It's Getting Hot In Here » danworth

On Gore, Tipping Points, the Law of the One, and Google’s New Climate Maven

danworth — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:03:14 +0000

Blame It On Rio

In June of 1972, some 35 years ago, a group of future-thinking leaders met in Sweden for the first United Nations Convention on the Human Environment. By the end of a whirlwind week, they had issued the Stockholm Statement, established what is now known as UNEP, and given birth to the modern field of international environmental law.

20 years later, in June of 1992, just one month before he would be chosen as Clinton’s running mate, Al Gore was scheduled to present as the head of the Congressional Delegation at the NGO ‘Global Forum’ at the Earth Summit, an event that spawned the Convention on Climate Change, the precursor to the Kyoto Protocol.

Unknown to Gore, a group of 30 rabble-rousing teens and 20-somethings were waiting for him the day of his talk. Organizing themselves into “US Youth at Rio” – in Brazil to push for Bush I to sign the Biodiversity Convention and to call for real leadership on the environment – they somehow got to Gore’s staffers, and asked, quite audaciously, to be allowed to introduce him.

One 22 year old in particular, Aimee Christensen, was up the night before, working with her colleagues to write the statement they hoped to give. By the end of the all-night session, Aimee was chosen to give the speech.

When Aimee arrived at the venue the next day, she was told that due to limited time, the introduction was a no-go. Undaunted, Aimee was waiting when the 44 year old Senator from Tennessee arrived at the venue. She introduced herself with speech in hand to ask for five minutes to speak and introduce him. Al Gore thought about it long and hard, and then – amazingly – said yes.

Gore took the stage, thanked the audience, and let them know that he was going to let a group of young Americans speak before him. He wasn’t sure exactly what they were going to say, but they were passionate about it.

Aimee and the group of US youth took the stage and proceeded to give their speech to an audience of 600. They were interrupted frequently – not by critical adults – but by loud applause, and finished to a standing ovation.

The Law of the Few

This past Saturday night things came full circle, as nearly 15 years later, Aimee again gave an inspirational talk to introduce Mr. Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth at the 17th Annual Conference of the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS) at George Washington University Law School.

In the past decade and a half, Aimee has built on her revolutionary beginnings to make a big impact in the public, private, and governmental sectors – most recently as the new “Climate Maven” at Google.org. Apparently, her boss called her that one day and they went with it.

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, describes Mavens as the information specialists, one of the three key ingredients – along with Salespeople and Connectors – in helping social epidemics reach a critical tipping point.
Gladwell calls this his Law of the Few, as in there are a select few who really move society to the tipping point. To understand Gladwell’s concepts and these three types in my own language, I have chosen mental representatives.

In my mind, the Maven is a smarter Cliff Claven, not just in possession of knowledge, but excited by the data and eager to share what they know. And that is an accurate description of Aimee. Every time I meet with her to talk about new ways to address the climate crisis, I come away with pages of notes and several hours of online research.

But to call Aimee a Maven is to sell her short. She is also a Connector.

According to Gladwell, the Connecter is a special type of person with a knack for bringing the world together. The Connecters are the Laurie David’s of any group. And that is also Aimee. With most of my colleagues, there is usually an exchange of contacts, as we share our social data in a somewhat open source network. But when I talk with Aimee, it is all take and no give on my part.

Last April, the head of the NAELS Board held a small dinner and reception for Nobel prize winner Wangari Maathai in conjunction with the 2nd California Campus Climate Neutral Summit. I was lucky enough to get an invitation to attend both events, and thought this was finally my chance to pay Aimee back for all of her support.

“You should come down to Santa Barbara,” I wrote her. “We are putting together a fantastic event and would love to have you speak. If you need an incentive, you could meet an inspirational Nobel winner!” “Thanks,” she responded. “Your event looks fantastic and I hope to make it. As for Wangari, I’ll be seeing her up here on the Google campus next week.” Foiled again!

But perhaps the most applicable title for Aimee is as a Salesperson, someone with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing.

