Climate Conversations S2E11: Intersectionality and Climate Justice

[00:00:00:03] JACQUI PATTERSON: There's this deep intersectionality of all of these different issues, and they're inextricably connected. We have to work on the systemic underpinnings to address any of these issues and to address all of these issues. No one should pay for poverty with their very lives.

[00:00:18:01] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Welcome to Climate Conversations. I'm Rajesh Kasturirangan, and we have a fantastic guest today, Jacqui Patterson, the Director of the NAACP Program on Climate and Environmental Justice.

[00:00:31:06] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: I'm really looking forward to hearing what Jacqui has to say. I read the interview that Bill McKibben did a couple months back in YES! Magazine. And she sounds really inspiring, somebody who's connecting a lot of important issues.

[00:00:44:23] CURT NEWTON: Hey, what's your name?

[00:00:46:13] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Oh, Dave Damm-Luhr. Glad to be here.

[00:00:48:18] CURT NEWTON: And I'm Curt Newton joining these two intrepid folks.

[00:00:51:14] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Thank you so much. And over to Jacqui. Welcome, Jacqui.

[00:00:56:08] JACQUI PATTERSON: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.

[00:00:58:03] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So, Jackie, for the benefit of our listeners, can you just say a few things about yourself, like how did you get to be where you are today?

[00:01:06:16] JACQUI PATTERSON: Yeah. Sure. So, yeah. I was born on the south side of Chicago. And my mom came up to Chicago through the Great Migration, and my dad came up from Jamaica where he was born and raised. And they met and got married and had myself and my brother.

[00:01:26:10] And I started my career path really in more of a service profession. I wanted to be a special education teacher. And as I went into Peace Corps in Jamaica, I really saw the need for real systems change. I saw how the education system, health care systems were compromised by our broader systems of extraction and domination in different nations and just really started to get a sense of how these political systems interacted with our economic systems and then our just core systems that we need in order to be able to have human rights for all. And so that really started me on this path of doing social justice work.

[00:02:06:08] And so I went from doing just social justice work from everything from disability rights because, like I said, I was a special education teacher, to public health justice around infectious diseases and HIV in particular and spent quite a bit of time doing HIV and AIDS activism work. And then that led me to doing work on women's rights, and the gender justice work that I did with the ActionAid International brought me into contact with the work that they were doing around climate change. And in doing their work-- looking at the intersection of gender justice and climate change internationally, it led me to think about what those connections are domestically in the United States.

[00:02:48:27] And I actually got a small grant to go around the country with this project called the Women of Color for Climate Justice Road Tour. And I was interviewing women of color who were either working on climate change explicitly or implicitly if they were doing food justice work or disaster work but not necessarily naming it climate change work. I just started to see the pattern of disproportionate impact of climate change on women as well as women's leadership and, in doing that, of course, started to see the racial justice component. And that's what led me to the NAACP. And reaching out to them to actually interview some women around the work that they might be doing around climate change resulted in them asking me if I'd be interested in being the director of their climate justice program.

[00:03:30:05] CURT NEWTON: I would imagine that coming to this climate piece through all these different social justice lenses gives you a really powerful perspective on the nature of the challenge then.

[00:03:40:19] JACQUI PATTERSON: Yeah, definitely. It really just has entrenched in me this understanding that there's this deep intersectionality of all of these different issues and that they're inextricably connected and that we have to work on the systemic underpinnings to address any of these issues and to address all of these issues. Yeah.

[00:04:00:13] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: I think in the recent YES! Magazine interview that Bill McKibben did with you, it became pretty clear there is a sort of formula. The less people have caused particular climate problem, the more likely they will experience an impact of that.

[00:04:16:23] JACQUI PATTERSON: That's definitely been my observation, whether it's nations in the global south that contribute the least to our greenhouse gas emissions, and now we have places like Barbuda which, for the first time in 300 plus years, is uninhabited. And, yet, their carbon footprint is barely even measurable compared to the other places in the global north. And then, of course, women also tend to have a lower carbon footprint but are disproportionately impacted. Communities of color, low income communities. So we see this pattern time and time in various populations and nations.

[00:04:50:28] CURT NEWTON: Could you give an example of, say, a particularly strong disproportionate impact on, say, women in the United States?

