 Good morning. My name is John Sutherland. I am the Phasenfeld Head of Environmental and Ecological Engineering And I'm very pleased to welcome you all here to the College of Engineering distinguished lecture panel discussion The topic for this morning is on policies strategies to Protect the public from exposure to chemicals and other waste streams We are very pleased this morning to have four outstanding panelists one of whom in fact is our distinguished College of Engineering lecturer Dr. Paul Anastas. So let me tell you a little bit about Paul first and then I will introduce the other panelists So Professor Paul Anastas is on the faculty of Yale University He has appointments in the Department of Chemistry the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences The School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the School of Management He is widely known as the father of green chemistry and has published 13 Books on sustainable technology. He has experience in business. He's co-founded companies He's founded NGOs the Green Chemistry Institute and he served in government in a number of positions including In the administrations of the last four U.S. presidents He worked in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Clinton and Bush administrations And he was the assistant administrator and the chief scientist at the US EPA and the Obama administration So let's all please welcome Paul Our other panelists who are also very distinguished Are Otto C. During the third who is a professor? Professor and public policy specialist on agricultural and environmental issues in the Agricultural Economics Department at Purdue University He served in the US Department of Agriculture and worked on several farm bills He's been an advisor to the USDA's natural resource conservation service on conservation programs He was the economic analysis team leader for the White House's National hypoxia assessment for the Gulf of Mexico He currently serves on the the EPA science advisory board and chairs the agricultural science committee He's worked on restoring the Mississippi River's water quality And we all know him as a long-serving director of Purdue's climate change research center. So let's welcome Otto Next up we have Jennifer Freeman dr. Freeman is an associate professor of toxicology in the school of health sciences And is a faculty affiliate in environmental and ecological engineering She's also a member of the public health graduate program here at Purdue She received her doctorate environmental Toxicology and molecular cytogenetics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign And was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston She researches the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms of toxicity of environmental stressors and currently is looking at pesticides metals and other Contaminants and legacy Chemicals she received the Society of Toxicology Kokei palm olive awarded for research in 2012 and received major awards from Purdue for both her teaching and research She is a Purdue University Teaching Academy fellow. So let's welcome Jennifer Last but certainly not least is Professor Andrew Weldon Andrew is Andy is an assistant professor at Purdue joint appointment environmental and ecological engineering and Civil engineering he earned civil environmental engineering degrees from Virginia Tech He is doing research on plastics technology for for energy and infrastructure systems He's leading a multi-state research study focused on infrastructure repair technologies And also as a leading a study on drinking water safety and buildings in 2017 his Purdue team of faculty students and staff completed a rapid response NSF backed study that worked That looked at worksite and public safety issues associated with CIPP use in 2014 the governor of West Virginia called upon Andy to help his state recover from a chemical spill that affected a Large segment of that state's population. So let's welcome Andy We have a number of Three by five cards at your table. I If you have a good question for the panel Please write it down forward it up front. I have several questions to start the day off with But at some point I would like to transition to these Audience suggested questions if possible So why don't we why don't we start? Question number one for the panel And and I did give Nina and professor knives a little bit of a hard time because I think they Deliberately dropped in some of these chemical names just to mess me up. So I Apologize for mispronouncing some of these Neo nicotinoid Insecticides came into widespread use in the 1990s Substituting for organophosphate and carbamate insecticides which have in turn replaced many persistent halogenated insecticides from the post-World War two era There was emerging evidence that Neo nicotinoids are depleting bee populations loss of insect pollinators would adversely affect food production Yet use of these insecticides has been a boon to large-scale farming So the question to the panel is what strategy should we be pursuing in terms of insect past management? Perhaps green chemistry as a suggestion while protecting beneficial species and And maybe we can start with Oh, I'll be happy to but I know that there's a lot of folks with a lot of knowledge. So first of all Thank you John for for having me here. It's a pleasure to be with you all I I guess I'd start at the at the highest level because we could ask this question about this particular class of