Episode 166: Costas Samaras, Carnegie Mellon University
Today's guest is Costa Samaras, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
Costa Samaras began his career as a civil engineer working on several multibillion-dollar infrastructure megaprojects in New York, including rebuilding the subway line underneath the World Trade Center after September 11th. After pursuing his Masters in Public Policy at NYU and his Ph.D. in Public Policy and Civil & Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Costa served as a Senior Engineer and Policy Analyst at the RAND Corporation and an Adjust Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon. Costa has also led analyses on energy security, strategic basing, and infrastructure issues faced by the Department of Defense. Since 2014, Costa has been an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He has published studies examining electric and autonomous vehicles, renewable electricity, transitions in the energy sector, was a contributor to the 4th National Climate Assessment and was one of the Lead Author contributors to the Global Energy Assessment. Costa also developed the course "Climate Change Adaptation for Infrastructure," one of the first civil and environmental engineering courses in the world that teaches climate change adaptation to engineers.
Costa joins me to talk about the clean energy transition and why climate mitigation and resiliency are paramount as we built the infrastructure of the future. Costa explains his research at Carnegie Mellon and what motivated him to focus on climate as a civil engineer. We also have a lively discussion about voluntary individual action versus significant systems changes and why policy and public engagement is essential to address climate change. Costa is a great guest with a wealth of knowledge on resiliency, automation, and the energy transition.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@mcjcollective.com, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded June 23rd, 2021
In Today's episode we cover:
Costa's climate journey and how public transportation projects motivated him to focus on climate change and decarbonization
The big questions he wanted answered as a civil engineer
The three buckets that Costa focuses on: Resiliency, Automation, and The Energy Transition
The link between Costa's research and policy
As a researcher, how Costa assesses trade-offs when looking at the best climate solutions
How to move forward on climate solutions with the many conflicting interests and opinions around the world
What individuals can do to accelerate climate solutions and why voluntary action alone won't solve climate change
A discussion on bandaid climate solutions and individual action being the focus of reducing carbon emissions rather than systems changes
Why local policy and community work is important in affecting climate change
A zero-carbon electricity system and why Costa believes this will most accelerate the clean energy transition
Policies Costa would put in place that would dramatically affect climate change
Why research and development play a key role in accelerating climate solutions
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
Costa's research: https://www.costasamaras.com/
Dr. Leah Stokes' voting behavior research: https://www.leahstokes.com/research
Power Sector Carbon Index: https://emissionsindex.org/
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Jason Jacobs: Hey, everyone, Jason here. I am the My Climate Journey show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the My Climate Journey, or MCJ as we call it, membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that listened to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well. So, we set up a Slack community for those people. That's now mushroomed into more than 1300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing, there's four criteria we screen for, determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent and we're not wasting our time for trying, and a collaborative spirit. Beyond that, the more diversity, the better.
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Hello, everyone. This is Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. Today's guest is Costa Samaras, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and affiliated faculty in the Energy Science, Technology and Policy Program at Carnegie Mellon University. His research spans energy, climate change, automation and defense analysis. Costa analyzes how energy, technology and infrastructure system designs affect energy use and national security resilience to climate change impacts economic and equity outcomes, and life cycle environmental emissions and other externalities. I was excited for this one, because we've had a string of great CEOs and investors on the show recently, but Costa brings a very different and important background into the mix.
He's an academic who does deep research around not only carbon and climate, but also things like adaptation, resiliency, infrastructure, such big pieces of the clean energy transition, and one that I was excited to understand a lot better. Costa, welcome to the show.
Costa Samaras: Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you.
Jason Jacobs: I'm thrilled for you to be here as well. And as you probably know, since it sounds like you've heard some episodes before the primary purpose of this show, is about me learning, and then the secondary purpose is for anyone else that wants to learn, we're building this kind of knowledge repository off the discussions, but I have to say, I was super excited for this one, it just feels like given the body of research that you've done and the breadth of topics that you've covered around climate, that I stand to learn a ton from the discussion we're about to have today. So, I'm excited for it.
Costa Samaras: Likewise, I'm super excited to be on the show, it's really a great resource for folks trying to figure out how they get involved in the space, and learning how they can play a part either big or small.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. And that was kind of the origin. It was just someone without a lot of foundational training, either in the problem nor how my skills would be transferable, just kind of sorting through and trying to figure it out, which is a lot of... It's not exclusively, but that's a lot of the kinds of people we have listening to the show, as well. But to kick things off, maybe just introduce yourself, talk a bit about you and the purchase that you've set out at Carnegie Mellon and with the rest of your portfolio professional time.
Costa Samaras: Sure. I think it might help for me to start when I got out of college, you know, how I got from there to here, I was trained as a civil engineer, I was working in New York for a major civil engineering firm. And this was in the early 2000s. And I got to work on really like by luck, some of the big mega projects around that time.