[00:04:58:15] JACQUI PATTERSON: Yeah, sure. When I talk about climate change, I think of whole climate change continuum. So whether it is the drivers of climate change in terms of the polluting facilities and practices that contribute to our greenhouse gas emissions, those same facilities are also emitting various endocrine disruptors, which are impacting the reproductive health of women-- reproductive systems. And so that's one thing. Similarly, with mercury being a large contaminant that gets emitted from coal fired power plants and other burning-type facilities, and mercury is known to be tied to birth defects. And so that is an example.

[00:05:41:15] Also, when we look at other aspects of the production of fossil fuels, we also look at things like man camps that are in North Dakota and South Dakota. And the indigenous women in those areas have very much suffered from being disappeared-- women experiencing sexual violence. There's high rates of trafficking of women in those areas-- high rates of drug abuse in those areas-- where women end up being involved in that whole miasma of harm and assaults.

[00:06:14:05] And then on the other side-- last example I'll give-- is the uptick in violence that happens after disasters or in the context of disasters and after disasters. So whether it's the earthquake in Gujarat or the Hurricane Katrina or even the BP oil drilling disaster, in each of those circumstances, there was extreme uptake on the police blotters from BP oil drilling disaster or domestic violence and in terms of reports of sexual violence and domestic violence after Hurricane Katrina as well.

[00:06:46:07] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So to step back a little bit and put on a more abstract justice perspective, how do you see the intersectionality? In your mind, what does justice look like when gender and race and climate and other environmental impacts come together?

[00:07:08:09] JACQUI PATTERSON: I guess on the negative side in terms of how you see the intersectionality and then, I guess, just relatedly moving to what the transformation looks like. Our core issues with patriarchy, with racism, with classism, with the need to amass wealth and power of a few all are what gets us to where we are today. So whether it's reckless extraction of natural resources-- to do it as cheaply as possible and then to process it and produce whatever the commons are, whether it's manufacturing of goods or whether it's development of energy or whether it's processing a waste. All these are core activities in our economy.

[00:07:51:01] And the folks who are holding the power around it want to do it in the cheapest way possible, which means that, A, they're putting out an extreme amount of pollution in extracting and using these natural resources. And it means that they are trying to do it in the places where they can do it the most cheaply, which tends to be communities of color and low income communities. So we see how classism, how racism, how just the reckless pursuit of maintenance of greed all come together there.

[00:08:21:20] And so, with that, going from that example to solutions is that we need to really de-link the connection between our political system and our economy because we have folks who are amassing that wealth and then using it to pay into the campaigns of elected officials or using it to pay for a lobbyist to push their interests in the halls of Congress. And so we have the rules and the rule makers following the interests of the wealthy few, whose real, single purpose is to amass wealth. And, therefore, we have the other folks who are just dealing with the carnage from those processes.

[00:09:04:21] And so in order for us to move forward, we have to break down the monopolies. We have to de-link money and politics. We have to build up local systems so that we don't have mass production of food and mass production of energy and mass processing of waste. We have to move to regenerative systems where we are recycling our ways, where we have distributed generation of energy and clean energy, where we have local production and less movement of goods and people. So we really need massive systems change, system by system, because each of these systems are based on this notion of amassing wealth for a few without regard to the human rights or the earth rights of the many.

[00:09:47:23] CURT NEWTON: Yeah, I'm glad you're raising the local side of things. That seems to come up in a lot of our conversations about-- especially here in the United States where the federal picture is bleak and challenging, to say the least. Working locally from your perspective sounds like the place to start seeing these solutions come up. Yeah?

[00:10:05:22] JACQUI PATTERSON: Yes. Yeah, definitely. And that's not to say that we're completely disregarding the federal piece, although, as you say, it's bleak right now. Hopefully, as we continue to build up the local, then, as they say, all politics are local. And as we get folks more involved locally, and we're able to produce more outcomes locally, and people start to see the relevance of themselves and how we produce energy, the relevance in themselves and how we produce food and so forth, then, as we begin to have elections in the future, we have a more informed, more invested folks who are going to the voting booth.

[00:10:43:04] And then we might have different outcomes, and we might have a better federal picture. And we've also started to demonstrate what it looks like to have a better socioeconomic circumstance by being able to say, OK, we want clean energy for all, and here is 100 examples of where it's working and how it's working. And so I think that combination can actually result in a larger transformation, and we need to work it through community by community in order to get there.