insecticides just as we could ask it about a Set of plasticizers just as we could ask it about a set of dyes And I think the fundamental point is that what we want to get is Function without hazard you want to get performance without the adverse consequence Now we talked about the evolution of you know the the organo halogens the organophosphates and neonicotinoids and and what comes next No one wants to go from the frying pan into the fire so What the strategy needs to be as we're developing new classes of chemicals is how do you define? performance to not just be that narrow functionality of Killing all the bugs right that will be pretty silly, but rather how do you get the performance that you need? killing the or eliminating the damage from pests to crop production while not having adverse consequence to to other Other species the ecosystem, etc. Etc. So there are a lot of to be more specific There are a lot of different strategies that you can use that quite frankly aren't limited to to chemistry We know and certainly there's lots of folks in this Purdue that know all about integrated pest management and different types of types of strategies But even when it does come to molecular design of an of insecticides How do you identify? those will say physiological property specific to the pests that you need to eliminate that is not shared by other Beneficial insects other other parts of the ecosystem so that you can target very specifically those those processes going to be a particular There's a number of different attributes, but the thing is Targeting is is going to be very important and just coming back to you need to understand that it's the job is not narrow function, but just Broadly defined performance of function without harm I think it's also important just to chime in that we need to remember to Expand the toxicity assessments when we're looking at these different chemicals that we're putting on the market and not only focusing on What the toxicity mechanism we're going after with the insecticides? But also remembering there might be off-target effects or there might be other types of toxicity events that are happening that we might not expect and we've seen this before in the past with Different chemicals that we've put on the market Especially for a lot of the chemicals that we're using that are end up being these endocrine disrupting chemicals for instance that end up having Harmful adverse health outcomes for us for humans or other animals once we're once we're using them And so I think it's we have to just keep remembering that we need to run through a full battery of toxicity assessments When we're creating these new types of chemicals and look beyond just that one specific Maybe mechanism of toxicity we're looking for for these insecticides to make sure we're covering the full gamut and protecting our health overall Let me broaden this a little bit That the the questions we're talking about are I'm not a chemist Are relatively narrowly chemical? But a lot of these questions have much broader impacts and I think one of the things we really have to do is Think what kind of a problem are we really dealing with? Are we dealing what some people term a tame problem that is subject to the scientific method? Or are we dealing with what the business literature started calling a wicked problem? which involves human values and the Political systems decisions in a wicked problem people can't even agree exactly on the problem They don't tend to agree on the way you deal with the problem Experts are not listened to Because this is a value judgment and if you just want it Putting a man on the moon is a tame problem You've got enough Purdue engineers and astronauts and enough money and you can do it The goal is clear the process is clear the problem is clear healthcare is a wicked problem and They're very very different kinds of problems and you've got to tackle them very very differently I'd go back to DDT There is an interesting discussion going on now as to whether we should in essence relicense DDT for certain places in the world where malaria is endemic and If used carefully, we're going to save a lot more lives getting rid of the malaria mosquitoes Inexpensively and relatively easily and are you willing to take the collateral damage? These kinds of questions You know come on you before you even realize it. I'll stop there having muddied the water So I'm a civil environmental engineer and the only thing I know about bees is that they sting me So I'm gonna kind of segue into infrastructure and then come back to reinforce something that Professor Anastas said but I think one of the issues and to bring up what Otto said as well You know, we're facing wicked problems across many issues If if if we could just do the science and the engineering and money was an option and politics were an option and Emotions weren't an option. I think we could solve a lot of things pretty rapidly But that's not how the world works and so across many sectors whether it be in in agriculture for pest control or Other like infrastructure Toxicity is extremely important, but also historically has been narrow focused until recently where they're trying to kind of Figure out which products may be potentially hazardous later on and they'll have to pull it off the market And there'll be a whole bunch of development money. That's lost Going back to what what Professor Anastas said we want products that Have great function and no hazard, right? We don't want