 it's time to start doing adaptation seriously, right? And as Billy said, you know, the seal of arises baked in now, right? And we're gonna be seeing impacts and a lot of the decisions we're making are very long-lived decisions, right? Like buildings stay there for a while, infrastructure stays there for decades and decades. And so the changes we're, you know, making now have to be thinking about the future. Dr. Carolyn Kuski and Dr. Billy Fleming are my guests on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Carolyn is executive director at the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Process Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also directs the policy incubator. Carolyn's research examines multiple aspects of disaster insurance markets, disaster finance, climate risk management, and policy approaches for increasing resilience. She has published numerous articles, reports, and book chapters on the economics and policy of climate risk and disaster insurance markets. And as routinely cited in media outlets, NPR, The New York Times and Financial Times are among many, many others. She is the recent recipient of the 2013 Tarte Uphari International Prize from the Academia Naznala de Linzai. She is the vice chair of the California Climate Insurance Working Group, University Fellow at Resources for the Future, a non-resident scholar at the Insurance for Information Institute, and a member of many, many other roundtables, risk and resilience and extreme events all over the world. I'm excited because she wrote this fabulous article. Besides the blueprint for coastal adaptation, she recently wrote a nice article for the Hill Changing America, why Biden should launch an ecosystem restoration course in 2021, which is a fabulous read. Our other guest is Billy Fleming, Dr. Billy Fleming. Billy is the Wilkes Family Director at the E&L McHarg Center. Billy is there at the Weitzman School of Design, a senior fellow with Data for Progress and co-director of the Climate and Community Project. His fellowship with Data for Progress has focused on the built environment impacts of climate change and resulted most prominently in the publication of low-carbon public housing policy briefs tied to the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, including introduced in 2019. In his role at the McHarg Center, Billy is co-editor of the forthcoming book. We're talking about it today and adaptation blueprint of coastal adaptation. And really the Project 2100 and Atlas for the Green New Deal. I'm so excited to have you both here on the show. Welcome, Carolyn, welcome, Billy. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having us. Thanks. You're most welcome and it's my honor. I think we're going to have a wonderful time. It's gonna be difficult. I'm gonna caveat that with my audience right away because I have two fabulous minds here with a deep breadth of experience. And not only what we're talking about today, a blueprint for coastal adaptation, uniting design, economics and policy, but in many other aspects that tie to the bigger picture of what's going on in our world. I just recently on the show that I wanna let you both know about had Dr. Yusuf Nassaf, who's the director of adaptation of the UNFCCC. And he and I worked closely together at the National Adaptation Program Expo in Songdo, Korea in 2019, where we launched a five-day workshop on adaptation, resilience, foresight modeling, back casting for the new model, the plan, the goals that would possibly come after 2030 after the sustainable development goals that could be called the resilience development goals or the resilience frontier goals. And he deals a lot with adaptation from many people from many countries. And at this Expo, which was my first time being there, not my first time at the UN or any UN conferences or meetings where there's discussions about adaptation mitigation or resilience needed in climate change, was a real big eye-opener on what's going on in our world and how many countries deliver their adaptation plans or expected to deliver them and actually come up short where they don't deliver anything, where they're way behind or not up to speed and the type of work and things that they're working on at these points. I wanted to start out first with all your breadth of experience that both of you have. And we'll start with Carolyn first, give the lady the voice first, has all these years of working in this field and insurance, risk, adaptation, what you've surmised and done with the book, giving you any form of preparedness, resilience, insights, especially during this pandemic where we've seen a lot of crazy things happen, not only in the climate, but in all over the world that you're saying, there are some better models out there. We need to start thinking about them more and how have you weathered this time? Thanks, yeah, that's a big question. I think one of the things that our work and my work at the risk center has really made clear is that preparing for extremes and disasters ahead of time is really hard because it goes against a lot of our sort of natural inclinations to sort of, you know, when the sun is shining, not think about the storms that might be coming, but we also know that climate extremes are getting worse and continue to get worse and that these risks are only growing and the more we can do ahead of time to prepare, the more we can better build our resilience and weather those events when they happen and come out stronger afterward. But it does require a lot of, what shall I say, political willpower to do it, which I think we're sort of entering a period where there's more attention to this and also individual attention. You know, I think we do a lot of work at our center on behavioral economics and how people think about risk and make decisions about risk and people aren't so great at it. And even though it's something I think about every day, I see that in my own life as well. So for example, before we moved to Philly, we lived just outside D.C. and we lived in a neighborhood that routinely saw power outages, like even the smallest storm. So we knew this was a big deal and our whole house was electric, including our heat. And it took a massive snowstorm. I mean, a couple feet of snow that wiped out our power for days with a one-year-old, no heat, to realize we should have had a backup generator and we're out running cords through feet of snow to our neighbors to like heat one room of our house. And I think that's the challenge with this stuff, right? It takes the big event to make you realize, oh, I should have thought about this ahead of time. So hopefully with our book and other things like that, we can start motivating more interest in taking precautionary actions. Is that mitigation? Is that adaptation? How would you see that? Sounds like you yourself were caught off guard and not prepared. Yeah, I mean, I think we also have a little bit of a language problem when we started thinking about addressing climate impacts because the climate world talks about adaptation as addressing impacts and talks about mitigation as reducing carbon emissions. But when we get into this climate adaptation space, we also run into the disaster world, right? And disaster scholars and emergency planners and all these people who've been thinking about disasters before, even before climate impacts was a big concern. And they use mitigation to mean anything that's reducing risk. So anything you do to lower your risk of a disaster happening. So I sometimes have to, you kind of have to know who you're talking about and be clear I'm talking about disaster mitigation which might be elevating my home or whatever and climate mitigation, which is actually about reducing emissions. And of course we need all of it. Great, Billy? Yeah, I just wanna pull one of those threads that Carolyn kind of laid out for us. This one about, I think the tendency of crisis to make things that seem impractical suddenly practical. And I think this is kind of the genesis of the book we put together. It's a project Carolyn and I along with Ellenberger at MIT began thinking about in 2017, 2018. So three, three and a half years ago in some ways. And the idea for us is always that this book might arrive at a moment like this with a new administration. Some political will will see how much there's still a lot to be determined. And some opportunity for a book like this set of ideas like this that really at their core trying to take the best examples, the best prototypes, the best kind of pilots or experiments with local and state-based climate adaptation and compile them into a framework that could channel national scale, national level investment in infrastructure in the best ways that we know how to sort of at this moment. And I think we did that. We set up on that journey to put this book together hoping we would arrive at this moment, but also knowing that whatever's in this book, whatever's in the rest of the climate adaptation space that our colleagues, our friends are kind of working on, we're only going to be possible in the kind of spectrum of crisis. And I think COVID-19 has created, has made lots of things seem suddenly possible that were no longer possible. I mean, even things like mortgage and rent moratorium, which during the 2009, 2010 housing crisis, great recession, we were told would be impossible to do, suddenly became possible. I think to ever, almost everyone's great benefit in cities across the country. And I think the same is gonna be true for this. It remains to be seen how much political will will come out of the recovery from COVID-19 that gets channeled in the climate adaptation. But I think for us, the hope was always