Andrew Zolli

During Wednesday’s State of the Union speech, President Obama reaffirmed climate action as one of the central planks his second term agenda, saying “I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.” (Emphasis added.)

The next day, I sat down with Jeff Nesbit, the Executive Director of Climate Nexus – a communications initiative that is working to change the national climate conversation, and tell the climate story in new and innovative ways. Jeff is a talented and seasoned communicator and wise in the ways of Washington. We discussed the speech, and what, exactly, the President could do without Congressional approval.

Quite a bit, it turns out. There are five areas in particular where the President has latitude to act unilaterally:

The first is to direct the Environmental Protection Agency to seek additional opportunities where it can regulate greenhouse gasses as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. This authority was affirmed in 2007 in a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court, and it has since been used as the legal basis for raising the CAFE fuel efficiency targets for automobiles, as well as for setting the emissions limits for coal plants high enough to force the closure of older plants and effectively shutter plans for new ones.

However, this part of the story here is a bit more complex, as the current US boom in natural gas – much of it driven by hydraulic ‘fracking’ – had already provided energy companies with more positive economic incentives to shift away from coal plants. And, it must be pointed out, coal isn’t going away globally – its use is continuing to grow rapidly, particularly in developing economies. In fact, the International Energy Association (IEA) predicts that coal will actually rival oil, globally, as the world’s dominant energy source by as early as 2017. (China uses more coal than the rest of the world combined, and India is on track to become the world’s largest importer – neither country has a fully developed natural gas infrastructure.) Indeed, so voracious are the developing economies’ (and Europe’s) appetites that US coal exports are skyrocketing. Whether these exports will ultimately raise or lower emissions is a subject of recent debate and conjecture.

One situation the EPA will likely address this year is the regulation of coal ash, a toxic byproduct of coal burning that gained national notoriety in a horrific spill in 2008 which dumped more than 525 million gallons of wet coal ash into the Tennessee River and surrounding areas. Industry groups argue that regulating coal ash as toxic waste could cost it $20 billion annually – a burden it can ill afford, given the circumstances described above (which is, presumably, just what environmental activists hope).

Given the natural gas boom mentioned above, the second thing that Obama can do is ensure that natural gas pipelines are secure and have minimal leakage. Methane, the key ingredient in natural gas, is a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon – and according to a 2011 study by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, if too much gas leaks into the atmosphere, and not into a pipeline, it could actually make gas much worse than coal in terms of climate effects. As long as such leaked gas remains under 3.2% of the total, gas-powered plants ecologically outperform coal-powered plants. Worryingly, however, field research, just-published in Nature, undertaken in the Uinta Basin of Utah where a big natural gas project is underway, found a whopping 9% of the methane pulled out of the ground was going straight into the air. The Administration must insist on tough rules for monitoring and tougher maximum leakage limits.

The third thing that Obama can do unilaterally is to more wholeheartedly embrace efficiency.  In his speech, he actually proposed doubling US energy efficiency by 2030, which is a huge task, but there are some things he can do on his own to get started. These include improving the energy efficiency of household appliances (which are regulated by the Department of Energy) and retrofitting federal buildings (a bill for which was recently introduced by Senator Barbara Boxer) and copying the “Race to the Top” model in education reform by creating similar competition for Federal dollars among the States for improving efficiency. (This last one is actually in the President’s more detailed post-speech proposals.)

The fourth approach Obama can undertake on his own is to work to accelerate the technical substitution of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). HFCs are gasses used in refrigeration and air conditioning, and their original purpose was beneficial: they were introduced by the chemical industry as part of the Montreal Protocol to replace chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) that created the ‘ozone hole’ in the 1980s. Today, almost all CFCs have been phased out, and the ozone hole is shrinking dramatically. Unfortunately, the HFCs which replaced them are ‘super greenhouse gasses’ – molecule-for-molecule, almost 4000 times more atmospherically potent than carbon dioxide.

The good news is that replacements for HFCs are on the horizon. For example, two American companies, DuPont and Honeywell, recently formed a joint venture to produce a ‘drop in’ automotive refrigerant that is 97% less impactful than the HFC it replaces. So one possible opportunity for Obama (and John Kerry) is use the existing platform of the Montreal Protocol to move the more-than-190 countries who are signatories to it away from HFCs.

Finally, there’s a fifth thing Obama can do: put real muscle into making sure we don’t go backwards. Little noticed amid the hoopla of increased automotive fuel efficiency standards was an ‘escape clause’ for carmakers: if, in 2018, they aren’t selling enough of Chevy Volts and Tesla Sedans, they can argue for a reversion of the standards. Obama can put effort into pressuring the car companies to either drop the escape clause, or make progress to the goal faster.