I have always thought of the Salesperson as the Lee Iacocca of the group – somehow able, as a new CEO, to sell Congress on supporting a flagging Chrysler company in 1979, with a $1.5 billion Loan Guarantee, just as they had supported airline and railroad bail-outs in the past.

Aimee’s salesperson personality hit home last week. Although I have considered becoming both a vegetarian and vegan several times, and even had a short stint as a vegetarian (to impress a girl) in high school and college, I have not been basing my food orders these days on those principles.

Enter Aimee this past week. During our first meal together at a Vietnamese restaurant in Georgetown, Aimee gently but firmly convinced me to reconsider the carbon impact of the food I eat, and urged me to order lower on the food chain. At Bertucci’s Saturday night I got the Minestrone and salad.

The Law of the One

So, with all due respect to Gladwell and his Law of the Few, it is time to recognize the Law of One. As it turns out, Aimee is the Tipping Point.

As a first year law student at Stanford in 1999, before climate change was on most of the world’s radar, she ran a sucessful campaign to get the school to commit to a responsible climate investment policy.

As a founding Governing Board member of the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS), Aimee brought in some heavy hitting speakers to a Seachange Conference at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto and recruited more for the initial NAELS board.

As a driving force behind Environment2004, Aimee connected the environment and climate change with voters’ values and top concerns several years before most others did.

As the founder and director of Christensen Global Strategies, Aimee created something our of nothing, connecting to top level clients and helping to solve some of the country’s most advanced environmental problems.

And now, at Google.org, Aimee will see the world’s top projects come across her desk. She will see the seeds of projects from the next generations of Edisons and Einsteins. And I have no doubt she will play a central role
in giving the best and brightest projects and young entrepreneurs the support and funding they need to change the world.

Creating a 10^-90Googol of Aimee’s

And the difficult but obvious task for Google, the country, and the globe is how to mass produce Aimee Christensen – and the other walking tipping points like her out there – and send them out to learn, teach, and connect people, while persuading them and helping them to change their lives.

And through 1 tipping point that moves 10,000,000,000 people, or 1000 tipping points that move 10,000,000 people each, or 10,000,000,000 individual tipping points, we must figure out how to sustainably support 10 billion people on this planet by the end of the next half century and beyond.

So good luck to Aimee, Google.org, and all of us! And I will close with words from Aimee herself, delivered this past Saturday night, fifteen years after her bold introduction of Al Gore half a world away:

“Global Warming is the first most clear impact of our unsustainable path to date, and the good news is that with our climate system, as well as on other ecosystems, reducing our impact on nature will also create many co-benefits like better health, better jobs, greater income (from sustainable livelihoods), and improved quality of life.”

…

A recent report by the Global Footprint Network and World Wildlife Fund found we are consuming the planet’s resources 25 percent faster than the earth can renew them, a rate unprecedented in human history. To keep it up, ‘we’ll need two planet’s worth of natural resources by mid-century.’”

…

I see our planetary degradation as an opportunity for us – we can make the world a better place, we can come together to fight against the common challenge to which no one is immune.

This is the chance for all of us to be activists, all of us to be advocates. Those of you who are law students have incredible opportunities to make a difference right now – and you will have many opportunities coming your way as attorneys. As law students you can join with Campus Climate Neutral, bringing together business and engineering students and show your universities and communities how to go carbon neutral and save money. You can lobby for investment responsibility policies to minimize the extent to which your university’s endowment is financing further global warming. And you can engage our political leaders at the local, state, and federal levels.

To all of us, it’s time for more.

Don’t be afraid to be an advocate

One Hundred Years Later, Will Higher Education Answer Theodore Roosevelt’s Call To Action?

danworth — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:40:55 +0000

In 1903, a 45-year old Theodore Roosevelt stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon in Northern Arizona . He looked out over one of this country’s great wonders and advised the nation to “Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”

A little over a century later, I am sweating about 175 miles south in the 95 degree heat of Tempe , Arizona.

And although the Grand Canyon is still intact, we have not listened to the advice of this great Republican leader on a global scale. We have, in fact, marred this globe, and marred it badly. And we need to fix it. And to do that we need to build a new world. “Leaving it as it is”, complete with its 6 billion greennhouse gas spewing citizens, is no longer an option.