that this project would be one of those things that could emerge in this moment and help shape what could be a generational investment in climate adaptation. So both of you said so the political will, you mentioned political will and a good friend of mine and one of my mentors is Al Gore and he's a recovering politician. He says political will is a renewable resource in and of itself. And I'm hoping that all our politicians and those who are in charge of the codes, building codes, zoning codes, flood zones who are preparing or should be preparing our infrastructures on the coast are listening and prepared. I wanted to know a little bit more from both of you because of that question. So we've just been through this crazy time. Not a lot of that has to do with flooding and coastal adaptation, but there's some learning lessons that we learn about our politicians, our governments, our current places where we live that I wanna know, were you prepared because of all the work you've done in the past, you both do stuff at Penn State. And so was there a big learning curve there? Were there any lessons learned where you guys ready and prepared? Have you seen a bigger doubling down in people's awareness for adaptation, for climate change in general, changing the things? And you touched on it a little bit that you've seen some changes, Billy, but I'd like to know even more if there was some aha moments, some learning lessons or some things that even bubble to the surface that we didn't see before that might even be telling for where we need to go moving forward. I'll jump in first and then Billy take a crack at it. I think one of the things that's really come out from the current pandemic that has clear overlaps into coastal adaptation and a theme that we try to weave through most of the book is the real equity impacts of disasters. And there's now an enormous body of research and anecdotal evidence. I mean, you just have to go look to see that all types of disasters, whether we're talking about a hurricane or title flooding or we're talking about a pandemic, disproportionately harm lower income households and communities. And that these types of disasters can really create negative feedback loops for these households and communities as well. So I think that the pandemic has really highlighted and some of the policies Billy mentioned included there and sort of the important role of the public sector in helping to provide resilience to those areas. And I think that that emphasis is also gonna be spilling into our thinking about climate adaptation and you really see it right now with the current administration and their sort of double focus on both climate and equity. So I think that's one thing we can kind of take out of the pandemic and apply in this case too. Sorry, I was meeting myself there. Yeah, so I totally agree with everything Carolyn said there. I would say, there were a few things that I would add to that that like clearly changed in the way that I've seen kind of climate politics, infrastructure politics kind of play out over the last couple of years. One is just that, you know, even though climate change is kind of a political issue remains, I don't know, not in the top tier of things that voters actually vote on they will often listed as kind of one of their top preferences, especially younger voters. I think if we lived in a world in which it was kind of the deciding factor on who folks vote for the presidential level, we probably would have a different president. Certainly we would have had a different nominee because there were a half dozen other candidates I think in the field in 2020 who at least rhetorically had probably more ambitious things to say about climate. Although I think Joe Biden has, because of that pressure has very quickly, I think moved to try and make himself become a more sort of climate sensitive or climate forward president. So I think that's a part of it. I think the other is that, you know, there's been a lot of focus within the policy world, within the messaging world around trying to put climate and economic policy together. I think this is one of the things that Green New Dealers did especially well a few years ago and putting forward this idea of a kind of national policy framework built around these pillars of jobs, climate justice and decarbonization that has really stuck. And I think changed the frame of the conversation around what climate action can and should look like in really important ways. And I think those ways are especially well suited to this post pandemic moment that we're about to enter in which, you know, even with unemployment levels kind of dipping, we have a ton of long-term under and unemployment that's gonna have to be, you know, for everyone to get to kind of full recovery, full employment, the kinds of things that I think most progressive economists and especially this administration are quite interested in. We're gonna have to find ways to put lots more people to work. And I think this is where climate adaptation especially has really become kind of a central plank of this administration in ways that I might not have expected a couple of years ago. And the other, I think, you know, to Carolyn's point too is this focus within the administration on what they call their J40 or EJ40 initiatives. Environmental Justice 40, this idea of targeting 40% of the benefits of at least the infrastructure bill and hopefully much more federal spending into frontline or frontline communities. And I think, you know, there are some questions that remain there about how we're gonna count benefits which is always kind of a tricky question when talking about kind of national economic benefits standards in the federal government. But I think that also is a huge shift from where we were 10 years ago, thinking about, you know, Hurricane Sandy recovery where equity was kind of a throwaway line at the end of the policy conversation. It's now become kind of the first and most important line particularly in the climate space, particularly in the climate adaptation space. And I think for me, you know, one of the things that's most exciting about this is that, you know, infrastructure spending whether it's on climate adaptation, whether it's on the energy system, whether it's on some other kind of carbon related or even justice related question has a tendency to create some path dependence or some lock in. And I think one of the big opportunities with this sort of forthcoming infrastructure bill from President Biden is that it's not, you know, we have to know it's not going to amount to the maybe the most ambitious thing we might have wanted it to be a couple of years ago but it does have a real opportunity to create some low carbon, more just futures for folks to lock them into place actually. And I think to me, like that's where the fight over what this bill looks like is really going to be one or lost. I totally agree and I appreciate that feedback and that clarification also playing off what Carolyn said and also for both of you bringing out that the book was also written with Allen M. Berger from MIT. It's not just the three of you though throughout this book, coastal adaptation experts, quite a few discuss the interrelated challenges facing communities, experiencing sea level rise and increasing storm impacts. These issues all extend beyond land use, planning into insurance, housing policy, finance for public infrastructure, fostering healthier coastal ecosystems and much, much more. It's set up in two parts with 12 chapters, two parts of the book. I have to say honestly, it's an academic read. It's definitely an academic read. It's probably good, great for those who are making policies or needs to get a wake up call to start changing things because it really points out far reaching problems that we have from everything from drinking water composition to clean up contamination after storms or hurricanes or issues where places are left abandoned, super fun sites. It just gives a really clear-eyed view of how much we have to do, what kind of chart or course still needs to be navigated to get to thriving coastal communities. And you have super examples in the book, Jamaica Bay, New York, New Jersey, Burris, Louisiana. You draw from numerous coastal communities, even you talk a little bit about Boston where I lived for a while. I'm also from New York and that right now I'm living in Hamburg, Germany. And so it's really has this nice mix of communities and places around the US that are experiencing some pretty big issues and offers it all in the structure of kind of a blueprint. First, raising the awareness of what these communities in these places are dealing with, what the actual situation is and then where it's going. I really kind of think I know the answer already, but Billy, I wanna ask you, how did you get to this work and how does your expertise and architecture and all that play in and kind of how did that process begin for you to get into this? Sure. I mean, the short version of this is, I was trained as a landscape architect and so I spent a bunch of time, certainly as a student and then in my early professional career, working on and helping to build a bunch of like pretty residential, sometimes commercial, sometimes kind of public realm based or public space projects. And there was really fun work. I felt myself increasingly frustrated by the scale of that kind of work, going from small project by small project, from place to place to place with no real continuity, no real kind of framework in which they were all kind of able to be married or mingled together and wound up going, getting a master's in city planning, getting a PhD in city planning and then in