Climate decisions hidden in plain sight with Verdical Group

Buildings shape much of our daily lives, but their environmental impact often goes unnoticed. Yet the built environment accounts for nearly 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions, from the energy used to heat and power buildings to the materials used to construct them.

In this episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia talks to Drew Shula, founder and CEO of Verdical Group, about the role the construction sector plays in climate action. The conversation explores how decisions made during design and construction can influence emissions, costs and resilience for decades, and why much of the real progress in reducing building emissions is happening at the local level.

From energy modelling and building standards to the challenge of scaling sustainable construction practices, this episode looks at how the built environment is becoming both one of the biggest climate challenges – and one of the most practical places to make progress.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram – and why not spread the word with your friends and colleagues?

Transcript

Felicia Jackson (00:41)
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Shaken Not Burned. We spend a lot of time talking about climate action

As if it lives somewhere far away, at COP meetings, in policy debates, in global targets that often feel really abstract and are increasingly contested. But at the same time, no matter what we think, something quieter and effective, is happening much closer to home. While international politics seems to be fragmenting and trust erodes,

Decarbonisation is accelerating in places that don't get nearly as much attention. That's in buildings, in cities, in professional practice, and most importantly in local decision making. Places where ideology matters less than physics, but where the choices made today can lock in emissions or reductions for decades. And perhaps more importantly, where action doesn't need full consensus to move forward. Today's guest sits right in the centre of that.

Drew Shula is the founder and chief executive of Verdical Group. That's a sustainability consulting firm focused on decarbonizing the built environment and someone who spends his days translating climate goals into concrete reality, quite literally if you'll excuse the pun, through buildings, portfolios and cities. He also recently helped launch the UN Development Programme's Climate Counts education campaign. That was ahead of COP30 last year. Misinformation and education around climate change

was a key goal of the presidency aimed at cutting through confusion and disinformation with clear grounded facts about both the urgency of the crisis and the promise of solutions. What makes this conversation so relevant isn't just what Drew works on but where he works. He's based in California which has really become a kind of living laboratory for climate action because it's being forced to deal with the impacts of climate risk now as it goes head to head.

With everything else that goes into running a society and an economy, you're seeing heat and wildfires, water stress, rising energy demand, lack of housing, aging infrastructure, and the drive for growth. And they're all colliding at the same time. So we're not going to be talking about net zero as a slogan or climate action as an aspiration. It's about where change is actually happening and how we can embed that change for the longer term. It's about how education works when trust is at a premium.

and why local sector level action may be more resilient than waiting for global alignment. Because if the world's becoming more fragmented, the real question isn't whether action is possible. It's actually where it is happening. Who is quietly getting on with it? And what matters is how we can accelerate that. So Drew sits inside the messy middle between policy and design and regulation and delivery. I'm hoping that he can help us unpack all these questions.

and help us identify where and how long-term sustainable change can be embedded. So Drew, welcome to the show.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (03:35)
Hey, Felicia, thank you so much for having me on. Happy to be here.

Felicia Jackson (03:38)
Great, it's a pleasure to have you here. Now as I've said, you actually work at the intersection of what we can only call global climate narratives and the very practical on the ground delivery. buildings, cities, individual projects. For a lot of people at the moment, the global conversation feels stalled and I don't think it would be unfair to say it feels chaotic.

So much of what we've assumed as global international norms now feel under threat. So from where you sit, do you think it's misleading to read what's happening at the global level as a proxy for real progress? I remember under the first Trump administration how much work was done at the city and mayoral level. They kept taking action even though the US was not part of the Paris Agreement. So my first question

is where does climate action actually feel real for you right now?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (04:29)
Great question. yeah, I agree with you that globally it is chaotic. There's so many opinions in the world and so many millions of people and this issue has been so politicized around climate that.

It does feel extremely chaotic at the global scale. And I do love to think about things at the global scale. Of course, climate is a global issue. There's no borders in countries when you look at the earth from space and emissions go up into the atmosphere and float around the planet. But there is a lot more progress happening locally, Felicia. I think that's what you're getting at with your question. with me on the ground, I'm working on buildings in the green building space. A lot of the work that I do and 42 % of global

global carbon emissions come from the building industry. So we are a big part of the problem, of course, but that also makes us a big part of the solution. it does feel like there's progress happening. If you look at just the building sector in the United States, for example, even though we've added millions and millions of square feet of new buildings, the overall energy use of buildings has actually come down over the

past couple decades. So that's a bright spot. We are improving. at the local level there are good things happening.

