Conducted by Audrey Wu and Elson Bankoff
Audrey: Anything you want to add or tell people as an introduction?
Dan: I get to interact with undergraduates and graduate students. I have a class that I teach right now that’s open to anyone at Harvard. There are first years and students who are mid-career master students at the Kennedy School, students in their 60s, and everything in between. What’s really interesting is in this particular issue, I think young people, and I mean before college, high school students, have added a huge amount of energy to this whole issue in lots of interesting ways. So I’m really curious to hear what you guys want to talk about. I want to hear what you think about some of the things I study and teach about because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but it always can use a fresh perspective.
Elson: Your class sounds amazing.
Dan: It’s open to any student at Harvard, so we have a real mix. We have lots of really interesting people with lots of fascinating backgrounds. Even some undergraduates have done things like you, Elson, and have started organizations. One of them was an early member of Sunrise when he was in high school, so he’s really into the movement and spent much of his life over the last five years involved in protests and lobbying and stuff, but he doesn’t know anything about climate change. He cares about it, and he’s passionate about it, but it’s an opportunity for him to really engage in the material of it, and it’s just so great to see their perspectives and see how their thinking evolves.
Elson: Relating to the youth and about your education path – what do you think you’ve gained from educating people and working with these students? What do you think of everything you’ve gained that you haven’t gained in your career?
Dan: I’m a geologist and a geochemist, and my interest in climate change grew out of studying the chemistry of sediments on the ocean floor that are used to reconstruct what ancient climate was like. And I’m talking about ancient, meaning tens of millions to hundreds of millions of years ago.
Artwork by Billy Walsh, Graphics Editor
There are really important lessons that the earth’s history has for the future, but it’s still a little indirect, it’s not exactly working on modern climate change itself. I used to give talks about climate change where I would try to talk about paleo-climate perspective, the perspective from ancient earth and what lessons they might have for the futures, and it got a little frustrating because I would talk for like 45 minutes about what the problem was, and then I’d spend the last 5 minutes arm-waving about some solutions that I didn’t understand really well. That was really frustrating to me, to give a really depressing talk and not tell people what to do about it. And so I started doing a little research on solutions, but mostly I started teaching about it, and one of the things that I discovered over my time being a professor is that you can learn an extraordinary amount by teaching, and you learn it better than anything else. I love teaching this big broad course on climate change because one of my skills is that I’m very good at multitasking, and I’m incredibly broad. I study Earth history, modern history, energy technology, energy policy, and climate adaptation. I’ve done work in so many different fields and different areas and I can communicate with economists, political scientists, art historians, and lots of other people. To me, I think my basic skill is my curiosity and that just fits perfectly with teaching because as you teach it turns out you have to teach something so much better than just what you would get on your own. You need to think about it in different ways, and the process of teaching makes you think about it in different ways because you have to think about why it is that so-and-so doesn’t understand this concept? How can I twist it and explain it to them differently? That really is a magical moment.
Audrey: You mentioned curiosity, and I’m also wondering, being someone who is young and curious as well, what age do you think is too young to be telling the entire truth? Do you think there’s a certain age where you should stop watering things down?
Dan: I don’t believe there’s an age where you’re too young to hear about it and I don’t think you should “water things down” or that you should ever lie to kids. But I do think that there are some aspects of this problem that are really dark, and that you don’t necessarily have to place the entire weight of the world on a six-year-old. You need to have them be curious, so they can continue to engage and if you freak them out they’re going to disengage and that’s not helpful. So I think there’s a balance, as a parent, I would talk to [my kids] periodically, usually when they would ask, but I don’t think there’s a time when it’s too early to talk to them about this.
Elson: This could be mistaken, but to my understanding, only around 8% of Americans can describe climate change at an A-level full description. That’s a very low statistic given that the movement’s so prominent. How do you think knowledge can be instilled among Americans, and what do you think will result from more people knowing about how climate science works?
