance, it’s cause for celebration on her farms, says Niman. That’s because it’s part of a necessary regenerative cycle, which plays out when cattle spend their lives grazing in pastures. “You have the capture of the solar energy in the vegetation that’s coming up out of the ground,” she explains. “And then the animals are using that…they’re converting it, miraculously really, to meat and milk, and then humans are using that food.

“And as those animals are growing and living on that space, they’re not only returning the manure but they’re also returning their urine…you’re actually utilizing the resources in that ecosystem in a much more sensible way than animals that are being separated from land.”

Recognizing the relationship between sun, soil and sustenance, then, may be the key to managing the meat industry’s carbon footprint. And the time is now: as Donlon points out, the FAO has declared 2015 the International Year of the Soils. “Our atmospheres are overwhelmed because there’s too much CO2 in the atmosphere,” she tells the audience. “Our oceans are acidifying because there’s too much CO2 in our oceans. But our soils are actually starving for carbon. And so we have this world opportunity to rebuild carbon around the world by using all these different methods, including composting.

“I mean, there’s this law of return, we come from the earth and we go back to the earth,” continues Donlon, “And when we take all our waste and we put it in a landfill instead of putting it back into the ground, it comes back to haunt us as methanes.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests: Diana Donlon, Director, Cool Foods Campaign, Center for Food Safety
Nicolette Hahn Niman, Author, Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production (Chelsea Green, 2014)
Whendee Silver, Professor of Ecology, University of California, Berkeley

You can also visit:  http://climate-one.org/

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Gas prices are plummeting as fracking has unleashed a gusher of American oil.  California’s cap and trade program is increasing the bottom line for petroleum producers. Meanwhile, public support for reducing fossil fuel reliance is growing, and major shareholders are divesting from oil stocks. What does the future hold for the industry?

Climate One recently gathered a panel of oil industry veterans, along with California’s top carbon cop, to discuss whether Big Oil must, in the words of H.G. Wells, adapt or perish.

Mary Nichols, Chair of the California Air Resources Board, began with the good news –from an environmental standpoint:  California has been steadily decreasing its petroleum use for the last decade, and is on track to meet its goal of 50% reduction by 2030. She reports that the savings are “to the point where now Congress and the state are worried about how we’re going to get the money to repair our streets and roads, because we’ve become dependent on gasoline taxes over the years to pay for those things.”  Ironically, she adds, “more people are perhaps worrying about too little gas being sold than they are about too much gas being sold.”

No one, certainly, could be more worried than the oil companies themselves.  Clearly the call to climate action has reached their boardrooms as well. How are they responding?

Angus Gillespie’s official title is Vice President of C02 for Shell Oil.  But within the company, he says, he’s known as “the green guy.”  He proudly admits to being an oil executive who doesn’t own a car, relying instead on public transportation and his bicycle. “I have been accused of being the internal NGO inside Shell,” Gillespie laughs.

But his company is serious about the need to face change head-on.  “Shell has long woken up to the fact that we’re the incumbent in an industry which there will be less production in future,” he says.  “It’s just a matter of what can be done and what practical basis to get us there.”

They’re often seen as the “odd man out” among oil companies, he says.  “Shell, I believe, was one of the first to come out and say, “We recognize climate change….we accept the fact that the majority cause is manmade, a large part of it due to fossil fuels.  There has to be a solution.”  What that implies, he says, is the need for a long-term energy transition – but within a commercial framework that will satisfy shareholders.  “Long term is an important point here,” he cautions. “We can’t rush into something as an immediate effect, but then has no legs commercially to stay in place.”

Lou Allstadt has seen the issue from all sides. Formerly executive vice president of Mobil Oil and a 30-year industry veteran, he is now a member of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, advocating for climate awareness.  He sees the current downswing in prices as a short-term situation due to oversupply.  “It won’t take long for the pendulum to swing the other way,” he says. “Longer term, it’s going up and that means that we really should be doing all the things that were just discussed about reducing energy consumption.

“We also have to consider that renewable energy costs are coming down, coming down fairly rapidly, and they’re going to put a lid on fossil fuels at some point.”

Hitting oil companies in their wallet, the panelists agree, seems to be the one thing that will get their attention – hence the current emphasis on carbon pricing.  Even so, California’s cap-and-trade program has been met with resistance by the oil industry.  Currently, says Nichols, California’s price on a ton of carbon is $12.50, and will rise to around $20 in the next five years. “So,” she asks, “how much does that price have to be before it’s worth your while to start really promoting some alternatives or changing your product?”

Gillespie points out that Shell has set its own internal carbon price of $40 at ton.  “And when the price of carbon goes up, as it’s projected to do, is when you’ll see real change within the industry,” he predicts.  “Because once senior executives see the impact on the stock price, then real activity, long-term activity, really starts to take traction.”

Allstadt agrees; rising carbon prices should sound the alarm for shareholders. “$40 up to $80 is what I’m hearing,” he says. “Most of them appear to be far enough out in the future that they don’t really impact project economics today.” But, “when the financial community realizes that they have to think about closer-in financial impacts, they’re going to start really discounting the value of some of these fossil fuel companies.”