between kind of spending a bunch of time, a fair amount of time doing policy work in the Obama administration, White House Domestic Policy Council and getting a sense of the kind of different levers, knobs, other organs available to the federal and state governments to be able to shape the kinds of things that designers actually work on. So if we think about the adult environment as kind of a key site in which climate policy is both contested and enacted, then for me, this scale, scope and pace of the kind of impact that I knew we needed that I know we wanted to work on was only ever really gonna come through working in that space. It wasn't gonna come through the individual projects, even if they were really exciting ones, like the Lower East Side Resiliency Projects, same in Manhattan, one of the kind of post-Sandy recovery, climate adaptation infrastructure projects. And so for me, that was kind of my path into doing some of this work. And then having the great fortune of finding out a place where I got to meet and work with Carolyn, who brings a whole other set of skills to this that a design, someone with a design and planning background just can't bring. Do you see that even when you have done designing in the past that you see that there's some really big issues of planning and permitting and things that aren't accounted for and looked at, did you ever run across that in the early years? But you know, say, boy, we're really not preparing for anything. It's just kind of a throwing up some kind of a building or doing some kind of landscaping and not thinking about long-term effects of environment or climate change. Absolutely. I mean, I think one of the big things that I carried out of that experience with me and to this one, it's just like a better sense of the life cycle of projects. You know, I think when people talk, this is especially relevant, I think in this infrastructure bill conversation, because I think most people assume that whatever gets funded, appropriated out of that package, out of something like a big sort of climate funding or financing package will result in brand new projects being conceived, designed, you know, engineered and then implemented in a few months, few years, whatever it might be. And the reality is, you know, the shortest span between say, you know, the first conceptual drawings of a project and the first shovel hitting the ground in this country is probably about seven years. That's like the minimum window to actually get all the design and engineering drawings together and stamped, to pull the permit you need to pull, to get the funding lined up that you need, and actually it's often quite longer. So when we think about, this is, you know, thinking about all the timelines that have been put forward for decarbonizing, say the electricity sector or adapting to some of the different sea level rise scenarios, the projects that'll be in the ground in 2030 to help us do those things are, if they're not already being planned and designed right now, they will be in the very like in the next 18 months. And I think that sense of just like what a slog it is to go from, you know, thinking of an idea of a project to actually like enacting it in the ground was one of the most important things that I carried with me from that work. Well, right now we're at this decade, before this decade is out, nine years left to go to reach the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, which are kind of or should be a roadmap to get us to a better future, one of 1.5 degrees of warming and kind of be a plan or roadmap to this better place. Right in the beginning chapter, Carolyn, you guys start out with the word resiliency. So normally when you talk in adaptation, mitigation, things like that, resiliency is usually not one of those things that comes up right away in my experience. And I'm wondering, that's a term we're hearing more and more and especially when Katrina, Costa Rica, Hurricane Maria, you know, things like that, we hear about, boy, I wish we had some resiliency or how do we do it in the future? Can you tell us a little bit about the framework for coastal flood risk reduction and kind of why you use the term resiliency and what you wanna tell the readers on where you're going with that? Sure, thanks. I think the resiliency conversation has really started to intersect so much with thinking about climate impacts because a lot of potential, well, we're seeing them already, right? A lot of the impacts of climate change are altering our sort of extreme weather events and resiliency is really just informally, it's like a catch term to talk about our ability to bounce back after these negative events and what's our recovery look like and do we even recover fully and can we also recover better and think about these sort of disaster events as shifting points and an opportunity to think differently. So I think resilience is a useful framework for thinking about these types of extreme event impacts and a lot of the climate impacts at the coast have to do with these types of things. So whether we're talking about hurricanes and the wind damage and the storm surge damage or we're talking about increasing flooding that's gonna, you know, the flood risk is gonna be escalating as the sea rises but even for some of the more, you know, an increasing heat waves and, you know, invasive species, you know, here in Philly, we've also been dealing with, you know, as elsewhere dealing with changes in invasive species, upsetting ecosystems. I mean, the list of impacts is really quite long but I think that framework of how do we deal with these negative shocks and come back from them is a useful one. That said, you know, there's always these questions of like resilience to what, for who. And I think it's an especially useful framework when we start thinking about our financial impacts and, you know, disaster events are often these, you know, what in a very academic way economists would refer to as negative economic shocks, like you have a bunch of expenses you didn't plan for and you probably might also have less income too at the same time. And how do you deal with that? And so how do we get financial resources to people to rebuild and get their lives back together and get safe homes? And I think the resilience framework helps with thinking about how we do that for people and get them back on their feet. I love that. And you speak a lot about insurance and risk and things like that. And has that always been the case that resiliency has always been part of that discussion or is it more risk protection that if that day comes that you have the right coverage and preparedness to storm it through? Or is there, because what I read, what I've read through the majority of the book is that a lot of our building codes, HUD codes, HUD codes, zoning codes, the way coastal regions are set up are outdated. They're old, they're, you know, we have to have this many parking spots and this fire path and escape and many kinds of weird zoning rules, laws and permitting in there and the insurance ties to it not only with what happened after Katrina with FEMA kind of getting in this huge debt issue and creating some things that the system's broken. We're kind of still deliating on an outdated infrastructure of building, especially in coastal regions and preparedness for that resilience, for that resilient infrastructures, I guess, you could call it. And so I just kind of would like to know what your thoughts are on that are. And yeah, sure. Yeah, you know, a couple of things. I mean, first, I maybe wanted to mention that this kind of idea of resiliency has grown up in a number of different disciplines, you know, and it only recently has become this like buzzword to kind of capture all these thinking, right? But, you know, engineers have thought about resiliency of built structures, right? Like the ability of a bridge to withstand some kind of impact that hits it. Psychologists have thought about the resiliency of people and our psychology when we go through trauma, right? What is it that drives some people to be able to kind of bounce back from that trauma better than others? It's also been a concept in ecology, thinking about ecosystems that get some kind of shock to them. And, you know, and do they switch into a new state? Do they kind of recover? So this idea of resiliency, I think, has been out there from a whole bunch of different perspectives, but has recently become a little bit of a catch-all for just thinking about, you know, how do we weather and recover from these types of events? So I think if that's kind of useful that it's been coming from all these different threads. I've actually given that same advice as well. So I mean, there's numerous definitions of resiliency and how we see it. I mean, there's also a very dystopian resilience where we're still living, surviving, we're able to continue, but we're wearing gas mass, oxygen mass, space suits. We're living in a bubble. It's not a very bright future. It's kind of a dystopian future, but we still have resilience. We're still around. Or there's a desirable future, a resilient, desirable future where we're actually still able to have clean food, water, sanitation, you know, the basics are still there because the infrastructure is resilient enough to bounce back and to use those things. There's one, I believe it's a park in Singapore that actually uses the ebb and flow of the tides and the flooding to actually process through the park and in a very good way. I don't know if it's already been tested fully, but it's definitely thinking in the right direction of how can we create infrastructures that not only sustainable development, but also very resilient