Help people who are engaging on climate policy, get them to top decision makers and create better policies. That’s the big way to help join that work and really get the word out to the places that matter the most you.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got Andrew Jones of Climate Interactive on the program today. Really excited to have Andrew. He’s done some amazing work. Worked with John Kerry, collaborating with MIT Stanford, and got a lot to talk about Andrew. Welcome to the show.

Happy to be here. Matt, thanks for having me.

Well, tell us a little bit about what your journey was to into the climate space and into the environmental movement. What kind of struck the chord in you that said, this is the path I want to trod?

I was lucky as an undergraduate to be a student of Donella Meadows, one of the writers of the Club of Rome report back in the 1970s that used modeling to think about sustainability, well before this became a really hot issue, and got involved in just overall environmental activism.

And I had this crazy idea when I was in college to carry around my trash with 150 other Dartmouth students for a week to teach ourselves about the long term implications of our actions, if there was no way how it would change our behavior.

This professor saw me do that. She said, that’s a simulation. You closed a feedback loop. And I said, What are you talking about? I’ve never heard of these terms, and that really launched this career of using simulations to help us see and feel. What if we change our behavior today? How much better can we make things in the future? And now, it’s all about climate simulations, and bringing those to us, government and to other countries around the world and a whole fleet of a million people who have used our climate simulations, that’s the short version.

Well, tell us a little bit about these climate simulations. I went to your website, and it is pretty fascinating, you know, kind of walk us through what what kind of led to this, and how you built those out, and how effective are they, how accurate are they, and that type of thing.

You may remember the whole series of negotiations around the world to address climate change. Go back to the 1990s and the Kyoto Protocol, which was the first time the government of the world came together and said, We’re going to figure out how to reduce emissions. But at that time, there was no there was no math on if everyone did US and China and Europe and India and everybody changed their behavior.

No one could tell everyone else if it would do anything to solve the problem. And I was a student at MIT studying system dynamics modeling that professor at MIT at Dartmouth had told me, this is the field to study.

So I was there studying the simulations that possibly could help when I realized that the the main models that were being used would take a week or two to run one scenario, and we had figured out a way and my colleagues to make those scenarios run in less than a second, and I saw the negotiations heading up to the Kyoto, through Kyoto, through the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 and then the Paris agreement would need fast running simulations.

So very quickly, we got elevated to briefing heads of state and helping the US China negotiations ultimately in 2014 to figure out what everyone’s pledges to the Paris agreement would be to get us on track to address this challenge and collaborate between countries, and they just need fast running simulations to run scenarios.

And since then, we’ve done a lot more with US Congress. We met with 128 members of Congress before the passage of the historic Ira bill, and now we have 850 people around the world using it in 85 different countries to help their leaders understand what kinds of policies will actually help in electrification and reducing deforestation and carbon pricing and cutting coal and methane and all of the other drivers. Using simulations to help people see what’s really going to work.

That’s pretty remarkable. And I guess maybe just as geek out a little bit and how it is that you’re able to determine whether these simulations are accurate and reliable and all that type of stuff.

Yeah. So we spent a lot of time with what we call confidence building. How do we know that this is going to give us useful insights? The main way is that there’s a whole suite of existing, what are called integrated assessment models that come out of the US, in labs here and also in Germany, and there’s one in Iasa. In Austria is really prominent, and they publish all of their results, all of these hundreds of scenarios.

And what we’re able to do is say, hey, when we try to create those scenarios in our model, which is called en roads, and you can find it at Climate Interactive, it’s n roads, en roads, when we compare end roads against those other models, we find that it’s consistent. We get the same or close enough results to the really huge, slow, brilliant simulations that are out there.

That’s one of the things that builds our confidence. We also start the model in 1990 and we now have this last 34 ish years to watch and see. Can we start a model in 1990 and track what’s actually happened for 34 years? The answer is yes, and when we don’t, that’s an opportunity to improve our model. Those are two of the methods that we use.

Well, let me ask you about AI. That’s a question that kind of comes up as you’re talking how are you using AI right now, and how do you see it potentially even sharpening your models further and informing us better ways to to stop climate change?

