When I was growing up, my dad had a small excavating business. As a young boy, I would sometimes hang around with him when he worked. When I was about six years old, a friend of my dad asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to build bridges.
He said, “So you want to be a construction worker.”
I said, “No, I want to be the guy who designs the bridge.”
He replied, “So you want to be an engineer?”
I wanted to know if that was what they called the guy who designs bridges. He confirmed it was. That was it. I wanted to be an engineer. I never wavered much from that desire. I didn’t realize until much later what a blessing it was to have a clear, unwavering goal.
I did the things one does to become the guy who designs the bridge. I went to study engineering at the University of Rhode Island. Like any self-respecting college student, I wandered down a few intellectual side roads. This included chemistry, economics, and environmental engineering, but chemists, economists, and environmental engineers don’t build bridges, so I became a civil engineer with an emphasis on structures.
With my freshly minted B.S., I started my career. I never did get to be the guy who designed the bridges, but I did a lot of other interesting work. I conducted structural analyses on submarine hulls. I designed composite pipes to transport water and underground storage tanks that replaced the steel tanks at gas stations. Steel tanks rusted and leaked gasoline, contaminating nearby aquifers. I dabbled in marketing (which I quickly discovered was not my life’s work). I married my wonderful wife, Lisa, and we had two terrific daughters.
In the year 2000, I began my climate crisis journey. I was working in the Owens Corning Corporate Research and Development Center as an engineer on the energy-saving effects of cool roofs. Soon the discussion changed to the effect of cool roofs on the climate crisis. Cool roofs are a mild form of geoengineering, the deliberate intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change. They reflect solar energy directly back into space and help cool the planet. I didn’t know much about the climate crisis, so I did some digging. I even made a little spreadsheet climate model to get a feel for how the process worked. Even then, the scientific evidence was convincing. I came to three conclusions. First, the climate crisis was real. Second, we were causing it by emitting CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, and third, the effects, while uncertain, were very bad. Once one comes to these conclusions, there is a moral imperative to try to do something about it.
In my spare time, I read more about the climate crisis. I also spent some time looking at the relationship between energy and the economy. It became clear energy use and the size of the economy are highly correlated. This means when the size of the economy goes up, the energy use also goes up. I read the landmark book, Ecological Economics, Principles and Applications,1 by Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley. The hook was set. I needed to work on this.
In 2014, I retired from my career as an engineer. Although I had many reasons for deciding to retire, one of them was I had once again been blessed with a clear, unwavering goal. I wanted to try to help save the world. It sounds idealistic, ambitious, pretentious, and crazy, and it is. In my professional life, I was never a climate scientist, an economist, a policy wonk, or a writer, but I am an excellent problem solver. This is a problem worth the energy and time I have left on this earth, and yours, and of anyone who hopes for the security of future generations.