Felicia Jackson (05:42)
Okay, so could you perhaps talk our listeners through what it is that you actually do? Because I think everyone is aware that the built environment is a huge challenge. but it can get quite confusing to the lay person because construction is such a huge part of it and materials and what you choose to build with. But at the same time, it's energy use in buildings. It's the life of the building that actually

demands increased energy, demands water. And you're talking about the fact that despite a growth in square foot, as we would say in the UK, actual emissions related to this have gone down. So what do you do and how do you do it?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (06:20)
I try to tell the short version of this. I grew up in Maine on the east coast of the United States. Real small town, 40 acres of land, was running around in nature all the time, so it really shaped me as a kid growing up and caring about nature and the environment. I went off to college, I studied architecture.

at Notre Dame out in Indiana, middle of the US, and then ended up moving to LA about 20 years ago and starting my career. I worked in architecture briefly, but I didn't love the design world and I gravitated towards getting involved in sustainability for buildings specifically. I was able to marry my background in Maine and growing up in nature with my studies in architecture in the built environment and found a

way to make a positive impact there and that's what I was most focused on. How can I make a positive impact on the world in my work? And yes.

Felicia Jackson (07:12)
Can I just interrupt and say I think that's one of the most

important things today to learn that it doesn't matter what you do, there is always a way to make a difference It's just about understanding that and applying it. So I love hearing you talk about it.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (07:25)
you know, we live in a capitalist...

system, at least in the US and most of the world. just the pursuit of money is so empty to me. I really struggled with that in college. But when I finally started to focus on positive impact, then the money just naturally follows. how can you help the world, help people, help the environment? So I just started to think about positive impact and in buildings, of course, like we started the conversation with, there's a lot of work we need to do to improve buildings, make them better for the environment.

So when I discovered that and found this lane for myself, I got really excited and that was really the beginning of my career. to explain what we do, it's a little, and that's part of the problem with the whole climate world and all the terminology, is it's hard to explain these things. So I think a lot of the goal of...

Felicia Jackson (08:07)
Well, one of the things that we do

try to do is because there are so many different avenues and so many different areas and so many different ways of approaching the problem, that we try to talk about things at a layman's level, but there are things that are technical and when they are, we'll just add something to the show notes that actually explains. So don't worry about that.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (08:26)
I love that. No,

thank you so much. And I think it takes a lot of knowledge in order to speak about things very simply, right? And remove the complexity. And that's what I try to do as much as possible as well. my work is really at the biggest scale. And the positive impact scale is focused on trying to help solve the climate crisis.

Felicia Jackson (08:47)
Mm-hmm.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (08:48)
in doing that, ⁓ focusing on buildings and reducing carbon emissions, because we're still just talking about global warming. we come up with all this new terminology, but it's just our emissions, mostly carbon, mostly from fossil fuels in the atmosphere heating up the planet. That's our problem. It's going to change our weather, create catastrophic issues. People are dying already today from the effects of climate change.

it's really the biggest focus is how can we reduce the carbon emissions from buildings. And there's two sources. there's operational carbon is the first bucket, which is turning on the lights, turning on your heating and cooling. Then the second bucket is called embodied carbon. And that's the carbon that sort of baked into the materials that the energy it took to create the building material and then ship it all the way to the site from whatever it is. Those emissions combined make up the total carbon footprint of your building.

what we're working to reduce.

Felicia Jackson (09:39)
how do you do that? mean, do you work with developers? Do you work with construction companies? Do you work with owners of buildings at the design phase, at the operational phase? And I'm fascinated by how you might work with actual city ordinances and the different rules and regulations and how you can actually use those to make a change in the way in which things are done.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (10:03)
we are a sustainability consulting firm.