Putting his money where his mouth is, he adds: “I’ve sold all of my ExxonMobil stock, and I’ve been reinvesting in renewables.”

Asked to paint a picture of the future Autopia, Mary Nichols was cautiously optimistic. “We think that by about 2030 every car sold in California will have to be either a plug in, a hybrid, a very advance plug in that uses a renewable fuel…a battery electric vehicle or a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle,” she predicted.  “And what we need to do is to direct the incentives and the investments in the direction of making those vehicles more viable.”

But, she added, “There’s still going to be a lot of cars using gasoline and diesel fuel out there on the roads at least until 2050.  And we want to make sure that those vehicles are using the cleanest possible fuel.

“So we need the oil companies to use the tremendous technical, engineering and in-house research capacity that they have to help come up with cleaner fuels that meet the same specs as the current fuels — but do it out of something that isn’t as polluting as petroleum.”

It remains to be seen which of the Big Oil companies will be able to adapt to a cleaner, greener world – and which of them will, ultimately, go the way of the dinosaur.

Host: Greg Dalton
Guests:
Lou Allstadt, Former Executive Vice President, Mobil Oil; Member, Citizens Climate Lobby
Angus Gillespie, Vice President for CO2, Shell Oil Company
Mary Nichols, Chair, California Air Resources Board

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Robert Fraley, Chief Technology Officer, Monsanto
Andrew Kimbrell, Founder and Executive Director, Center for Food Safety
Nathanael Johnson, Food Writer, Grist; Author, All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing, and the Environment Really Keeps Us Healthier and Happier
Jessica Lundberg, Seed Nursery Manager, Lundberg Family Farms

Technology is everywhere – in our phones, in our cars and now, in our corn flakes. Biotechnology promises weed-resistant crops, bigger yields, more food for a growing population. But are genetically modified fruits and vegetables safe? Are they healthy? And should foods containing GMOs be labeled as such?

Those were some of the questions on the minds of the audience members who gathered at the Commonwealth Club for a lively discussion on GMOs – genetically modified organisms.

Monsanto Company, a major developer of GMO technology, has long been at the center of this controversy. And for Monsanto’s Robert Fraley, it’s all about better living through science. “Man has been improving crops from the beginning of time, whether it’s the tomato or the corn or all of our fresh fruits and vegetables,” he says. But with modern technology, “we can do what man has been doing for thousands of years really more precisely, and I think it’s a powerful tool…that we’re going to need to be able to meet the challenge of food production for the future.”

Lundberg Family Farms still uses time-honored farming methods to improve its crops year upon year. But recently, says Jessica Lundberg, the rate of modification by commercial growers has accelerated – and not necessarily for the better. “We have been modifying these crops in a way that is different from what we’ve ever been able to do before…to the point that they’re exhibiting traits that they wouldn’t be able to exhibit in nature,” she says. “While it can be awesome from a science and technology perspective…I think from a farming and a consumer perspective, that’s not always something that we should be doing.”

While advocacy groups have questioned the safety of GMO foods, their effects on crop diversity and their efficacy in eliminating hunger, the motivation of companies like Monsanto comes into question as well. “This is about chemical companies selling chemicals,” says Andrew Kimbrell of the Center for Food Safety. “It’s not about feeding the earth. We have yet to see a GMO crop that has greater yield, that does anything about malnutrition…that does anything about a better taste, a lower cost.”

Nathanael Johnson, a writer for Grist, is a self-identified skeptic towards both sides of the argument. In researching GMOs, he found no hard evidence that proves they’re harmful. “There are some studies that you probably heard about, because they are the ones that get reported on, that suggest there’s some health hazards,” Johnson told the Climate One audience. “But you have to weigh that against the hundreds of independently funded studies that suggest just the opposite. When you do that, they really start to look pretty safe.”

Towards the end of the hour, the discussion returned to its core question: in the face of climate change and its challenges, how will we feed a growing population? According to Fraley, the world’s appetite will double in the next four decades, and they’ll be looking to the U.S. to find ways to satisfy it. “That’s why we need the breeding tools, we need the biotech tools, we need the precision ag tools. That’s where we should put our focus.”

Kimbrell agrees that the problems are great, but favors more holistic solutions: “Not growing commodities but growing food, concentrating on the 2.1 billion people, the poorest in the world who are living in rural areas, how to strengthen their farm communities and their farms.” In the end, he says, “biotechnology offers at best a meager opportunity.”

When it comes to world hunger, Johnson favors a balanced, big-picture approach. Humans should be able to feed themselves “in a way that’s equitable and sustainable, and make the earth a more beautiful and delicious place in doing it,” he says. Technology is only part of the story – we should also be looking at politics and food waste. “And then we’d be looking at individual GMOs, and we’d be saying, “That disease-resistant banana is going to be really useful. I want that.”

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To quote Charles Dudley Warner, “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Dr. Jane Lubchenco was tasked with just that when President Obama named her to head up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2009. It turned out to be the start of the most extreme four-year weather period in U.S. history.

“We had over 660 major tornadoes,” Lubchenco remembers. “We had sixty Atlantic hurricanes, including Sandy, Isaac and Irene. We had six major, just devastating floods. Record-breaking snowfall, prolonged heat waves, wildfires — you name it, pretty much every category of weather, we broke records.”