Taken together, argues Nesbit, these actions don’t amount to an energy policy, but they could propel two positive outcomes: first, spurring Congress to act more comprehensively, and second, returning America to a leadership position in the global climate arena, putting the President in a position, by 2015, to negotiate bilateral climate deals with India and China, which is the real prize.

I said to Jeff, “This list has many features of an energy policy, though it clearly isn’t one. What’s missing that would round it out?”

Without hesitation, he said:

“A Manhattan Project for renewables. But you can’t do that without the Congress.”

Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson

This summer, while America was suffering through a mega-drought that plunged half the country into a state of emergency, and India was experiencing the largest blackout in history, a group of Chinese scientists were undertaking a remarkable voyage. Aboard the world’s largest icebreaker, the Xue Long, (or ‘Snow Dragon’) they charted a course through what was once called the “Northeast Passage”, over Russia through the record-setting melting Arctic sea ice, finally docking in Reykjavik, Iceland.

China is obviously not an Arctic country, but that has not prevented it, like many other nations, from taking a keen interest in the region – scientifically, diplomatically, and commercially. In fact, the Chinese seem intent on playing a leadership role in this part of the world, particularly in Iceland, which has vast geothermal and hydroelectrical capacity (much of it currently used, controversially, to power aluminum smelters). In the capital of this small country of 320,000 people, the Chinese are constructing a truly massive embassy, with room for up to five hundred people. (The American embassy, presently the largest, holds about seventy.)

Why build something so big? Partly, to broadcast China’s presence, and partly to act as a basis of operations for the whole region, particularly those involving access to rich mineral and oil and gas resources of nearby Greenland. These may include up to 25% of the world’s reserves of rare earth metals, which are used to make magnets used in everything from cell phones to wind turbines to precision-guided munitions. (Much to the chagrin of folks at the Pentagon, China currently has about 95% of the world’s current supply.)

Indeed, plans are already being drawn up to open a huge iron ore mine in Greenland that could, overnight, swell the population of the country by 4% with Chinese workers – and that’s just from one project alone. This poses a challenge to the country’s 57,000 citizens – many of them indigenous Kalaallit – just as it does to their Icelandic neighbors (and Africans, and many others): how to admit the interests of the insatiable global extractive economy into their country in a controlled way, while trying to conserve one of the world’s pristine – and globally essential – ecosystems.

Amid these moves in a new ‘great game’ in Arctic energy, materials, and transport, something can easily be lost – the vastly greater global importance of the disappearing Arctic ice itself. The Chinese scientists aboard the Snow Dragon were there because, much like every nation – including the United States – China has to worry both about finding and extracting vast quantities of natural resources to power its growth, and about the consequences – in the form of melting ice, rising sea levels, and threats to its coastal cities – of those very extractive processes. (These threats don’t just include increasing risk from severe weather events, but also from things like the contamination of drinking water by rising seawater.)

The health of the planet’s ice is implicated in all of this, as Iceland’s President Olafur Grimsson shared with me a few days ago on a visit to Reykjavik. In our wide ranging conversation, he mentioned two things that deeply impressed me: first, that, in his international travels, nations as far away as Singapore and South Korea – realizing they have a stake in what he calls the ‘Global Arctic’ – continuously express interest in joining the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental body that addresses issues faced by regional Arctic governments and their indigenous people.

Second, President Grimsson also suggested a compelling agenda-item for Obama’s second term: convening an international Summit to directly address our shared, civilizational interest in the State of the Ice, and to generate what he called an “AHA” moment, which stands for the Arctic, Himalayas and the Antarctic – the three major ice centers on the planet. You can read about both of these and other compelling ideas in this transcript of a terrific speech he gave on the subject at the Arctic Imperative Summit, held earlier this year in Alaska.

It’s clear we need a moment of global focus and rule setting, or the new Wild West may be the Wild North.

Image credit: United Nations Photo

Later this week, I’ll be traveling to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for a very special event – the official launch of the i2 Institute, a new organization dedicated to building an ecosystem of entrepreneurship and social innovation for scientists, technologists and engineers in the Middle East and beyond.

I2 is the brainchild of my friend and colleague, the biotechnologist Hayat Sindi. Hayat is one of those people whose career path is as improbable as it is extraordinary.  She left her home country, went to the UK alone, got into Cambridge, then MIT and Harvard to do her post-doc work. There, in one of the preeminent chemistry labs in the US, run by George Whitesides, she helped launch a breakthrough medical diagnostics company called Diagnostics For All – which is developing ultra-low cost medical tests for critical health conditions.

Hayat’s fierce determination and abundant talent has been widely (and rightly) lauded in her home region and around the world – she was the only person to receive both a PopTech Social Innovation Fellowship and a Science Fellowship; she has since been named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and was recently named a UNESCO World Ambassador for Science, among many other justly-deserved honorifics.