to know where that we're using a product now that in 20-30-40 years will wipe out certain populations of really important species or will cause The applicator's long-term health impacts or in case of infrastructure, you know for asbestos It was used in mine for years and as the toxicology data kind of started to bubble up It was still used and mine for years and you can go on TV now and see the consequences of that with these lawsuits and mesothelioma outbreaks disease Fatalities so I think whether it's infrastructure or or Pest control What I really am amazed about is that it's bubbling up to the surface I think some of the work that dr. Anastas has done and dr. Freeman and auto have done needs to Transition to the infrastructure realm because in the engineering community and civil and environmental engineering Historically that's not been there. It's does it have a function does it stand up? Does it stand up for a long time? If so, then we're good So I think hoping that the science community can help permeate into the infrastructure world Can I just add one more point of it because I am in complete agreement with my with my fellow panelists And I just want to add one thing about the DDT point Which is which is such an important point because we do hear this being raised and one of the things you'll hear is Whether it's with DDT or or other types of Hazardous substances as well, you know it has this function And so we need to we need to use it and almost as if Well, we wouldn't be using it if there were anything else Available, let's just be clear. There's give or take a hundred thousand chemicals in commerce today That's the rough number that's thrown around give or take if you look at the number of Potential so there's about 75 million Chemicals that are on the chemical abstracts registry known chemicals 75 million okay, if you look at the potential theoretical chemicals that will be made that can be made with a With a molecular weight of a thousand or less The best estimates done by Barry Sharpless who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago is ten to the sixty-third I'm told that's about the number of water molecules in the Pacific Ocean So have we even scratched the surface of chemical space? No, so before we go saying oh Well, it's just except I think there's a whole lot more work to be done in Exploring the the molecular space that's possible and and getting the kind of functionality that we need without all of the harm So Andy you brought up infrastructure, so let's talk about an issue that's near and dear to your heart cured in place pipe CIPP Has emerged as a technology of choice For rehabilitating undergroudened water and and sewer piping This technique avoids intrusive Excavation and reduces costs as you know Andy's research team has shown that the steam emissions actually contain Toxic chemicals such as styrene and other compounds So the question to the panel is do we have some suggestions on how we achieve the convenience? economic and engineering benefits of CIPP But also improve Or actually protect the human health and the environment So why don't we start with Andy to get his thoughts? So Professor Anastas said something that I hear from engineers municipalities worldwide Well, if there was something better, we would use it, but there isn't so that's the best we have and The function of the technology is basically to take a basically a t-shirt that you saturate with resin That you've normally handle inside a fume hood and inside a building and you drag that into a sewer pipe and you blow steam in it And white stuff comes out at the other end and sometimes can go up into buildings hospitals daycare centers elementary schools and residences Or you put hot water in it and emissions come out or you put UV light But you have to blow air through that and emissions come out And so the process is really an amazing technology about creating a new plastic pipe inside an existing damage pipe I mean we've been doing this for years creating stuff inside manufacturing facilities But now the manufacturing facility is going to neighborhoods without fume hoods without certain PPE and So the principles of green chemistry here don't seem to have been considered in the application of the technology and that's resulted in children becoming sick people needing oxygen in their homes and states and in worker safety agencies now paying attention and Worker safety agencies and states didn't know about this because they're new technologies And so unless somebody tells them and makes them aware of it. They're not there as I Stop talking Let me just mention that the only reason why we at Purdue were able to do what we did and Determined that the emissions were not steam as assumed for 30 years Was because we worked with toxicologists. We worked with their quality engineers. We worked with civil engineers and worked with material scientists that actually make this stuff and That introduced my approach is really important And I think we need to kind of commoditize that approach for all these Wicked and non-wicked problems moving forward. I Guess the only thing that I'd add again a complete agreement with Andy that There will be many material solutions for how you patch pipes and things like that. That's that's really Probably not the biggest the biggest issue so When When one of our pipes gets punctured, you know, how do we deal with it? You know the the the whole area of self-healing materials is going to be tremendously important