Lubchenco was at The Commonwealth Club to receive the Stephen Schneider award for Outstanding Climate Communication, honoring the late Stanford climate scientist and a founding member of the Climate One advisory council.

There was one upside to all this crazy weather, Lubchenco continued, and that was a heightened public awareness of the very real effects of climate change. Americans paid attention, she says, “because it was no longer, in their view, something that was way far down the road in the future or someplace way off in the Arctic. They were actually experiencing something that they knew was weird.”

Describing the connection between climate change and recent extreme weather events, Lubchenco used the all-American analogy of baseball. “If a baseball player starts taking steroids, he has a much better chance of hitting lots more home runs, and some really big ones,” says Lubchenco. “Now, that doesn’t mean you can point to any particular home run and say aha, that home run is because he’s taking steroids. But the pattern of a lot more and bigger is attributable to steroids…what we’re seeing is weather on steroids.

“We’re not there yet to be able to say with any certainty in real time whether an event is caused by climate change,” she continued. “But stay tuned, because the science is getting better and better, our models are getting better, and I think in the not too distant future we’ll be able to answer the question more directly in real time.”

Climate One’s Greg Dalton asked Lubchenco, a marine ecologist, to talk about the effects of global warming on the oceans. “The oceans are definitely warming,” Lubchenco reported, “that’s true around the globe.” She went on to describe how warming oceans become more acidic as they absorb more carbon dioxide caused by human activity. “That’s very problematic for a lot of marine life that makes shells or skeletons of calcium carbonate. We’ve already seen oysters and other shellfish be seriously affected by this increased acidification. And obviously, sea level is rising. So there are multiple different ways that climate change is affecting oceans and that in turn, of course, affects people.”

There has been some good news regarding marine repopulation efforts, she says. “The four years that I was at NOAA we saw very, very dramatic changes in U.S. fisheries,” That, she says, is thanks to new government legislation as well as teamwork between NOAA, non-governmental organizations and the fishing industry itself.

The discussion then moved from ocean depths to stratospheric heights. Lubchenco and Dalton were joined on the dais by Alex Bakir of Planet Labs. The company is engaged in deploying “microsatellites,” about the size of a digital camera, for mapping climate change and other applications.

“What if you could launch many satellites that size?” asks Bakir. “What could you do? What if you could put a camera inside every one of them and operate hundreds of these things, what does that mean for the planet? Our goal over the next 12 months is to take a composite image of the entire planet once every 24 hours.”

Lubchenco sees this nimbler, comparatively inexpensive technology as complement, not competition, to the array of multi-billion-dollar satellites operated by NOAA and NASA. Those massive satellites, she explains, are equipped to measure “things you can’t see in the atmosphere — ozone, the chemistry in the atmosphere, measuring rain, ocean color, sea surface heights…not just visible wavelength information but other wavelengths, radiation, calculating the earth’s radiation budget, the solar radiation.” All of this information, she says is critically important to understanding climate change.

Lubchenco says persuading a reluctant Congress to fund such expensive equipment has been a challenge. Still, she got a laugh from the audience when she related that “one member of Congress looked at me and said, ‘Doctor, I don’t need your weather satellites — I have the Weather Channel.”

Both Lubchenco and Bakir are excited about using crowd-sourcing to enhance the scope of satellite data, through sites like Zooniverse and Planet.org.

“It’s a very powerful tool,” says Lubchenko. “More and more scientists are using it to help analyze very, very large amounts of information where you really need people to do something specific, like identify something.”

So back to our Dudley quote: what can be done about the weather? Or more to the point, what can the average citizen do to address the impact of climate change?

“Being active in reducing your own footprint and making your own decisions is important,” Lubchenco reminded the audience. “But really paying attention to the politics of it, having members of state legislatures, of Congress, having businesses and communities really show leadership” is key.

“Things happen because citizens make them happen. And, you know, California has certainly been a leader in much of that. And it’s making a difference.”

Host: Greg Dalton. Guests: Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D. Ecology, Harvard; Former Administrator, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Alex Bakir, Director of Business Development, Planet Labs

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Do you believe in climate denial? To hear climate scientists tell it, there is a war being waged on science by government opponents and special interests, designed to fuel skepticism and discredit their work in the eyes of the public. Two of them told their stories recently at The Commonwealth Club.

Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory says that being a climate scientist today feels “a little scary.” He’s been targeted by congress and threatened with referral to the Justice Department; threatening emails from strangers have filled his inbox. Michael Mann, a professor of Meteorology at Penn State who has written on the climate wars, tells of having his emails hacked and used out of context to malign him, his colleagues and climate research. “I see that as a direct assault,” he told the audience.
“Not just on us, but our children and grandchildren, who stand the most to lose if we fail to act in time.”

Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes has charted the history of climate denial, which, as she explains it, has its roots in the final days of the Cold War. Physicists who had previously used their degrees to downplay the dangers of tobacco use now turned their attention to the climate awareness movement. “And not just climate science,’ she continues. “Acid rain, the ozone hole, the role of pesticides in harming the environment, they begin to challenge the scientific evidence on all of these issues…and they pursued that strategy successfully for more than 20 years.”