In the building world, the prime, they call it, is usually the architect or the general contractor who are hiring the rest of the team members because there's so many different disciplines that work on buildings. The engineers, landscape architects, building architect, et cetera. So we're most frequently hired by architects or sometimes hired by the owner developer, the end user of the building directly. If that's a Google or a Meta, for example, or

or sometimes by the general contractor, the builder of the project. So those are typically the types of firms that are hiring us. And then also we're joining the larger design and construction team for these projects. We're mostly working on commercial buildings, all types of buildings, office buildings, warehouse buildings, university, K through 12, everything. We do a little bit of residential here and there, but not too much.

And there are two tools that we use that help reduce carbon. one is called an energy model on the ⁓ operator. Exactly, yes. The software we use mostly is called IESVE.

Felicia Jackson (11:07)
Yeah. Is that like a digital twin for the building? Okay, great.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (11:16)
it's a very robust 3d energy modeling tool. And that's again, on the operational carbon side. So you can imagine a 3d model inside the software where you can change everything from the wall thicknesses to the windows, the number of windows and where they are in the building to the orientation on the site. all these things in impact the energy performance of the building. And so you can get this iterative feedback to the architect who's mostly focused on

just the design, the aesthetics of the building. architects are learning more and more about, being responsive to the climate, about decarbonization, but they're not experts in it. They just, they know bits and pieces of things. So they do rely on consultants like us to help. Anyway, that's the energy model. The second thing is the life cycle assessment is the second tool that we use. That's the tool that is looking at the materials in the building. So the, again, the embodied carbon side of things and trying to figure

out the difference between two different types of concrete for example if one has less carbon than the other in the mix then we can help inform the team to specify the one that's that's better for the environment.

Felicia Jackson (12:23)
And can I ask, when you do the LCA or the energy monitoring, the sort of modelling so you can see what difference a different approach makes, does that also highlight different trade-offs like cost and longevity and robustness and whether or not it meets particular local standards?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (12:43)
Yeah, so we are looking at materials and typically we're thinking at least 50 year life cycle for the building. It would be better if people would think even longer term, know, 100 years for a building or longer because there's a lot of carbon used if a building is demolished, torn down, and then you have to rebuild the new building.

we are trying to look at timelines out into the future and longevity is important, but it's difficult in the environments that we've created today with paybacks being shorter term. know, clients are typically short term thinkers more than super long term. And it's the same in politics, right? We have in the U.S., the president is a four year term, which of course we're on the environmental side of things, we're very much counting down on a new federal administration and three more years.

years. But yeah, we do want to think long term about the impacts of these choices.

Felicia Jackson (13:38)
that's something that fascinates me because obviously there is this disconnect of time horizons and we've got a lot of existing buildings we need to do something with and as the environment changes they may need to be repurposed or whatever it is. What I'm really interested in is why is it that buildings in this local level is such a powerful lever for change and

Is there a reason why decarbonisation seems to be moving more or moving faster at an asset level than it is at a national or geopolitical level?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (14:07)
actually, I don't have great data points around global numbers versus like national numbers local numbers.

Felicia Jackson (14:17)
I mean, I'm just thinking more about how it feels when you're actually in that mix. Is decarbonisation of building something that is taken seriously by architects, by the owners, by local government? One of the arguments that always comes up is this idea that decarbonisation or some kind of sustainability initiative always comes with increased costs.

that's why time horizon and buildings are so interesting because over time, if you're using less energy, you'll be paying less for that energy. At the same time, if you are the developer, you might not want to put in all sorts of work that actually results in a lower operational profile because you're not getting the benefit from it. So,

I'm really just trying to get your thoughts on on what it is that is driving action.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (15:04)
think it's all voluntary for the most part right now. There are some...

There's building codes, for example, like California has a very progressive green building code. It's called Cal Green. It's the most progressive in the United States and probably one of the most in the world. a new one just came into effect January 1st, 2026. They release a new building code roughly every three years or so. They move the market forward because each time a new code comes out, it becomes more stringent, a little bit harder to achieve the minimum energy performance required, for example.

also looks at water and things like this. So when policy comes into effect, like a building code that requires all new buildings to meet this minimum standard,

It works immediately. The example I use a lot for California is about 10 years ago, we have periodic droughts in California. We're in a drought situation. And the governor at the time, Governor Jerry Brown, mandated water restrictions. And overnight, there was a 30 % water use reduction across the entire state of California instantly. That's a huge reduction.