I am in town for a Conference set up by Arizona State University (ASU) and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) to confront this very inconvenient truth.

The Role of Higher Education in Creating a Sustainable World has brought together 650 participants from 200 universities and colleges in 46 states, 4 canadian provinces and 5 nations. These sustainability leaders, from 18-80, will spend the week trying to figure out how to harness the resources and energy of higher education to ensure that we Will to our kids at least as many global resources as we inherited.

The largest campus sustainability gathering to date is serving as both the launching pad for Arizona State University ‘s revolutionary new School of Sustainability and as a visioning session for a new AASHE initiative to get every University President in the country to commit their institution to long-term Climate Neutrality.

ASU’s School of Sustainability runs undergraduate and graduate programs to prepare students to address the complex, interdisciplinary challenges of building a sustainable future. The School and its research equivalent form the core of ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability. According to Conference Co-Chair and ASU sustainability guru, James Buizer, “This is our way to make sustainability a basic tenet of everything ASU does. It has been a transformational exercise.”

The other Conference co-host, AASHE, is an association dedicated to advancing sustainability at all levels of higher education. AASHE was launched in 2005 as the fusion of EFS West and the Consortium for Environmental Education in Medicine (CEEM) and is off to a fast start.

AASHE’s bold new Climate Neutral campaign asks Universities to continuously and aggressively improve their efficiency and reduce their carbon output until they eventually eliminate and counteract their overall contribution to global warming. While the concept of Climate Neutrality may sound radical to some, and a commitment of this magnitude could seem risky to administrators, Conference Co-Chair Tony Cortese, a Senior AASHE Advisor, accurately notes that “at this point not acting is an even bigger risk“.

And there is such vast untapped potential in higher education! As AASHE Board Chair Sherri Tonn puts it, “Universities are like small cities entirely filled with people dedicated to learning. Campus communities can stop adding to climate change and begin to take care of our planet.”

Moreover, the great campuses of this country, acting together, in an open source analysis of sustainability, can do even more. Near the end of the Conference, Mr. Buizer, noted that the staff at ASU had “learned a great deal from our guests”, were “extremely pleased to have served as host” and “had a wonderful time seeing old friends and meeting new ones.” Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful, long-term, sustainable friendship to me.

Renewable Student Energy

Best of all, throughout the week, a stream of renewable, youth and student human power flowed through the Conference – power that will drive the increasingly efficient engine of higher education and generate the leaders, ideas, and technologies needed to create a sustainable world.

The National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS) presented its work on its flagship project Campus Climate Neutral – a graduate student project at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, to develop a climate neutral plan (pdf) for the UC – Santa Barbara campus. Standing on the shoulders of giants, the students worked from revolutionary climate neutral models and plans at Middlebury and Oberlin (pdf).

Several representatives from Energy Action, a coalition of youth and student groups running the Campus Climate Challenge, also wandered the ASU halls – soaking up knowledge, teaching, and planning. The group, whose leaders names you will surely know 10 years from now, include:

Already-famous Yale dropout and Energy Action co-founder Billy Parish;
Visionary organizer Dave Rosenfeld from the Student PIRGs;
Wise-beyond-his-years, shareholder engagement and university endowment expert Mark Orlowski from the Sustainable Endowments Institute; and
New Age Cornell graduate student, Dan Roth, Co-Chair of the Youth Action Team of the US Partnership for the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.

These young leaders are all touring the country, launching and implementing innovative campus solutions while engaging in an unprecedented, self-cloning process, trying to enable, train, and mobilize thousands more just like them.

They hope to leave the next generation of students with exponentially more American human resources than they were given. It is truly inspirational to watch and gives me hope.

By the Time We Get to Arizona

In many ways, the location of this gathering of visionaries seems appropriate as our generation looks to the future. While many of us Ivy Leaguers and Northerners flew in from frost warnings, and are preparing to hunker down for an extended fall and winter, Arizona is warm and drenched in sun. Everywhere I look around campus I see ASU’s mascot – Sparky the Sun Devil – reminding me of this state’s unmatched, year-round solar potential and the jobs and prosperity a new renewable energy industry would bring to the area.