Personally, I'd like to see them Develop so that the self-healing whether it's in roads and bridges that part of the the healing part of the cloth That's formed would be from from carbonates That would be wonderful and and there's good work being done on that that quite frankly needs to be funded at a much higher level That aside, but the real point that I just wanted to make is around awareness so I've mentioned a little bit about ubiquitous integrated sensors and being able to they hear about See and sense whether it's emissions coming out of a pipe out of a pipe or the various air quality issues we're moving into a time where this kind of awareness of Not only our environment, but a pipe sensing when it's ruptured and and when it's broken and having reactions in real time is going to be All around us So how do we? Make Decisions, how do we put in place processes with this level of awareness of yes What we're being exposed to but also what's going on with our infrastructure and that's A new time. It's a new it's a new set of questions, but I think it's huge opportunities as well I think there's a great need for the communication just kind of what you're marrying before and the I mean the area of public health We're always dealing with this issue of how do we get our message out to the public about these different health issues that arise Whether they're at your workplace or if they're in the environment from your everyday exposures, and it's really difficult I think it also kind of goes back to the point that was made earlier about who does the public decide to believe and I think it's really important for all of us as Scientists and experts in this field that we need to be aware of how we're Communicating this message to the public and making sure that it's we're putting it in language that people can understand And that hopefully we're being approachable in these types of questions just to make sure that this communication is out there and helping To raise the awareness to the other thing here is We're also having the problem of determining when is a problem a problem I had come on my email this morning a new study from the US geological survey on our be chemical Okay, trying to determine how persistent the chemical is in the ground and moving through the water course in the ground and Potentially being taken up by adjoining plants This is a systemic chemical. So when the insect lands or or eats the leaf of the plant That's when it when the insect may be killed or damaged And we're still not a hundred percent sure on this thing and you know, when does the this communication thing? when does the public decide a problem is a problem and Are they really identifying a real problem that has scientific merit or do we have a lot of emotion involved? Bees are now seen as being cute and fuzzy rather than stinging you Okay, he has had one experience and has one view of bees. I view bees as cute and fuzzy And we will approach this problem differently in terms of whether it is a problem Depending upon how we view the poor bee who is in the middle of this argument without much of a voice You know, I just want to add one thing because I think the point you made is so important. They were talking about The data that we have and how we communicate that and I'm guessing that everybody Gets a sense that so data is not information data needs to be Transformed into information information needs to be transformed into knowledge and ideally knowledge into wisdom, right? but those things but data is not wisdom and That that transformation process is becoming critically important now since we are swimming and perhaps drowning in Data slash information, right? So some of what we are drowning in the Internet We are not There's not evidence to suggest that we're very good at curating this information to be able to tell what's True or untrue valuable and valuable so your point about Communication is so important and of course critical part of that communication is is curating and being able to show that that judgment and insight on The value of data. I don't know that we've shown that yet I don't know so here. I am espousing the the opportunity and the potential of more and more Awareness coming in but it doesn't have to be all good. It's it's something that is is only going to be as good as we are at Inflicting that that judgment curation and wisdom upon it. I have a question from the audience I have several questions, but I will Use this to inspire a question Paul You were just talking about self healing plastics and there is a great deal of discussion about plastics and composites For the reasons that they're lighter very often than alternatives Yesterday you talked about about a gradeable plastics Are there some things that we should be thinking about in terms of pitfalls to avoid? as we move forward and Maybe in terms of not only research, but you know some perhaps some wise policy steps that we should be taking As we move forward There's a range of things and questions that need to be asked even the ones that are You know put out in the 12 principles of green chemistry green engineering so those are Fundamental design questions the important thing to always think about is coming back to Yes, something can accomplish a narrow goal And if you if you stop there and don't think about the unintended consequences, then you're going to you know Keep on progressing on the trajectory that we're on so reductionism, you know Holding all things constant and