Oreskes says such spin doctoring is designed to distract the public and cast doubt on the scientific evidence of global warming. “This is about an organized campaign to undermine the work that we do and to make people think that the science is unsettled.”

It’s a technique that goes back to the Greeks, says Joe Romm, author of ‘Language Intelligence.’ “The key to being persuasive,” he says, “is to be memorable. And modern social science basically shows the stuff that’s easier for you to remember, you’re more likely to believe is true.”

But how good are scientists at being persuasive? Popular wisdom has them squirreled away in labs, focused on the pursuit of knowledge yet collectively tongue-tied when it comes to championing their work. Oreskes says the notion that scientists can’t communicate with the public is a fairly new one — as is the idea that the public isn’t aware of, and hungry for, their information.

“In the late 19th and early 20th century there was a great tradition of scientists reaching out to the public,” she relates. “The British Association had public meetings in which thousands and thousands of ordinary British citizens would come to hear lectures on geology. Thousands of people would come to hear Michael Faraday lecture on electricity and magnetism.” Twentieth century scientists, she says, frequently published best-sellers, which were gobbled up by the public; one of her favorite examples is William Bowie, who also had a Sunday radio program on geodesy – the study of the shape of the earth. “Now, if you can make geodesy fun,” Orestes laughed, “you can make anything fun!”

As to the question of whether social activism can discredit a scientist’s reputation, Oreskes dismissed that notion out of hand. “Some of the greatest scientists of the 20th century became very active after 1945,” she reminded the audience, “I don’t think anybody ever said that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity lost credibility because he spoke up about the dangers of atomic weapons.”

Fast forward to the 21st century: how to counter the pervasive message that the science of climate change is “inconclusive?”

Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education agrees with Romm that “the best way to communicate is to tell a story.” Conveying a personal message, she says, resonates with listeners, whether you’re at a cocktail party or in a public forum.

“When you go on that talk show, when you go to that school board meeting or that congressional hearing, you tell the stories. You try to make that personal connection just like you would if you were an accountant or a plumber or a ballet dancer. It’s nothing that’s specific to scientists,” she continues, “it’s specific to people who want to get something accomplished. You have to talk in the language of the people that you’re talking to.

“You’ve got to repeat your message frequently, have it come from a trusted source, have a message that assuages the concern of the person that you are trying to convince, and then the science has a chance to be heard.

And getting the science heard, I think, is what we’re all about.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests: Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard; Co-Author, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming (Bloomsbury Press, 2011)

Joe Romm, Founding Editor, Climate Progress; Author, Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga (CreateSpace, 2012)
Eugenie Scott, Chair, National Center for Science Education

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A climate scientist, an economist and a politician walk into a bar, and…well, if you follow the news about climate change, you know it’s no laughing matter. But there were plenty of smiles, chuckles and belly laughs when “the world’s only stand-up economist” visited The Commonwealth Club.

Yoram Bauman co-authored The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change, described by one reviewer as “An Inconvenient Truth meets Peanuts.” His Ph.D. in economics is fodder for some self-deprecating humor about his chosen profession, such as his series of “you might be an economist if…” jokes (“You might be an economist if…you’ve ever gone to a bank in hopes of getting a date”). Bauman joined host Greg Dalton and Free Range Studios co-founder Jonah Sachs to talk about how to tell an inconvenient truth – and be heard.

So, what’s so funny about climate change?

Bauman laces his stand-up routines with tough economic realities and a brief pitch for a carbon tax. During a typical hour-long routine, “I’ll spend five or ten minutes talking about carbon pricing,” he explains. “I think about it as sort of the pill that you put inside the ball of meat that you feed to the dog, right?”

The Commonwealth Club audience was treated to a sample of how Bauman delivers that pill. Anecdotes about his time spent living in Beijing segued into Bauman’s Five Chinas Theory, which divides the world into five chunks roughly the size of China. This leads to an explanation of world economic growth and development, and to what he believes will be one of the century’s big stories: “the environmental impacts of dealing with 7 billion people growing to 9 or 11 billion people, who are all trying live the lifestyles that we live.”

“If you make people laugh for 45 minutes,” says Bauman, “then you can talk about anything that you want for five or ten minutes, and they’ll be open to it. They won’t necessarily agree with you. But one of the benefits of being an economist is, you get the benefits of low expectations, right?”

While he knows many of his audiences may not agree with his views on climate change, Bauman says humor does open doors to a conversation on environmental tax reform – one issue where he does find common ground with conservatives. It’s “the idea that we should have higher taxes on things we want less of, like carbon emissions, and then we can afford to have lower taxes on things who want more of, like jobs and income and savings and investment. And that’s an idea that economists across the political spectrum think is a pretty good idea.”

Sachs agrees that a spoonful of humor and storytelling can help the medicine go down. “There’s so much information out there. We don’t know how to sort through the amount or the credibility of it,” he says. “But as human beings, we’ve always really organized our sense of meaning and purpose around stories. We live by stories, we listen to stories and say, “that connects with my values and who I am, and therefore I will go along with that and I will act on it.”

