Where Are We With Climate Change, Mitigation, and Resilience? (A Conversation With Cabell Eames and Peter Frumhoff)

This episode includes two guests, Peter Frumhoff, a climate scientist and ecologist, and Cabell Eames, an environmental policy advocate and strategist. The topic for discussion this time is around climate change, the reality of where we sit, and the efforts that need to be done with both climate mitigation and climate resilience.

They unpack the hard math of net zero, the global emissions split between developed and developing nations, and why warming will continue for decades even as cleaner tech scales. The conversation leads to a case for a both-and strategy: aggressive mitigation and urgent, practical resilience that protects people where they live.

For more information on Will and to share your thoughts, please head over to willbrownsberger.com. 

Find more information about Cabell and her work at castlingstrategies.com. 

Find more information about Peter and his work at woodwellclimate.org/staff/peter-frumhoff/.

Transcript

Matt: 0:00

Welcome to the Will Brownsberger Podcast. Hi, I'm producer Matt Hanna. In every episode, I sit down for a conversation with Massachusetts State Senator Will Brownsberger to explore some of the biggest issues facing the Commonwealth and its people. This episode includes two other guests, Peter Frumhoff, a climate scientist and ecologist, and Cabell Eames, an environmental policy advocate and strategist. And the topic for discussion this time is around climate change, the reality of where we sit, and the efforts that need to be done with both climate mitigation and climate resilience. So let's get into the conversation with Cabell, Peter, and Will. 

Matt: 0:34

Hi there. Welcome to another episode of the Will Brownsberger Podcast. We're here today with a larger group than usual. We should have a good conversation. So why doesn’t everyone want to introduce themselves briefly about who they are? We already know Will, but Will, do you want to kick it off quickly and then we'll go around the room?

Will: 0:48

Yeah, I'll kick it off quickly. I'm somebody who's, for a couple of decades, been very focused on the issue of climate change and it's been a key legislative priority. And I'm just thrilled a couple of folks that are with us today to talk about where we are from a really big picture, from a global picture. So I'll let them introduce themselves, but I've got Peter Frumhoff.

Peter: 1:06

Yeah, sure. Well I'm really delighted to be here. I'm Peter Frumhoff. I'm a climate scientist and ecologist. I teach at Harvard University. I also work at the nexus of climate science and policy at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, which is a nonprofit based in Falmouth, Massachusetts. For many years, I was the chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and I've long been focused on the connection of science to action on climate change. I'm delighted to be with you.

Will: 1:28

Thank you. And Cabell Eames.

Cabell: 1:30

Yeah, Cabell Eames here. I have been working in climate in the advocacy space primarily since the 90s. My first job was with Sierra Club knocking doors in New York City. So it's been a long road, but since that time, I have really been focused on bringing people together around how you talk about climate in people's living rooms and kitchens versus in academia because I feel like it hasn't been reaching the masses as it should over the last couple of decades that we've been hearing about it and talking about it. And now I have my own strategy firm and I have a couple of people that I work with in the nonprofit sector, and we are working on state and local policy to try to make real change on climate change and to make some headway there.

Will: 2:10

Yeah, I mean, so Peter, I did a piece a couple of months ago on my blog about just sort of the math of climate change and where we are, and you and I talked about it. Maybe it'd be better if you talked about that piece or that big picture, if you just sort of opened with that.

Peter: 2:24

Yeah, sure. Well, the math is pretty brutal, right? Every year, we collectively, all more than 8 billion people of us, members of a human race on the planet, spew about 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. That's causing temperatures to rise, the greenhouse effect. And temperatures will continue to rise until that number goes down to what's called net zero, which is to say no more carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere as is coming out through the terrestrial ecosystems through plants and photosynthesis and so on. We have a long way to go before we get there. And temperatures are rising. We're about 1.4 degrees Celsius global average above pre-industrial levels. We're gonna hit the lowest end of the Paris target, 1.5 degrees, the Paris climate agreement target, in about five years. And we're gonna hit it. We're gonna go past it. There's really no serious debate in the scientific community about it. Really, the question for us in terms of that brutal math is when do we stop, right? How far do we go? How far do the damages get? We're on a path today, based on the policies that are in place today to address climate change, to go to about doubling where we've gone so far, up to somewhere between two and a half and three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. That's a world we don't want to go to. We need to do a hell of a lot better than that. We have a lot of work to do to get there.