moving one parameter has transformed our understanding of the universe. It is Been completely revolutionized Our modern life and it also has been largely responsible for so many of our unintended consequences Because quite frankly the real world doesn't hold all other parameters constant while you change one These are systems nested in systems So are there are there questions and levels of awareness that we have to do and we invent the next generation of self-healing polymers or you know You know jet-packed or whatever it is absolutely and if we if we don't ask those questions if we don't build that into our design frameworks then Sadly we're going to stay on this trajectory. I'd suggest Otto I guess one of the questions that relates to plastics is the use of petroleum as a source for So perhaps you have some some thoughts along those lines or that the big debate Within the agricultural and food community has been Materials or fuels from from biomass materials This is an older debate than you realize When I first started at Purdue At the time of the first Arab oil embargo, which none of the rest of you in the room are old enough to remember There was a big push in agriculture that every farmer would make His or her own ethanol and run the farm on ethanol and there were salesmen running around Tippi Canoe County and for ten thousand dollars They would drop a still at your back door and you could make ethanol and I got involved in the economics of this which was absolutely terrible Along with a wonderful Agricultural and biological engineer by the name of Bruce McKenzie who would point out if you're going to make ethanol Stop you're going to have to stop managing a farm and become a junior chemical engineer if you're going to do it at all decently The big push more recently has been food or fuel But there's a there's sort of a whole array of things that cascade from this One of them for example being soil erosion if you're going to use the corn stalks and leaves To make biomass from that organic material you will leave Remove this from the soil and you leave the soil open and much more subject to soil erosion What's the trade-off you are not returning the organic matter from this? Corn stalks and corn leaves to the soil so your soil may start losing organic matter even the technical reductionist trade-offs Cascade and become almost infinite and then how do you put that in the context of a wicked problem? Where people know darn well there are people starving in the world and there's no way we should make fuel out of corn and You know it's infinite in terms if you want to cascade a problem like this Which makes life easy for all of us Jennifer have you been exposed in? Are you familiar with some of the toxicology issues that you've seen some of those in your work? For plastics or composites. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's a wide array a lot of these plasticizers I think BPA bisphenol A was the one that made The notoriety out there with the public when they gained on that and being able and it's interesting that story I think of BPA as of which Chemicals a public picks up on and decides to kind of be behind it and move forward with and the BPA story if you're not familiar with it It was really led by young moms who were whose children were using baby bottles that had BPA in it And when the studies came out showing that BPA was a potential endocrine disruptor and the worry was once you heated up the plastics that The BPA would leech out into the into the formula or the milk if you're heating up breast milk and having that concern And so it's interesting we're here. We have the public really behind this push where we haven't had the band But now we have Alternatives coming into which kind of brings us back to that green chemistry part of it of what do we replace it with and how? Do we go about making smart decisions about our alternatives that we're putting into place and the alternatives that have been put into place for BPA now we have these same toxicity studies going on and they're showing very similar types of endocrine disrupting effects going on as BPA did and so unfortunately That's we have a number of those examples throughout history where we seem to make these quick decisions not necessarily Intelligent or educated decisions about where we come up with these alternatives, and I think it's important The basics of it of trying to come in to put of trying to create these chemicals that are safer for us and the full Understanding and that the full gamut of the understanding of what their toxicity is for us to How do we begin to? infuse or popularize or Start getting people to think more about green chemistry green engineering Designing something from the outset to be environmentally friendly How do we make that happen? when I was a little Little young boy my dad used to say to me always speak the language of the tribe you're talking to and What he meant by that and what I've found that he's meant by that he he you know Dear old dad. God bless him. He's He's gone now, but you know, he becomes more and more right every year older I get and what I what I realized what he what he meant was that You know if you if you're trying to persuade a board of directors Who's in business to make money you don't go up here appealing to their moral and ethical You know values if you if you're talking to the to the clergy you don't tell them how they're going to make a whole lot more money if you if you're talking to a Person