Jason Jacobs: So now with a climate bent, but really just for the bent of civil engineering for infrastructure projects if I'm hearing it right.
Costa Samaras: Yeah. I mean, the climate bent is that these were public transit projects. And so public transit, it's we need to greatly expand public transit, which I think that we'll get into in our discussion, but these projects were building subways, building passenger rail systems. And the reason I'm mentioning is like, it really has a thread of the timelines that we have for infrastructure and for climate draw down and for decarbonization. This was the early 2000s, and we were... I was part of a big team and kind of a junior engineer. We were planning how you get more training capacity underneath the Hudson River and the Penn Station in New York City, and, and track tunnels that are there are 100 years old. And so everybody knew we needed new tunnels. And so we kind of did the first round of analysis and design environmental review of the new tunnels underneath the Hudson River going into Penn Station. And so now, 21 years later, here we are, and those are just starting to kind of get moving again. They were canceled for a while, and now they're back moving.
So like, it's 20 years later, and we needed to get one thing done, one big thing done. And sometimes infrastructure takes longer than we want. And so from that project, I was also, was a junior engineer, and helped out on the rebuilding of the subway system underneath the World Trade Center after 911, and then New York actually was expanding its subway system for the first time in a while. And I was on the project to design the new number seven line extension from Time Square down into West Midtown. And so that's really where the climate angle started ramping up in my career. And because part of that project was how do we do infrastructure in a sustainable way? And the subway system owner, New York City Transit, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, they were like, "Hey, we want these stations to be green." We're like, "Okay, what does that mean?" They're like, "I don't know, let's figure it out together." And they had some guidelines.
And so we started to think about, like, how do you design infrastructure in a way that minimizes its total impact on the environment? And so that's energy efficiency, it's sustainable materials, it's better lighting, better ventilation. And this was kind of my opening entry into not just infrastructure for infrastructure's sake, but infrastructure to reduce the total impact on the environment. And so after, you know I worked on these amazing projects, I was super lucky to be involved. I was part of a big team, I started seeing how engineers and the policy folks weren't really talking the same language. And I was like, "Hey, I think that there's a role here for some boundary organization, some translational science here." And so it's like, I went to go get a degree, another degree and a master's degree in Public Policy. And my goal was, "Hey, I might not be the best engineer, and I might not be the best public policy analyst, but you only have to pay once and I can be the translator between these two systems."
And so from there, I did that. And I really got a hunger for how do we really do a big energy transition in this country and around the world? And for those questions that led me towards a PhD. And I came to Carnegie Mellon, we did a PhD on electrifying vehicles and transitioning to low carbon energy systems and the lifecycle implications of that. And we did a lot of work on what are the lifecycle implications of electric vehicles? How do we minimize those? How do we create the policies that encourage vehicle electrification in a rapid and robust way while minimizing total damages to the environment? And then, after a, another postdoctoral fellowship working on low carbon technology policy, I left academia, I went to work for a research think tank at the RAND Corporation. And that was a really amazing experience where I got to understand the policy process, the research process across the whole bunch of different stakeholders in government. And I worked on energy technology, energy policy, and energy security, and saw the overlap between defense technology and energy technology.
And there's a lot of innovation, both ways from the defense world to the civilian world and from the civilian world over to the defense world in the energy space. And so I was there for five years, and then a position opened up at Carnegie Mellon on the faculty and I joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon in 2014. And so that's where I am now. And our work at Carnegie Mellon centers around three big planks. And we can go into any of this that you'd like. But the first is, how do we do energy transition? And I've been focusing on the transportation sector and the electricity sector. And so how many cars by when do we need to transition? Where are the power plants? Where should we be building clean energy power plants? How fast does the electric sector emissions come down and where and why not? And then what kind of policies do we need? So like, first big plank is energy transition, the second big plank is automation.
And it's how automated vehicles affect energy use, crashes and economic output and equity, both on the ground and in the air? And the third plank is climate resilience. So how do we build climate resilient infrastructure? And how do we make decisions under deep uncertainty to make sure that the infrastructure that we have lasts as long as we say it's gonna last. And so across that, I've really been thinking about... Like, we shouldn't be doing just mitigation or adaptation, we really need to be doing both. Right? We need to be doing in mitigation to get CO2 emissions down to zero and below zero. And then we also have to be ensuring that our physical and social systems are resilient and equitable as we deal with climate impacts.
Jason Jacobs: If I look at those three buckets that you just laid out around climate, resilience, automation, and the energy transition. I mean, those are each important buckets. There's so many important buckets when one goes to try to figure out how to tackle this challenge. So, how did you land on those three? And do they interrelate intentionally? Or should we think about each bucket as separate and distinct?