Will: 3:44

Yeah. So let's talk about the developing countries and the developed countries and how they fit in the world of climate change. I mean, the narrative going back to the early nineties when the world sort of first came together around the UN Framework Convention was it's on the developed countries to reduce their emissions. Because of course it is absolutely true that we are, you know, the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, Russia, the transitioning economies in Eastern Europe, those countries account for the historical majority of emissions. And so the narrative was they need, we, we need to reduce our emissions. Those 40 approximately countries, those 40 developed countries need to reduce their emissions. And the developing countries, of course, need to develop because they legitimately have quality of life issues that are enormous that they want to solve through development. And as part of that, they're likely to increase their emissions for a while. Let's talk about that fundamental dynamic and where that sits.

Peter: 4:38

So as you say, Will, the U.S. and other major industrialized countries have been the largest historical emitters. We've created the problem by and large. And as developing countries develop, they need to grow their energy use. The question is whether they do so in a way that continues to increase emissions or not, right? That's a choice that we can collectively make. So, you know, for historical reasons, China, for example, was listed as one of the developing countries. Clearly, China is now much larger and much more developed than it was when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was set almost 40 years ago. And so we do face a problem of figuring out ways for developed countries to reduce our emissions and to ensure that developing countries go on the path to reduce their emissions as well as they grow their economies. 

Peter: 5:23

I've been actually very heartened. So maybe just to take a step back, the U.S. today, on a per capita basis, emits about six times or six and a half times more carbon dioxide per person than do people in India, and about a third more than people in China. So on a per capita basis, our emissions are still substantially larger than in major developing economies. But their emissions are growing, and because they have a lot of people, their total emissions are growing rapidly. But it's I think important to recognize that in China, for example, we're beginning to see a transition. So at least for the last almost two years now, China's emissions, total emissions, have been flat or actually declining somewhat. And that's a function not of the fact that they're not having economic growth, but that they've invested heavily in solar panels, in clean vehicles. They're major producers now of electric vehicles. And they're also exporting those to other developing countries, and in fact to Europe, not so to the U.S. because of U.S. tariffs. And so we're beginning to see a transition in developing countries as well, where there's a decoupling of their economic development and their continued growth in energy from their growth in emissions, and that's a really important sign.

Will: 6:34

So today, last I looked at the developing countries now, China, India, and all the rest of the world that's not as developed, accounts for approximately 75% of the total emissions. What the trend is in that whole collection of countries is really what's going to determine our future. I mean, we in the developed nations are only a quarter of the emissions problem today. And so we can't solve it through our own actions. We're dependent on what that trend is in developing countries. And there's a hundred countries whose emissions are a fraction of ours, you know, are still below a quarter of ours. You mentioned India, I guess, still among those. 

Peter: 7:10

Yeah. 

Will: 7:11

So they have an incredible potential for growth in emissions. And the question is, will they develop without growing their emissions or not? So I think that's kind of a, there are mixed signs on that, right? I mean, China and India are still permitting coal plants, new coal plants at a vast rate, as high as ever. In fact, in India, more than ever in 2024. So I don't know what to expect there.

Peter: 7:34

So coal plants are still being built in China and India. That's absolutely true. Of course, we're trying to revive coal here in the United States, too, right? 

Will: 7:40

A terrifying thought, yeah.

Peter: 7:41

So not a them versus us kind of comparison. 

Will: 7:43

Yeah, no, no, no. I don't make it them versus us. I'm not thinking about it that way.

Peter: 7:47

I totally get it. But we're beginning to see, and I think this is a positive sign, really positive sign, that there is beginning to be a decoupling in the growth of economies and the growth in energy use that's required as economies grow from a growth in emissions. Because of the significant drop in cost of renewable energy, both as expressed in the price of solar photovoltaics, which are expanding dramatically in the developing world, not just in China and India, but in sub-Saharan Africa. In many parts of the world, we're seeing a tremendous growth in solar photovoltaics. We're also seeing a tremendous growth in electric vehicles. Again, because of investments that are being made, not here in the United States, but in major developing economies, particularly in China, and they're gaining a lot of the economic benefits associated with that, that we are not. 