Felicia Jackson (16:08)
Isn't California

the fifth largest economy in the world? That's a rather significant figure.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (16:12)
Yes!

there's a lot of people here, a lot of industry here, fifth or sixth largest in the world like you said, I'm not sure exactly where it ranks. It's huge, yeah. you think about that globally, if we ever have any sort of net zero requirements or start to have a carbon tax or things like this, as soon as those things happen, we will have really fast change happen. We're just not at that tipping point. So today we're in this

Felicia Jackson (16:23)
It moves around, but...

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (16:43)
between period where most of the choices are voluntary. So it's a lot of Fortune 500 companies that they want to do these things so then they can share the stories around what they're doing. It's great for recruiting talent, retaining talent, the sort of marketing side of their initiatives around ESG and sustainability.

A lot of companies are making the choice to do these things, but they're not required to do it. And that's just the point that we're at now. And within the building world, I gave a keynote talk ⁓ a year or two ago asking the question, are architects dumb? Because like,

Felicia Jackson (17:18)
of One Use and fans.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (17:20)
Actually, there's a quote from Greta Thunberg, the well-known climate activist, that we've already solved the climate crisis, we just aren't doing it yet. And I think that's absolutely true in the building world. We know exactly what we need to do to build net zero buildings that solve this issue. We just are not doing it at scale at all. There's a very small number of these buildings around the world still today, even though we know...

Felicia Jackson (17:22)
Yeah, yeah.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (17:43)
exactly what to Meanwhile, the atmospheric carbon, parts per million keeps rising and rising and rising every year. So we got to get to a point where we're we're rating that in.

some architects get it. Of course, there's, there's great architects out there that are doing.

climate sensitive designs and are looking at an energy model and at a life cycle assessment as they make their decisions. But I think the majority of architects are still not using these tools. They are not looking at the carbon impact of their buildings. And the knowledge is out there. We need to be taking these steps.

Felicia Jackson (18:12)
this is a fascinating point because in almost every sector there is a specialist body who's done analysis which shows that the technologies exist and the processes exist and the prices have come down. Sometimes it takes some time. has anything changed recently? What is it that's going to take? You talk about the fact that we have the knowledge but we're not actually doing it at scale.

What do you think it's going to take to actually move from pilot projects and demonstration buildings and, for lack of a better phrase, the wonderful things you can show off with, to changing the built environment at scale?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (18:48)
a few things. one is that literally people are dying from the impacts of climate change. And I don't mean to say that to create unnecessary alarmism or anything like that, but.

from major weather events, hurricanes, et cetera, especially in the developing world where, many countries lack infrastructure to protect people as much. these extreme weather events, people don't have the ability to move away to safety. And they're stuck in these situations where there's massive flooding or whatever it might be, wildfires, et cetera. People are literally dying. So those impacts are going to increase more and

each year into the future, more and more people will be dying. So that's the, that always makes people pay attention and it should, of course. The other pieces of this is that this is a newer thing in the big picture over the, it's been what, 50 years, we've been talking about climate change, but really focusing on it as more of a significant issue the past few decades. And it's just,

In the grand scheme of things over many, many decades or a century, this is a massive global issue that we're working to solve. And it takes all the countries around the world, all the industries around the world to work together. So it's very complex.

Felicia Jackson (20:04)
you said at the beginning, technical issues might come up and there's some very specific things that need to be understood. And, you know, for people who don't work in construction or the built environment, it can all sound like a very niche interest. But the reality is that everybody either lives in a building or works in a building or celebrates in a building or gets entertained in a building. We all use buildings in different ways.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (20:25)
Yeah.

Felicia Jackson (20:27)
And I'm just interested in what your thoughts are about what buildings can tell us about emissions and risk and long-term lock-in. Because you're absolutely right that people are dying. They have been for a very long time. What's also become really clear is that alarming people makes them just back off and want to get away. We've had the fossil fuel industry that's put a lot of time and effort into making people feel it's their individual responsibility.

to act differently and do things differently and that's how we address climate change. Now there's no doubt that lots of small actions multiplied by thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of people will have a huge impact but there are big systemic things that need to change and for me buildings kind of touch on both of those things. They're huge, they're long term, they're planned for a long time and yet people in their day to day are in them.