The biggest thing that’s showing up about AI is the potential future energy demand and the data centers that are required in order to power AI. And we’re now talking to a foundation about adding that factor to our simulation, because we have 100 different factors that we want to look at. This is one that a lot of people are asking us about, and it’s so good at looking into the knowledge that’s been created in the past, and so that’s the main way we’re going to be able to go mine a lot of the scenarios and simulations that I’ve mentioned already, using AI in new ways.

However, there’s something that’s missing in how AI helps us understand issues that we think is particularly important that needs to be recognized, which is that AI never tells you why things behave as they do. You can understand from looking at past things that have been written in the internet, a lot of insights about how the climate system might work and the energy transition, but it’ll never do explain to you what’s underneath sufficiently.

And so we’re trying to supplement what people are relying on in AI with a real understanding of what drivers are and not just what results are. So that’s one big thing we’re trying to supplement out there.

That’s fascinating. Well, of course, we know that these simulations have been run for 50 years, and Exxon, for one, had created simulations showing that if the CO two levels went up to 430, parts per million, that all kinds of disastrous things would happen. And they knew this back in the late 70s, early 80s. So I would imagine our models are even more sophisticated and can peg these things even more carefully.

We’ve known these things for a long time, and that’s been published, and scientists have been saying, here are the solutions that are needed, and we’ve known and the principle that we then apply here is really comes from our colleague at MIT who was my advisor when I was a student there. John Sterman said, research shows that showing people research doesn’t work, research shows that showing people research doesn’t work.

And of course, the Exxon scientists back then and ever since, everybody knows quote, unquote, these facts. The challenge is how to engage people in a way where we actually change our minds and behave differently. And we’re not just going to say we’re from MIT, we’re really smart, believe us and comply. We help people think around their own terms. That solves this problem of just throwing research at people, expecting them to change their behavior.

I guess the question is, how do you get that out farther and faster? Because somebody who’s been interviewing a lot of people over the last four years about this maybe you guys haven’t shown up on my radar screen, and you know, not that that’s the biggest thing in the world, but it is kind of an indicator of somebody who’s nosing around in these things and reading a lot about it. And I’m not, I didn’t see you front and center enough.

I mean, because I think what you’re talking about is brilliant stuff, and it’s the kind of stuff that we need to see more of. So like in general publications, I assume that after having the interview with you now, I’ll start seeing your name all over the place where I you know I was probably seeing it, but missing it.

We have 850 people who are around the world who have gone through our eight hour training course. And you. One thing that limits our scope of breadth of impact is it really takes a good bit of time to get good at helping people think through this issue with all its many facets using a tool like a simulation model. So it takes a unique person, and it takes a person who really wants to dig in, but those 850 who are many of them in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Turkey, Mexico, the places that are growing really fast, and they need these capacities even more than in the US and Europe.

It takes a good bit of training, and that’s one thing that slows how far it gets out there. It’s in the MIT Museum and roads. If you walk in there 100 yards straight in, and it’s in a couple European museums. A million people have run the model in some way. It’s in a lot of classrooms now. So professors, I’m going to University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to teach 50 business school students, undergraduates, and then MBAs in three days.

And it’s very straightforward to give it to the students, let them play with it. And it’s spreading a good bit as a game. That’s what I’ll do Friday and Saturday, is run a role play game version of it. And it takes a good bit of time to learn how to facilitate a role play, game like that, but it’s one of the ways that it is diffusing, is in that form.

Well, definitely the last piece that you just mentioned seems the most promising to get it out there to young people is put it into game form, and not just young people. Maybe you have ideas of this Matt of how to turn it into a digital form. We’ve talked some with Microsoft, Xbox and others about imagining a better game version.

But the basics of it is this, on Friday, I will say to 50 students, I am Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the UN and you are eight different parties, stakeholders around the world who are trying to address climate change. And I’ll have Greta Thunberg and climate activists sit on the floor, and I make the most conservative students in the class, of which there are many, play the environmental activists. And I’ll find the environmental students, and they will play Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil and conventional energy.