that's wants to save the earth. You don't necessarily Tell them why this is a wonderful academic scientific challenge In other words, you put things in terms that people can understand what they're motivated by and most consumers are Motivated by the performance that they want things to to do So you want to you want to wild them what this is just plain better So if this is If this is a car. Oh, yeah, you make a Tesla. That's what you do because it's just plain better I Owned a Prius how many people own a Prius? You're lucky if you don't I'm sorry, but I Smart smart I'm sorry, but it that is that is not going to be this now I'm fortunate enough to own a Tesla and oh my goodness. I would never own anything else Yeah, it's eco-friendly. Yeah, but I'll tell you this thing rocks the street. Okay You can go right on through Virtually anything that organic food it just tastes better. Oh, yeah, it's healthy and it's not Not not killing the earth. So I think you have to lead with with that. I think you have to lead with just plain better Now don't get me wrong I'm actually sad that you have to do that I'm actually sad that you know you can't go into a boardroom generally speaking and say this is the right thing to do But I guess if I had only one strategy I'd say you know appeal to the to the whiz bang and amaze people by making sure things Just work better and and quite frankly We talk about well what we need is behavioral change. We need to change the way Consumers behave. All right. I I'll beakers in flasca. I know how to make a lot of molecules I know how to do a lot of them. I do not know how to change the the consumer behavior of folks So I've been one that said how about this how about we just make the Material infrastructure of our whole economy, you know, but I'm in helpful for people and we won't tell them It'll just be better. How about that? You know, so that's my strategy for what it's worth When Paul is talking, I thought he was gonna go one way and and I'll just go that way liability determines legal liability and Determines a lot of what corporations and even politicians do in terms of what I've seen in my experiences and so talking to an organization that a person in their home Who has a a newborn baby has been affected Doesn't cause that company to go in and give them money and take the child to the hospital it causes them to back off and and Shelter in place and wait for everything to kind of die down At least in my experiences and that's primarily because I think They were not aware that their technology that they're using could do that or could cause certain consequences To the degree that they've seen and so liability from a corporation standpoint. I think the more that It is not good business practice to to to operate that way You may see cultural changes in the business sector. There are certainly some good actors out there That are trying to do the right things that are that are anticipating and making changes without having legal actions taken against them Once you have a technology that's out there, that's a commodity There's a lot of money into keeping everything in the same way keeping moving The other side is the people aspect of this and how do you get people to embrace or kind of facilitate? substitutions alternatives better saver inherently benign technologies and That's what we've focused on with my group and team. We've been interacting with homeowners We've been interacting with Department of Health. We've been at NIOSH OSHA to try to get the Kind of the the pendulum to slide towards more public health protection Which then industry would have to respond to if they want to stay in business and make money Which they can do is just going to cost them more and anything that affects the bottom line cost. We've seen from some organizations causes them to go out and hire people to Issue disinformation and try to corrupt that whole public information Campaign so there's a lot of play and if corporations did the right thing if politicians did the right thing There was no money involved. There was no motion involved. I think everything would be great But that's not the world we live in so we had to find ways to come together to work together And you all are going to be the ones that make that change If I could I don't know go ahead Just one very quick thing because I I think that the points any makes is important when I Spent a lot of time at the Environmental Protection Agency and when you take a look at the the entire arc of environmental regulatory enforcement I Would be really hard-pressed to find many maybe any maybe a handful of Any actions that had been taken to enforce any finds that had been levered That rise to the level of beyond the cost of doing business the the harm done Versus the fines that are levied are in the margins So this idea that there is just widespread draconian the regulatory Enforcement the enforcement office has been reduced to the level where if it tried to inspect all of the Facilities that it is responsible for inspecting It would take Centuries at the current rate It's not happening So if we if we think that there's this image out there that there are you know Jack-booted EPA thugs that are going into every plant and we are finding them and we're shutting them down a way That is that is so divorced from reality that the I think it's important that Through you know taught liability and things like that that those things exist But right now our regulatory enforcement infrastructure