[00:11:13:19] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: It sounds like you favor a decentralized solution rather than centralized, national, one-size-fits-all kinds of things. In a recent conversation with Ramon Bueno about Puerto Rico and the devastation there, he was suggesting-- proposing very strongly that folks look into microgrids. So that's not a centralized system but more of a district and area--

[00:11:35:16] CURT NEWTON: And microgrids owned by the communities themselves.

[00:11:38:29] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Right. Is that the sort of thing that fits in what you're talking about?

[00:11:42:04] JACQUI PATTERSON: That is. That is, particularly given where we are now politically and otherwise but also just from a practical standpoint. And, I mean, even now, some folks who are proponents of clean energy will say, clean energy, no matter how it's done. And whereas we're saying, not utility-scale solar or utility-scale. We want distributed generation partially, also, because we see where the utility companies now, as I said before, are using that wealth to fight back against clean energy, clean air.

[00:12:16:19] And they're using the money that we're paying for our electricity bills to actually fight back against these human rights component. And not only are they doing it to invest in legislators that they think are going to restrict clean air and clean water and so forth-- regulations-- but they're also paying into groups like ALEC that are pushing forward on everything from school privatization to prison privatization to supporting stand-your-ground laws and actively pushing back against voting rights. So we see that all is interconnected. So we need microgrids both on a practical level in terms of being able to create energy cleanly but also just to really reclaim our democracy.

[00:12:55:10] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So underlying all the things that you have said is a term that is kind of a scarecrow term in this country, but I'm going to say it anyway.

[00:13:06:13] CURT NEWTON: And I'm going to get scared.

[00:13:08:04] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Right, which is really capital, right? I mean, if you think about it, the ability for money power to influence the political system to use its concern for profits over pollutants-- however you see it. I mean, it looks like there's a central thread that runs through all of these, you could say, power structures. So what's your take on it?

[00:13:33:07] JACQUI PATTERSON: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, capitalism is predicated on the notion of winners and losers. I mean, that's just literally baked into the system. And the way it's played out is that those who amass the most capital have the most power, and those who have the least capital have the least power. And people are paying for it with their very lives.

[00:13:55:12] I mean, I've worked with communities who've had their water cut off for nonpayment, who had their energy cut off for nonpayment, and have burned down their houses with trying to light their houses with candles or burned down their houses when their oil and gas gets cut off, and they're trying to use the space heater. Or they've poison themselves by bringing a generator into the house and trying to use it to generate energy and get poisoned by carbon monoxide poisoning. No one should pay for poverty with their very lives. And this is because of the system that we're in. And so capital really is at the root of it the way capital is used now and the way it's inextricably connected to our political system and who makes the decisions and who makes the rules.

[00:14:39:05] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So what's your answer?

[00:14:44:06] JACQUI PATTERSON: Well, like I said before, I mean-- and, again, I am not an economist so I-- it's a relatively unrefined answer, but I do believe deeply that we need to have much better distribution of wealth and means of production and so forth that we also need to structurally-- dealing money from politics through campaign finance reform. We also need to make sure that we don't have these large companies that are holding so much wealth and using it in different ways, not just in the legislature but also even in the courts and so forth.

[00:15:18:26] So we do need to deconstruct these monopolies. And really, I mean, it sounds basic, but our latest campaign that we launched around energy is power to the people. And that's really what we contend that we need.

[00:15:33:21] CURT NEWTON: Yeah. Can I throw another request for a scare quotes unpacking out there? This is term "just transition"-- I've heard you talk about a little bit the way that it's been co-opted or twisted around by various groups. And I have to say, I really appreciate the work that you're doing here because my heritage would be from one of those big green groups. So really appreciate what you're doing here.

[00:16:00:09] JACQUI PATTERSON: Sure. Yeah. So we just-- I mean, we also want to make sure that we're holding ourselves to a high account around the usage and application and design-- defining of just transition as well. We just had a convening last week called the Black Labor Convening on Just Transition because we wanted to make sure that we weren't being so focused on communities and how communities are impacted by pollution that we're putting forward a definition of just transition that doesn't properly hold us accountable to the fact that labor is as much our constituents as communities are.