When Hayat met with Leetha Filderman and I in a Camden, Maine coffeehouse, after her first PopTech gathering in 2009, she laid out a big challenge, and an equally bold vision to address it. Her remarkable experience – not just pursuing scientific work at the highest level, but also working to see it translated from a research context into a company – is comparatively rare, at least by the standards of her home region. This isn’t for lack of talent – the Middle East is full of brilliant people. Instead, what is often lacking is an ecosystem – not just of money, but of mentors, colleagues, role models and institutions who could provide the services, encouragement, peer support, skills training and connectivity to help turn scientists’ and engineers’ research ideas into applied innovations that create wealth, employment, and prestige.

The consequences of the absence of this gap are significant. For example, according to NPR, the unemployment rate for college-educated men in Saudi Arabia is and eye-popping 44%. That number is an proxy for countless stories of people unable to realize their dreams and contribute to the richness of society and the world. And, as Hayat told us, it’s a story that is repeated, in different ways, across the region.

Hayat wanted to tackle this enormous challenge, and she had a clear vision of how to do so – to create a new kind of institution, starting in her home country, which could become the hub of a network of high-capacity innovators who could blaze a new path, and themselves become role models for the next generation.

So, over the next two years, with PopTech’s enthusiastic early support, she marshaled world-class resources (including the renowned strategic design firm Wolff Olins, and later McKinsey, as well as signing on MIT and Harvard). These would be essential to the task of scoping, communicating and delivering the elements of her vision.

After much work, next week, in Jeddah, Hayat’s vision will become reality: the Institute for Imagination and Ingenuity – i2 – will officially launch, opening the nomination process for its first round of Fellows.

I’m delighted to be speaking at the launch, joining innovation and design luminaries like Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab, noted digital thinker and venture capitalist Esther Dyson, Robert Fabricant of Frog Design, and Greg Brandeau of Pixar and Next. We will be joined by HRH Prince Khalid Al-Faisal Al-Saud, as well as Mohamed Al-Mady, the Chief Executive Officer of SABIC, Abdul Aziz Al Khodary, deputy Governor  of Mekkah, and Arif Naqvi, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Abraaj Capital, among others. I’ve also joined i2’s Board of Directors as a charter member.

It’s been an honor to play a small part in all of this, but it’s been ten times more inspiring to have watched Hayat undertake the never-easy, always-exhausting process of putting together a new organization from scratch. She is part of a global ‘reaspora’, which is the opposite of a diaspora: global elites, educated in the world’s best institutions, who could live and work anywhere in the world, but who choose to return to their home regions to labor on issues of critical social significance. That makes Hayat not only a social innovation hero, but also an embodiment of the very principles she seeks to inspire in others.

Image Credit: I2 Institute

An edited version of this essay appears today as an Op-Ed in the New York Times:

For decades, people who concern themselves with the world’s “wicked problems” — interconnected issues like environmental degradation, poverty, food security and climate change — have marched together under the banner of “sustainability”: the idea that with the right mix of incentives, technology substitutions and social change, humanity might finally achieve a lasting equilibrium with our planet, and with each other.

It’s an alluring and moral vision, and in a year that has brought us the single hottest month in recorded American history (July), a Midwestern drought that plunged more than half the country into a state of emergency, a heatwave across the eastern part of the country powerful enough to melt the tarmac below jetliners in Washington and, most recently, the ravages of Hurricane Sandy, it would seem a pressing one, too.

Yet today, precisely because the world is so increasingly out of balance, the sustainability regime is being quietly challenged, not from without, but from within. Among a growing number of scientists, social innovators, community leaders, NGOs, philanthropies, governments and corporations, a new, complementary dialogue is emerging around a new idea, resilience: how to help vulnerable people, organizations and systems persist, perhaps even thrive, amid unforeseeable disruptions. Where sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage an imbalanced world.

It’s a broad-spectrum agenda, which, at one end, seeks to imbue our communities, institutions and infrastructure with greater flexibility, intelligence and responsiveness to extreme events, and at the other centers on bolstering people’s psychological and physiological capacity to deal with high-stress circumstances.

For example, “resilience thinking” is starting to shape how urban planners in big cities think about updating antiquated infrastructure, much of which is robust in the face of normal threats like equipment failures but — as was just demonstrated in the New York region — fragile in the face of unanticipated shocks like flooding, pandemics, terrorism or energy shortages.

Combatting those kinds of disruptions isn’t just about building higher walls — it’s about accommodating the waves. For extreme weather events, that means developing the kinds of infrastructure more commonly associated with the Army: temporary bridges that can be “inflated” or repositioned across rivers when tunnels flood, for example, or wireless “mesh” networks and electrical microgrids that can compensate for exploding transformers.