Costa Samaras: The nice thing about research is that research can be very focused down a path that tries to understand one question very deeply. Research can also be across systems. We kind of do a little bit of both. And I like to think about the climate change issue as a systems issue, in that you kind of... you poke on one piece, and another piece is affected. And how can we model that and make better decisions in both governments and firms to get the outcomes that we want? We want zero CO2 emissions, we want cold beer, hot showers, we want jobs, we want opportunity, we want equity. And those are the ways that I tend to think about it. And I, I don't think I wanna do only one of those. And the reason is, is like, in order for us to understand the transition to electric vehicles, we really have to understand the transportation world, we have to understand the electricity system, we have to understand international supply chains, we have to understand lifecycle assessment.
So, there's all kinds of skills that students and researchers and practitioners will need to build teams of experts on, to kind of make change in some of these systems problems. So we think that all of these are connected. Like, we shouldn't be building infrastructure that's not climate resilient. We also should be building infrastructure that's going to enable a decarbonized future. And we also should be building infrastructure that anticipates disruptive technologies, like automation, and increases equity. And so, one of the big themes here is like in transportation and infrastructure, we look back at the 20th century and we see some amazing progress that the build out of transportation network has done for some, but often with great costs. With highways dividing up neighborhoods, and concentrating pollution in vulnerable communities.
And what we wanna do for the energy transition story, is not look back in 50 years and say, "Wow, we really messed that up." Or, "Wow, this was intentionally done wrong because of racism or other bad intent." We wanna do things right from the beginning. And so that's how and why I think a systems approach to this problem is where we're coming from.
Jason Jacobs: Who is the audience that you envision for the work that you do, as you set out to take on new projects?
Costa Samaras: The work that we do is generally led by our graduate students, and we wanna ensure that they are learning how to be independent researchers and successful in anything that they wanna do. But everything that we do, we wanna have a angle of improving information for decision makers. And those are generally in the government, as well as in firms. And what I mean by that is, the research that we do, almost always at the end has some policy implications of it around it. So, we're doing some work around drones right now, and package delivery drones. And so we've done some really deep technical work on the energy use of a package delivery drone, how the wind affects the drone, how payload and altitude affects the drone. These are all very technical engineering papers and details. But at the end of that, we kind of wanna say, "Okay, here's the data, here's the numbers, but what does it mean for individually a drone manufacturer who maybe wants to make a more energy efficient drone?"
A city might wanna use our work to compare drone delivery to ebike delivery. We do those comparisons as well. So we're always trying to think about what are the policy and decision information that people would need to know, that people need science and engineering to investigate to make a better decision about sustainability or climate change, or equity, or other things that we care about.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh[affirmative]. And one of the challenges that I found just in terms of figuring out what solutions to get behind, and also just where to apply my own skills is... I mean, if you take that delivery as an example, there's a number of companies that have set out to come out with let's say, small, autonomous, last mile delivery robots to make the deliveries to take the place of other forms of transportation. And I don't know the lifecycle of that versus alternative. So, I don't wanna speak over my head. But the point I'm trying to illustrate is that sometimes things that are on the surface make things better, when you actually do the full lifecycle analysis, the truth is a lot murkier. And so, on the one hand, it's important to understand that and to properly assess any solution, but on the other, it feels like it's kind of an excuse to just be paralyzed and take no action ever, and just keep the status quo because you can just kind of shoot darts and any new thing that someone brings about.
So as a researcher, how do you think about and balance those trade offs when assessing the best ways to bring about change, given how interrelated things are, and how many second and third and fourth and 10th order effects there are to any action, or inaction?
Costa Samaras: Yeah. And that kind of tugs at really a central piece of how we think about things, which is, there are always gonna be trade offs in any energy transition. And it's society's job, all of us to make our preferences known to our elected representatives. And this is very kind of bill becomes a law naivety, I understand that. But like, we need to ensure that in the transition that the trade offs and the benefits are equitable, and that any bad outcomes are minimized, and any good outcomes are maximized. And just the kind of the electric vehicle issue, or the, even the sidewalk delivery robots issue, as you mentioned, as, as an example, this is something that we work directly in, and it's, "Okay, well, we're gonna do a delivery with a sidewalk robot.
How would we examine that problem? Or how should we examine the problem?" Well, we wanna know, all right, what would the sidewalk robot be replacing? Maybe it's replacing a freight delivery truck, maybe it's replacing a personal vehicle, maybe it's replacing you or me driving to the store and getting something. So there's on the kind of the plus side of a ledger, it's all right, I can get an electric rubber tired vehicle, low speed on the sidewalk, that is reducing energy use because it's more efficient and smaller, it's not a couple of tons of steel riding on the road.