They sit at the top of the of the classroom. I give them candy, which they can hand out to students as kind of money. But then you also have clean tech and Jair Bolsonaro from Brazil runs the land forest, and ag Xi Jinping is there with China. Sheik Hasina from Bangladesh, runs the developing countries. And we have all these different parties who get a piece of paper that says, here’s your position. And I say, all right, you’ve got an hour and a half solve climate change, talk to each other, and they will propose, I think we should electrify everything.

I think we should ban deforestation. I think we should have a carbon price of $73 a ton. And they get a chance to advocate for their position, and then in a simulation, see how much does it help? Then they stop their speeches, and they go talk to each other, and they work out deals and walk around in someone else’s shoes for a couple hours, because they’re playing a position very different from themselves and finding their voice, which is what we need the world doing right now, finding a voice grounded in the best available science.

That’s how we like to use it in education. And then over the next two weeks after the game, they get in a team of five and sit down with the simulation and construct their dream scenario to limit warming to no more than 1.8 degrees, or 1.5 or 2.2 if it’s too difficult.

Wow, that’s a great exercise, and I think it is totally engaging. And I think of it as as a trial attorney, we say you’ve got to know the case from the other side of the V where to really know your case and how to prepare it and present it.

That’s it, and that’s what we’re training students to do to be more effective in these often polarized conversations. What you’re saying is absolutely essential understand the other case, right? And it’s more persuasive. And I think that we’ve kind of lost that as an art form in in the political dialog, it seems loggerheads so much of the time and yelling at each other versus I can stand in your shoes for a minute here and see some of the points you’re making.

Well, I think we’ve lost that in the publicly visible political dialog, but I’m happy to report having been underneath that level, some with the aides in Congress and the advisors and the think tanks that talk to the advisors and the aides in places like Congress, that there’s a whole nother level of conversation that is. And much more rational.

I’m happy to say what we see in the news is not the real conversation. That’s theater. Happily, there’s more that’s going on now. It’s not always going in the direction that we love, but know that it is happening, and people and talking that way still matters in the halls that where power really gets delivered.

So yeah, tell us a little bit more about where you see your work going over the next few years, and what are the wins and maybe what are the challenges with the new Trump administration in terms of getting them to take climate more seriously in the coming years.

I think the next big area, particularly here in the United States, is to be thinking seriously about the kinds of solutions that are being proposed relative to what’s really needed. And in particular, there’s a whole suite of new technologies that are being considered as high value climate solutions, and we’re doing the math, but often finding that they don’t help quite as much as we had dreamed.

One of them is a new technology, like fusion, nuclear fusion, or thorium fission. Like could we find a new solution, a new energy source. And when we model the potential, which, if you ask people on the street, hey, if we had a new, cheap energy source that didn’t produce any carbon dioxide, how much of the problem would that solve, and how fast people think it would be a very big contributor to preventing climate change.

But when we actually simulate the effect of fusion and its ability to get rid of coal and gas in particular and reduce emissions, what we find is it takes so long for that industry to grow that it isn’t nearly as beneficial as some other approaches that are out there.

So it’s been that humbling experience of seeing how long it would take, and this modest contribution of a new technology and how to engage people of the possibilities of new solutions, like something like a new energy source, or geothermal, those kinds of solutions with the appropriate expectations. And it’s not just that, but planting a trillion trees is similar. It takes a long time to plant a lot of trees and then have them grow up to be big enough to remove a significant amount of carbon.

That neither of those two solutions really do much to limit temperature in the future. Whereas we know there are a range of things that really help, things that particularly lead us to not burn coal, oil and gas, protect forests and reduce methane, which help over this next 10 to 15 years, not 20 or 30 years out into the future, that’s been one of the biggest challenges, is the difference between these high leverage and lower leverage actions, and how to engage people well, on that uncomfortable fact.

What do you see, given your research as to the top 5-10, technologies and things that we should be doing that are going to have the biggest bang per buck?

Well, the big theme is, anything that keeps us from burning coal, oil and gas in the next 10 or 15 years. So then you ask, what does that the clean energy revolution is going so outrageously well right now. We have such a boom in wind, solar, electrification, these zero carbon sources that are growing, they have been growing and get deployed more.