I'm interested in your thoughts on what buildings can tell us about how things are going to change.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (21:28)
I do think buildings are very direct.

positive impact on reducing carbon and one of your initial questions that we were talking about earlier is this where we can actually see these bright spots think real progress happening and Absolutely buildings are a great place for that. We are making progress. We do have the tools and knowledge to do that like you said, we really do need to take the onus off of individuals From solving the climate crisis. I do think that is a the wrong direction

to put the focus. all of us make an individual impact, of course, but it's really on these larger entities at the national government scale.

and at the corporate level, those are the folks that need to be responsible. There are people running these companies that need to step up and take responsibility. But one thing I'd love to talk with you about too is just the fact that this is an invisible problem. It's something that you need to trust the science around in order to understand the issue, believe and know that the issue is happening. Because even for me, somebody who works in sustainability every single day, I'm not

not climate scientist. I'm not going to the Arctic and measuring the ice or anything like that. I have to trust the science, but we need to have the separation of science from politics. ⁓ It's so important. We should not be politicizing this issue.

Felicia Jackson (22:42)
Absolutely.

if you think about the sort of development of the industrialized world, it's built on science, it's built on engineering, it's built on testing and building and developing and innovation and all of these different things. But when it comes to a point where we're having a conversation where we might have to do things differently, there is significant pushback. And I remember someone saying to me once, and this was very much about the science of it all, that why was there such a rapid response to COVID and such a sort of, meh.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (23:03)
Yeah.

Felicia Jackson (23:14)
response to climate. And what they said at the time was the thing about climate is for most people, they vaguely know it's a problem. They get a bit confused between climate and weather. And it's something that's happening to people far, far away. Whereas COVID happened overnight to everyone, couldn't get away from it. And everyone knew someone it was affecting. So it changed that emotional response that I think people have. And I think your point about invisibility.

and having to trust the science is critical but difficult when a lot of the political agendas these days, wherever you are, is around not trusting experts. It's around saying, well, yes, but I did my research and equating, and I'm going to sound horrible now, but sorry, equating an hour going down a TikTok wormhole to reading a paper written by 14 specialist scientists who've spent 20 years studying it.

arguing with each other about what's right and coming up with their best answer. So that's a real challenge. And part of that is communications and how people understand it. So perhaps we can turn to the work you were doing with Climate Counts, because I think the way in which we communicate and what we communicate and how we communicate is absolutely fundamental. So what did it actually look like? What did it do?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (24:35)
I wasn't involved in creating the climate counts campaign or anything like that. I had more of a minor role just helping to spread the word, but it was a great program, exactly what you're describing, to get some real factual information out in very simple, easy to understand terminology. And trying to counteract this, there's a lot of just like...

outright lies and then almost even worse than that are the greenwashing terminology that's like half truths and difficult to understand and just murky and it confuses people. And so this climate counts campaign was put out by United Nations and they just reached out to me to help spread the word on social media, Instagram and LinkedIn and whatnot. But it was great. There's a website set up.

Felicia Jackson (25:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (25:22)
if folks can go and And there's 30 different facts in there and they're just numbered one through 30. like,

Felicia Jackson (25:22)
I will link to that

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (25:30)
number one is like, only have one earth. We need to protect the earth. And number 30 is 50 % of the world's population is under the age of 30. So these are the folks that we need to educate and help to solve the issue in the future.

Felicia Jackson (25:39)
Yeah.

Absolutely. And I think, again, one of the things that's so challenging, you mentioned earlier all the different ways in which one can become involved, but what the ultimate reality is that those people who are in charge at the moment, the whole world is changing. And if over 50 % of the population are under the age of 30, needs, wants, attitudes, they're all going to need to change.

What would be really interesting to me is if you know anything about the sort of feedback they got, know, did clear facts and visuals and solutions, did they have an impact? I'm really interested in a perspective on what kind of climate information actually lands with people.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (26:21)
Yeah, I actually don't know feedback on metrics around this particular campaign, but I do for sure agree with you and think that.

