be9e134d-e891-43fc-a901-

d4040d5055c2.mp3
Sat, 04/06 05:41AM 04:01

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

transition, climate impacts, anchored, talking, industry, economy, community, place, alaska,
climate, culture, globalization, warmer winters, climate change, thumbnail sketch,
economic development, cultural identity, concept, oil, itinerant

Easy to talk about jobs and raw numbers. But when we talk about these ideas of anchors and
community and history and transition, it takes on a different dimension. I'm curious if you can
unpack a little bit some of these concepts, because I have a sense that they have a bit more
nuance and direction for you. But let's start with just transition. What does that mean, in this
context? When you're talking about a community that may be deeply embedded in a particular
geography and industry?

Yeah, that's a great question. So just transition is a concept. It's not a new concept. We've been
talking about just transition in the economic development context for years. And essentially, what
it is, is the question of how do you transition from an industry that has anchored and economy
whether that's manufacturing, agriculture, mining, how do you transition at a community when
that industry goes under for some reason? And how do you do it in a way that’s just? How do you
do that in a way that actually respects workers and community and culture? So we've been talking
about this for a long time. And I think it's interesting that it's now become such an important
concept in the climate world, it's really core to the issue of resilience, because we need to think
about transition not just in areas where we're saying, we need to close down that coal plant, or we
need to find alternatives to oil, I really have come to believe that climate change and climate risk
is a macroeconomic trend, like globalization and automation, and you can't look at it in isolation,
you have to think about what is transition look like at a time where we have climate change
impacts, where we do have globalization in the economy and where there's massive
automation of some of these same industries that we've been relying on for years to kind of give
people jobs after transition. So I think we're at a really critical moment to rethink this whole idea.

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I'd love if you could give us a little bit of color to where we're talking about here. Where are some
of the communities that you're looking at, give us you know, a thumbnail sketch of what their
physical climate risks are, and their transition and industry frameworks are? What are we talking
about?

an obvious one that I'm certainly not the only person to talk about is Alaska. So Alaska is an
interesting place, because so much of its development has been on the back of the oil industry.
The oil industry, in fact anchored Anchorage, and has really driven a huge amount of economic
development there, and is very embedded in the culture and the economy. Alaska is also
ground zero for a lot of severe climate impacts. And we've already started seeing that in terms of
warmer winters, flooding, in some places, ice melt, sea level rise, there are communities that are
already having to deal with actually having to move looking at relocation. That's a very extreme
example, where if we're serious about climate change, and what we have to do to avert it, we
need to look at moving away from oil, the industry that anchors Alaska, and at the same time,
numbers of those communities are actually facing climate impacts today that are causing a
complete upheaval with the economy. And so to me, Alaska is a really interesting example of
how do we think about transition then place that's been anchored by this industry also is in such
the crosshairs of physical climate impacts?

Excellent. I think it's a great example. And I think I think that makes a lot of sense that you've
actually brought up a couple of things that I want to further unpack a little bit. You've talked
about justice, culture, identity place based, can you talk about the role of that cultural identity as
a factor in this confluence? Because it sounds like it's a big one?

I think it is. I mean, my sort of underlying theory is that these inherently base based industries
ground culture in a different way, then kind of itinerant industries do. And one of the interesting
distinctions, of course, really, between most of the clean energy economy actually, and that old, if
you will enter the economy is that a mining and extraction based economy is place based. One of
the great things about wind solar resources, but if energy efficiency, is that there are things that
we can do in many, many places, their job creators in a lot of places that have not had that
before they're distributed, people can own them. There's all kinds of great things about that.

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