so that tomorrow we have clean water, sanitation, energy and that we're kind of this off-grid resiliency, but it's not in a dystopian way. And so I love that you explained that. I do that quite a bit as well. Billy, you look like you have something to say as well. I mean, not a ton, but I would say I think this idea of resilience has like, you know, basically survivability or the ability to like just literally remain alive as opposed to like being able to thrive and have the kind of life that folks deserve and would enjoy is important because it can sometimes get lost and just like this focus on resilience is kind of a measurable characteristic to trade. And I would say, you know, the Singapore example you brought up is really interesting for lots of reasons. One of them is that, you know, in some ways there aren't, there's not really like a shortage of ideas or ways to do say Singaporean type things in the US. There are lots of different proposals for coastal adaptation, infrastructure and projects that are trying to put multiple benefits, multiple uses, multiple kinds of things on the same site and a piece of infrastructure. And one of the big challenges you kind of alluded to this on the sort of local land use planning and sort of administration side, which is certainly true there. This is also true at the federal level where institutions like the Army Corps who oversee near the all of the kind of coastal infrastructure building in this country have just not been updated. They haven't been refreshed to be attuned to the realities of the climate crisis and to the many other crises that we're living with. And it makes it really, really hard because the core ultimately is responsible for giving at least the sign off on if not actually leading the design process for most coastal infrastructure in this country to get the kinds of things that like you were talking about in Singapore, there are similar versions in Germany and Japan and many other parts of the world where people have figured out how to do this like multi-use green infrastructure in sort of coastal or flood risk reduction sort of context. And the big challenge in the US is that we've created the system for ourselves in which all of those kinds of what are often considered like trills or extras to the most basic purpose of just keeping water out of people's homes which is really important, get value engineered or cost engineered away as the review process kind of drags on for years and years. And it's why we end up with some of these like massive surge barrier or pump or wall and pump systems which operate as advertised but don't provide any benefit other than keeping some of the water out of people's patients or out of their homes. I totally agree. Sorry, Carolyn, I cut it off. No, I just want to build on what Billy was saying there because I think that is a point that we really tried to make with this book too, right? Is that can we think about the investments we need to make in adaptation is not being just to keep the water out but to support, you know, I like Billy's language about thriving communities and how do we make sure that we have these kinds of range of benefits that enhance and help people's wellbeing not just keep their feet dry. That I really appreciate that. And so another thing that I maybe might not have made clear the book is really US cities, US coastal regions which for me, I'm used to hearing about, you know the Philippines and PG and other coastal regions around the world that are really hit and it's usually those coastal regions in the poorest countries that are hit first by climate change. And matter of fact, my mentor, like I mentioned, Al Gore, he, you know, he said, we're going to see some flooding in New York at the World Trade Center. Sure enough, it happened. And he was, did part of this filming for a second film, the sequel to, that they can be in truth in Florida after one of those events. And in some places of the world, we're actually trying to pump out the ocean. We're trying to pump the ocean back which is a never, it's a failing process. And you guys really not only go through the book and talk about these different areas, you talk about the framework and you talk about how we're also dealing with these outdated codes and they really need to get up to date along with the big insurance impacts and how we can also change the insurance system. Now, when I asked you the first question of how you weathered this storm, Caroline, it was interesting because he says we should have had a generator. And it's almost like we all have to not rely on our government or the infrastructures or we live anymore that we all have to have kind of be this self-reliance or survivor type, have every preparedness and thing available. Is that because our infrastructures are not up to date, they're not prepared to take care of us and that we need to think about things like that or is that just a given? I think there's actually a few things there. Certainly a lot of our infrastructure is completely out of date, needs upgraded, absolutely. But I also think FEMA will be the first to tell you that right after a disaster event, the people who are gonna be responding and helping you right then are your like immediate neighbors and community, right? The federal government just doesn't get in fast enough. They can't, right? And also when you're thinking about the sort of immediate few days post-disaster, that's a time period, federal money is not in people's hands in that time period. Your insurance money is not in your hand in that time period. And so that's a time where there's a lot of reliance on your social networks and your friends and family and your community. And so I think there is a big push to make sure that communities and households understand that and that there does need to be a level of response capability and preparedness and resilience at that local level. And then certainly for the big events, we have to bring in our state and federal resources absolutely, but those aren't things that can be there in hour one. Yeah, I mean, there's also, I mean, so there's, I mentioned that there's 12 chapters, but one of the chapters 10 is really where it says, you know, take out the trash when you leave, you know, clean up properties that have been abandoned to see level rise. And I remember I was one of the teams that went into after Hurricane Katrina and there was this, there was almost like a business out of it, a blue tarping houses going in and people profiteering off of disasters. And we've seen that in many cases over the years. And then there's just a strong hard recovery for people. And there's not good plans like you've outlined in your blueprint where everything, okay, let's think about this in a new way, in a more resilient way. What needs to happen? What are the actual steps that we need to go through to make sure these things don't happen again? So I love that you touch on all those aspects and kind of explain that to us. I just got done reviewing another book from Dr. Lawrence Krause. The book is called The Physics of Climate Change and I'll tell you more than half of his book is devoted to sea level rise and why and the physics of why it's occurring and things like this. This is not a niche or not a new topic for the time that's here to stay. We've got to do more than, in my opinion, more than adapt and mitigate. We've got to be prepared with new operating systems, new infrastructure systems throughout our world and especially in the US, you know, that some people, I guess, were left in the dark on this. And so, Billy, I would like to know what your really biggest takeaway is that you want for others as a policy makers, is that just the general person who's now moving to a coastal region or living in a coastal region, how they can be prepared. And also in your book, you kind of talk about that those people who are living in coastal regions, a lot of them are vulnerable communities that aren't always the richest and thriving to get those insurances, to have those generators and those things on hand to be prepared when that trouble comes. Yeah, there's a few things here I want to pull and then I also would just love to hear Carolyn's response to this as well. I think, you know, on this last point about, you know, the coast is really a place where kind of the gross inequities that this country are often laid bare and you find, you know, very wealthy, often vacation homeowners living in well protected or sort of high amenity parts of a coastal environment and just, you know, across the street in some cases, across the island in some cases, find working class folks who are either renting homes or perhaps have inherited them. And I think about places like Albuson Island off the coast of Houston, you know, parts of the Outer Banks in North Carolina, some of these other parts of the country where, you know, risk and resilience are sort of front of mind for everyone and all of the inequities that sort of shape, you know, basically life in this country and especially life in the context of the climate crisis are just really laid bare and in the foreground of sort of every conversation. And I think, you know, related to that, this kind of era, I think we're beginning to snap out of austerity politics in this country and in the West more broadly has really done a number, I think, on folks. And I think, you know, the idea that we have to find, that one, like we have to find a way to like pay for in a really traditional sense, every single thing that we do and that, you know, doing the cost of spending public money on things like climate adaptation infrastructure is viewed as inefficient or wasteful or just like something we