Peter: 8:33

So it's absolutely true that we need to help developing countries transition to being able to grow and decouple that growth from growth in emissions. But we need to get our own house in order too. And I think it's important to keep our eyes on that because although we can't solve the problem ourselves, nor can any country solve the problem by themselves because it's a collective action problem, right, we all need to do our part. U.S. emissions are poised to go in the wrong direction as a result of federal policies, which are rolling back what we saw during the Biden administration and causing what had been a declining emissions path in the U.S., under previous policies, begin to be a trajectory in which our emissions are going to decline less rapidly than they would have otherwise because of a rollback in particular in federal policies. That's quite disconcerting to me, and something I think that we can also address.

Will: 9:25

So from a big picture standpoint, though, what we see is at the moment, the developing countries are continuing to grow in their emissions collectively. And as you said earlier, we're on a path to, for the next couple of decades at least, of probably at least growing or flat emissions as opposed to dramatically declining emissions globally, with the result that there will be continued warming over the next couple of decades at least.

Peter: 9:53

Well, there will be warming, increased warming until emissions go to zero into net zero, right? So even as we're beginning to see a peak, and we don't know this yet because we can't look retrospectively from a few years ahead, but we're beginning to see a leveling off in global emissions. That's what the trajectories are looking like. It's not that global emissions are continuing to dramatically increase, they're beginning to level off partly because of just the dramatic decline in the price of renewable energy and the increased transition towards clean energy. So emissions are beginning to peak. When they begin to decline, that's a really important step. We don't know if we're there yet. That may be a few years from now, it may be several years from now. We don't really know. We can't forecast. 

Peter: 10:34

But just bear in mind, and this is where the math gets so brutal, those emissions, our collective emissions, need to go to net zero in order for temperatures to stop rising. And we're not gonna get there tomorrow, we're not gonna get there in the next five or probably ten years. We hope we can get there by mid-century. That's a very big lift. And in the meantime, global temperatures are gonna continue to rise and with them, increasing climate disruption. So we need to both reduce our emissions collectively to get as swiftly as possible to that net zero point, which is still a couple of decades away at very best, while preparing for increasing extreme events, extreme weather, and all the disruptions that come with a warming climate.

Will: 11:14

All right. So let's focus on that. Because clearly, whether we're peaking or not, we're looking at increased warming over the next couple of decades with the consequences that we all have concern about. Cabell, you've been thinking a lot about that for a long time. You know the challenge of talking about that. The challenge of talking about focusing on resiliency.

Cabell: 11:36

Yeah, it's a real problem just within the advocacy space to speak on resiliency and what that means for development. Primarily, the advocacy space is focused very much on energy and renewable energy, which has served us well. We've had a lot of push for policies to change and to bring on clean energy. And so that has been successful. However, it's hard to do both. And from my experience working in the energy space in advocacy over the years, it's a very robust and just vital piece of everyone's daily life and how everyone communicates in the communities. We have the churches are involved. There's a whole vast majority of people that have come together in the last 15 years around renewable energy and how we need to bring it online in order to decrease our emissions. 

Cabell: 12:31

But what hasn't happened, and this is important, is that the conversations very rarely step into: and we also need to be building for a future that has extreme weather events. Whether that's drought, whether that's flooding, whether that's food scarcity. We are not able to talk about that in a way that feels positive and makes people enthusiastic. And therefore, we don't have the same amount of advocacy on the resiliency side. Because quite frankly, people just find that it's too depressing. And I've heard others accuse people of saying that they're giving up if they spend their energy there. And because of that, we don't have the sort of focus locally and state and federally in the advocacy space that's pushing for those measures to come online. Whether it's stormwater management, whether it's drought policy, those sort of things haven't really hit mainstream. 