Dan: I think 15 or 20 years ago people used to think the reason why Climate Change didn’t have more political “umph” in this country is because we, scientists, weren’t doing a good job of explaining it. And I’ve come to believe that it’s garbage. The fact is, take any technical issue you like: vaccines, evolution, ask Americans to actually explain it in detail, and you’d be horrified at how few actually know what they’re talking about. The late night folks make fun of it and interview people on the street, and they say the stupidest things and everyone laughs, but it’s actually not funny, right? It’s unbelievable how technically, and literally, our country is. That being said, I don’t believe that the solution requires us to educate all these people because I don’t think there’s time.
Something like 75% of Americans are actually concerned about Climate Change. So that’s a lot. The bad news is that only around 25% are very concerned. So people are concerned, they’re just much more concerned about other things. Their willingness to do much, pay, or support any sort of policies that require sacrifice is like zero. And that’s really the problem. So when I try to describe climate change in 5 minutes to a really broad audience, what I say is, look, climate change is a global collective action problem we’re really bad at global. I mean, look, we’re getting our third vaccine and many countries have not gotten their first. We’re very tribal and we see it within the US, as a country versus the rest of the world, North-East versus Mid-West, in all sorts of divisions, religious, political, ideological, we’re tribal. It’s human nature. You can look at primates and discover the same thing. So global collective action is really hard because it goes against our nature.
The other aspect of climate change is that just about every component of climate change has really long time scales. I mean centuries to, like tens of thousands of years. So we’re making decisions today that will profoundly affect not just you guys, or your children, or your grandchildren, but like thousands of generations into the future. How do you even begin to think about that?
We’re short-termed thinkers, and so many we combine the global collective action with the long time scales, it’s what I call a super hard problem. And so in some ways, I look at it and say, I’m actually amazed there’s as much interest in climate change as there is. It’s sort of a half-full half-empty sort of thing, but if you actually recognize how difficult this problem is it’s kind of amazing, kind of awesome how much interest there really is. Not enough yet, but there’s still a lot and that’s a good thing. So I’m kind of an optimist in that sense, I actually view it as half-full. The most inspiring thing I’ve seen in the last decade is the youth movement. And the fact is, not just Greta Thunberg, not just Sunrise, but one of the founders of Sunrise is actually a director, and she was a student at UMass Amherst when she started Sunrise. She lives in East Boston, is 26 years old and wonderful. It’s great, they’ve changed US politics. Now, I’ll say something that I hope won’t offend both of you, but the actual policies and timetables they talk about are total nonsense. One of the things I make students do in my class is actually design a zero-carbon energy system for the US, quantitatively, and you actually have to figure out where you’re going to get the electricity and the steel.
The point is, if I just lectured and told students “it’s really hard to decarbonize” you might say “Oh that’s Dan’s opinion”. But if I actually made you design a low carbon system yourself, and simplified it because you could spend 5 years on it, it’s a really hard project. We spend 3 weeks on it, but in the process, the students really learn about energy systems, and they learn about trade-offs. Let’s suppose you need to get rid of petroleum in long-distance trucking and jet fuel and a variety of other things, suppose you decide you want to use biofuels, but what you discover is the land use requirements start ballooning enormously, and that’s a quantitative problem. And students come to me and say is four times the land of the US reasonable, and the answer is certainly not. What they discover in trying to do this is that there’s no reasonable way to solve the problem, it’s a super hard problem. They wouldn’t learn it in the same way if I just told them that. Some people get very depressed because they really that the Sunrise call for decarbonization by 2030 like Bernie Sanders was saying is total nonsense. If he actually believes he can do it in 10 years, then he’s a fool, or he’s pandering because he should know that it’s not possible for all sorts of reasons.
So then the question is ok, so what do we do? And here’s where I love Greta Thunberg because she’s 18 years old, she doesn’t claim to have the answers. She says “I’m 18 years old, I don’t know what to do. But you do, and you’ve got to do it.” And that’s exactly right. It’s totally simple and true, and she’s not pretending to say “Oh this is the right policy”, she’s not getting involved in that. She’s saying just fix it goddamit, you caused this mess, now fix it. If I were 18 years old, I’d feel exactly the same way. There’s an intergenerational equity aspect of this, and it’s totally unfair. We have created this problem, and we’re passing this problem, and you will make the problem worse and pass it onto your children. The challenge is for each of our generations to try to make it better and give hope to future generations. That’s sort of how I think about it. I just love the emergence of this strong voice from youth around the world because I think it’s actually starting to make a difference. Not for the specific policies, I love the Sunrise movement, but I think the Green New Deal is total nonsense, but I love the demand. The demand is exactly right. It’s not possible to achieve that demand. You and I would hate a world in which we actually tried to decarbonize because it would involve building massive infrastructure with no permits or local objection, you’d just have to put things wherever you wanted. People would hate it and a democracy would never happen.