It's electric, it's much less likely to cause a fatal crash in the middle of the road, like a car would. Right? So, traffic is down, crashes are down. All right, so everything sounds great. Let's go do it. But we also should think about, okay, let's first take the lifecycle perspective when we make a battery, it's pretty energy intensive right now. It's not a deal breaker, but it's not zero. Right? So kind of the when we do systems analysis is like, let's see where the impacts are that would make our answer change. And the upstream impacts of a battery are significant. They're not zero.
And the way that we get those down is innovation, it's smart regulation. And it's ways that we improve technology. The impacts are going to be the physical making of a battery is energy intensive, as well as the mining of the materials in sensitive regions of the world, many that don't have protective rights for indigenous populations, many don't have protective rights for labor, many have sensitive environmental areas. And so, like we need to ensure as we transition to a global electrified fleet, that all those impacts are minimized and eventually brought to zero. Now, is it a reason to not do the sidewalk robot? Well, there might be other reasons. Maybe you don't wanna share the sidewalk with commerce, maybe the sidewalk should be a place where people can walk and bike or walk and enjoy the space without a vehicle driving down it at the same time. Now, you... if you take a vehicle off the road, it might improve things otherwise.
So like, I think I've arrived at the answer that you wanted to avoid, which is kind of like on the one hand, but on the other. But it's our job as systems analyst to try to figure out what the big problems are, and minimize those, not dismissing them, but also moving forward with outcomes that we know under almost all conditions might be better. And to me, electrifying the transportation fleet meets that criteria.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. I mean, just off the top of my head, I can think of several examples that I think the right path depends on who's evaluating and how they stack rank the criteria. And I mean, one example that comes to mind is that there's one set of voices that says that climate is a rich people's problem. Because people in developing countries, for example, that don't even have access to basic electricity, they're not concerned about climate change, they're concerned about energy poverty and having basic electricity so that they can have something like a refrigerator so that they can have food to feed their families. Or another one would be like robots to do solar installations at big commercial projects for example. Well, on the one hand, you can talk about, well, if it can get done more efficiently and cheaper, and it drives the cost down and helps renewables proliferate faster. So if I'm the head of the Solar Installers Labor Union, I might have a different perspective, because my constituents are all these solar installers that need to have jobs and roof over their heads and feed their families. So...
And then that doesn't even, actually even take into account the fact that the US has a different set of priorities than Europe, than Asia, than [inaudible 00:20:56]. So there's definitely like, regional and geopolitical dynamics as well. So, I mean, where do you even start when trying to tackle this? And I guess maybe this is less of an academic question and more of like a, what do we do as a society to unclog the arteries in the system and get moving given how many different conflicting interests there are and will always be?
Costa Samaras: Well, there's a bunch of things in there, and really good points. And let me start on the global side. The thing to remember about CO2 is that on our timelines, like, we can think about CO2 as forever. And what I mean by that is a coal plant when it turns off the air pollutants that are coming out of the smokestack, the stuff that makes smog, the small particulates that create air pollution, those stuff are in the air, and then in a couple weeks or a little bit longer, those will fall out of the air, they will go down to the ground. And so the air pollution from that coal plant will eventually go away. The climate pollution from that coal plant is forever. So, CO2 degrades, but over a multi century or even millennia timescale. And so we can think about CO2 as forever, we are surrounded by the CO... some of the CO2 from the first steam engine. And so when you think about that, it lends itself to both the scale, the challenge and the timing of the problem that we have ahead of us that we have to solve.
And we will, but it also lends itself to the historical responsibility of countries that have put out CO2, and the ways that we as a global community can reduce CO2 to zero and then below zero. And at the same time, we will need to, as a global community, ensure that the world has access to clean modern energy services. The people that are in energy poverty around the world, have a big opportunity for advanced life outcomes by having access to energy. And we the global community need to ensure that that access is robust and clean and spread as far as possible. The other thing to understand is that climate and climate impacts are a multiplier of poverty. And the folks that are in poverty around the world will have been and will bear a disproportionate brunt of additional climate impacts. So as we do mitigation and climate mitigation, we can reduce the impacts of climate on the most vulnerable around the world. And so it's not really a choice of, should we do development, or should we do climate mitigation?
We have to do clean and sustainable development and climate mitigation to improve everybody's lives in the world while also getting 100% access to modern energy services for anybody that wants it. Those are the challenges articulated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And those should kind of guide how we, how we think about advancing progress. I'll stop there cause I know your second problem was about kind of the trade off inefficiencies and labor. Let me stop. And if you want to riff on any of that piece, we can go from there.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, why don't we switch gears if you wanna chime in on that second part?