Cabell: 13:27

And I believe because people just can't really think about it in a way because it's just too depressing. And I know that I keep saying that, but I mean, we're talking about reality here. We have missed the wave to be able to get out of this in a way that's not going to cause disruption, an extreme disruption, economic disruption, public health disruption. We have missed the wave on being able to address that in the here and now. And so we need to get caught up. And I don't see us being able to do so without that advocacy piece being able to help push, because that's the way historically any big picture things have gotten done is through people asking for it, because lawmakers listen.

Will: 14:15

There you go. I think that's very, very true. We saw a release last week of a report by the executive branch on the kinds of investments we need to make in resiliency in this state, you know, everything from hardening all kinds of infrastructure, sewer, storm infrastructure, roads, subways. Peter, I don't know if we haven't talked about this too much, but if you focused on sea level rise projections and, you know, how those are.

Peter: 14:39

So sea level is rising. I'm not an expert on sea level rise as it relates to Massachusetts, but I can tell you as it relates to resiliency. You know, I have talked about this, that there are really interesting examples where forethought and planning has led to preparing for resiliency in the face of climate change, including sea level rise. So Deer Island, the sewage treatment plant, when it was kind of redesigned. This, I think this was back around 1990, a long time ago. Well before we were collectively talking about climate change in a public way, it was just beginning to hit the public radar screen. Deer Island was rebuilt in order to address what was then understood to be the projected sea level rise by mid-century, by 2050. And so it was raised up above the levels that it would have been otherwise in order to avoid the impacts of sea level rise on that treatment facility. This was done before anybody was seriously talking about this. I don't know exactly what led to that decision, that forethought, that foresight, but it is, I think it was the first municipal facility on the coast, anywhere in the United States, to address climate change in a direct and proactive way.

Peter: 15:43

So I totally agree that we need to be prepared for sea level rise, for increasing coastal storms, for the equivalent of Superstorm Sandy, you know, which hit New York. If it had hit a couple hundred miles north, it would have devastated the greater Boston area. That's going to happen at some point. We don't know when, but we need to be prepared for it. And we need to be prepared for it in ways that leverage the successes that we've had and really point to them, I think, as ways of looking forward in order to say that we can prepare. And we must prepare because the math and the science requires that we do so.

Will: 16:15

That's it. So talk some more, Cabell, about the challenges of getting people to focus on this. I almost feel like there's multiple kinds of climate denialism. There's one kind of climate denial which says, oh, you know, there's no such thing as climate change. Or then there's, there's climate change, but it's a natural phenomenon, it has nothing to do with us. And then there's, we're actually bending the curve and it's not going to happen and therefore we shouldn't talk about it happening. But no, that's maybe the most dangerous denial right now because if we pretend that this isn't happening, or we pretend that we're not still on a trajectory for increased warming, or that we're somehow going to bend that down to zero before anything bad happens, that's a kind of denial that's actually, I think, the one that's most prevalent right now. And in my world, nobody in my world is saying climate change is not happening, or that it's not due to us. I don't hear that. But what I do hear is, no, don't talk about the reality that it's gonna happen, you know, that it's happening already, and it's gonna continue moving in the wrong direction for another couple of decades, and we need to really do something about that.

Cabell: 17:14

It's a hard conversation to have. I think psychology plays a part in this. I don't think that it's necessarily people avoiding it for any other reason, that people are not designed to catastrophize, if that's the right word to say. They're not designed to think about this could happen, therefore we need to prepare now. And also the funding is not there, which is extremely significant because if the funding has been primarily focused on a nonprofit that organizes around renewable energy because someone has an investment in solar or geothermal or wind, then everybody wins. And so the nonprofit gets the money, they then hire staff, everybody has a strategic meeting, and then they go into action. You don't have that same dollar investment in resiliency in the nonprofit space. They have to come up with that money through usually outside donors because people just don't think of it as a way to galvanize themselves into action. 