Sach’s company Free Range helped create the popular web series ‘The Story of Stuff’ to educate people about the environmental impacts of consumerism. While its impact may be difficult to measure, Sachs says the series has been seen by 30 million people and has inspired an online community of 250,000 to take action in their own lives.

“Comedy is totally one way to do that,” says Sachs. “And with storytelling, on the internet for instance, stories can travel and hold those facts, and move them forward.”

Bauman admits that his message doesn’t always land on target. Once, after a presentation to a conservative audience, he remembers, “this fellow came up to me and said that the stuff that I said about climate change was the funniest part of my whole routine.”

Maybe it’s all in the timing?

This program was recorded live at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 24, 2014.

At a Climate One gathering last October, U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz outlined three major objectives for addressing the country’s energy challenges. “One is to support economic growth, good jobs, et cetera. Secondly is to reinforce our security. And third and perhaps, in my view, of greatest interest right now, is addressing the climate challenge.

So the issue is, how do we do all those three together?”

Moniz started things off on a positive note: the nation’s energy renaissance has meant good news for the economy. “There’s no question that what’s happening in energy has led to economic growth and jobs,” says Moniz. “Recently Fortune Magazine put out a list of 100 fastest-growing companies; 26 of those had their growth pegged to what’s happening in energy.

“So we are seeing the economic benefits. We are seeing CO2 reductions on the ground. Now the question is sustaining it and, in fact, accelerating the transformation to low carbon that we need to meet our climate challenges.”

One step towards that transformation, says Moniz, is driving down the costs of green technology. And it’s up to the U.S. to show leadership in this area. While federal subsidies have helped the process along, the government is also finding other ways to encourage growth. “For example,” Moniz reports, “we have dramatically increased the pace of issuing energy efficiency standards for appliances, electric motors, you name it. It brings higher efficiency, lower emissions…we have issued $30 billion worth of loans and loan guarantees…And this is a way of jumpstarting areas.”

Moniz also name-checked the ARPA-Energy program, which provides mentorship and funds to help bring innovative technologies to market, as another way the government is feeding the startup pipeline. “So that’s the model we like. We come in, we help get this thing pushed off, and then the private sector comes in to continue the deployment.”

Energy security was next on the agenda. As host Greg Dalton pointed out, the U.S. has significantly increased its own crude oil production, reducing the need for imported oil. The balance is changing, Moniz agreed. But while we’ve substantially reduced our dependence on foreign oil, “we still import 7.5 million barrels of crude oil per day. We are an enormous importer still because of our enormous use…what the oil production increase has done for sure is dramatically lower our imbalance of payments. So it’s a lot more capital and a lot more resource that stays in our economy to go to other purposes.”

But while a boom in oil production may bring economic benefits, Moniz stressed that a lower carbon future is still very much the ultimate goal. “We are aggressively pursuing more efficient vehicles, alternative fuels, like next generation biofuels and electrification of vehicles, like getting those costs down on batteries. So we are working very hard on reducing our oil dependence.

“The president’s position is clear and so is mine,” Moniz declares. “We pursue an all-of-the-above approach. We put resources into every fuel, fossil, nuclear, renewables, efficiency that will lower emissions.

“There will be multiple low carbon solutions. They will look different in different countries. They will look different in different parts of our country. The important thing is to get to a low carbon solution. And in that sense we think across the board there’s going to be a role for just about everything if it reduces carbon emissions.”

In conclusion, Moniz quotes former Saudi oil minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani: “The Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stones and the oil age won’t end for lack of oil.” Rather, he says, putting our resources into renewable energy solutions will hasten the demise of oil dependence.

“We need to keep working, driving down the costs, such that the low carbon alternatives are going to be the best choice,” says Moniz. “They’re good for security. You don’t have to worry about importing the sun or the wind or the earth’s heat. And I think in the end, the technology and associated business model innovations are going to have to carry the day.”

Imagine you’re remaking “The Graduate” for today’s climate-challenged world.  What would be the one word you’d whisper in Dustin Hoffman’s ear to signal the business opportunity of the future?  That’s the question that sparked a lively conversation about innovation, technology and entrepreneurship at The Commonwealth Club recently.

For Arun Majumdar of Stanford University, the word for the future is “storage” – as in energy storage. “It’s a game changer,” he says. “Especially if you are transitioning to renewal sources, which are intermittent.  If you could get storage out there at low cost that would be game changer.”

Adam Lowry of Method Products bypassed “plastics” — despite the fact that recycled plastic is a central component of his ground-breaking eco-friendly household products. Instead, he cites carbon capture as the next big thing. “Because whether we like it or not, we’re in a period where we have to go negative carbon.  We have to take carbon out of the atmosphere at this point, given where we are.  And so if you can solve for that problem, you’ll be a billionaire.”

Energy is by no means the sexiest industry out there, as NRG CEO David Crane readily admits: “No one wakes up in the morning and says I can’t wait to turn that light on so that I can use electricity!”  But there are some “cool energy startups” on the horizon that are generating some current among investors. GigaOm reporter Katie Fehrenbacher named two hot-topic companies that have recently invested in the future of clean power:  “Google buying Nest for $3.2 billion…Apple building solar energy in North Carolina, the largest privately owned solar farm in the US.  So some of these kind of bigger, cooler brands are paying a lot more attention to it.”