can't afford to do as we continue to build, you know, fire planes that don't fly has really, I think created a kind of a really perverse set of incentives in which people have been told by their government that like we can't do anything for them. And so of course, like both in this post-disaster moment that Carolyn mentioned where, you know, government is really never gonna be your first point of contact all the way through the recovery process. That entire thing has been almost, you know, wholly privatized and farmed out to contractors and done on the cheap and done it at less than we know it ought to cost to do well because there's this real crush of austerity-minded politics that they're shaping really everything we do, but especially around climate change. And I think, you know, one of the things that's most exciting about this administration is at least rhetorically so far a shift away from that idea that we can't afford to do the things that we know we need to do. And if we can't afford to do them, they have to be done as like cheaply and efficiently in conventional terms as possible. And I think we're gonna see, we'll see what comes out of this summer long infrastructure fight, but I think that's a place where I'll be watching, I'll be paying a lot of attention to see kind of what the next few years that look like for this administration. I think the other thing too that's kind of interesting is just related to this idea of austerity shaping so much of the way that we think about, you know, climate and infrastructure in this country is that folks like, you know, Naomi Klein, who I don't know if we're allowed to like curse on this podcast, but I'm going to just- Yeah, of course. Yeah, it took like endless amounts of shit for a very long time. And it still does in some circles for basically, and has now I think been probably more vindicated than any writer of my adult lifetime in thinking about the ways in which disaster, crisis, and the politics that emerge from then shape like our present and our future, that in fact, the right has been very, very good at doing the kind of utopian like world-building thinking that we're trying to do in a kind of a wonky way in this book, and then waiting for the moment in which they have a chance to really actualize and enact it. So when a crisis strikes, they really were the only ones with well-formed ideas and plans on the table and political power to go exercise them. And I think we're entering a moment, whether it's through this kind of work, whether it's through the Green New Deal, whether it's through other kinds of, you know, climate and economic transformation policies or frameworks, where the left has finally built up its ability to kind of punch back and to have alternatives on offer. So that when we come to these moments of crisis, we have a chance to actually go win some of the things we know we need to win. And I think, you know, the last thing I would say about that, cause I do wanna, I do wanna let Carolyn jump in. It's just that, it's interesting to know that the book you were kind of reading coming into this too was a physicist writing about sea level rise. Because that's like, the sea level rise is one of the things about climate change that it's just like locked in. There is no shutting off emissions tomorrow, does not take care of it. Geoengineering the planet, which is a whole other terrifying conversation, does not take care of it. It's one of those things that just is like coming. We have to find a way to deal with and adapt to it. And the rest of the effects of climate change, I think remain, you know, in some ways speculative and in some ways uncertain, but sea level rise is coming. And like we have no choice at this point, but to find ways to live with and adapt to it. Thank you. Yeah, I think that's totally right. I just a few things to kind of build on what Billy said. I mean, I think coming back to this question you asked earlier about what we'd learned from the current pandemic and the current, you know, the past year plus of what the world's been living through. And we talked about the equity issues, but I think another important thing building on what Billy said is the importance of a strong, effective, capable public sector, right? I mean, we need government for collective action to provide social goods for people. And we need smart, effective, capable public sector leaders. And I hope that that's like something that's come out of the current pandemic and that would also spill over into our climate response as well. But another thing I wanted to add on, because in addition to sort of getting away from this austerity politics that Billy mentioned, I think another shift that's long overdue when it's starting to happen now is sort of a rethinking within the economics community actually of their models as well. You know, and for a long time, a lot of economic models guiding a lot of our, you know, federal policy decision making were frankly not good depictions of reality and neglected a lot of important context and we're seeing some shift there now, right? Like the fact that the economy is fully embedded within our natural system and our climate system, it's not separate from it, right? And the natural system and climate system puts constraints on the economy. And we can't grow the economy forever. Like that's, you know, and we also need to be paying attention as well to, you know, the sort of other half of the income distribution and helping make sure that we provide everyone with basic needs. And I think some of that rethinking, and I'll pull out and I'll suggest another book for folks interested in it. It's something that's been out now for a few years called Donut Economics. Does a really nice job of sort of putting forth a whole new way of conceptualizing what we think of as economics and economic advice. So I think a lot of these strands are starting to come together in the present moment. And I think the question is just, I mean, we didn't spend a lot of time talking, you know, this hour about, you know, the scary stuff. Like if you start looking in at the climate impacts that are coming, it's terrifying, as well as thinking about things like, you know, biodiversity loss, right? And the kind of stress we're putting on our natural systems. And so the question now is, can these new ways of thinking, you know, happen quickly enough to move us into that better future? And that's, I think what we're all hoping for. Yeah, that's so important. I'm glad that you mentioned Kate Rower's book, Donut Economics. So that and everything that you guys not only talk about in the book, but we've discussed today is so important. I hope people don't need to get that wake up call. I was very surprised, some of the documentaries and reports that I saw after Hurricane Katrina, how people who had just lost lives and lost everything they owned and things that they don't believe in climate change. People who are having their house flooded and losing everything they have, they're just like, I don't believe in climate change. So I guess, you know, maybe we need to talk sometimes about the doom and the gloom and what's coming and why don't we put out these terrifying images? But sometimes I think when we're presented with too many charts and graphs and only the doom and gloom, we want either bury our head in the sand or we're like, oh, another chart or graph about climate change. And it's not, there's no fight or flight response in there, you know, because, but if it's a tiger or lion or you're faced with a, you know, that in real life, you would think that there would be some kind of a reflection or a wake up call and it just, it's crazy how it is. And so I mean, I mentioned to you that Dr. Lawrence Krause, he wrote about the rising sea level quite a bit in his book, but his example was the Mekong River basically is higher than most of the surrounding land there as well. In this book, and what you talk about it is some really interesting, so as we get to the end, as we find out what each area is dealing with and kind of the framework and what's, if we can, if we hear and know what's going on, what we're dealing with and what we're kind of struggling with in the United States, in policy and zoning and codes and building requirements as well as insurance and policies that we're almost fighting against in some respects, there's also this very beautiful thing that happens is we can realize at the end of your book, you really give us some examples of what can change and what can happen. And so you use a lot of acronyms in the book, but thank goodness you explained them. So the BCM Bureau of Coastal Management, if I got that right. And then the other one is coastal land management. So it's like the opposite of the BLM and that you really want to create. And that's why I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion, you mentioned in that article that Biden should get a core around climate adaptation and really do some stuff with the Army Coastal Corps is already involved, that's already their job and task. So much money goes to military out of the yearly budgets. We need to double down and make sure that that budget is really preparing the infrastructure for where we need to go. And I really liked how that kind of evolved and came out at the end of the book with some real big tips. Are there some other things around insurance and other things throughout the middle of the book that we should touch on a little bit more, Caroline, that are bring out or vital to know? Do you think we should go a little bit more into some eye-openers that people might need to know? Are you seeing that that's working when we shake them into a fear state a little bit more