And in this century, we are seeing another bold Republican, John McCain, from Arizona himself, perhaps inspired by the words of the great Theodore Rex, breaking with powerful interests in his party, and pushing for the first national legislation limiting global warming emissions.

If he is succesful, my great-grand-children, if they return to Arizona a century from now, may walk through the streets of their generation’s Texas – only their’s will be a sustainable energy capital. We can only hope.

Teddy Roosevelt closed his Grand Canyon speech with a flourish, “We have gotten past the stage, my fellow-citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we treat any part of our country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation, whether it is the forest, the water, the scenery. Whatever it is, handle it so that your children’s children will get the benefit of it.”

Let’s hope and make sure that AASHE, ASU, NAELS, Energy Action, and US higher education in general – with its 15 million students, 4,000 plus universities, research labs, brilliant professors, and powerful administrators – finally heed Teddy’s advice and take the lead.

If we won’t, who will?

Keeping the Faith(s): May God(s) Help Us

danworth — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 11:31:30 +0000

On Monday, in the wake of remarks that have caused anger and intense debate throughout the world, Pope Benedict XVI told Muslim diplomats that “our future” depends on good relations between followers of the Catholic and Muslim faiths. His Holiness quoted John Paul II calling for “reciprocity in all fields” and urging religious freedom and tolerance.

This past week, I had the incredible honor of presenting on a panel with religious leaders from around the world as part of the Climate Institute‘s Summit on Climate Destabilization. The panel, chaired by famed founder of Earth Day, Denis Hayes, featured revolutionary leaders from the Jewish, Presbyterian, Catholic, Christian, Muslim, and Mormon faiths, all united in efforts to urge their religious communities to take action to stop global warming. As each visionary leader spoke, I watched the rest of the panel nodding, taking notes, and cheering each other on.

“Good relations” and “reciprocity in all fields” indeed!

Jo Anne Lyon of World Hope International spoke about her groups work;
The Reverend Sally Bingham, Executive Director of The Regeneration Project of Interfaith Power & Light talked about uniting faiths around climate solutions;
Mr. Walter Grazer, Director of the Environmental Justice Program for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops provided a Catholic Perspective;
Rabbi Warren G. Stone quoted from the Torah, telling the crowd to “be bold”; and
Attorney Joseph Cannon provided a Mormon perspective.

Of particular note was a Presbyterian initiative, spearheaded by Pamela Mcvety, asking the Church’s 2.4 million members to “bear witness” to global warming and Go Carbon Neutral in their own lives. This revolutionary commitment made by the national body of what Mrs. Mcvety jokingly called the “frozen chosen” – a religion in which conservatives are estimated to outnumber liberals 2-1 – shows the amazing potential of religion to overcome political and cultural differences in the face of a common, global threat.

In the session’s final presentation, Dr. Khalid Shaukat, Advisor for Scientific Issues for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), quoted passages from the Qu’uran, stressing the duty of all Muslims to protect creation.

A response to the Pope’s remarks by Dr. Shaukat’s group, the Islamic Society of North America, notes that: “It is true that some Muslim rulers deviated from Qur’anic principles by using political or military power to oppress other religious communities. However, such actions were exceptional, which is why the oldest and most diverse Christian and Jewish communities were found in Muslim lands up to the modern period.”

Before last week, I had this vision of two of the most influential religions in the world locked in a death spiral over conflicting religious values. But after listening to these visionary leaders from potentially conflicting religious and world views turn the issue of climate change – potentially the ultimate divider – into the ultimate uniter, I have faith.

Their talks highlighted the huge base of common beliefs – respect for creation, one’s neighbors, and future generations – that these great religions and all of humanity share. Each of these visionary leaders has begun the long term process of changing the behavior of the more than 3 billion people that their faiths represent. I am humbled, inspired, and hopeful.

Catch the Wave: Get Up, Stand Up

danworth — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:25:57 +0000

This past weekend, I joined 110,000 men and women, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists, from age 8 months – 80 years, and engaged in a century old fall ritual.

