Here is the full transcript of researcher and author Joseph Romm’s talk titled “The Surprising Truth About Solving Climate Change” at TEDxAsburyPark 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Wise Uncle
You know those rare people who seem to understand the mysteries of the universe? Well, let me tell you about my uncle. Picture this scene: summers in a New Hampshire farm, surrounded by family, and there stood my uncle, a soft-spoken genius with bushy eyebrows. He was an MIT physics professor for four decades, and then he was awarded over 60 patents after the age of 70. OMG. Yes, please, please.
But what I remember most was his ability to explain things with such clarity that even a child could grasp, like why the sky is blue, or how light ping-ponging inside a raindrop can become a rainbow. But long before there was an internet to answer all our questions, he was my personal internet.
My uncle made me realize that I also wanted to be able to explain things, so I pursued a PhD in physics from MIT. Then I pursued a career in clean energy, but that work hit a wall of water on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall and flooded my brother’s home in Pass Christian, Mississippi, which was walloped with a 28-foot storm surge.
A Life-Changing Question
I admired my brother because he became a doctor. He healed people. I was uncomfortable when people called me Dr. Romm because he was the real Dr. Romm. My brother said his house looked like it had been through a washing machine, with all his possessions soaked in water and turned upside down.
We were all in shock. But a few weeks later, talking on the phone, he asked me a question that would change the course of my life. He asked, “Joe, should I rebuild my home?” Wow, that threw me. I didn’t know the answer, but I was supposed to be able to explain things, and I had to give my brother the best possible answer.
The Climate Crisis Revelation
So that became my mission. I started talking to every scientist I could. I started reading countless studies, and what I learned surprised me. First, things were more dire than I realized. Yes, we were going to see many more Katrinas, because greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide were heating up the oceans, and the hotter the water, the worse the hurricanes.
But I also learned that scientists and the media needed to do a much better job of explaining things, since we are on track to leave our children a ruined climate, and that is not defensible. So I decided to become a full-time communicator. A non-profit in the nation’s capital helped me set up the Climate Progress blog.
My friends thought I got a bit obsessed, because I wrote 2,000 articles over the next decade. But I learned many more surprising things, and in 2009, Rolling Stone named me one of 100 people who are reinventing America. Though I must say, I’m still figuring out how to reinvent the climate crisis.
The Politics of Climate Change
But first, let me assure you, this is not a talk about politics, although I did learn the definition of the word politics when I was at the Department of Energy three decades ago. It comes from the Greek “poli,” meaning many, and “tics,” meaning small, blood-sucking insects. Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned is that we know the solution to climate change, and we have known it for a long time.
But we are being distracted by sexy strategies like hydrogen energy or carbon offsets that offer little hope of much help for decades. Here is our real challenge. The main cause of climate change is burning coal, oil, and natural gas, which release vast quantities of carbon dioxide. CO2 is a heat-trapping gas that acts like a blanket over the earth.
The Urgent Need for Action
The more coal, oil, and gas we burn, the bigger the blanket gets. But we are emitting 50 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year, and that is a big blanket. And we, as a result, need to have solutions that can get as big as the blanket.
And the science also says that we need to reduce emissions to near zero by 2050. So we have to get very big very fast, and that limits our options. If the world had started reducing emissions when we started having annual meetings to address the problem, things would be much easier.
But we dawdled. How many meetings? Dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dawdle, dabble, dawdle, dawdle, dawble, dawble, dawdle, dawdle, dawdling, dawdle, and dawdled. When you dawdle that long, there are consequences, and one of the consequences is that we all need to work together now to rapidly deploy technologies that are already successful, like solar power, wind power, batteries for storage, electric cars instead of gasoline ones, and electric heat pumps instead of natural gas ones.
The Limitations of Current Strategies
We have dawdled too long to wait for technologies that still need a breakthrough to become commercial, like fusion, or hydrogen energy, or small nuclear reactors, or direct air capture of CO2. Yes, research in those may pay off someday, but we have to keep our eyes on the prize, and that is rapidly reducing emissions this decade using existing solutions.
Another flawed strategy is carbon offsets, where people or a company pays someone else to cut their pollution so we don’t have to cut ours. Carbon offsets are like paying someone else to exercise for you. When you buy an airplane ticket, you’re often offered the chance to offset the emissions for a few dollars, but if cutting CO2 costs that little, climate change would not be a problem, and I would be up here talking about Taylor Swift.