What role should the government should play in developing green technology? As Majumdar points out, federal subsidies can be instrumental in helping innovation through the R&D stage. “Sometimes the industry is not willing to take the risk,” he says. “So the government has to play the role of the early stage, not just going down existing learning curves, but also the disruptive technologies, the ones that could be even cheaper and better than today’s technology.  So that’s really the role of the government in the R&D.”

It’s not easy being green, but as many businesses are finding out, the extra effort pays off. Companies big and small are conjuring up new technologies, production methods and delivery systems to capitalize on the trend toward a cleaner economy.

But for some, it’s not just about the money. David Crane took a singular approach among CEOs by using the much-maligned shareholder letter to share his world view on the subject. As he told the Commonwealth Club audience, “It’s time to take a stand right now on this issue.  Whether you’re a public corporation for profit or not for profit, a member, a thought leader in society, the time is now.

“The science is beyond dispute,” Crane continued. “The excuse that we don’t have the technology is just not true anymore — we have the technology.  And across the business world, I think we are starting to see a series of leaders in very large companies much more powerful than mine that really believe this.  Not only because they want to position their company in a particular place, but because this is what they want their personal legacy to be: a commitment to sustainability.”

So there’s not “just one word” to whisper in the ear of today’s graduates. But according to Majumdar, they’re well aware of the possibilities.  “They care about what’s going to be in the future,” he says.  “You can get kids really excited about the fact that they can leave a legacy and leave a dent in this universe, as Steve Jobs used to say, by doing something not just for the United States but for the rest of the world….that’s an opportunity that I find the kids really excited about.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:

David Crane, CEO, NRG Energy, Inc.
Katie Fehrenbacher, Reporter, GigaOm.com
Adam Lowry, Co-Founder and Chief Greenskeeper, Method Products PBC
Arun Majumdar, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University; former Vice President for Energy, Google

This program was recorded live at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 15th, 2014.

Coffee, beer and chocolate – while it would be a stretch to call them necessities, many Americans refuse to live without them. But how is global warming affecting the companies that produce our beloved guilty pleasures?

Will it take a shortage of craft beers, chocolate kisses or mochaccino lattes to finally wake Americans up to the dire consequences of climate change? (View Full Description)

Part 1: Ecological Intelligence

Daniel Goleman, Author, Ecological Intelligence
Joshua Freedman, COO, Six Seconds; Author, Inside Change
George Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley; Author, The Political Mind

Part 2: Climate on Our Brains

George Marshall, Author, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change
Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley

Part 3: Deepak Chopra

Deepak Chopra, M.D., Mind-Body Physician; Author, The Soul of Leadership
Rinaldo Brutoco, President, Chopra Foundation; Founding President, World Business Academy; Author, Freedom from Mid-East Oil

Summary:

Talks about protecting the climate are peppered with Megawatts and BTU’s; parts per million and fugitive methane; wind velocity and crop yields. All these terms can make your head spin – even if you understand and accept that humans are frying the Earth.

But behind the numbers are hearts and minds. And that’s what we’re talking about today. How do people think about climate change? Why aren’t more Americans engaged and actively addressing the most pressing issue of our times? And how do social groups shape individual attitudes toward climate disruption?

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Halting the adverse affects of climate change will require a change in our collective consciousness, according to well-known author and speaker Deepak Chopra, and Rinaldo Brutoco, a businessman and president of The Chopra Foundation. “Our collective consciousness is what creates a change in behavior,” Chopra says. “There was a time when everybody was smoking in public spaces, but collective consciousness chose to change that. There was a time when you could drive and drink at the same time, but collective consciousness changed that. And that’s the only solution.”

Chopra and Brutoco are the founders of Just Capital, an organization dedicated to helping executives of financial institutions and members of the public sector make sustainability a number one priority. It counts Ariana Huffington, and Paul Tudor Jones, the head of Robin Hood Foundation, as board members. But going green doesn’t mean giving up on profit, according to Brutoco. “In the last ten years, the cost of wind energy has dropped by over 75% and is still dropping,” he says. “The cost of solar energy has dropped by over 90% and is still dropping, and that has unleashed enormous amounts of wealth. So here we are sitting on the edge of Silicon Valley, we should be the people wanting to own the development of these technologies.”

Chopra adds, “Just as the space program gave birth, in a way, to Silicon Valley and now Southern California epigenetics, and genetics understanding is giving birth to biotechnologies, and these companies are becoming extremely wealthy. If you truly understand that sustainability is the key to wealth consciousness, then we can create wealth from the infinite abundance of the universe that comes to us through energy.”

So how do you bring about a change in consciousness? Deepak Chopra says it starts by creating a space for the conversation, like the one created by Climate One. “First having a conversation like the one we are having,” says Chopra. “Secondly, enlisting the help of media as much as you can, because media takes that conversation and can help you reach critical mass….it includes Twitter, and Facebook, and every possible outlet that we can have to engage in this conversation, because it’s an emergency.”