And in that case, now is better than new, as Jonathan Foley said, deploying what we have today in clean energy is what’s so effective, and energy efficiency, not using energy in the first place, in our buildings, in industry, in transportation sectors, help so much with the clean energy revolution. We need electrification in order to shift demand over to electricity, to use the wind and the solar and those sources really well.

So that’s a lot on the kind of carrot side. And the inflation Reduction Act really helped so much make those incentives to go after things that help us with clean energy, that help keep us from burning coal, oil and gas in the near term. But what we also lack right now is, you could say the stick that is direct pressure on coal, oil and gas.

What does do that? Carbon pricing, citizen climate lobbying. Other groups have advocated for and now 25% of global emissions is covered by a carbon price, a relatively modest one, but it has been, the coverage has been increasing, and having Reggie in New England and states in the US, like out in California, having regional carbon prices helps you directly burn coal, oil and gas, which.

Is what helps the climate the most. And then there are all these conversations about other direct pressure on coal, oil and gas. Jay Inslee in Washington State really did a good bit of work about not putting natural gas infrastructure into new homes so we don’t lock ourselves into using natural gas. And then anything that keeps you from drilling, not building pipelines and other things that would have us directly not build coal, oil and gas infrastructure.

That’s my high level summary of what really works on the carbon dioxide side, methane is really important as well and protecting forests. So my big five, anything that keeps us from burning coal, oil, gas, reduces methane and protects forests. There’s my big five.

That’s great. So let me ask you about California energy policy, because it certainly is something that I’m familiar with to a certain extent, and also is it a good model for going forward? Certainly a number of blue states have followed some or all of those policies. Are they going to be sufficient, or they insufficient running through your model?

So I’m mostly going to pass on California because we’re we have a global model. We’re looking at those international dynamics. Now, when we go to states, we ask, we’ve done a lot of workshops for states, and ask them to think global and act state. And when we do that, California, clearly, in the US is the model for how to do it.

They’ve really led the way in a lot of innovations. But I think I would defer to you, Matt about picking apart more of the bills and Newsom’s policies, although I do love that he signed on to beyond oil and gas Alliance and other things that put pressure on oil and gas production.

Yeah, so I guess in terms of phasing out the internal combustion engine in California. Do you think that’s something number one top priority. It is top tier, absolutely top tier.

And given the unstoppable force that is the electric vehicle revolution around the world, I think it is appropriate to talk about that kind of internal combustion engine phase out, just because we’re not leaving the world hanging, that the potential for both electric vehicles and building the needed infrastructure that along the same time, but also other forms in public transportation, etc, that could complement it. I think we can handle that, and we won’t just leave people hanging.

This may be a little bit outside your lane, but I can’t help but ask the tariffs on Chinese vehicles, electric vehicles that are coming in the US, is that something that is counterproductive to what the overall climate needs?

If it just on a purely climate basis, we need more electric vehicle competition, and we need lower prices and reducing tariffs. I would think, would it help that? So the climate needs lower tariffs there, but I understand that’s not what drive it. What’s driving the policy. So it certainly isn’t happening quite as much. There are other things that are related to tariffs that are interesting right now, carbon, border adjustment mechanisms, sea BAMs. Have you heard of these?

Oh, yeah, I was a proponent of those back in 2020 when I ran for President. I don’t know if you’re familiar with my my background there. I’m not, say more, Matt, tell me.

I ran against Trump in 2020 in the Republican primary, primarily to address his unconsciousness on the environment. And I had read up about what they were doing in Europe on the C bands, and I thought that seemed like a brilliant way to kind of deal with carbon usage and pollution, and saying, hey, we’ll put industries that are importing products into the US on the same footing as US manufacturers, which it seems like a no brainer and and it helps American workers, American industry to say, hey, we’re not going to get out competed by China that might be polluting a lot more to create that same product.

Yeah. Well, it may have some legs. What Europe is doing could diffuse around the world. We’re watching it closely. It probably has a chance to diffuse more than a carbon price on its own. And so that’s one reason sea BAMs could be so powerful.