Our loosely affiliated group came together from across the country and around the world to celebrate pure person power at its highest level. The participants we watched used no machines, no electricity, and no oil. Instead – full of carbs, sugars, and water – they put on an inspiring display of human power and collaboration.

In the end, the University of Michigan Wolverines football team prevailed 41-17.
NCAA college football is an amazing game and quite a U.S. phenomenon. In England and Europe, college athletics play a relatively insignificant role in the sports scene. Here in the US, we recorded an amazing attendance of 32,641,526 visits to division 1 football games in 2005.

So this past Saturday, my wife and I left the comfort of our home and walked four blocks to Michigan Stadium. We stood in line to get in to the stadium, stood in line to get into our section, and spent the next 4 hours with our butts smushed into 17 inch seats. We got poured on during an hour long rain delay, but stuck it out until (close) to the bitter end.

Midway through the 3^rd quarter, the crowd got bored – we were, after all, playing Central Michigan. In perfect sync, 1,000-2,000 Michigan students stood up and sat down. Around them, 18,000-20,000 of their classmates followed suit. In the next section down, 10,000 graduate students, alumni, and Ann Arbor locals did the same.

Before you could say Big Ten Champions, 100,000 people were following their lead – standing up and sitting down – creating a human wave that made its way around the stadium 3 full times, engaging and mobilizing us all. Just to challenge ourselves, we got tricky. We sped up the wave. We ran the wave in slow motion. On the final time around, two separate waves originating in the student section traveled clockwise and counter-clockwise around the stadium – crossing in the corner of one end zone – and returning to the point from which they had originated. A small collection of student actions had sparked a sports fan “tipping point” – transforming 100,000 distinct individuals into one, collaborative, complex human system.

This year, college students across the country will take on the Hurculean task of doing something very similar but far more challenging – starting a massive wave that they hope will sweep across the country – catching up professors, administrators, alumni, staff, and locals in its current.

The Campus Climate Challenge is the bold and ambitious project of Energy Action – a coalition of today’s leading youth and student environmental and environmental justice groups. Instead of literally standing up, though, students will push their campus communities to figuratively get up – and stand up – to the Challenge of global warming.

In graduate programs across the country, a similar wave will began to break – engaging the next set of lawyers, architects, engineers, divinity scholars, business people, and other soon-to-be professionals in 21^st century consulting projects. Campus Climate Neutral, run by the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS) will give graduate students the tools they need to join their undergraduate brothers and sisters. Short on extracurricular time, but flush with research hours, they will work with their professors and university staff to help identify over a billion dollars in potential campus energy savings, and speed the walk down paths to capture those savings. Santa Barbara students have already gotten 1/200^th of the way there, highlighting $5 million in savings by 2020 last year. At US business schools, the Green Campus Initiative, run by Net Impact, will engage business students and MBA graduates – helping them to use business skills to improve their universities’ impact on the environment, as well as to raise awareness of environmental problems and solutions among emerging business leaders.

All of these efforts will require thousands, if not millions, of coordinated, collaborative campus actions to be effective. Thousands of bike trips to campus. Thousands of light switches turned off and thermostats turned down. Thousands of signatures gathered. Thousands of hours on group projects – plugging away in libraries and touring campus facilities. Thousands of lectures, discussions, and panels. Thousands of light bulbs changed, windows replaced, and new vehicles purchased.

The ultimate success of these campaigns will depend on how well today’s young leaders are able to overcome the hurdles that have historically plagued student organizing. Their lack of power, knowledge, and experience, high turnover rate, limited time, and the steep learning curve in understanding and changing a complex university system will make this a truly monumental Challenge.

But this weekend gave me hope. Even though tackling the impending threat of climate change is not nearly as fun or inspiring as NCAA football, if the 15 million students on today’s campuses can be innovative, collaborative, and determined enough, they will be able to harness the same behavioral trends that pull millions of people off of their couches and porches and out to college football stadiums each Saturday morning. And together we will all guide a giant wave that will sweep over the 4,000 campuses in the country, riding it to a more sustainable future.