[00:16:35:25] And so we really want to be very intentional ourselves because it's easy to go astray and think that you're doing the right thing. On a call, someone said recently-- and it was one from one of those big, green groups. And, again, it wasn't with any malice or anything like that. They said, we have to all agree that emissions reduction in the aggregate is good for everyone.

[00:16:56:12] And so on the face of it, that seems like a reasonable statement. So it really is always the devil being in the details because we were saying, yeah, that does sound like a reasonable thing. But the fact is emissions reduction on the aggregate could mean emission increases in certain communities. And so it's not a good thing for everyone.

[00:17:14:01] And so that's why I was saying we don't want to beat up-- well, to some extent. But we want to have some level of grace when it comes to understanding that this is all a little bit complicated. And as we seek to define just transition and advanced just transition, we have to make sure that all the voices of the folks who are most impacted by our current system are at the forefront of those definitions.

[00:17:35:21] CURT NEWTON: Yeah. Yeah. Especially down at the level of individual communities, some of their current well-being is so connected to the current systems that require some very different thinking about their situations, doesn't it?

[00:17:47:17] JACQUI PATTERSON: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:17:49:13] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: So in your work in the NAACP Environment and Climate Justice Program, what sort of things are you doing to support building up of community leadership-- that decentralized approach that you were talking about a minute ago?

[00:18:01:00] JACQUI PATTERSON: Yeah. So a number of things. One is we just finished-- so we actually just finished three different convenings as I mentioned.

[00:18:09:07] The first one was a three day Energy Justice Training that we did where we were helping communities who are interested in transforming their energy system to understand the existing energy system, understand the utility business model, and to know what opportunities there are in decentralizing our energy systems-- so presenting to them what net metering looks like in terms of a policy that could be applied to decentralizing our energy grid and then giving them examples of communities that are doing community-owned solar that are anchoring their energy systems and energy efficiency and so forth. So really giving both the frame, the analysis, and the tools to various communities from 45 community numbers from 26 states. And then we have our field fellows, organizers who then go out and help them to implement whatever it is that they want to take from those trainings back at home.

[00:19:07:03] And then, as I said, our next convening was the Black Labor Convening on just transition where we worked with the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the National Black Workers Center, Black Workers for Justice, Labor Network for Sustainability, and the Emerald Cities Collaborative to bring together a group of folks to say, OK, we know that the markets are changing and that our energy systems are changing. How do we make sure that what we define as just transition is at the center of this transition, and how do we make sure that we're not just on the menu when we're at the table but that we are actually in positions of decision-making and power as we make these moves? And so that was a critical discussion [? that ?] will, and we'll continue to support the action agenda that arose from that conversation.

[00:19:51:05] And then our last convening was a Climate Resilience Convening of people from Alaska to Florida, all coming together to talk about how do we build these local systems around our local food, our recycling systems, like how do we do whole community transformation? And so each of the people who were gathered there are committed to doing a whole community-- like a holistic community model that involves multiple systems that are rooted in localism and community control. And so, overall, we're really providing the tools. We're providing the convening so people can exchange. We're connecting people to technical partners like the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and others, and then providing the assistants with strategy development and implementation as we guide communities in making that transition, and then also using our brand and political power to push for the policies that will support these local actions that communities are taking at the local level.

[00:20:49:09] CURT NEWTON: Jacqui, you are on a roll.

[00:20:52:02] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: That's fabulous.

[00:20:53:04] JACQUI PATTERSON: We're trying.

[00:20:54:28] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Fantastic. So you ended with a statement about the NAACP's brand and its political power. So, clearly, NAACP has taken a measured stance that climate and environment is an important issue. So how did you come to that?

[00:21:12:21] JACQUI PATTERSON: Yeah. That was a long road. At the very beginning, people were very much questioning, what do polar bears and ice caps have to do with our civil rights agenda? The first couple of Climate Justice 101 sessions that I did at our regional convenings that we have-- it was literally-- it said Climate Justice 101 on the program. And people came in.

[00:21:34:15] And by the end, they were like, wow, I see how this relates to my community. And they gave specific examples, and they're like, but I got to tell you, when I saw that title, I thought this was going to be about the climate of workplace discrimination. Like they literally-- just the terms didn't even resonate with our agenda, so they just kind of put it in to whatever frame made sense. And someone said that at our Oklahoma regional convening.