This is the heart of the issue, education. That's what gets us to the tipping point of having enough people on board that want to make change happen that will vote policy into place, at the federal level or national level around the world. And that, again, that's just like my story around reducing water in California. You get a policy in place, there's massive change really quickly overnight. in democracy globally, we need to vote

Vote these these things into place and so education is what's gonna get young people on board understanding these issues understanding the science and then of course ⁓ Once you understand the issue, of course, you'll vote for change, but follow the money right the problem right now is Big money interests do not want to change are actively fighting to maintain the status quo fossil fuel companies, of course direct

Felicia Jackson (27:19)
Yeah.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (27:26)
contributors to President Trump in the United States and he is literally pushing these agendas forward around fossil fuels, oil, coal, etc. to help those industries grow at a time when we should be doing exactly the opposite and the knowledge is already there to inform that.

Felicia Jackson (27:44)
one question that then comes to mind, because it's difficult enough when there are tidal waves of money coming from one particular direction. The question that begs is why are organisations then investing in net zero design and green buildings? What is driving the decision? You talked about reputation and wanting to be a leader, but that...

to me seems almost as if it's not enough. mean, is it just climate values and the fact that they think net zero is important? Is it regulation at a national or local level? Is it cost and how that's changing? Is it risk? Because for a building, if it's in a particular area, it might have higher insurance costs because there's increased risk of flooding. Can that be connected to the way the building is built?

What is it that's driving people to get involved when that's going against the flow of capital?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (28:38)
for building specifically there is a business case so Just like ⁓ in your your home you have your your heat your heating bill cooling bill your utility bills You have a water bill in green buildings Reduce the energy use and reduce the water use and in large commercial buildings, a million square foot building your utility bills are really high they can be millions of dollars and so These strategies do actually say

Felicia Jackson (28:40)
Mm-hmm.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (29:03)
the client money significantly and sort of pay for themselves in a lot of ways. The fees that we charge to do our work oftentimes are paid for by the cost savings that we create. So there are really direct business cases, which is why a lot of these environmental initiatives are just a no-brainer. They're good for the environment, they're good for people, they save money. When we're talking in terms of money, you can't argue with that no matter where you fall on the political spectrum.

But then there are the softer benefits around marketing reputation like you were mentioning. And then there's the risk mitigation side as well like on insurance or like if in the future carbon taxes happen where like companies for example are taxed based on the amount of carbon that they're emitting every year and that's measured. Companies could start to get ahead of that now by reducing their emissions from if they have giant factories, manufacturing facilities, whatever it might be, whatever their footprint

print is from, they can start to reduce that now to save themselves higher costs down the road.

Felicia Jackson (30:06)
That makes a lot of sense. I want to bring this back to the potential for change. So we've talked about what the drivers might be, but I think you've said that it's still possible to create real change through businesses and through buildings. And that's something that rings true for any industrialized society.

are we right to believe that things are actually happening at the asset level or do we have to wait for national or global alignment?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (30:30)
Things are definitely happening, but just nowhere near the scale that they should be. just as an example, we're company about 25 people based in California. We're doing work in about half the states around the US, about 25 states in a few countries globally. But we're a relatively small company. so the scale that we're working on, we're working on maybe

one or 200 buildings at any given time. think about there's millions and millions of buildings out there. just what is happening is just a tiny, tiny fraction of what of where we need to be. And

In the US, the sort of voting blocks are, it's very close to being a 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans. When we do the national presidential elections, they're like 51 % to 49 % or whatever. It's almost a split 50-50.

Felicia Jackson (31:24)
So does that mean that the independents hold the power?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (31:27)
Gosh, mean, unfortunately in the US, it's just like this two party system. And I wish we had more room for other parties in the mix. it just creates problems that.

because the science issue has been politicized, we've got about half of our country thinking on the Republican side of things that have tied climate change to being false or a false narrative or a waste of time or not real. And on the Democrat side, it's more something that folks are pushing forward more. But...

We're trying to find common ground to get to solutions here because again, I do think it comes down to voting these policies into place. And so we need to get the young people educated and over the next couple of decades, as more and more people are educated, that I think is what's gonna change things over time. So asset level, yes, it's happening, but at a very small scale right now.

Felicia Jackson (32:22)
Okay, so basically it does boil down to people actually having to use their agency to push for the solutions that they really believe in. one question that comes to mind there is just about California, because we've talked about the fact that it does function as a testing ground and you've talked about how a policy brought in resulted in a 30 % drop in water use. What do you think other states or regions might misunderstand about how change happens in California?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (32:46)
I guess it's because we're ⁓ a very Democrat-led state in the U.S. So again, because it's so tied to politics, unfortunately, which I disagree with as we talked about, but because...