Costa Samaras: To me, clean energy transition across the electricity sector, across the transportation sector, industrial sector, agricultural sector, the building sector, is the greatest job opportunity in our lifetimes. And the amount of stuff that we need to do, is going to provide opportunities for everybody from big coastal cities, to rural communities, to mountain communities, to desert communities, there are opportunities for good paying jobs in the clean energy transition, unlike that we have ever seen before. And we need to manage that and think about that as a system. Now, what does that mean? It's like, it doesn't really help if one community is harmed by climate impacts or harmed by a certain issue, people are more mobile than they were before but doesn't help say, "Hey, there's jobs here and you live there." We need to meet people where they are and ensure that legacy fossil communities are reinvested in in a clean way. We need to make sure that there are good paying jobs for people who were in these legacy fossil communities so that they are part of the transition, and they're not left behind.
So we need to be reinvesting in all of our communities, cities, suburbs, exurbs, rural, to ensure that the benefits of a clean energy transition are equitable and shared. And that's how you build a durable coalition to ensure that the clean energy transition happens on the timeline that we want it to happen.
Jason Jacobs: On the one hand, there's the doing the hard work to model and understand the application and the lifecycle analysis and some of the work that you were mentioned that students take on, and the other is more of a practical implications of, and then once the research shows the path, then we actually have to have a system that takes the most promising ideas and then puts them into action. Do you worry sometimes that the work that you're doing to uncover the right path is just gonna fall on deaf ears, especially given the state of our democracy here in the United States?
Costa Samaras: Well, it's on everybody to be an active participant in democracy. And that's at the local level, that's at the state level, and it's at the national level. And what do I mean by that? I mean, I'll have people who will tweet with me or tweet at me about, you know, national policy issues. And I'll ask like, "Have you ever gone to a local planning and zoning meeting where they're talking about bike lanes? When's the last time that you have talked to the staff at your city council person's office or your state representatives office, or your national representatives office?" And there's been a lot of great work, some by Dr. Leah Stokes and colleagues that says like the national politicians don't hear from constituents, as much as they hear from kind of vested interest. And so they have a skewed view of what people want, because nobody is telling them what they want.
And one way to be an active participant in democracy is just to show up and be a part of the discussions in your community, and think about the things that you want in that community. And whether that's safe streets for walking and active transportation, whether it's clean energy from your local municipality, or the purchases from your local institutions that are clean energy. Every municipality in the country has some vehicle fleet, there's like two and a half million state and local vehicles out there. There's no reason why we couldn't transition a whole bunch of them to electric. And I don't know how many local officials offices even heard that idea from their direct constituents. And so you asked like, do we care if our research sits on a shelf somewhere? Obviously, we wanna... Everybody who does research wants it to have high impact. A lot of times though, the impact can be direct, whereas, hey, we write something and somebody advances a policy along those similar lines, that would be great.
But other times, it might just be expanding the knowledge frontier, and we do a little bit of systems work on here, and then somebody else picks it up and adds it to what they're doing to build their company. And so the impact can be in the short run, and the impact can be in the long run. And we're happy with expanding the frontiers of knowledge, shooting for impact, and like any portfolio, sometimes you're gonna have ups and sometimes you're gonna have downs.
Jason Jacobs: And for the ordinary citizen out there, who maybe does not work in the field, but sees with their own eyes the wildfires and the extreme events and natural disasters and droughts and all these things that are happening and continuing to accelerate and a super concern, what should they want? I mean, from the work that you've done, are there certain levers that can have an outsized impact in accelerating the transition? Or is it more of a long tail where we just need to kind of chip away at these little things. Not to minimize, but the local bike lanes as an example, like, is it just tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of... Those are other three or four key things that it's like if those would happen, it would kind of catalyze everything? Or what's your view of the world from a solution standpoint?
Costa Samaras: Well, everybody can do something. Everybody doesn't have to do everything. And I'm trying not to be like a cliche here. But like, if everybody does nothing, then we get nothing done. And so there may be groups of folks who are really fired up about local bike lanes, and that's their passion and they wanna go organize for ensuring that there are safe ways to move around without a car in their community. And you don't need to be working in the field to do that type of stuff. These are just decisions that are made around infrastructure in your community, then there are ways to make voices heard around national policy with their elected representatives. But it's also, it's like, what are the levers that they can push on in their own lives? And in many places in the country, you can choose a clean energy supplier, you can choose your electricity supplier to be a clean energy supplier.
And if that's something that appeals to you and can work, that's kind of step one, because we need a clean electricity system. So clean electricity system is how I've described it, it is like the plate at the barbecue of decarbonization. It's like without the plate like we don't have anything that we can pile on this plate. So let's get the plate. At the same time, we have to be cooking all the rest of the ingredients. So we need a clean electricity system. And there are ways to push on that local state and national levels. Some of that is purchasing both personally and through institutions. Maybe you work for a company that hasn't yet committed to 100% green energy purchases yet, so you can push on that, maybe you go to a school that hasn't committed to that yet. So once we get clean energy, clean electricity, excuse me, then we can start transitioning stuff that we used to burn on to things that we can power by electricity.