[00:21:57:09] And then a couple of weeks later, I was at another regional convening of the same title and the program, and someone said the exact same thing. And then they said that they thought it was going to be about the climate of injustice in the world. So, again, the notion of climate change just didn't have any-- so, in the very beginning, the reactions were everything from just bemused and confused to actively resistant because it felt like mission creep because people were concerned we were just doing this because there was money to do it, and it didn't really have anything to do with our mission.

[00:22:29:16] And then we had people who were in the Gulf region or people who were in the shadows of these plants and so forth who were like, thank you. Finally, the national is taking on this priority. But, over time, people have really embraced this, as you've seen. It's really moved up in the priorities of the organization.

[00:22:48:28] Now people are always interested in being a part of the convenings that we have. People are-- just in Florida-- I was in Florida a couple weeks ago. And 28 of our branches and chapters throughout Florida signed up to do three or more Environmental and Climate Justice projects from green schools to disaster projects to local food to passing community solar at the state level, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:23:12:14] And so we really have had a surge of interest-- a surge of understanding of how it intersects with our core civil rights agenda and now with our recently appointed leadership, a real deep embrace of how this fits into even our broader understanding of social justice as an organization. So it's been quite a road but definitely the biggest challenge of my life by far exponentially so but with rewards.

[00:23:42:25] CURT NEWTON: Yeah. Fantastic. Thinking about all the convenings you've done recently and your recent work, I was wondering if there is a specific project or location or two that you might want to raise up who's doing really great work who personifies what the next wave of solutions might look like?

[00:24:00:07] JACQUI PATTERSON: Yeah. I would say-- two places come to my mind. One is Anchorage, Alaska, where they are in a place where you wouldn't necessarily think of solar being a big bang. They have started a solar project there. They're doing it with school, the Begich Middle School, which is, interestingly, number one of, if not, the most diverse school in the nation.

[00:24:25:25] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Really?

[00:24:26:11] JACQUI PATTERSON: Yeah. I was fascinated by that. And it was amazing going-- because I visited there in March. And they have-- I don't even. I'm afraid to say the number of languages that they speak there because it was a ridiculously high number of languages that they speak there.

[00:24:42:03] So it was fascinating. Just seeing all the kids there was an extreme amount of diversity. Anyway, so they're doing this at a school, which is great. The solar project-- they're also doing an aquaponics project there so growing food and vegetation indoors. And just in the level of leadership and also working directly with the Alaskan native villages on this work.

[00:25:05:26] So they are really embodying a number of the values that we think are necessary for transition, working across cultures and communities and coming together, really pushing youth leadership, and youth being at the center of the work, and starting to make those systems changes, and also linking this to a larger transformation because they're directly in contact with the Governor's Office because they released this report that we put out in all the 50 states called Just Energy Policies, Reducing Pollution, Creating Jobs. And they released the Alaska version of the report. And the Governor's Office actually reached out to them, and they said that they wanted to follow some of the recommendations in the report.

[00:25:43:26] And so it's doing everything that we want out of these projects, both improving the life and well-being of the communities working across cultures, anchoring in youth leadership, and being a part of a broader transformation at a broader level then the community and being an example of what it can look like if taken to scale and then actively working with state leadership on that transformation. And so that is definitely a good example of it all coming together nicely.

[00:26:13:01] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: We're going to have to follow up on some of those sources to get smarter ourselves about what's happening up on Anchorage.

[00:26:19:04] JACQUI PATTERSON: Yeah. It's pretty impressive.

[00:26:21:13] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So the follow-up question I have is, because climate change is global and given NAACP's focus on communities of color here, is there a way that it expands beyond the United States? Or are you thinking about it that way, or is that too much mission creep?

[00:26:42:21] JACQUI PATTERSON: No. We've actually actively been working with the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance since the inception of the program. And we've gone to the UN climate talks every year since the inception of the program and through that have connected with PACJA and have talked about the common cause that we have between our organization and between our constituents.

[00:27:06:29] And in the last few years since we first met in 2009, we have started to do where they will come in September, and we will organize a nonprofit-- like a roundtable of nonprofit organizations in Washington, DC-- and, one time, we also did it in New York-- to really talk about how we support their agenda and vice versa. We've organized Hill Visits for them to go and talk, and then we'll jointly talk about, again, these common impacts across borders and our common desire around seeing emissions reduction and transition to clean energy, et cetera. And then, a couple of times, we've had where they've gone out to certain communities that have been impacted.