Cabell: 18:17

And so it's a hard problem to solve. You also, when I'm in these spaces, because I'm now straddled between energy and resiliency. On the energy side, it's just been building for so long. You've got double the size of individuals in a meeting trying to strategize around what to do next, how to reach a lawmaker, how to reach a neighborhood to go to net zero, how to reach this municipal building and that staff to talk about it with their next town meeting or city council meeting. On the resiliency side, you've got maybe five or ten people, all staff based, trying to figure out how to get the word out to the public to backwards plan and put pressure on local and state authority to make the investments needed to make sure that we don't have flooding or we don't have fires, for example. Particularly now, because the federal government is not participating in our fixes at all. California is still waiting on money from the fires that happened last year, from the federal government. They had to fund that themselves. There it's literally a charity that had to fund most of that redevelopment. So we are very much on our own. And the psychology says that, you know, I feel like I'm in the business of trying to sell life insurance to a 20-year-old. That's what it feels like in the resiliency space.

Will: 19:38

That's a good example.

Cabell: 19:40

It's a hard conversation to have, and people want to move past it, particularly now because there is so much bad news every single day. And this is the time that we need to be having advocacy and action grassroots-wide, not grass tops, but grassroots-wide in the resiliency space, because like I said, lawmakers are being pulled in eight different directions. You know this. I know this because I work in that space. And the only way to stay ahead and to stay top of mind is to have people meeting you at your office hours, is to have people coming into the building and prioritizing this legislation that, you know, would invest in maybe culvert replacement or no development in floodplains. Which, you know, we haven't even touched on the fact that we have a housing crisis, and so they want to develop everywhere, which is a terrible idea because we have floodplains. We already have housing in floodplains, and we don't need to do that in the 21st century. We can build up, but we shouldn't build out. And so it's just a matter of an issue of being human and not wanting to talk about the hard things.

Peter: 20:43

You certainly don't want to get to a point where you need to have an equivalent of a Superstorm Sandy hit in order to start having a conversation about resiliency, right? That's what happened in New York. It got the conversation going, but terrible that it needed to happen in order to have that conversation. I've been slightly heartened, just thinking about your comments, Cabell, about the fact that at least in some local municipalities, particularly coastal ones, they're beginning to seek advice on how to address forthcoming climate risks. So my colleagues at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, for example, produce a series of municipal risk assessments for several municipalities. In Massachusetts, they do these free of charge. It's kind of just a public service piece that they do. New Bedford, Chelsea, Plymouth, and others, where they've gone in and done the modeling on sea level rise and coastal storms and changes in flooding and precipitation, and where the culverts are, right, and thinking about how to address them in a really practical, local scale way and provide risk assessment information to local municipalities in order to inform decision making. That doesn't mean those municipalities have the public support or the funding to go off and do that work. But I think practically minded local leaders know this is coming, right? They're not denying it, even though they may not be able to have a conversation about it, but they lack the political backing in order to get the funding and the public commitment to back up what the science is now telling them. So we need to find a way to connect the dots. And if we have to wait for the next major disaster to hit, that's a failure in our political system that we need to avoid.

Will: 22:10

No, I mean I think there is a fundamental thing in the political system. I mean, let's say you're the mayor of Miami, which is, of course, is incredibly vulnerable to sea level rise and they're already having daytime flooding in storm drains and so forth. Are you standing there saying, my city's going underground, underwater? Is that the message that's going to buoy property values and economic activity in your city? I mean, there's a certain role, especially of municipal officials, to boost. And it's true at the state level, too, right? And you sort of boost the community, boost the prospects of the area. You don't stand there saying doom and gloom about the risks that we're facing. 

Will: 22:43

On the flip side, the industry that does have an incentive to be serious about this, is the insurance industry. It was like 15, 20 years ago, I was at a, it was actually an athletic event. We were both getting ready for this triathlon the next day. It was a sort of pre-event dinner, and I happened to sit down with this guy who was an executive at a reinsurance company. A reinsurance company, right. So these are the guys that take the risks that the insurance companies themselves can't handle. And he was all over it then. The collective risks that were rising, you know, as a result of sea level rise in storms.

Matt: 23:14

I wonder too if I know you're trying to separate out climate change and climate resiliency. Has climate change worked relatively successfully of getting in people's minds because it's like carbon. This is the one thing we can point to, and we can show a direct number for that. Are you struggling with resiliency to come up with what is the one angle that we can put this all under that can tell that story best? Is that an angle that's being developed right now?