Mostly transportation, and heat. And on the transportation side, there are all kinds of ways that folks can be consumers. They can be advocates, they can share the information that they learn about their own experiences. And one of the big powerful ways that technology diffuses, is what's called like the neighbor effect. Somebody sees somebody with, let's take a very small scale, an electric lawnmower, the two stroke engines in gas powered lawn equipment, the CO2 from these are not that big of a deal. I mean, it's still CO2, but the air pollutants are actually pretty bad, because there's incomplete combustion, and the engines aren't designed like a car to have some pollution controls on them.
And all of a sudden, you start seeing people in your neighborhood, if you live in a neighborhood that has lawns, with an electric lawnmower, and it's like, "Whoa, I, this might work for me, I can go get the lawnmower." And so now, like these little nudges from your network, it's like somebody has an electric lawnmower, okay, maybe somebody else gets an electric bike, maybe somebody else gets an electric car. These are ways that technology diffuses not really from top down, but really from the bottom up and what your network is using. And so as we get those diffuse through, that's one way that people can push is by being if they're able to, be first adopters of some of these technologies.
Jason Jacobs: So it sounds like done, cause I mean, a lot of what you're talking about is from voluntary standpoint starting with consumers or employees, or humans, an advocacy role of some capacity. I think the skeptics would just question how far voluntary can take us and would maybe put out there that it would require much more wholesale compliance and mandates and deadlines, and I mean, maybe some incentives, but also some stick, not just carrot. So... But it seems like unless I'm hearing wrong, maybe you're more bullish on the role that each of us can play as consumers and advocates from a voluntary standpoint, because we care about the planet in the collective good?
Costa Samaras: Well, let me agree with half of that. And it's basically say, the challenge that we have for climate ahead of us is, we need to be very clear eyed about that. We need to get to zero GHG emissions and likely below zero GHG emissions globally, within the span of a couple of decades. One of the ways that I like to kind of mark time is like the release of albums. So, like you think about this is for us, more mature, advanced age folks in the audience, but like the album's of the early 90s, A Tribe Called Quest, Jane's Addiction and Nirvana, and all the stuff with the music of the early 90s. Basically, from the time that those albums have been released to now, is the time until the mid century that we have to kind of get this going. And so it's not a lot of time. 30 years is not long, and especially in infrastructure when stuff takes a long time. And so the question you asked was, is voluntary enough? Absolutely not.
But we are gonna need every single piece of voluntary action and very robust national and global action to get this done. What we talked about is like building mega projects, building big real mega projects in New York City. Decarbonization is a global mega project. It's the biggest in history. It's gonna take every single country on Earth, and we're gonna have to get it all done at the same time. I believe it's doable, and I think that we need to be very clear of the scale of the challenge and attack that in deliberate and focused ways, but also not be overwhelmed by it. And if somebody wants to do local action, and be that local champion, that's positive. But for sure, we will need government investment. If you look at the recent IAEA report around net zero, clean energy investment will need to triple by 2030. And that's public and private. And so we'll need to make big investments, both publicly from governments and from private sector to get this done.
And so that's why I think that there's a role like, you don't have to be somebody doing lifecycle assessment to be a part of this. You could be in clean finance, you could be in clean law, you can be in clean manufacturing, you can be in clean advocacy, anything that we do now, because climate is not an environmental problem, it's an everything problem. Anything that we do now, likely has a climate lens to it, if you think about it. And so like, that's why I'm trying to redirect the fights that we see online, sometimes between like, is personal action enough? No. Is government action enough? No. I mean... Like, friends, we will need everything that we have to get this done.
Jason Jacobs: Well, it seems like there're some different schools of thought on that, because on the one hand, we're behind, more's better. And so it's not either or, we should have an abundance mindset, more shots on goal, more this, more that. And that'll make sense. But some of the critics would say, and this is across a number of areas, is that sometimes doing the wrong thing can actually be detrimental. And just some examples come to mind, recycling for example. Not to say recycling is bad. But recycling was something that was pushed from the fossil fuel companies so that they could keep making plastics. Or Jimmy Carter, wear your sweater. It's like that pass of the buck from big oil to the people in their houses and wearing your sweater is not gonna solve the problem. What's gonna solve the problem is stop burning fossil fuels.
Or people would say with offsets, like offsets just give people an excuse for the status quo, or direct air capture in CCS. Same thing. Stuff like plugging methane leaks in natural gas pipeline, some people would say, "Well, that's good, because methane is harmful. So, therefore, we should plug the leaks." And other people would say, "Yeah, but we need to get off of natural gas as soon as possible. And by plugging the leaks, it gives them an excuse to slow roll and keep the natural gas pipelines around for longer, keep putting new ones up." So, am I right that there's a tension there? And I guess, what would you say to the people that maybe argue that more isn't necessarily better?