[00:27:48:13] The first time that they went out to some of the communities, they were shocked because they, like so many of the nations around the world, have this one-dimensional view of the United States and didn't really realize that there are people living in grinding poverty to the extent that they do and really saw the linkages between the communities that they work with in their nations and some of our communities that we were sharing here, which really deepened our relationship and deepened the sense of mutual concern. Most recently, we decided we wanted to do a memorandum of agreement together and launch a joint project-- a global effort to send the initiative on climate justice that really works with not only folks on the African continent and [INAUDIBLE] communities in the US but also in the Caribbean, Afro-descendant communities, and Europe and other places-- really just coming together around, again, that common cause and each working respectively with their government on a joint agenda that we're all invested in.

[00:28:48:17] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Yeah. Jacqui, we're based at MIT up here in Cambridge, Massachusetts and wondering, what can universities and academic places, research institutes like MIT, be doing to support the goals of the kind of things that you've been talking about today?

[00:29:04:25] JACQUI PATTERSON: Thank you. Yes. And so I do a lot of talks at universities and, as a result, we've had some great models of universities coming together with communities to do work together. So some examples-- not necessarily from my sparking because a lot of the ones that I've sparked up have been in their infancy because that's happened in the last year or so. But some of the ones that I want to lift up include-- actually from Boston Harvard School of Public Health and their partnership with the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization.

[00:29:33:05] And really taking leadership from LVEJO, they developed a methodology to look at the emissions from the two coal-fired power plants in Chicago, the Fisk and Crawford Plants. And out of their findings, which is that 40 asthma deaths and 1,000 hospitalizations on average every year were attributed to those two coal-fired power plant, LVEJO was able to use that data to then go to the city council, launch a public education campaign, which very quickly, after those findings, resulted in the mayor issuing an ultimatum to Midwest Generation to tell them to either clean them up or shut them down. And within six months, they were shut down. And so those are the kind of partnerships that would really be exciting to see replicated in other places.

[00:30:19:19] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Do you have any specific suggestions to our community, which is centered around MIT, but also our listeners who are across the world?

[00:30:29:07] JACQUI PATTERSON: So one thing I did write for folks-- if people are interested-- a document-- it was on Earth Day, I think, last year-- "Ten Things We Can Do to Advance a Sustainable Planet." They give some ideas of how individuals and others can connect with environmental justice groups and do collaborate work together.

[00:30:47:12] There was another document we also wrote called, "And the People Shall Lead." Like the Ten Steps document, it gives a sense of what people can do. "And the People Shall Lead" document gives us a sense of how one can do it because, often, again, with that collaborating across differences piece, there's some specific nuances to that that we want to try to keep in mind. "And the People Shall Lead" lifts up some of fault lines and some of the ways that folks can be intentional about working with frontline groups.

[00:31:17:15] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Are these publicly available?

[00:31:19:04] JACQUI PATTERSON: Yes. Both of those are available online.

[00:31:21:06] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: OK. So we will link to those. And thank you so much, Jacqui. We look forward to hearing more from you in the future.

[00:31:28:21] JACQUI PATTERSON: Great. Thank you.

[00:31:29:20] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: We really appreciate your time, Jacqui.

[00:31:31:05] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Bye.

[00:31:31:15] JACQUI PATTERSON: Bye bye.

[00:31:31:27] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Bye bye.

[00:31:33:11] CURT NEWTON: So good to hear from someone who's been working so hard and so broadly sharing those thoughts with us.

[00:31:40:26] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: And talk about somebody who's connecting the dots. Jacqui did that tremendous job of linking concepts and ideas and actions in a field that hadn't occurred to me before. So I feel like I've got a lot of good homework here to educate myself about all those things.

[00:31:56:26] CURT NEWTON: Speaking of links, we will do our best to provide you with a list of many of those things that Jacqui talked about on the podcast page on ClimateX.

[00:32:05:13] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: And, in the meantime, if there are dots that you would like to connect, please reach out to us on Twitter, on Facebook, or send us an email at climatex@mit.edu or, of course, comment at the bottom of this podcast.

[00:32:20:04] DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Looking forward to hearing from you real soon.

[00:32:21:29] CURT NEWTON: Bye bye.

[00:32:22:13] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Thank you. Bye.