Episode 42: Anthony Leiserowitz

This week on the pod, Jon Powers and Anthony Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, dive into how social, economic and behavioral norms affect the way humans view climate change. In their discussion, we learn about the 6 different views Americans hold regarding climate change, the types of questions scientists ask when studying human behavior and climate, and how the clean energy revolution will be the biggest economic revolution in human history.

Anthony Leiserowitz is an expert on public opinion and public engagement with the issues of climate change and the environment. His research looks at a series of factors, including psychological, cultural, and political beliefs, that influence environmental beliefs, attitudes, policy support, and behavior. Organizations like the John F. Kennedy School of Government (Harvard University), the United Nations Development Program, the Gallup World Poll, the World Economic Forum and others have tapped him for his insight. He is also the host of Climate Connections, a daily national radio program and podcast.

Transcript

Jon Powers:       Welcome to Experts Only Podcast sponsored by Clean Capital. You can learn more at cleancapital.com I’m your host, Jon Powers. Each week we explore the intersection of energy, innovation and finance with leaders across the industry. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jon Powers:       Hi, this is Jon Powers, your host for Experts Only. Thank you so much for joining us for today’s podcast. You can get any of our episodes at cleancapital.com. Today, I am speaking with Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of Yale’s program on climate change communications. Anthony’s an expert on public opinion and public engagement with issues of climate change in the environment. He’s research looks at a series of factors, including psychological, cultural and political and how they influence the environmental beliefs and attitudes for things like policy report and behavior.

Jon Powers:       He’s also been brought in by organizations like, the World Gallup Poll, World Economic Forum, United Nations Development Program to tap his insights. We talk today a lot about the incredible moment that’s happening here in climate change is, we’re at record numbers of Americans wanting to see action, but that we as an industry need to be into drive that action in a more coherent way. So you’re going to enjoy the conversation. Anthony’s also the host of Climate Connections at Daily National Radio Program and Podcast.

Jon Powers:       Anthony, thanks so much for joining us at Experts Only Podcast.

Anthony L.:        Hi Jon. Great to be with you.

Jon Powers:       So, your personal experience is pretty amazing. It’s taken you all over the country, in both policy and academic roles. I want to talk a little bit about sort of what triggered your interest in the environment and climate change as a whole. What sort of got you started down that path?

Anthony L.:        Oh, interesting. Well it was a bit of a winding path, to be honest. So when I was an undergraduate, I actually studied international relations. I studied Cold War politics, nuclear policy, in particular. I thought I had a long career ahead of me, basically trying to keep the United States Soviet Union and China from blowing each other up.

Anthony L.:        Six months before I graduated, the Berlin Wall came down and my international relations degree turned into a history degree overnight. So, after that, believe it or not, I followed a friend out to Aspen, Colorado with the intention to be a ski bum, make some money. I was going to have the big goal of traveling around the world and instead, I ended up with a real job and became one of the first staff members at a small institution called the Aspen Global Change Institute. Where I spent the next four years learning about climate change, biodiversity extinctions, the ozone depletion problem and many others with the world’s leading environmental scientists.

Anthony L.:        It was an incredible experience. I mean, just amazing people. It was basically like another college education with many of the world’s experts. I really enjoyed that and it was a wake up call because it was really… This was back in the early 90s as climate change… The famous Jim Hampton testimony had happened just a couple of years earlier and the scientific community was really beginning to make substantial progress.

Anthony L.:        But at the end of that, I actually felt myself feeling a little frustrated because I felt like… The natural scientists were fantastic and I loved being with them and they were great. But personally, I felt we were mostly talking about symptoms and not the underlying causes. Because if you look at climate change or biodiversity extinctions, are any of these other global environmental challenges, the reasons why they exist is human beings. The natural scientists are incredibly important for helping us understand these challenges and why they happen.

Anthony L.:        But ultimately, they’re the result of human perceptions, human decisions, human behavior. I felt if I wanted to really address these issues, like climate change, which even back in the early 90s, we knew was going to be existential. The answer was not going to be in the natural sciences. It was going to be in the social sciences and even the humanities.

Anthony L.:        So I basically started a long, winding process through a lot of different fields, really trying to answer a question that I’m still trying to answer. That is, why do human beings perceive the world in the way that they do? Why do they make decisions about the world and the way that they do? And why do we behave the way we do? Because it’s those where I think… It’s answering those questions and seeing how that relates to our underlying psychology, our culture, our politics, the economic systems we’ve built around ourselves, where the real answer lies to how we solve these problems.

Jon Powers:       That’s challenging. I mean, the reality is that people don’t see it. It’s not black and white, right? People’s perspectives sway how they’re viewing it. [inaudible 00:05:00] folks that believe in climate change and those who don’t. There is that break down for us, but just people who are swayed by different messengers or different narratives or their religions or their cultures. How do you begin to divide them up and how do you look at engaging them, maybe from a communications perspective, for instance, to help educate them in action?