Costa Samaras: Yeah. I think that there's a lot of truth to those points. And the concept of a personal carbon footprint, or the notion around recycling, did deflect a lot of the responsibility. But at the same time, you should recycle. It's the law in most places. Like recycling aluminum is good, like do it. I you're gonna use aluminum, recycle it, because it reduces the energy use from natural aluminum production in a big way. So it's like, I guess what I'm trying to get at is like, we can be aware of the big systems problems and the big kind of political economy challenges and push for a change in how those things are done. And at the same time, we can be technology adopters, we can be conservationists, and take individual actions that start to shift where the public is around clean transition. Kind of think about, like, I don't know, the mindset around how smoking changed pretty rapidly. And that was a response to government regulation in some places, but then it was kind of social norm started to change.
I still believe it's not an either or, and for sure, we need systems change and we need government investment to get this work to get this done. I just don't want to dissuade the folks who are doing what they can in their corner of the world to make their community a better place by fighting for a bike lane, they, they're doing good work, that's important. They can also at the same time, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. They can also be pushing for system change what they need to be doing. But like, I don't think it's helpful to throw up our hands and give up on what we can do individually. And at the same time, be very clear eyed about what the system's change needs to be to get done.
Jason Jacobs: So, I hear you. I mean, just a few examples. So, there're some purists for example, that say, "Well, hey, look, we get that every little bit help, but just fundamentally we don't believe that we have any shot of getting to where we need to go in the timelines we need to as long as we have a democracy." Some might say that. Because democracy, it just moves too slow. It's like there's too much red tape. Like every time you try to take one step, there's all this like back and forth, and then four years from now, it's just gonna get undone whatever we get done in this administration, and then this cycle continues. Some might say the same thing about capitalism.
Some say that, "No one has expertise and might like big oil, and we need their help in the transition and it's crazy to cast them as the enemy." And others say, "Well, that may be true, but they can never be trusted, and they need to be killed. And that's the only way we need to rebirth with a different system with a different set of players." So I have trouble with this one cause on the one hand, every little bit matters, but some of this incremental stuff given... I mean, if the timelines really are where people say and we need to move as far as we need to in those timelines, and we are as behind as we are, and getting worse with every minute and hour and day and week and month and year, the pass is then, like, do we need to think bigger and bolder, and maybe break more glass?
Costa Samaras: We should always be looking for opportunities to break glass metaphorically in ways that positively suggest system change. But one of those ways of breaking glass, is being active participants in our democracy. So instead of giving up on democracy, actually showing up and being a part of it. I guess the challenge here is like, the scale of what we need to get done is sometimes daunting and overwhelming. But if you look at the US electricity sector, so we tracked the carbon emissions of the US electricity sector at our website, emissionsindex.org, and since 2005, emissions from the US electricity sector have been down by 40 ish percent.
Jason Jacobs: What about globally?
Costa Samaras: Yeah. So globally, is not as good, but the intensity of emissions has gone down as technology has improved. But if we look at both the US and globally, it's like, we weren't even really trying. I mean, like, there wasn't... Like, we don't have a clean energy, a big clean energy policy in the United States. We have some tax credits for wind and solar, and there are some emissions requirements that have helped drive this. But basically, we got 40% without really doing much. Before I get yelled at by my friends who have really pushed hard to make that happen. Again, like, it was a lot of hard work to get to there. But I'm trying to get a sense of like, what we can get done in what time period is really up to us. And we control, we the democracy, control what those timelines are. And we can set those to be whatever we want them to be.
Jason Jacobs: So if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing that would most accelerate this transition, what would you change and how would you change it?
Costa Samaras: Oh, wow! I would love to have a zero carbon electricity system tomorrow. And if we have that, then a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about makes everything cleaner. I don't know how many wands you're giving me Jason, but I'd love to have like a very clean source of heat, industrial heat, I'd love to have a very clean source of cement, or some sort of construction material. And so there's innovations happening there as well, right? I'd love to have a zero carbon airline fuel and shipping fuel. There are big challenges that we have ahead of us that we can solve. And we don't have magic wands, but we do have our voice. And we have our abilities. And every single person can do something for this transition to get it done in time.
Jason Jacobs: And what about on the policy side? Is there a magic wand wave that you would use on that front? Is there a specific policy or a specific policy objective that you would want us to put way behind if we could?
Costa Samaras: A lot of these things that we've been talking about are a function of what the government regulates. So, maybe that's clean electricity emissions, what the government invests in, and maybe that's clean energy R&D. So, I'd love to see clean energy R&D scaled up by more than it has been recently to levels that are appropriate with a challenge. We say and we are correct in looking at climate change as one of the biggest, if not the biggest challenges that we face as a society. And so we should have our clean energy R&D portfolio reflect that challenge. And it currently does not. And then I'd like to see the government use its procurement power. The government buys a lot of stuff, both here and around the world. And so I'd love to see the government's transition its fleet of vehicles to electric and maybe that sparks a whole wave of innovation.