the floor that has Supposed to be there since 1970 I'm going to suggest is not what it needs to be in order to just have that minimum floor and This is coming from a person who always thought and still believes that the best of environmental Protection comes from innovation, but you do need that regulatory floor in my opinion Yeah, you do need a a two by four as well as a carrot And and the two by four Need to be effective need not be able to cover absolutely everyone As long as you can have enough cases And the best example of this is the IRS and income tax enforcement Which has also gone downhill and I'm I'm sure that tempts more people to To disobey the thing if you talk about Enforcement on the one side the other thing that really discourages me from my much more limited experience with EPA is the innocence Defunding of the EPA labs The EPA labs were initially for many years for decades considered the sort of gold standard of environmental toxicology chemistry whatever else And they have been over many administrations including the Democratic ones as well as Republican ones defunded and and the real thing there is is what is scientific truth and How do you establish trust in that scientific truth? And if you don't have trust It doesn't work Just plain and simple And let me just add As a researcher not paid by a company or financial interest You know your your your duty is to the public if you're paid by federal tax dollars state tax dollars And if you come upon something That is a public health issue or potential public health that your duty and ethical obligation to say something about it now generally You don't it's it's not like you discovered Something major and it's definitive. I mean it may be one study you do that leads to other people to get in that space But when you start having financial interest of other organizations in play Some of you may not know this when they give you contracts. It says thou shall not Disclose any information until our basically executives review it and then we will provide edits and that edits will then Be integrated into the report that then you make public And so there are these other issues that a lot of people don't know about that when they hear information coming from certain organizations They assume that well because the person or group that conducted it is this therefore it's at this level of transparency And so I think that's an educational aspect. We have to do with this public outreach We need to make people more aware of Certainly they know they can get a lot of information. We need to make them more aware of What types of information may be generated by Under what conditions and then let them make the decision best for their family and friends about what to do moving forward? We have a few minutes left and I I didn't want to I had a few questions here But I thought there might have been some other ones that came up. Are there any questions from the audience? Before we run out of time Yes I'm There's Where The answer is I don't know, and I'm former director of the Climate Center here at Purdue. And the other one is I'm not sure you can separate these things out in a very clean way. I'm not an atmospheric science person, okay? I'm an economist. I got hauled into climate stuff by a colleague at Indiana University three decades ago, and that's how I started getting involved. I do not really know climate science as I look at the way climate scientists work. And that in essence began to give me confidence that there was a high degree of truth in what they were talking about. The basic physics of the greenhouse effect is fairly clear and fairly provable. Alternative explanations like increased activity of the sun have been proven to be not true. To some extent you have to take these things again. I go back to the word on trust in a community and faith. How you convince the public generally that this is important enough is really difficult. And one of the things that makes this one of the most wicked problems is when we talk about trying to deal with and maybe mitigate climate change, we are talking about intergenerational transfer. And what I mean by that, things that I am willing to do today that may cost me some money, all right, or some inconvenience, and the only beneficiary or the first real beneficiary will probably be my great and great grandchildren. Am I willing to do this in the sense of looking forward to the future? And in essence what you're talking about is the willingness of a society to give something up now for a benefit that we're not 100% sure of, I'm only 98% sure of it, at some future date. And this is an incredibly difficult thing to bring about in a society. And if anyone knows how to do it, let me know. I do and have spent a lot of time on the climate science issue. And I'll ask the question, say it's a politicized issue. Why isn't astronomy politicized? Why aren't there pitch battles around astronomy? Why aren't there pitch battles around geology? Why aren't there pitch battles? Because there's not winners and losers. There's winners and losers economically, politically, and so it's not that the science is politicized. The science is being used as a tool in a political battle because there are winners and losers, right? And so when you're drawing a scientific conclusion, if you have a stream of evidence that leads you in a particular way, and the weight of evidence of that conclusion, the weight of evidence is overwhelming, you say, that's a pretty strong argument