Will: 23:39

That's a really good question. I don't think we have it because resiliency is in fact a thousand things, right? It's a storm drain. It's a seawall. 

Peter: 23:49

It's a restored wetland, right? 

Will: 23:51

It's a restored wetland. 

Cabell: 23:53

It's a salt marsh. Yeah.

Will: 23:54

It's the elevation of a road. It's a whole range of things. And so it's not one.

Peter: 23:57

It affects every sector, right? Yeah. It is tricky. It is absolutely tricky. But I'm wondering whether lifting up, and maybe that's a good metaphor since we need to lift up a lot of things in the context of sea level rise and storm surges. Lifting up examples and the Deer Island is just one that comes to mind, but there may be others that are out there and finding ways to tell stories about them where proactive thinking has made it possible to be resilient, and then using those to shine a light on them as ways to point to the future and things that we need to do. I'm just wondering whether, Cabell, that's a valuable thing for us to try as a storytelling device to engage people in a positive way of thinking about, not the dismal way of thinking about climate change is coming, which is, you know, chicken little, we need to put our heads down, but rather to lift up the stories of success in building resilient infrastructure that people aren't otherwise paying attention to.

Cabell: 24:49

Yeah, sponge cities is a term that I've been hearing a lot in other areas. Things that they do that you wouldn't even notice were resiliency measures. But, you know, if you see a rain garden, that's a resiliency measure. If you see a green roof, that's a resiliency measure. Sometimes, too, in some of the states, they are painting the storm drains, beautifully, I might add, where they have artists come out and everyone paints the storm drains. And so then you start to notice them. Just ways of trying to get it in the public sphere, right, is also part of the storytelling. 

Cabell: 25:22

But I find it exciting. I just do, because it's reimagining where you live. It's reimagining how you build a house. It's reimagining, you know, the term managed retreat has started to even get a bad rap. And basically what that means is you live in an area that's going to flood repeatedly, you need to move. So that is also a term of resiliency, but you can reimagine that in the sense of, and you're going to move into this beautiful home that is climate resilient, you know, thinking of a building holistically. It's energy efficient, it has solar, it's heated and cooled with heat pumps, but it also retains water and it cools because there is a green roof. So there are all these measures to think about it in the storytelling world, but we haven't really gotten there yet. We're just very far behind as we are in energy, because we're also not there. We're also very far behind in the resiliency of storytelling and how we can reimagine what a city looks like in the 21st century with really hot temperatures and possible flooding, you know, how we can keep that water on site and also not pollute our rivers. Because that is what stormwater management is. It's about filtering the water so that it doesn't pollute our rivers so that maybe one day you can swim in that river. There are all kinds of really smart people that have been thinking about this, but those messages haven't really been amplified, but they should be.

Will: 26:46

I like that positive vision of, okay, there are definitely some areas where people live now that they’re really not going to be able to keep living eventually. And that’s not so far away. So thinking about that as a positive thing that we can rebuild. And that points to the whole thing of streamlining our permitting around making it easier to produce housing. It's going to increase our need to produce housing. This is one of the things that's going to increase our need to produce housing, is the need that we're going to have to lose some housing here and there. 

Will: 27:09

But you know, one of my heroes is there's some people over at DCR, you know, our state parks agency, they have responsibility for managing our dams across the state. And in particular, they have the responsibility for managing the seawalls at the mouth of the Charles and the mouth of the Mystic River. Not everybody understands this, but the Charles and the Mystic are both maintained well below their natural level by seawalls that keep the ocean out. So instead of fluctuating a lot with the tides and tending to have a level that's close to the high tide level, they have a level that's several feet below high tide level down around the mid tide level. You know, that's drained the swamps around Alewife and Fresh Pond and created developable land and also protected these neighborhoods from the things that come out of swamps like mosquitoes. 