Elson: Do you think we have time to have it be more gradual?
Dan: Honestly, when I look at it, I think it’s going to be more gradual. It’s a global collective action problem. Remember that’s the other thing that the Sunrise and Green New Deal forget: it’s not about decarbonzing the US, it’s about decarbonizing the world. If we decarbonize the US, race to zero in a way that spends a huge amount of money and bankrupts the country and ruins our economy, what are the odds that other countries are going to follow us? So we have to not just decarbonize, but we have to decarbonize in a way that looks attractive to other countries. That’s much harder. It’s not like World War II where we just had to build planes and tanks to defeat the Germans, we have to do that in a way that makes all the other countries in the world want to do the same thing.
To me, here’s the question: when I look, the path we’re on is totally ridiculous. What people don’t understand is that the promises, the targets and time tables that environmentalists talk about, like decarbonization by 2050 which is President Biden’s goal, I would say the probability of that, at least right now, is zero. We are not even close to the kind of political will, and willingness to pay, willingness to sacrifice to make that reality happen. It’s based on what we’re actually doing. Is it technically possible? Absolutely, we could do it by 2050 but the kind of sacrifice it requires is way beyond anything that..and I was talking with grad students last night for a couple hours, some of them from Nigeria, Tunisia, Morocco. The fact is that very poor countries in the world have so many more important things than this. And this is what people don’t get about Climate change. Some people say it’s the most urgent problem of our time but it’s actually backwards. Climate change is the hardest problem because it’s never the most urgent.
Elson: Historically, I think the movement has failed in connecting issues back to humanitarian causes. It’s all very broad, we make ambitious statements and set goals, and then it’s not really specific to the dire needs of people in specific moments.
Dan: Something has changed, that you should be aware of. Fifteen years ago, I think a lot of people’s perceptions were that Climate Change was something that was going to happen to poor people in Bangladesh, and that it was going to happen 50 years from now. It’s really hard to get people excited because there are so many more pressing things: Again, long time scales.
Audrey: How do we get a lot of people interested, engaged, and willing to do something, but not always feeling like they need to have all the answers?
Dan: I like to tell people the truth. I teach people and talk to them about the way that the world really is. It’s sensitive sometimes. For example, a week ago, I gave a lecture to my class about environmental justice. There were a bunch of people for whom this was a big issue. Mostly people of color, who were in the class, who really cared about this issue. And they had some very strong feelings about it. Some of those feelings are exactly right, some of those feelings were a little bit confused and I needed to push back a little bit.
Elson: What are the things to push back on?
Dan: Climate justice has a big international component. Most of the world is going to suffer from climate change, and most of the world didn’t cause the problem. Only a few countries caused the damage. That’s fundamentally unfair. Climate justice is an oxymoron. It should be called climate injustice. There is no such thing as climate justice. Think the US is gonna pay for the damages all over the world? Don’t hold your breath. That’s not going to happen, and it’s unfair. There is also intergenerational justice and injustice. We caused the problem, it’s gonna be our great-grandchildren who will really suffer. That’s unfair. They will inherit a world that is very constrained in a way that we didn’t have. You are going to inherit a quickly changing world. That’s unfair.