I'd love to see the government buy clean electricity for all of its facilities, I'd love to see the government put out a contract for, "We want clean hydrogen, and we want it at this price. And we're gonna ratchet that price down over time, or we're gonna have other opportunities to get this lower." So like, the way to internalize the damages of climate change is to use policy to align the damages with the costs. And so we can think about ways that the government can make investments to bring the cost of new technology down, require companies to do stuff, or buy directly clean electricity and clean electricity technologies. And so policy is at the center of this. So it's like, I know that we went back and forth a little bit on the individual versus system change, but like, the government will be a primary impetus for clean energy transition because of the functions of the regulatory state, the functions of investment in R&D, and the functions of procurement.
And that doesn't always have to happen at the federal level, although it should, but it can also happen at the state and local level as well. And so there are... I wanna stress to folks listening is like, you don't have to do clean energy or clean transition for your job to be involved, there are millions of ways to be involved and be an active participant in democracy.
Jason Jacobs: And for anyone that's listening that's inspired by the work that you're doing, where do you and your team need help? Or what kinds of people might you wanna hear from if any?
Costa Samaras: We always love to hear from folks. I am on a faculty in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. And if I look around the country, and even around the world, a lot of the clean energy transition work is happening in all kinds of departments. But from my lens, a lot of is happening in civil and environmental engineering departments, not just with us, but with our colleagues around the country and around the world. And so like, where you can tell I'm a civil and environmental engineering booster, I teach our first year students civil and environmental engineering. So I'm really big believer in the power of using civil and environmental engineering to advance healthy, safe, equitable and clean infrastructure around the world. And so, I, I am always interested to hear from students who are interested in doing research in these areas, but I think if you're thinking about a major engineering, is a great one to go into on any level for all kinds of opportunities, but especially in the clean energy economy.
The thing that is worth throwing out there is that PhD students, and this is something that I didn't know, when I was in college, and not a lot of people really understand this, like, stem PhD students, or engineering PhD students, for the most part in the United States, don't pay tuition, they're fully funded by grants. If that's something that you're interested in, reach out to the folks that... your mentors in your network and say like, "Hey, I'm interested in diving deep into this problem, how do I think I can be involved? What are the types of research that I would need to do in order to achieve my objectives?" And it doesn't have to always be graduate school or more school or anything else. It doesn't even have to be college. I mean, there are opportunities at community colleges, or opportunities in the trades, in the building sector for active participation with good paying jobs in the clean energy economy.
Jason Jacobs: Is there anything I didn't ask that I should have? Or any parting words for listeners?
Costa Samaras: Well, you mentioned it in passing about carbon capture. And I wanted to give you just a kind of my quick thought about it. Like from an engineering perspective, especially if it's on the back end of a power plant, or some sort of fossil burning plant, separating this relatively smaller amount of CO2 that's in the exhaust gases, at a high temperature when all kinds of pollutants capturing that separating it, pressurizing it, transporting it, injecting underground, monitoring that it stays there, it kind of seems hard, right? I mean, like, it's doable... Like, if you were designing the system from scratch, it's like, "You know what? Why would we do this? This seems like, not ideal." And at the same time, it's like, I feel like we need to get good at it.
And I feel that capturing CO2 from the air and doing the R&D of capturing CO2 from the air, also, capturing CO2 with natural solutions, is a responsibility of developed countries, and that we should be leaders in the R&D and technology side of doing that. And so, maybe I don't wanna rely on it as a way to massively overshoot our targets and then bring us back down to zero, like, we need to be getting our CO2 down to zero, and we need to do it in a way that is just rapid, equitable, and provides economic opportunities for all who want them. But we should also know how to capture CO2. And we should know how to monitor and verify that it stays underground. And we should be making those investments to get good at it. And that doesn't make us path dependent on CO2 air capture, but it does enable us a tool to clean up our environmental legacy, which is in the atmosphere.
Jason Jacobs: I think that's a great point to end on. And it's also a representative of probably philosophically what you could say about a lot of other things that people might knock as well. It's like, "Look, is it gonna get us there on its own?" No. But should we take it off the table? No. So... And I mean, I was playing devil's advocate with you, but I mean, to be honest, I'm more in your camp anyways, that more is better. But Costa, thank you so much. Really enjoyed our discussion, and best of luck to you. And thank you for all the important work that you do.
Costa Samaras: Thank you so much, Jason. It's a pleasure to be with you.
Jason Jacobs: Hey, everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note that is .co, not .com. Someday we'll get to .com, but right now, .co. You can also find me on Twitter @JJacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers maybe say that. Thank you.