that something is happening. But, okay, CO2 levels go up and it gets warmer and et cetera. If you have many, many different threads, different lines of argument that all line up in the same direction, whether it's habitat change, acidification of the ocean, all of them pointing in the exact same direction, that's not a scientific issue. That's a scientific slam dunk. Now, there's lots of great scientific discussions around climate. You can talk about the rate, the role of water vapor, feedback loops. Great scientific questions that we can and should be asking. But the whether or not, no, no, that's a... So what this comes down to is about what's the end there for? If this is happening, what's the end there for? So there's a great study by a colleague of mine, Kahane at Yale University, that says if you ask people to identify themselves in terms of philosophies and just various backgrounds, and then you present them with the same set of data, they will come to different conclusions, same set of scientific data. They will come to different conclusions based on how they self-identified. That makes a scientific explode because we've been saying, oh, if they only understood, I don't know, it's not about understanding. It's what you're willing to accept and what's the end there for? There's this great New Yorker cartoon, and then I'll stop talking, but there's this great New Yorker cartoon of a speaker who obviously is just completed as talking, has a bullet point list of clean jobs, healthier habitat, things like a big long list, and the person stands up in the audience and says, yeah, but what if this climate change stuff is all a big hoax and all we have is a better world? So he starts saying, what's... So why would you argue against these things? It comes back to the winners and losers economically of the immediate term. And the last thing I'll close with is, I love the way you phrased it, that the only beneficiaries will be grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and you put it in those terms. Are we willing to give up for the benefits of children and great-grandchildren? But the flip side is also true. Are you willing to take? Are you willing to be so selfish as to have the only victims be your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren? Is that really who we want to be? I think realizing the economic side is one thing, but I still think as a scientist there's something we can do, and I think about the examples in environmental health where most of where these issues come about, they're public-driven. And so I think as a scientist, one other way that we can go about it is just making sure that when we're working with the public of making sure that we're working together with them. And there's a lot of cases, unfortunately, of scientists going in in the environmental health area, going in and doing types of studies, and really kind of taking advantage of those public or the communities that were there, and then just leaving, and just leaving out. And there's this big push now, and it has been for the past few years, of, you know, this isn't the right way to do it. This isn't how we build public trust in things that we're doing. And so I think if we always remember when we're going in and we're asking these types of questions and we're working with the public and making sure that we're a team and trying to get the message both ways and listening to what they have questions about and trying to work towards, you know, those specific questions and not just our end game of what we're trying to do with some of our studies, I think that we'll see that public backing even more. Maybe I'm being more optimistic, but I just think, I've seen that over through, like, I think about Superfund. And it's a Superfund movement with the EPA, and really that was a community that got that going. It wasn't the economic, it wasn't any other factors, but it was the community members being active about it and wanting change for that. And I think we've got to just keep working with the public and making them aware of these issues and that we're trying to be on the same page with them as much as possible about what's going on, too. Anything to add, Andy? So I would say that much of the work that I've done deals with disasters and very personal things, people choosing their plumbing to determine if it's going to be safe. And I've had people preface their conversations with, I made this politically, but I have to make this decision. And in disasters, when the water's handed out or people have, you know, a parent is sitting on the floor with their two kids running around asking if their kids are going to get cancer, drinking the water that the city, county or state told them could be toxic, puts everything into perspective. And I've seen a lot of action taken with the political barriers down because people's direct connection to that primal urge to survive. And I think if we can find a way to link these big, wicked problems to people's everyday lives or health or well-being, it would be less likely and there'd be public support behind it than it's possible more productive things may rise to the surface faster than they would with the muddy water and the muck that takes a long time for something to emerge in today's climate. That's excellent. The time has flown by. I want to have all of us thank our panelists. And thank you, Paul, for making the time to come visit us here at Purdue. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.