of what's happening? I wouldn't be one to comment on when fear works and when it's a bad idea. But I do think that one thing that comes through, I hope comes through clearly is that, it's time to start doing adaptation seriously. And as Billy said, the seal of arise is baked in now. And we're gonna be seeing impacts and a lot of the decisions we're making are very long-lived decisions. Like buildings stay there for a while, infrastructure stays there for decades and decades. And so the changes we're making now have to be thinking about the future. And so I think just teeing up that conversation and making sure that that's a part of all these decision-making processes is important and something that I hope comes out of the book. What role does insurance play and recovery from disasters? And is it difficult? Is it going in the right direction? Yeah, so there's a lot we could talk about insurance. Insurance is really important for people's financial recovery because we know that, you know, federal aid's kind of limited and delayed. Lots of folks are locked out of access to credit. Most people don't have enough savings to fund rebuilding on their own. So insurance can be really important for people to be able to recover from a disaster event. On the other hand, disaster insurance is really expensive and lots of people don't have it because they can't afford it. We also have a system in the US where because of the difficulty with ensuring disaster events, they tend to be carved out of our standard insurance products. So people will have to have homeowners insurance if they have a mortgage, but that doesn't cover floods. And so, you know, when the big hurricane comes, there's, or, you know, or any other form of coastal flooding, they don't have the financial protection to rebuild from those events. You have to buy a separate flood policy. But having insurance carved up into all these different things, I think is very confusing for consumers and also very expensive for consumers. And so, you know, there's lots of, if you look globally at how disasters and disaster insurance markets have been handled, there's some other nicer models that I think would be useful to be considering. But, you know, Billy mentioned path dependency earlier, you know, it's really hard to sort of overhaul a whole system, but just, you know, for, just for the thought of it, other countries like France, Spain require that all natural hazards be included in your standard homeowners insurance. So when you get your standard property policy, you're totally covered. So you don't have to worry as a consumer about all these holes and making sure you have it. But of course, disasters are hard for insurers to stay profitable. I mean, the reason they're so expensive is you have like tons of claims and you can go bankrupt. So they backstop the insurance companies and say if there's a really severe disaster event, the federal government will step in and make sure you don't go bankrupt. But in exchange, you're gonna provide this coverage to everyone. And I think models like that are a nice one to consider going forward. As climate events, you know, as the risk increases and makes the importance of insurance, you know, just grow. I totally agree and I think that I'm living in Germany. There's no country more insured than Germans. They insure everything. So I think that's a good way to go. There's something to be said by that, but I also had some ties to the insurance industry. And I know that you sit on a lot of boards and hopefully you're pushing and continuing to talk and make sure that that industry is going in the right direction. It would be nice that if our infrastructure, especially in the US was up to par, up to speed, ready, resilient for that, that we didn't have to get that insurance to tell you that God's honest truth. And Billy, it is okay to swear on this podcast and come out with some real opinions on how you think and feel and how we're moving forward. And that really leads me to probably some of the difficult questions that I have for you both, that I ask all my guests on the show because our sea level rising, our climate change isn't just tied into the borders and confinement of just the United States. They are a global problem. And so I wanna know how both of you feel about the thought and during, again, I guess we have to go back a little bit to the crazy question how have you weathered the time? During this time where nationalism has rise, people of color, Asian racism on and on, where we've kind of all of us have gone back to a little bit of nationalism and division one amongst another during a time of confinement. So what is your feeling about global citizenry or even globalization if you wanna go take it a step further and how would you feel about the removal of borders, walls and divisions of humanity one from another? What's your understanding of this and your views on how it would tie into coastal adaptation and the blueprint that you have come out with? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I think it would always be, although we're seeing strands of this, I think again in the Biden administration of this kind of economic nationalism as a way of couching climate action of this idea of like bi-American, produced American could I think potentially that it's done some really dangerous paths, ones that look a lot more kind of like say ego fascism or ego apartheid than perhaps the kind of future that folks who listen to this podcast and certainly I and Carolyn and you would want, right? And I think this is where there are a couple of people whose work has been really important for me and thinking about the internationalist implications of climate policy and climate change, like even within the US, like the idea of building out a fully electrified clean energy system isn't the thing that can be done without global implications. It's like it requires various minerals from all over the world to build the things we need to build for that grid system, whether it's in Chile or Fango or China or wherever it might be. And I think that creates like some real important questions about whether or not we're gonna find ways to use international policy and climate policy as tools of kind of climate reparations and a way to think about the global North's responsibility to the global South as sort of the legacy emitters, the primary source of carbon emissions in the atmosphere historically. And even if not like year to year now, it's all over time. And to think about like the hundreds of millions, if not billions of people who will be displaced, who will have their lives totally disrupted and in some cases destroyed by all the things that climate change is gonna bring around the world, but especially in vulnerable places in the global South. And so I think like the question of like how we find ways to try and yeah, I don't know, make reparations for all the things that this country and the West have done to create those conditions in the global South, is gonna be really important. And if that means dissolving borders, if that means building tons of new towns or new housing or new infrastructure in the US to make room for, make space for whatever it might be, a bunch of folks who are being displaced and perhaps coming here, I think those are things we're gonna have to think about. I think the response to climate change question, which you kind of pulled us towards a little bit a moment ago, is also just really important for this too, because the effects of climate change, particularly in the US, like can feel pretty diffuse and perhaps like only real in a couple of brief episodes or sort of episodic moments, post disaster, post heatwave, post whatever it might be. And that's just not the case for lots of people around the rest of the world, where every single day is from here forward is being shaped and will be shaped by the effects of climate change. And I think part of what we have to find ways to do better in this country and in sort of international settings is to think about climate policy as also kind of economic and material redistribution policy. So how do we not just decarbonize the economy, but like do it in ways that center frontline communities already in this country and do what we're, do what we're, you know, ought to be doing to, I think, assist in the resettlement relocation of folks who are being displaced from as being displaced as a little climate change. But that's a lot to throw, I think, out here. So I'm curious to hear what Carolyn has to say. I don't think I have much to add to what you said. That was great. I think it's a really challenging topic. And I think, you know, our books focused on the US but the international dimensions of this are gonna be profoundly challenging. Yeah, you ask in the book, you actually kind of, how can we learn from the international community? How can we take some learning lessons of what's happened? A lot of other coastal communities have started to build dams and different things to or put up different measurements, whether they're band-aids or not, or they work and the Netherlands has been flooded for a long time and it's only getting worse. And I'm not sure how much they've continued to prepare or do things other than just some, I don't know if you call them a dam or what they build, but there's a couple, you know, exchanges that could probably happen there. The really reason I ask you that question is because during the pandemic, obviously COVID it was a global citizen. Food is a global citizen. Air is a global citizen. Water is a global citizen. Species are global citizen. And it's really crazy how people don't realize that the things that occur across the world, whether