The part that these students are really focused on, is relationship to race and inequity in the US. There’s a history of this having to do with redlining. Redlining is focused on mortgages. When soldiers came back from World War II and the Korean War, the GI bill essentially allowed them to buy homes in the US at very low mortgage rates. Most veterans were eligible, but not black people. 67,000 mortgages in Massachusetts were given for the GI Bill, and 6 were black people. It’s unbelievable. Here’s why that’s such a big deal. If you look at the wealth discrepancy between an average white family and an average black family, which today, I think the average white families net worth is 70 to 100 thousand and the average black families net worth is 17 thousand dollars. So it’s a factor of 10. Where did that come from? Trace it back to slavery and all the terrible crimes of reconstruction and horrible first of the 20th century for African Americans in this country. If you are talking about wealth discrepancy, most of that came from GI bill and mortgage rights. Black people weren’t allowed to borrow money and redlining of neighborhoods basically meant they couldn’t build up equity by owning a home, so 50 years later they have no wealth. If you look at an average white family, 80 percent of it is their home. You sell the home, then pass it to your children. The thing just continues. That’s terrible. There’s also an environmental aspect. When you had to build highways in the 50s and 60s, where did you put them? Right through the black neighborhoods. As a result, there was air pollution, and also those neighborhoods became undesirable and property values lowered. So even the houses people could afford to buy did not increase in value in the same way the nice houses in white neighborhoods did.
I think the students in my class wanted to hear about that. There are some aspects of environmental justice that are a little more complicated. For example, if you live in an industrial neighborhood, it’s less desirable. People say “well of course they are putting the factories and power plants in black neighborhoods,” in the low income neighborhoods. Some of it’s true, some of it is not true. It’s not always intentional. Turns out in poor neighborhoods, land is cheaper. That’s where you build factories. In New York City, you don’t build factories on Park avenue, it’s too expensive. You don’t build factories in Georgetown. That’s ridiculous. You build factories far out in low-income neighborhoods, in industrial neighborhoods where the land is cheap. And by the way, the housing in those neighborhoods is not very desirable as it’s next to factories so it’s inexpensive, meaning that people are poor. There are certainly examples explaining how these decisions are actually racist and discriminatory–– no question about it–– but there are also things that are kind of correlated while not being direct brand decisions made to discriminate against black and low income communities
[The discussion continued for a little while before we segued into the next topic.]
Elson: What would you think of all the renewable energy sources, alternatives, and options? Mitigation vs. CDR (carbon dioxide removal), SRM, and those kinds of technologies?
Dan: Let’s talk about CDR. That’s carbon dioxide removal. I’ll tell you, it’s expensive. Yeah, there are lots of ideas out there; none of them are commercial because they’re really expensive. At the scale that we have to do it, billions and billions of tons of CO2 it’s going to be much cheaper to switch our energy systems than to just do carbon dioxide removal, at least for the first 80%. I think the last 20% is the real question. Maybe some emissions will be cheaper just to remove, like it may be cheaper to remove CO2 from the atmosphere than to decarbonize jet fuel. Jet fuels are hard. Hydrogen’s a potential solution, but it’s really expensive and a little more complicated. That’s one of the things we talked about in my class.
In general, CDR is interesting, and it’s great to work on it as a scientist. It doesn’t substitute in any way for the hard work of decarbonizing, and you have to understand that it’s just going to be a long time. 75% of our new generation electrical generation every year for the last two years has been wind and solar. 75% so that’s awesome. Now, remember that was during President Trump–– a president who has this bizarre hatred of wind energy, but still 75% of new generation energy was wind and solar. We’re building it faster than ever before, but it’s still only 13% of US electricity. For example, Ireland as a country is run on about 40% wind energy–– that’s going to take the United States a long time to achieve at the current rates of construction. We’re talking about 20 to 30 years. People are saying “zero carbon electricity by 2035,” well we better start accelerating because we’re not on track to come even close to that. I think that means that we’re very likely to blow past two degrees and head towards three, and what we’re going to see is more and more impacts. At some point, people will get scared and then maybe we’ll see the willingness to pay and the willingness to sacrifice.
Artwork by Billy Walsh, Graphics Editor
Right now people get together, world leaders get together in Glasgow at the COP meeting, and they talk, but it’s a lot of PR, and it’s a lot of you know blah blah blah, but I think they’re serious about solving the problem. But it’s not like their post 911 urgency. So the question is–– will something in the next 10 or 20 years change that completely? To me, that’s the big question. The problem is that it tends to be very local. In New York City, after Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana, New York City got this crazy rainfall and people died in their basement apartments. We weren’t even thinking about basement apartments and all of a sudden basement apartments became a big deal. People drowned in their cars in New Jersey driving on a road and all of a sudden the water came and covered their car, and they drowned. In July, a city called Zhengzhou in China got eight inches of rain in an hour. It’s the record for any city, anywhere, ever. Eight inches in one hour. People drowned in the subway. They were taking the subway and all of a sudden the subway cars stopped, and the water started rising, and it literally just filled the entire tunnel. Can you imagine, I mean I grew up taking the New York City subway, you probably have grown up taking the metro. Imagine if suddenly the metro was vulnerable to extreme flooding. I got to say, I have nightmares about that. At what point will people be willing to say, you know enough’s enough. We just got to fix this problem, cause it requires much more political will than we have right now.