“Anybody who doesn’t recognize the sense of urgency…we’re calling for, please do some more study, do some more thinking, do some more inquiry, Brutoco says. “It starts with you and find out why this is probably the most vital thing you can do.”

– Katie McMurran

Sea level rise has become the ugly face of climate change.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has listed the 20 most threatened coastal cities in the world – Miami is first, New York is third, and New Orleans is 12th.

Our Rising Seas special examines the causes and consequences of sea level changes in south Florida, the Gulf Coast, New York City, and Greenland, where ice-melt is going to make the world a very different place.

The U.S. Department of Defense is the biggest user of fossil fuels in the world, and the Navy uses about one third of it. But with heavy consumption comes heavy influence.

Unlike many corporate executives hung up on the short-term costs of low-carbon energy, U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus has committed to obtaining at least 50 percent of energy for the Navy and Marine Corps from alternative sources by 2020.

“It’s going to be very competitive with fossil fuels,” Mabus said. “In fact, we’re not going to do it unless it is competitive with fossil fuels.”

While the main objective for incorporating alternative sources is to fulfill its military mission, Mabus was proud to be a frontrunner in the move toward a clean-energy economy.

“What we do is, we bring a market,” Mabus said.

Oil is the ultimate global commodity, and the shrinking military budget makes alternative sources of energy imperative today, he said.

“Now is exactly the time that we have to do this,” Mabus said. “A tightening budget situation makes it even more urgent, even more critical that we do this.”

Mabus spoke about how the Navy historically switched from sail to coal, coal to oil, and pioneered nuclear, and “every single time, there were naysayers.”

“It’s one of our core competencies: Changing energy,” he said.

People who join the Navy or Marine Corps have this willingness to change, and it’s part of the spirit of innovation, Mabus said. When asked about what other countries’ navies around the world are doing in terms of alternative energy, Mabus said they are all watching the U.S. very closely to see how we do.

“Saudi Arabia is one of the largest spenders on alternative energy in the world,” Mabus said. “That ought to tell you something.”

Aside from the economic implications of alternative fuels, many American lives are lost in fuel or water convoys overseas. “We’re talking about saving Marine lives, doing this,” Mabus said.

He spoke about other technological innovations, such as a solar blanket given to Marines that produces energy where they use it, which can save lives – when you turn off a generator, all of sudden you can hear when somebody’s sneaking up on you. The Navy also has a patent to create fuel by combining organic matter and seawater, he said.

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Photo: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/

Breathing, eating and consuming, an individual human being produces tons of carbon every year. Could population control be the key to curbing greenhouse gas emissions.? Populations are expected to skyrocket in developing areas like sub-saharan Africa, generating even more carbon pollution. Reducing population growth could also help fight climate change, but in the wake of India’s forced sterilizations in the 1970s and China’s mandatory one-child policy, nationwide family planning has a stigma.

Malcolm Potts, a professor of family planning at UC Berkeley, believes talking about condoms should be as natural as talking about cabbages. “They’re not a medical thing. They are choices, they should be available. Like cabbages, they should be where your vegetables are.” Alan Weisman’s most recent book Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth addresses the question of the world’s teeming masses head on. Weisman and Potts sat down at The Commonwealth Club last March to tackle the sensitive topic of our growing population and its part in straining the earth’s resources.

Both Weisman and Potts emphasized that education is key to reducing growth rates, and in particular, the education of girls. And the reverse is true as well. “People in developing countries want fewer children,” says Potts, “because they all know the power of education and they all know if you have a smaller family, your kids are more likely to get educated. But if we remove the barriers between family planning, the knowledge and means to do it, then even illiterate people will have fewer children.”

Equating the world’s bourgeoning population with climate change, says Weisman, is a no-brainer. “We’ve jet propelled society. We can do all these incredible things. We have electricity but we also have these waste products and they float up into the atmosphere. And the more of us demanding this stuff, the more carbon dioxide is up there. There’s more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now than there has been in 3 million years.”

Solving our climate problem could be simpler – and less expensive – than we think. “Carbon-free energy, we don’t know how to do that really well yet, but even if we did, it would be really expensive.” Weisman says. But birth control? “This doesn’t involve any technological leaps. To make contraception universally available, it’s been calculated that it would cost about a little over $8 billion per year.”

“For 200,000 years, there was not a population explosion. We were roughly in balance with our environment” says Potts. “We’ve done wonderful things to reduce infant mortality. And we’re being blind and stupid and curious about not offering people family planning at the same time.”

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:
Alan Weisman, Senior Radio Producer, Homelands Productions; Author, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? (Little, Brown & Company, 2013)

Malcolm Potts, Fred H. Bixby Endowed Chair in Population and Family Planning, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley
 
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Photo courtesy of http://www.climate-one.org/

From Egyptian irrigation systems to Roman aqueducts to the dikes and canals of The Netherlands, the world’s civilizations have long found innovative ways to harness and conserve their water supply. But with California entering the third year of an historic drought, what 21st century technologies are on the horizon to help us deal with an ever-shrinking pool of water?

At the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Greg Dalton explored the topic with the heads of three companies that are finding ways to meet the crisis head-on.