it's in Brazil or it's in the North, the South of our world or the equator, affect us wherever we are. There is no place on this earth to hide from climate change. And so we're still breathing the same air that Gandhi breathed and Julius Caesar, Socrates drinking the same water. And it's just hilarious how many of us haven't made that connection to symbiotic earth and that we're all crew members on the spaceship earth. And so I wanted to know your thoughts and how that ties to adaptation and what effects that are maybe being caused in another part of the world that ripple on over and how we can't just always live on these national borders of rules, laws that maybe not be totally in alignment. And so that was probably the first hardest question I have for both of you. And the second hardest question I have for both of you is the burning question. And it's the burning question WTF. And it's not the swear word although maybe you both have heard that during this past 14 months or so, it is what's the future? And I wanna know because I ask all my guests this because if we don't know the future and especially as scientists and PhDs, a part of that is to kind of think about the future. How can we create more resilient futures? What kind of medication adaptation do we need to get there? What's that roadmap look like? If we don't have a roadmap then we're definitely not gonna get there. And so from you, each of you specifically is probably different as all my guests love to hear your version of where we should be looking going or even if it's just you personally, what your future is. Philly, you wanna start? Sure. Yeah, so I think, you know, I'll try to answer both of these questions like together I think and hopefully kind of succinctly. I think through this question of, you know, if it's collective action problem of say responding to climate change, I think the way, I'm not the first one to think about it this way. Lots of people are framed it this way but I think the idea that we all do better when we all do better is like really important here because it's really easy to become atomized and for someone, you know, I grew up in Arkansas. So for me, if I still live there to say, you know, what happens in New Jersey, what happens in New York, what happens in Houston, what happens in other coastal communities around the U.S. like doesn't matter to me. Like it's not me, those aren't my friends or family, like and you know, it's not my fault I don't live there, et cetera, so we shouldn't be bailing them out. And I think the reality is just that like we are, to your point, we are all linked socially, ecologically, politically, economically and simply cannot afford, I think this continued atomization, individualization of everything. It both makes bigger problems like the response to climate change harder to address because they're happening at scales that individuals simply like cannot adapt themselves out of. And it makes the, you know, the framework for winning an argument about bigger, you know, bigger kinds of questions of restructuring the economy around justice, around decarbonization, around good paying dignified jobs for people much harder because everything then becomes about individuals versus, you know, everyone else and everything else on this planet. And I think, you know, we're gonna see, like when you, when thinking about like how that plays out in the future, what the future looks like, I think in your point, in your question, I don't think like anyone knows, hopefully people are out of the kind of prediction game at this point, but I think we're seeing a few different strategies play out that I'm particularly excited about. One of them is coming from kind of the climate youth movement and thinking about mobilization theory as like the theory of change that gets us from here to say the kind of world that Green New Dealers would like to build both, you know, in the US and hopefully around the world. And, you know, the idea there is that, you know, mass action is the thing that creates the conditions for a better kind of climate politics. And there are a couple of years into their, their ideological and sort of professional project and doing that. So I'm curious to see how the folks at sunrise and their kind of, you know, friends in that space in the movement continue to push that, push that set of ideas. And I think the other which is a bit more technocratic and a bit, probably a bit more favored by this administration is this idea that industrial policy, that investments in infrastructure can create real kind of social and political, you know, coalitions or formations. So that by driving, you know, investment from a federal government perspective into, you know, new sectors of the economy. So building up clean energy, building up, you know, different, different kinds of decarbonized infrastructure. All of the other things that I think are kind of laid out in the book here creates, you know, a real kind of mass politics around those industries, around those kinds of jobs, around the places where, you know, those, that kind of work happens. And it's very different in many ways. I think the mobilization theory that sunrise is playing out, they're gonna both happen in parallel. They're probably gonna have some relationship to each other. So I think for me, the thing that's most exciting, the thing I'm gonna pay the most attention to is how those two different tracks begin to kind of merge or not, and which one appears to be the one that's leading us down kind of the fastest path to a more livable and hopefully better future. I like that description of the two approaches that Billy just laid out. And I think that kind of to get to the future we want, we need, we're definitely gonna need some of the kind of top down federal policy changes. We're gonna need, you know, technological innovation. We're gonna need the private sector, but what kind of inspires me most. And I think you can see it in some of the examples here in the book, but it's also that people just need to start empowering themselves and their communities and wherever they are to start making change, right? And it's important to still be pushing on the other fronts, but there's also a lot that can be done as individuals, as communities that can start building the future that we want, right? And if we build it, then we will self-fulfill into what we want to see. And I think sometimes it can feel overwhelming or that it's hard to see what you can do as one person when we're faced with these immense global crises. But I think in the face of that, it's important to come back to my actions still can matter and be important in getting there because otherwise you kind of get into the climate despair. And what I hope for the future really is that, you know, a lot of my work has focused, I think on these three big crises that the planet's facing, the climate crisis is one of them, the biodiversity crisis is another and the widening inequality is the third. And to think about the kind of revisioning of the way we live that would address all three of them at the same time. And I think we talked about this earlier in this episode that there's a lot of types of kind of solutions to climate adaptation that can actually be beneficial on these other dimensions too. And so instead of thinking that we have to like, you know, solve this problem here and this problem here and go house by house, we think about collectively what a kind of new approach looks like. I'm glad that you brought that up because I think it's so important. I live in Hamburg, Germany, I'm originally from America and back in 1962, one of the big German politicians and there was a big flood in Hamburg and devastated 80,000 people lost their lives, the whole city was devastated. Since I moved here in 2013 was another flood and they were a little bit better prepared, also some damage, also some lives lost but much more prepared than before. With Katrina and other things that we've seen from Katrina to Florida to other areas in the United States, do you think we've learned from some of the past mistakes we've made or past experiences we've had like Katrina, other hurricanes that were prepared for sea level rise, were prepared for hurricanes and storms that we won't feel that as much or is there still a long way to go? Both, you know, I think I have to hope that we're learning, but there's often a gap between what we learn and putting it into practice, right? And I think that forward progress is often sort of two steps forward, one step back kind of thing. So I hope we're learning and we do still have a ways to go. In the positive section of your book where you basically you go through and you talk about new approaches to design, make sure that they get implemented to coastal resilience, you know, you structure the structures of coastal resilience, you go through and you talk about them, you talk about what redesigning coastal urbanism looks like, you talk about what some tools and tips and tricks there are to use for that, thinking about Dutch design, which was obviously from Denmark and applying that some resilient design that we've seen in San Francisco. The coding flux from end state zoning to zoning processes and potential. So you come up with a lot of tools and things that can be implemented, things that we should be looking at. It's really important that we innovate and we think about how we do those things, thinking about impact bonds, new financing methods. I see as hopefully others would see that this is a good tool for policy makers, senators. This is a good tool for planning city planners, coastal planners and how they work with those interlying cities and states and places that