(dramatic instrumental music)
- Earlier today, I taught a classroom of 20 students
about how we create electricity
from the nuclear fission of Uranium atoms.
While this might not come as a shock to you all,
it is certainly a surprise to me
and to anyone who knew me before I started graduate school.
I never imagined myself doing this.
I am a graduate student instructor, basically a TA,
for a course called Energy and Society.
It's cross listed with the Goldman School
and the Energy and Resources Group
and it's meant to help students understand
the whole universe of energy and electricity.
This course covers everything from the
chemical reactions that happen in the
combustion chamber of a power plant
to the movement of electrons through power lines
to the environmental injustices
associated with the production and consumption of energy
to the policies we can implement to remedy those injustices.
It's chemistry and engineering and economics and sociology
and this week, it's nuclear physics.
(audience laughing)
I didn't expect to teach nuclear physics
during my time at policy school.
(audience laughing)
I've always considered myself a social sciences person
with two capital S's and a capital P.
In undergrad at Brown, I studied Anthropology
and International Relations.
I excelled in courses like
Ethnographies of the Muslim Middle East
and War in Film and Literature
while just scraping by in Statistics.
But after graduating in 2015,
I fortuitously fell into a job in D.C.
consulting for companies and nonprofits
in the energy and climate space.
I had no background in energy and climate.
I just knew I wanted to work in the policy arena
and this was the first job I landed.
As I took on utilities, energy associations,
and environmentalist groups as my clients,
I quickly learned three things.
One, I didn't know nearly enough
about how the electricity grid works
to be credibly advising companies like PG&E
on their lobbying strategy.
(audience laughing)
Two, that expertise can be faked
with some sharp presentation and hours of
panicked background research googling basic questions like
what is net energy metering and how do utilities make money?
And three, I'm actually really interested in
climate change mitigation and the role that
energy can play in that.
Maybe this job wasn't just a way for me to stay in D.C.,
but the beginning of a career advancing climate policy.
Flying by the seat of your pants and the strength of
your WiFi only takes you so far in consulting.
Particularly when it pertains to such technical issues
as energy and climate policy.
I decided I wanted to know more to be better at my job
and to play a more proactive role in climate policy.
So I decided to come back to school.
I'm a concurrent degree student at GSPP
and the Energy and Resources Group, also known as ERG.
Which means that it'll take me three years
to earn an MPP and a Masters Degree in Energy and Resources.
As far as my parents are concerned,
this means I'll have earned half a Ph.D.,
which is very exciting for them.
(audience laughing)
More substantively, it means I've split my time
between two departments in an effort to learn
both the languages of energy and policy.
While I initially worried the split would be a challenge,
it turns out that the programs
fit together quite seamlessly.
The core curriculum at GSPP has provided me
with a skills based education
in equity, economics, statistics and policy analysis.
And from the Energy and Resources Group curriculum,
I'm learning about which technical solutions
work best and why.
Should we invest in getting solar panels
on every rooftop in America?
What changes would we have to make
to the grid to make that work?
Who benefits and who doesn't?
Would that even be enough to achieve our climate goals?
Taken together, GSPP and ERG have already provided
the holistic knowledge and skill base
around climate policy that I came for.
And I'm only a year and a half in.
But what to do with this knowledge.
GSPP students, in particular, are really
preoccupied by the question
how can we do the most good
with the knowledge that we've gained in policy school?
The most good?
So I've been thinking about the answer
to this question for myself.
What's the most good that I can do after Berkeley?
Recently I attended a talk by an alum
of the Energy and Resources Group
who does climate research and advocacy.
His name is Chris Jones and his organization,
the CoolClimate Network, helps cities understand
where their carbon dioxide emissions are coming from
and then recommends effective policies
they might implement to cut those emissions.
Chris spoke to a group of graduate
and undergraduate students who have
decided to spend their careers,
or at least their academic lives,
working on issues relating to climate change.
In the first 10 minutes of his talk,
Chris delivered a difficult but important truth.
Unless our work has the potential
to reduce hundreds of millions of tons
of carbon dioxide emissions from the environment,
we are wasting our time.
The emergency of the climate crisis
means we don't have time to tinker with marginal solutions
that only impact a tiny slice of the problem.
We can't focus on emissions from
Berkeley or from California.
We can't dedicate precious intellect and resources
to building apps that help rich people
manage their electricity usage
or incremental regulations on small segments
of the industrial sector.
If our work is to effectual,
the scale of its emission reductions potential
must be national or global.
I've attended lots of great talks at Berkeley,
but this one, given to a small group of students
in a windowless classroom in Barrows Hall,
has been the most electrifying.
In the universe of green jobs,
there's a lot of work that seems worthwhile,
but if I really want my work to matter, it needs to
eliminate hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide,
it needs to engage tens of millions of people,
and it needs to have the potential to scale
to national or global proportions.
So what does such important work look like?
As it turns out, it's mostly policy.
Policy has the potential to transform our economies,
to regulate polluting industries,
to direct sustainable development,
to correctly price the true social costs of consumption
such that it becomes too expensive for us
to continue down this path to self destruction.
And as a policy student in a room mostly full of engineers,
you can imagine how smug I was to learn that
climate solutions would come from
community organizing and legislative action,
not from a laboratory.
The technology we need to save ourselves already exists.
We have clean electricity and battery storage
and solar panels and sustainable farming practices
and efficient cars and metal drinking straws.
That was the easy part.
Now comes the hard work of changing our behaviors
around consumption through policy.
So that's my plan after school.
Pursuing a concurrent degree in Public Policy
and Energy and Resources is giving me the fluency
and the languages of policy and energy
to pursue those goals.
To act as a mediator between
climate scientists and policy makers.
To make the economic and political case
for truly transformative climate policy.
And as I stood in front of a classroom
to teach undergraduates about nuclear energy,
I can communicate the importance of thinking big.
The basic mechanics of a nuclear reactor
are important to understand.
And sure enough, I now mostly understand them.
But even more important are if and how
that nuclear reactor fits into the better world
we're building for ourselves and for future generations.
Taking advantage of my concurrent degree in
Public Policy and Energy and Resources,
I'm equipped to make meaningful systems change
and impart upon my students that this potential is
alive within them as well.
So thank you for all you do and all you have done
to help Goldman students like me do the most good.
(audience clapping)
(upbeat instrumental music)