Peter Yolles is the CEO of Watersmart Software, which takes a grass-roots approach to the issue by educating residential and commercial customers on how to reduce water usage. For most residential customers, says Yolles, saving water is part of the social compact. “Research tells us that only 1 out of 10 people will change their behavior to save money.” Yolles says. “Only 1 out of 10 people will change their behavior to save the environment. But 8 out of 10 will do so because of what’s happening around them.” Comparing water usage within a community, he says, is the first step. “That really motivates people to say, “Gosh, I’m using a lot more than my neighbors. What can I do to save water?”

The Watersmart approach is working, reports Yolles. “On average, homes that received our home water reports save 5% of their water use across the first year. They’re also twice as likely to participate in the water conservation programs and twice as likely to rate their utility as excellent at providing on ways to save money and water at home. So it’s really a win-win for the utility and for the customers.”

Tamin Pechet is the Chairman of Imagine H20, which seeks out and funds start-ups in the water industry. He says the need for new ideas is greater than ever. “Over the past couple of decades, the pressures on our water system have increased,” says Pechet. “When we face an acute event, like a drought or…a heavy series of rains that causes more water to enter into our storm and sewer systems, we don’t have the same level of excess capacity to deal with that as we used to. We essentially need a new wave of innovation to address those problems.”

And a new wave of innovators, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are out there, exploring solutions from desalination to wastewater treatment to mining satellite data. One idea, aimed at helping the agricultural sector weather the drought, was developed by mOasis – and it’s deceptively simple. Picture a sponge put into the soil, says CEO Steven Hartmeier. “When water is put in, it absorbs that excess water and stores it to when the plant needs it as the soil is drying out.” Reducing the stress on plants, he adds, results in a healthier crop.

The Commonwealth Club audience included several entrepreneurs who have their own water innovations in mind. And despite dire predictions for California’s reservoirs and rivers, Pechet says the future of water technology is promising.

“There’s a lot of really cool stuff out there,” he told the crowd. “The history of water in civilization is one of innovation. And so just about anything that you dream up, is something that someone could innovate and come up with. If you look hard enough, you can find a company doing it.”

What’s so funny about climate change? Stand-up economist Yoram Bauman uses humor to explain carbon tax, cap and trade and the ‘Five Chinas’ theory.

Yoram Bauman, PhD., Co-author, The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change (with Grady Klein) (Island Press, 2014)

Jonah Sachs, CEO, Free Range Studios

This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on July 8, 2014.

What’s really preventing us from enacting environmental change? Blame our brains, says Daniel Goleman, author of Ecological Intelligence. As he explains it, “The problem comes down to a design flaw in the human brain.” Evolution fine-tuned our brains to protect us from immediate survival threats – lions, tigers and bears. But long-term dangers, such as those that threaten our planet today, don’t register. “The problem is that we don’t perceive, nor are we alarmed by, these changes,” says Goleman. “And so we’re in this dilemma where we can show people, “Well, you know, your carbon footprint is this,” but it doesn’t really register in the same way as “there’s a tiger around the block.” Facts alone aren’t enough, he adds, “We need to find a more powerful way of framing them…a way which will activate the right set of emotions and get us moving.”

George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at U.C. Berkeley, sees the issue as a moral, rather than environmental, crisis: “…the greatest moral crisis we have ever been in. It is the moral issue of our times and it’s seen just as an environmental issue.” But morality can mean different things to different people. This sets up a debate that quickly goes from the political to the personal, as Josh Freedman, author of Inside Change, points out. “When we start saying, “okay, they’re good, and they’re bad,” what happens is we’re actually fueling this threat system that is what’s in the way of us actually solving these problems.”

So what is the solution? How do we retune our primitive brains – and those of our political and business leaders — to focus on a less than clear, less than present danger?

Throughout the discussion, several key avenues rose to the top: economics, education and emotional appeal. If major institutions can be persuaded to divest from environmentally unsound companies, says Lakoff, “then what will happen is that the prices of the stocks will go down for those energy companies. When they go down that way, they stay down…you have an opportunity to shift investment away in a way that has an exponential feedback loop.”

Educating today’s youth was a powerful and recurring theme for all the speakers. “What kids learn and tell their parents is important,” Goleman said. “Schools are a big counterforce that we can do a much better job of deploying in this battle for minds and heart.”
Despite our primitive wiring, the speakers concluded, we humans do have the capacity for the ecological intelligence – and the morality – to effect global change.

“Your morality is what defines who you are as a human being,” says Lakoff, “it’s who you are emotionally and morally as a human being that matters in your life, what you do every day. This isn’t a matter of compromise…we have, like, 35 years to turn this around, period. That’s not long.”

“All change starts on the inside,” says Freedman, “If we can support children and adults to connect with that capability and to develop what’s already there, then things are going to get a lot better.”
Daniel Goleman, Author, Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy (Crown Business, 2010)

Joshua Freedman, CEO, Six Seconds; Author, Inside Change: Transforming Your Organization With Emotional Intelligence (Six Seconds, 2010)

George Lakoff, Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and author of many books, including The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics (Penguin Books, 2009)
This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on May 1, 2014.