Will: 27:59

But they're responsible for maintaining those dams. And they are looking to the future for those two dams and thinking about raising those dams. And that's one of the big priorities that I personally worry about as it relates to my district is protecting the neighborhoods around the Charles River, protecting the neighborhoods around the Mystic River and the Alewife tributary by raising those dams. But one thing they've already done, you know, these dams are they're about 18 inches above the highest previous storm surge. And, you know, that's a level we're going to get to within another couple of decades. So they realized, okay, on the top of these dams, picture a seawall with a flat top to it that's wide. On the top of these dams, there are vents. And these vents go straight into the engine rooms that drive the pumps that pump water over the wall when you have it. If it's high tide and there's a storm surge coming down the river, you need to throw that water over the wall. And so you have gigantic pumps, room-size engines, they're submarine engines, but they've got to stay dry. And so they realized these vents are open. So the day that we actually have these dams are overtopped, it's going to go straight into these engine rooms and salt these pumps and put them out of business. So they've done that. They've hardened the top of these dams. They're looking forward and realizing the challenges that we face, and we need to support them in that work. So that's one of my key district priorities in this space is lifting those up. You've been involved in that, Cabell, right?

Cabell: 29:20

Yes. Well, and that Watertown Dam specifically, I've been involved with that with the Charles River. 

Will: 29:25

Well, that's a different issue. That's a dam as opposed to a seawall. That is something that people talk about, is removing dams that obstruct the flow of water downward. But the seawalls at the mouth of the Charles and the Mystic are things we need to preserve and in fact raise if we want to preserve most of the neighborhoods in the Charles River Basin and the Mystic Basin.

Peter: 29:44

Is there also maybe a need and an opportunity to provide residents in your geographies of what risks they face as they make decisions, whether it's buying housing or even places to rent if they're going to be there for a long period of time? I know that Zillow, for example, just pulled off of its web platform information on climate risk associated with housing at different geographies, which they had done a pretty good job of providing that information before. And I think probably just the political pressure associated with providing that in terms of how that affects housing prices and so on was something that they decided not to continue. But it does seem to me that there's a real opportunity for local government, state and local government to provide information to communities about what those climate risks are in a way that it also informs individual choices about housing prices and values and whether if they're buying a place that's at risk of flooding, maybe 20 years from now, they actually know that going in. I don't know whether that's anything being done in a kind of legislative way or the private sector seems not to be stepping into this space as they should be.

Will: 30:45

Unfortunately, not sure the public sector is going to go there either. What government's gonna have the, the.

Peter: 30:50

Temerity.

Will: 30:51

The temerity, thank you, to stand up and say, look, you people in this 10% of our jurisdiction, anybody buying your house better think twice. That's a pretty hard thing. That's a pretty hard message for people to deal with. But that's the kind of conversation we need to have. We need to be honest about that, and we need to invest where it makes sense to protect as opposed to retreat. And we can buy some time, maybe buy a lot of time, maybe buy enough time to last out the bending of the global curve and start to see emissions drop towards net zero so sea level rise stops, and we stabilize in a new place. And so buying time is worth doing. 

Will: 31:24

Right now we have a set of technologies that is somewhat compelling, but we can hope that we're going to get even more compelling technologies, technologies that people are gonna widely adopt, even in this country at a scale that if we had better batteries and that lasted longer, were quicker to charge, you know, everybody might be buying EVs because they'd just be so cool. You know, they're not quite cool enough yet that everybody wants to have one because of all the challenges, such as they are, and they're getting better. But imagine they were a lot better. And there's the potential with that. So we I think we should hope, you know, our record of technological improvement across the past 150 years is amazing. I think we should hope that we're gonna have dramatically better technologies than fossil fuels over the coming decades. And the same in the grid space, whether it's small modular reactors that are gonna just be great baseload and make it easier to go green in the grid. So I think there's lots of reasons to hope in the long run. What we need to do is make sure we are making those investments in resiliency and being honest about where we need to make some changes that'll get us the time to get there.

Cabell: 32:27

The flood disclosure is actually in the bond, which is exciting.

Peter: 32:30

It's in what? Sorry?

Cabell: 32:31

It's in the Senate bond bill.

Peter: 32:33

Oh, interesting. 

Will: 32:33

What's in there?