So this fall, keep an eye out, start paddling, and catch the wave as it breaks over your campus. I’m in a coffee shop in Ann Arbor and I think I see it coming now…Whoooooooooaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!

Why I “Hate” the Yankees but Love Republicans

danworth — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:26:40 +0000

Two nights ago I sat in the right field seats at Fenway Park and giddily watched the Red Sox demolish the hapless Baltimore Orioles. Sox third baseman Mike Lowell – hit in the head by a pitch early in the second inning – not only stayed in the game, but played the hero, diving into the stands to catch a foul ball, recording two key hits, and stealing third base with a head first slide to help the Sox win. Man, I love the Red Sox!

And as my Newton North high school buddies and I sipped $4 beers, we watched the left field scoreboard record a loss for the “Evil Empire”, more commonly known as George Steinbrenner’s New York Yankees, moving the Sox within 2 games of first place.

Now I don’t know Derek Jeter, Joe Torre, or Steinbrenner personally, but I “hate” them. I’ve grown up learning to hate the Yankees, Yankee fans, and for that matter everything that is baseball in New York. I can still clearly remember sobbing along with Wade Boggs when the Sox lost a heartbreaker (think Buckner five-hole) to the Mets in 1986.

In many ways my baseball upbringing mirrored my political upbringing in the liberal haven of Newton, Massachusetts. My parents are educators / artists / activists / pacifists who marched against the Vietnam war, spent their lives enjoying and respecting nature, and instilled in me the strong liberal values of civil rights, human rights, and lives dedicated to the public interest. I like to thank them for my financial struggles.

They also, intentionally or not, shielded me from the corrupting influence of Bush 1, Reagan, and the sprinkling of Republicans brave enough to live in Newton. As a result, I came to “hate” Republicans much in the same way I “hate” the Yankees. As a faceless force of evil standing for everything wrong with this country.

Five years ago, I was rudely uprooted from my liberal soil to follow my wife to Michigan to be close to her family, who happen to be Republicans. During my first year in Michigan I got a hands-on, crash course, in Conservative political discourse, primarily from my father-in-law. We discussed Bush vs. Kerry, global warming facts vs. myths, and American capitalism vs. European Social Democracy. It didn’t go well.

And why should it have? He was a Republican, so I “hated” him, his political party, and everything he stood for. I wasn’t trying to broaden my horizons, see his points, or learn. I knew what was right and was trying to win the argument against the enemy.

Over time, however, we have both made quite a bit of progress and gotten quite an education. My father-in-law agrees that society needs to reduce its energy consumption and CO2 emissions, he just doesn’t think that government regulators can get us there – and he’s probably right. I argue that leaving it to voluntary corporate action won’t get us there either – and I’m probably right. And we both think every day citizens – both Democrat and Republican – need to do more to get us there, and we are both right.

Over many hours of heated debate, we have learned to translate each others’ comments into a common, solution-based dialect of English – and can now actually work together to find solutions. We are no longer trying to win the argument, but are struggling together – melding our respective faith in corporations, governments, and citizens – to tackle the biggest issue of our time. Through our discussions, we have now come to know, love, and trust each other, and I must admit, it has made it awfully hard to “hate” him.

In fact, I know I love at least 5 Republicans. And that number keeps growing.

At base, my new family and their Conservative friends are a group of fallible, complex people, who share most of the values that I do. They are my mother-in-law, father-in-law, brother-in-law, sister -in-law, and sister-in-law once removed, and soon to be nephew/niece. And I love them very much.

So while I still “hate” the Yankees, and always will (although I’m sure Derek Jeter is a great guy to get a beer with), and while I still hate the current Republican leadership and am frustrated to tears by the candidate that my father-in-law put into power, I am no longer able, in good conscious, to “hate” Republicans.

And if 30 million of my environmentalist, New York Times reading, public interest, fellow Democrats could just learn to do the same. And if 30 million of my in-laws’ flag-waving, Wall Street Journal reading, pro-business fellow Republican could do the same. Perhaps we could begin to work together and actually make progress on issues – like global warming – that threaten the broad base of common American values that we all share – values that will surely be rendered meaningless if we can’t figure out how to work together in this country.