Editor’s Note: Over the past year, Fresh Energy has partnered with Change Narrative founder Jothsna Harris to help our staff explore and articulate their personal climate stories through guided workshops and reflective writing exercises. The following post is the fifth in a series in which Fresh Energy staff share their individual climate stories, providing an intimate, personal look into our staff’s diverse experiences, passions, and connections to place that shape our dedication to building a carbon-free economy that works for all Minnesotans. Climate stories are representative of the staff member, not necessarily the organization. –Isak Kvam
Many people first learned about Fresh Energy — and were convinced of climate change — from hearing me speak to a group of Minnesotans. How did that come about?
I distinctly remember the first time I learned about global warming. I was a sophomore at Dartmouth College, taking a physical geography course from my first-ever female geography professor. About 30 years ago, I re-read my notes from that class. What I had written down decades ago included 95 percent of what is known, today. Aha! We’ve known about global warming for a long, long time. Unrelatedly, I woke early one morning when I was 20-year-old to share with my roommate: “I know what I want to do; I want to save the world.” Several years later, it became clear to me that I wanted to help people benefit from policies that deeply cut greenhouse gas emissions.
My path would not have been possible without many conversations with a large number of my excellent high school, college, and graduate schoolteachers. Many of them were Regents’ professors at the University of Minnesota. I am deeply grateful for the fantastic education I received. Many of those teachers have been very helpful during my career.
For years I was on an academic path, culminating in teaching superb graduate and undergraduate students in the geography department at The George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, D.C. But three years on, I saw an opportunity to try my hand at shaping clean energy and climate policymaking in Minnesota. When I left academia for the first of my now 29 years at Fresh Energy, I was torn. I was an excellent teacher, and it was tough to leave GWU. But as a Minnesota friend of mine later assured me: “You still now teach every day, J. You now teach state legislators.” She was right! My learning to teach well meant that I am really good at explaining many scientific and economic concepts.
Over the years, I have spoken about successful Minnesota climate policies across Minnesota, across the U.S., and 10 times at the global level. I have spoken, and always answered questions, to many hundreds of audiences and just in our state, to about 100,000 people in nearly every one of 87 counties. At the biggest events, I worked with many local people to ensure the audiences often included the mayors, the entire city council, local businesses, people from every living generation, and state legislators. Thanks to our months of legwork, each event sometimes was attended by 650, 900, or 1,100 people.
My biggest honor was the day President Barack Obama invited me to the White House. I would be one of just a dozen individuals to spend an hour with him before his public announcement of the Clean Power Plan. That’s me in the Red Room before we went together into the East Room, where the president spoke to a large room filled with hundreds of people and reporters from all over the world. That was the highest-level meeting of my life.
I tell audiences that almost every success Fresh Energy has helped create started from bipartisan support. Fresh Energy taught staff to “look for the highest policy lever you can pull, and use all your collective strength and expertise as hard as you can.” That is what I’ve done, with hundreds of other climate action companions. At the end of my talks, I give people the challenge: What is the MOST you can do?”
When people ask me: “How is success possible?” I respond that a spirit of compromising — not your values, but the necessity of not seeking a perfect policy but one that benefits everyone — and working together with people of all the seven generations now in our state. After all, I know Minnesotans who have been doing climate actions before I was ever in our state. They will be great companions for you to accomplish much.
My Drake and Hamilton families include ten nieces and nephews. They all know what I do for a living. All of them have asked me what I have done to address climate change at the scale and pace needed.
We need to be able to tell the beautiful children around all of us in every neighborhood: We did everything we could to fight climate change. AND IT WORKED.