There’s some new life in the US, where Senator Cassidy in Louisiana has been talking about it, but more purely as a way to protect American industry from Chinese imports, is he actually as a Republican, proposing sea BAMs when it comes to relating with. China, so I’m tracking that pretty closely with Senator Cassidy.

Yeah, I think it makes sense. It’s it’s not, it doesn’t have to be a partisan issue. It can be, hey, it’s a win, win situation for American workers that they don’t get out competed or pushed out of their jobs because countries like China are polluting and using workers that they aren’t giving them a fair wage, and so on and so forth. So we kind of have our workers and our industry competing on a fair playing field.

That’s the idea. Be interested to see what happens in the next few years on C BAMs,

Yeah, I guess the another question is on the IRA, in terms of how would you rate it in terms of its effectiveness, using the models that you have as well as, where do you see it going over the next four years? Do you see it being gutted? Or do you see being able to make good arguments to the Republican Congress and Senate saying, hey, let’s keep this thing as designed.

The IRA was incredibly effective at reducing US emissions. Most of the modeling out of Princeton, out of rhodium, out of this group that has this EPS model, out of energy innovation, showed how much emissions would go down if it was followed. Now it’s only half of what’s needed. I like to think of the effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions as like scissors, and all of the work to promote the clean energy revolution is one half of the scissors.

The other half I talked about earlier is direct pressure on fossil fuels themselves, removing subsidies and or carbon pricing or something to discourage it more directly is needed. So it’s halfway there in that way, but so effective now we’re watching closely how much is not going to happen that we were expecting to happen because of the new administration.

I’m here in North Carolina, in Asheville, North Carolina, and we’ve seen like North Carolina is one of the main places that new investment is happening in clean energy because of the IRA and we see so much in other red states that we’re hoping to have some state leadership to fight for that clean energy revolution, funding incentives, because there’s so much job growth, economic growth that’s coming from it. I’m confident more of that will happen.

But we’re just, you know, weeks into the conversation of what it’s going to look like after the initial Bluster of the IRA is going to get shut down, which is kind of what we were hearing.

I’m more confident that we’re going to see lasting impact, partly because of the incentives in these states and in local leadership, but partly because the clean energy revolution is relatively unstoppable on its own merits, just economically right now,

That’s fantastic. Yeah, tell us, how any of us can get involved and contribute to the work that you’re doing and keep this moving?
Yeah, the main way is to go to Climate Interactive, and we need people using the simulation in the classrooms and with their policy makers. And there’s a whole way to do that become what we call an inroads climate ambassador, teacher, facilitator, and of course, we’re always looking for new funding partners to bring this to the world. And the latest big effort is to bring it to the countries that are growing their emissions the fastest.

Those are the middle income countries, China, India, Indonesia, Argentina, where you are, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Turkey. Help people who are engaging on climate policy, get them to top decision makers too and create better policies. So that’s the big way to help join that work and really get the word out to the places that matter the most.

That’s great. Appreciate you being out of the program. And just for everybody’s info, some of your collaborators are very impressive. You got MIT and Stanford working with you and others. So it kind of shows that the high quality of work that you’re doing, and greatly appreciate that. It heartens me when I see such talented folks working on these issues that around the world.

Yeah, and MIT has just launched several new initiatives, the MIT climate project, it really is one of the cornerstone efforts that is pulling together dozens and dozens of professors and researchers there. So it’s a new project and a new something out of the business school, MIT, Climate Policy Center, and where they’re really trying to get to top decision makers, and inroads is one of the tools that they’re using to get to those top decision makers.

Well, that’s fantastic. Thank you so much for being out of the program, Andrew, and enlightening all of us to the great work that you’re doing. And we’ll try to spread the word as far and as wide as we can

Well, thank you for doing the same, Matt with this podcast, and getting all these voices out there and into our ears.

Thank you again, and we’ll look forward to maybe touching base with you in, you know, months and years to come to hear what the updates are.

Okay. Hope so. Thank you.

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