We’ll also need to use nature itself as a form of “soft” infrastructure. Along the Gulf Coast, civic leaders have begun to take seriously the restoration of the wetlands that serve as a vital buffer against hurricanes. A future New York may be ringed with them too, as it was centuries ago.

Hurricane Sandy hit New York hardest right where it was most recently redeveloped: Lower Manhattan, which should have been the least vulnerable part of the island. But it was rebuilt to be “sustainable,” not resilient, noted Jonathan Rose, an urban planner and developer.

“After 9/11, Lower Manhattan contained the largest collection of LEED-certified, green buildings in the world,” he said, referring to a common standards program for eco-friendly design. “But that was answering only part of problem. The buildings were designed to generate lower environmental impacts, but not to respond to the impacts of the environment” — for example, by having redundant power systems. In an age of volatility, the extremophilic trumps the ecoperfect.

The resilience frame speaks not just how buildings weather storms, but how people weather them, too. Here, psychologists, sociologists and neuroscientists are uncovering a wide array of factors that make you more or less resilient than the person next to you: the reach of your social networks, the quality of your close relationships, your access to resources, your genes and health, your beliefs and habits of mind.

Based on these insights, these researchers have developed training regimes, rooted in contemplative practice, that are already helping first responders, emergency-room physicians and soldiers better manage periods of extreme stress and diminish the rates and severity of post-traumatic stress that can follow. Researchers at Emory University have shown that similar practices can bolster the psychological and physiological resilience of children in foster care. These tools will have to find their way into wider circulation, as we better prepare populations for the mental, and not just physical dimensions of disruption.

There’s a third domain where resilience will be found, and that’s in big data and mobile services. Already, the United States Geological Survey is testing a system that ties its seismographs to Twitter; when the system detects an earthquake, it automatically begins scanning the social media service for posts from the affected area about fires and damages.

Similar systems have been used to scan blog postings and international news reports for the first signs of pandemics like SARS. And “hacktivists” are exploring ways to extend the power of the 311 system to help people not only better connect to government services, but to better self-organize in a crisis.

In a reversal of our stereotypes about the flow of innovation, many of the most important resilience tools will come to us from developing countries, which have long had to contend with large disruptions and limited budgets.

In Kenya, Kilimo Salama, a microinsurance program for argiculture, uses wireless weather sensors to help small farmers protect themselves financially against climate volatility. In India, Husk Power Systems converts agricultural waste into locally generated electricity for off-grid villages. And around the world, a service called Ushahidi empowers communities around the world to “crowdsource” information during a crisis using their mobile phones.

None of these is a permanent solution, and none roots out the underlying problems they address. But each helps a vulnerable community contend with the shocks that, especially at the margins of a society, can be devastating. In lieu of master plans, these approaches offer a diverse array of tools and platforms that enable greater self-reliance, cooperation and creativity before, during and after a crisis.

Yet as wise as this all may sound, a shift from sustainability to resilience leaves many old-school environmentalists and social activists feeling uneasy, as it smacks of adaptation, a word that is still taboo in many quarters. If we adapt to unwanted change, the reasoning goes, we give a pass to those responsible for putting us in this mess in the first place, and we lose the moral authority to pressure them to stop. Better, they argue, to mitigate the risk at the source.

In a perfect world, that’s surely true, just as it’s also true that the cheapest response to a catastrophe is to prevent it in the first place. But in this world, vulnerable people are already being affected by disruption. They need practical, if imperfect adaptations now, if they are ever to get the just and moral future they deserve tomorrow.

Unfortunately, the sustainability movement’s politics, not to mention it’s marketing, have led to a popular misunderstanding: that a perfect, stasis-under-glass equilibrium is achievable. But the world doesn’t work that way: it exists in a constant disequilibrium — trying, failing, adapting, learning and evolving in endless cycles. Indeed, it’s the failures, when properly understood, that create the context for learning and growth. That’s why some of the most resilient places are, paradoxically, also the places that regularly experience modest disruptions – they carry the shared memory that things can go wrong.

“Resilience” takes this as a given, and is commensurately humble. It doesn’t propose a single, fixed future. It assumes we don’t know exactly how things will unfold, that we’ll be surprised, that we’ll make mistakes along the way. It’s also open to learning from the extraordinary and widespread resilience of the natural world, including its human inhabitants, something that, counterintuitively, many proponents of sustainability have ignored.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t genuine bad guys and bad ideas at work, or that there aren’t things we should do to mitigate our risks. But we also have to acknowledge that holy war against boogeymen hasn’t worked, and isn’t likely to anytime soon. In its place, we need approaches that are both more pragmatic and more politically inclusive — rolling with the waves, instead of trying to stop the ocean.