Cabell: 32:34

The flood disclosure, Fernandez's flood disclosure idea of if you have a home that has flooded before or is built in a floodplain, that you have to disclose that. So we have a $3 billion bond that the governor put out, and that's one of the sections. There's a lot of investments there. And so I think we just need to make sure that they stay in there and that we can beef up where we can, whether it's, you know, right now there's an added $315 million for MVP, which is a really great program that local municipalities use, and we can beef that up. There's a lot of really great ideas in there. There's culvert replacements. They are hoping to address some of the hazardous dams that are throughout the state. And because some of them are owned by DCR and some of them are privately owned. And so they know that they need to get in there. So it's pretty big, you know, $3 billion for our bond is, it’s a step up from 2018. I feel like the state is really starting to look at these issues and try to figure out how to address them, but we need the public push behind to make sure that they stay there and that if there's more investment needed, that we have it. So I would just put in a plug for all that the state is doing, because I think that you are thinking about these things and that there will be some movement by the end of this session in the resiliency space. 

Will: 33:46

Yep. I think we will. You know, and the other thing to talk about is drought management. You know, climate change means more rain. It also means more periods of less rain and our ability to manage those and this legislation.

Cabell: 33:56

Because we're in a level two drought right now in the southeast, which people don't realize. I mean, you look outside and you think, what, there's snow on the ground. But we are actually in a significant drought in the southeast. So it's a level two. And the reason the drought is important, drought legislation, but just to even think about this and to understand droughts is that the hotter it is, the more water it sucks and moisture it sucks from the ground. So the more likelihood you are to go into a significant drought faster than you would have been if the temperatures weren't as hot as they are. So resiliency is, the engine is moving, but it just needs to go faster.

Will: 34:33

It needs to go faster, and we need to talk about it front and center and give it the same level of urgency that we have been giving to climate mitigation.

Peter: 34:41

And recognize it's both and, right? 

Will: 34:42

It's a both and. 

Cabell: 34:43

It’s a both and.

Peter: 34:44

It's an absolute both and that doesn't mean we should forgive the metaphor, take our foot off the pedal for reducing emissions, right? We absolutely need to do that too, even though there's the challenge of developing countries that we can't directly solve. We need to do both. And people somehow think incorrectly that we can't do both at the same time. And by focusing on resiliency, that sort of triggers the oh my gosh, we've.

Cabell: 35:03

Given up. 

Peter: 35:04

We've given up. And we can't adapt our way out of the problem. We need resiliency, but we can't be resilient to a three-degree world. We can be resilient to a two-plus-degree world, we hope. But you know, at some point our ability to adapt really diminishes with further climate change, and we absolutely need to do both. And kind of getting that message across, they're not set up as competing constructs is really essential.

Will: 35:27

I think that's right. And it's not like you can really shift resources from one to the other. Sometimes people say, oh, let's shift resources from incarceration to community programs. Well, you know, yeah, but actually it doesn't really work that way. You can't just sort of take it out of one bucket and drop it into the other. Same thing. The bucket that is climate mitigation and reducing carbon is just a completely different kind of bucket than the bucket that's investment in new infrastructure and so forth. Climate mitigation is driven off of electric rates, it's driven heavily by utilities. But infrastructure over here is municipal investments, it's bonding, it's just a whole different game. And so it's not like they transfer. You can think about both and you have to put them together in the big picture.

Matt: 36:06

Great. I think that's a good place to stop, so.

Will: 36:09

Yeah. Super grateful for you guys for bringing the perspective you have. So informed by so many decades of effort in the climate space, and I'm grateful that we had this conversation today. So thank you, Peter. Thank you, Cabell.

Peter: 36:21

Well, thank you, Will. Really appreciate the opportunity.

Cabell: 36:23

Yes, same. Thank you. 

Matt: 36:26

So that's it for this episode. If you'd like to join in the conversation, please head on over to WillBrownsberger.com. As this is an ongoing conversation, Will would love to hear your thoughts on the issue and how it's affecting you. And also subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, so you can know when the next episode is out, where Will will continue to dive into the issues and share his thoughts on them. Thank you for listening and take care.