California's primarily votes Democrat. We typically vote these environmental issues in as a state, you and we have millions and millions of people in the state. And I think that's why California is the leader that it is environmentally.

Felicia Jackson (33:05)
Yeah.

if we were going to be having this conversation in five years time, how would you want it to be different? What does meaningful progress look like?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (33:20)
For me, it's interesting because the goal is sort of to work myself out of a job. I told you also earlier that our clients are majority architects. But really, ideally,

architects wouldn't need to hire Verdical Group as a sustainability consulting firm. They would have this expertise in-house and they'd know what to do to design a net-zero building on every building every time they have a project come across their desk. five, 10 years from now, this is a lot of this work in the climate space you kind of think about in decades. I'm 44 right now, I've got at least another

Felicia Jackson (33:43)
Yeah.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (33:56)
three decades of work hopefully ahead of me. I do expect to see really significant carbon reductions in my lifetime over the next three decades. Despite the political environment we're in now with, you know, the Trump administration in the U.S., I do hope we'll have a new administration in three years that will return to really big focus on making positive impact on the environment. And yeah, over the next 30 years,

I think will continue to make progress and reduce emissions across the board every industry every every country around the world

Felicia Jackson (34:33)
I think that's a very positive thing to hope for and what's interesting is going to be finding out how we actually make that work. The last question I have for you is just if there's one assumption about climate action that you think needs to be let go of, especially in business and professional circles, what do you think that is?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (34:52)
it's just around education. Like if you don't understand the basics, get on online and look it up and just understand what's happening in the world. Understand the tie to science as we've been talking about today.

We all believe in gravity, right? We understand that when we drop something, it will fall to the floor. this scientific method proves things.

we know will happen. Scientists globally around the world have proven that climate change is happening. It's caused by humans. We know what it is. We know what's happening. We know we need to solve this. And I think if we all can be educated on that, then we'll vote these things into place. And that's what I'd like to see as climate action moving forward.

Felicia Jackson (35:33)
I think that's

a wonderful place to draw our interview to a close. My very final question, is there something I haven't asked you about that you wish I had?

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (35:41)
⁓

Well, we didn't talk about our conference today. My company started a really cool conference. called the Net Zero Conference. It's happening at the LA Convention Center in October this year, 2026. We ⁓ convened the building industry together. We have over a thousand attendees. We've had folks from more than 50 countries globally attend as well. People are talking about how to push Net Zero building.

Felicia Jackson (35:45)
Ooh!

Okay.

Drew Shula, Verdical Group (36:08)
things forward. again, we're trying to take action. We're trying to educate the market. And we'd love to see anybody out there who's listening to this podcast, please come out and check out the Net Zero Conference.

Felicia Jackson (36:20)
it's so important that we actually have conversations with each other, because everybody is at different stages and knows different things. And recognizing that we're actually all in this together and we have to collaborate, we have to talk to each other and we have to keep learning. Drew, thank you so much for joining us today. I do really appreciate

there is a thread that runs through all the conversations about climate change. And that's that climate action isn't waiting for permission or to be told what to do. Even when the politics isn't in place, things are still happening. And I think that's a challenge when global politics and trust become harder to follow and to sustain. But the reality is the physics isn't changing and progress is happening in places.

where the need for long-term decision-making is recognised. that's probably most obvious in buildings and cities and local systems where people are going to be experiencing the results of the decisions that they make, where delay in action is going to have real consequences. And I think what your work through shows us is that change doesn't always look loud and it doesn't have to be headline grabbing. It can be specific. It can look like better design choices, clearer information.

and just getting on with it even when the wider context feels unstable and unsafe. we talk a lot in climate about optimism or denial, but actually this is very much about agency and how we use it, how we use what we know and how we live and work to be part of making that change happen. So I really appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us and to our listeners. Thank you also for being here. And don't forget if you found this episode useful.

Please do follow Shaken Not Burn, leave a rating or a review, or share it with someone who's trying to make sense of sustainability in a complicated world. It really does help more people find the show and that helps us broaden the conversation. we'll be back next week.