Like I was fortunate enough to serve on President Obama’s council of science advisors, but also I started an NGO. I started a new NGO called Potential Energy Coalition with my friend John Marshall. John Marshall is an awesome guy, he’s from the marketing world, he’s an advertising guy and he and I created this thing. He’s really led it, so it’s more his thing than mine, but I’ve helped. I’ve been kind of the idea guy, but he’s really the leader. The idea was to use data and advertising methods to reach out to Americans and get them more engaged in climate change. So we worked on something. We did a campaign for the election and it was called Vote like a Madre. You’ll see a video of Jennifer Lopez talking to Lin Manuel Miranda. It turned out the target was Latina mothers. Why them? Well we discovered that they were the most susceptible to real movement on climate change and most of them had never been approached by environmental groups. 35,000 of them went to the polls in Arizona who wouldn’t otherwise have gone. Arizona was a close election, so we also created a campaign targeting just suburban mothers, so go to Science Moms. I wish I could be the spokesperson and convince suburban mothers to be concerned about the climate, but the data says that doesn’t work. I’m a 55-year-old Harvard professor, I’m a white guy! It doesn’t work. What we did is we actually went out and got colleagues of mine, women of different ages, who are mothers talking to mothers and that’s what Science Moms is about. It turns out the messenger matters. There’s a woman who was a postdoc at Harvard named Emily Fisher, she’s a professor at Colorado State University now, and she’s awesome. She’s so sincere. You’ll see videos of Emily, and she can really deliver a punch. Like, I cry every time I see these videos. Remember, you guys aren’t the target. We already got you guys. After mothers, we’re going after suburban mothers who were kind of moderates, they’re not terribly politically active, and we’re trying to get them jazzed about this. We’re not going to use ads just because I cry, who cares!? We want to make the ads that make those women, those mothers cry. We want to reach them. So what we do is we actually use data and analysis, and we test and choose people who are good messengers based on the effectiveness of the message, not based on what we think or our intuition.
Elson: Anything that you want readers to take away or like people who take your course to go away with?
Dan: I want them to view this problem critically and honestly. One of the things that worries me about the rhetoric on climate change from the environmental movement and politicians is that they lie to people. They lie in multiple ways. First they kind of want to scare people, so they make it sound like we’re going to go over a cliff, and maybe we are, but it’s just going to get worse and worse, not too late to stop the problem. We never go over a cliff and say “oh ok” end of the world we’re done. It’s never too late to intervene, that’s a really important message. The second thing that a lot of environmental groups say–– and it’s really tempting you to say–– if we don’t act now things are going to get really bad. This implies that if we do act now, everything will be ok, and the reality is it’s not true and that’s why things like solar radiation management actually have to be discussed. We don’t know how bad it’s going to get. If it gets bad, we may actually need some technological interventions, as terrifying and troubling as they are. For me, solar radiation management is the sort of thing that is a little bit like Churchill’s view of democracy. Churchill said it’s the worst form of government except for the alternatives. I kind of think that’s the way SRM is. I’m not saying we should use this all around, I’m saying we should understand it and be prepared because I fear that somebody this century will want to deploy it and when they do, I’d like to understand it better.
Getting back to the main point and what you asked about. I want students to understand this problem in an honest way. I want them to see it critically and clear. But I also, don’t want them to be defeatist. Yes, it’s a super hard problem. I’ll tell you, I think we have to have some humility about the future. None of us know what the future will bring in terms of technology and innovation, but also in terms of political will. I think that’s one of the important lessons to remember. Climate change is going to require global collective action like nothing we’ve ever seen, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen, we just need to work on it and I think that’s really important. Time for us to roll up our sleeves, work together, and figure it out.
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