maybe be a little bit further apart to make sure that it's a end-to-end thought through process. I would like to hear from both of you. Who do you think this book would be best received for? Who needs to be reading it and making sure it gets applied on this much bigger scale? I think we have a mix of audiences. I mean, I would hope that one important group is community decision makers. A lot of coastal adaptation in the US is just gonna inherently be local when we're talking about things like building codes and our zoning and where we build and that type of thing. So I think we hope that that's one audience. I also wanna throw out that I hope that students is another audience because there's increasing interest. We see it just depend in climate adaptation topics because everyone can look around and see the impacts materializing. And so I hope this would also be a nice entry into the field for students as well. Billy, maybe you have others. And I think that's right. I mean, I think certainly I do a bunch, I do a bunch of other work, bunch of other writing that's for either a more popular audience or a more kind of movement or activist-based audience. And I think they might find this book, I think interesting or helpful, but I do think that Carolyn's point is just really geared towards both current decision makers, whether it's folks in elected or appointed office, whether it's folks who run local or large national environmental organizations who have some ability to shape their local state or federal sort of politics. And then it's also for folks back to Carolyn's point who are going to be those folks some days, the folks who are going through whatever program they're in where this book might be relevant to them. Obviously in schools of design, in any kind of department or any kind of economics program, any space where they're gonna be worried about the built environment, worried about the future of communities and how and where we live. I think we hope this book is full of tools, full of ideas, full of things that you can carry with you, both in current practice today and for folks who will be in practice years from now working on this stuff. This is the good and bad part of climate for Carolyn and I is that it's never, there's just simply too much work to do. It's not gonna go away anytime on our lifetimes. Exactly, and you don't have to hope because it definitely is. Although academic, it is still a very good read and has a lot of hope and optimism. It also gives you a nice insight on the many systemic things that need to be dealt with in order to fix and adapt coastal regions and tools that you're suggesting. I interview and speak to a lot of Island Press authors and authors and experts all over the world. I have to tell you that articles like Carolyn wrote, mentioning Biden and this book, The Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation are definitely not falling on deaf eyes and ears. Those people in the right places usually hear them. Dr. Shalanda Baker became department, deputy director of the Department of Energy. She is doing amazing things. She's also an Island Press author. It's also very outspoken for people of color, indigenous communities and on and on. I hope that this book falls into the hands of the Biden administration and that maybe there's a new position for you to put some implementation for that Army Corps of Coastal Adaptation that we really need and that you write about. So I'm very optimistic and I hope that. I only have two last questions for you. I know Carolyn needs to run to another appointment. We could actually talk for hours and go into much more depth because we also tickled a little bit about a few other things. And that is really that one, we have all these new emerging, the new Green Deal, the circular economy, the donut economics. We have the planetary boundaries. We have all these, the new Green Deal from Europe, that these economic models, these new models for systems and society. And it's really hard, which is for us, which one are we gonna do? The Paris Agreement, the SDGs. I wanna know from each of you, are they all working towards the same thing? How do we make a decision? Is it even up to us to make that decision? And what fall, what of those plans fall most in line to the book and to the direction that you would suggest? I'm actually not deeply familiar with all of the different international frameworks. I know there's a lot of them, but I would hope that they're converging into sort of pointing everyone in the same direction. And I think a lot of that could also provide guidance to the communities and places we talk about in the US and the book as well. There's a lot of efforts to kind of achieve the type of future we've been talking about today. And so I'd hope that they could all kind of synergize in getting us in the same direction. I think there is a concern, when you start to see, this has come up in like the climate disclosure stuff, you start to see proliferation of too many types of standards and frameworks, then it can just get confusing. So I think we need to be cautious about that, but any guidelines in the right way are useful. If there was one message you could depart to our listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change our life, what would it be, your message, Billy? Well, you're saving the easy questions for last. I don't know, I mean, I think one of the most important things you can do is to like get to know your neighbors, like really get to know them and like find ways. So for me, like for many other people, it's really easy to just like remain in either my academic or professional or personal, like ideological and political and other kinds of bubbles. And one of the most important things that I try to do, pretty regularly is go doorknock and canvas for either campaigns or for causes, whatever it might be. We just wrapped up our municipal primary and Billy and it felt really good to go knock doors again, which I hadn't done in like a year and a half. And I think that's like a really important way to get to know like the people around you to get to hear from and talk to other people who might not be like, you know, as nerdy about and as interested in climate policy as obviously Caroline and I are. And even especially when it's your neighbors, it's just like another way to I think like, I don't know, continue this like need to humanize and like empathize with all kinds of people who like, again, I think think about and work on and care about, you know, a bunch of different things in different ways than I do. So for me, that's one of the most important things I would say, I think lots of other, you know, more direct actions can come from that, things that may be aligned with, you know, things you care about more like specifically today, but I think getting to know your neighbors, whether it's through something informal, which Philly's a big block party city. So this is like one of the ways we get to know our neighbors or through door knocking on campaigns is one of the most important ways to develop kind of a practice or a practice of sustainability. That's a great answer, Billy. I love that. I just want to build on his answer because I like that. I think part of what can happen when you get to know your neighbors and talk to your community is also sort of localizing these issues, which I think is really important. And when it comes to climate adaptation, impacts are going to be different in different places. And so talking about what's going to happen where you are and what it means for your community and how your community should adapt, I think is really important. It needs to be sort of driven by the community, right, and the future the community wants. And I also think it's also important to talk about these issues with people because, as you said, lots of people go through something like a hurricane Harvey and don't connect it to climate change. We need to start making these connections and talking about how all these things are interrelated and what the impacts are and what it means. So I'm just stealing Billy's and writing on his answer. That's OK, you can do that. What have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start? And that's my last question for each of you. This is part of the hard ones at the end. I wanted to know at the start. A lot of people say it's the journey in and of itself. They wouldn't have had that knowledge without the journey. I think that's true. I think that's true. I think that's also a recipe for being a happier person to focus on. Billy. Billy. That sounds great to me. The other thing I would say is that you can, I don't know, I spent a lot of time really worrying about either where I was working, what employer or what city I was in. And I think the thing that I found, I think what people find over the course of careers, that you can really make a wonderful community kind of wherever you are. You don't have to be in New York or Philly or San Francisco or whatever. You don't have to be a pen. You don't have to be at one of these other institutions to do the things you want to do with the people you want to do it with. So that would be the other thing I would add to that. I really thank both of you for being on the show. It's been a sure pleasure. I appreciate you putting me on the spot and letting me put you on the spot. And I hope we can have another discussion when your next book comes out when you give us an update if President Biden's read this. Thank you very much, both of you. Caroline, Billy, and I wish you a wonderful day. Thank you so much for having us. This is a fun conversation. Yeah, thanks, Mark. Take care. Have a good one. Thank you. Take care. Bye.