Anthony L.:        Yeah, I think, first of all, you have to start with a realization that human beings and human societies are at least, as complicated, and I would argue, way more complicated than the climate system itself. I mean, we’re talking about people here and unlike say, a carbon dioxide molecule, once you know how one carbon dioxide molecule traps heat, you pretty much know how the bazillions of them do because they all operate the same way.

Anthony L.:        You can’t say that about a human being. I mean, it’s hard enough even understanding one human being, whether it’s yourself, your spouse, your kid, or your family or all the other seven and a half billion of us and that’s because we change, right? We do change. Now, you get into these incredible areas of underlying psychology and then, the different cultures that we exist in and the different histories we come from and the different politics that we all live.

Anthony L.:        These and many other factors all come together in a Gordian knot of this very, very complicated system that has produced these problems, but also are the ways that we’re going to get out of these problems. So anyway, they try to bring some simplicity to that. I’ve ended up, through the course of my career, ending up in a field of studying how Americans and other mass societies around the world respond to the issue of global climate change. So what do people understand and misunderstand about the causes, the consequences, the solutions to climate change? How did they perceive the risks? So the likelihood and severity of different types of impacts, whether those be wildfires or heat waves or extreme storms, sea level rise and so on. What kinds of policies do people support or oppose? Then what kinds of behaviors are people engaged in around climate and clean energy?

Anthony L.:        So that can range from how people use waste or conserve energy at home and on the road. Secondly, is consumer behavior. So, will people actually prefer the products and services that are better for the Earth? And likewise and interestingly, to what extent are they willing to reward and punish companies for their actions or inaction? I’ll say just as an aside, that we find in general, at least in the United States, that Americans are much more willing to vote with their dollars on this issue, than they are to necessarily vote at the ballot box. That’s interesting because those signals to the private sector can turn out to often have political consequences too.

Anthony L.:        A third major area is social behavior. So how do we talk about this issue or more often don’t talk about it and why? But also, the role of social norms. These unwritten cultural rules that guide much of our daily lives, and I’ll just use a quick example. I mean, when I grew up anyway, smoking was everywhere. It was in movies, it was in film, it was glorified, it was in bars and restaurants. If I flew across country, I’d be strapped in a seat in a metal tube next to about 30 other people that were puffing away. You could not escape it.

Anthony L.:        Today, if you and I were sitting in a crowd of people and I pulled out a cigarette and lit it, people would recoil in horror. That’s how much that unwritten cultural rule, that norm, has shifted in our society. It turns out those norms play a really important role around these issues too. Then, the last area of behavior that we look at is political. What leads some people to actually get engaged with the system and roll up their sleeves and say, “I’m not going to stand on the sidelines and watch the world burn. I want to get involved and do what I can to change the larger system.”

Anthony L.:        Those are the kinds of things we get to study. Many, many studies here in the United States, increasingly also at state and local levels. But we’ve also done a lot of this work internationally, as well. So, we’ve done the first two ever studies in China, a study in India. Then, we partnered with the Gallup World Poll for a few years, where we looked at this in about 120, 130 countries around the world.

Anthony L.:        So anyway, it’s been a fascinating journey and it really has helped to, both see the complexity of human responses out there, but also, some commonalities as well. Some of the consistent things that seem to show up across many different people and cultures.

Jon Powers:       Interesting. So I’m going to get into that a little more here in a second. But, talk for the audience who aren’t familiar with Yale’s project on climate change communications. As you sort of left Aspen and got into the space, what led you down the road to end up at Yale and launching this and talk a little bit about what the project does.

Anthony L.:        Sure. So, I ended up deciding and took a few years to figure out where I was going to go to graduate school and ended up at the University of Oregon. Go ducks and it was just the perfect place to be. I got a degree in Environmental Science Studies and Policy. It was an interdisciplinary PhD, where I was trained as a human geographer. Then, did a bunch of psychology outside of that and I had the great fortune to meet and befriend and have as a mentor, and then ultimately as a colleague, one of the world’s great psychologists, a guy named Paul Slovic. Who really has helped create the field of judgment and decision making and what is now known as behavioral economics. Along with people, like you might’ve heard of of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Anthony L.:        Those three guys really did lay the foundations of bringing these psychological findings into the realm of decision making, including financial decision making, as well as, environmental decision making. So I was able to study with Paul and learn a lot about how human beings perceive and respond to risk. But my interest continued to be climate change and so, I was able to apply a lot of those ideas and new ones to the study of this and ultimately, was made an offer I couldn’t refuse by the Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, at the time, Gus Speth and came to Yale and have been very happy here for the past 11, 12 years.

Jon Powers:       That’s amazing. So, as we were talking offline, this is something that’s been near and dear to my heart. I got into clean energy and climate change after spending time in Iraq and coming home and launching a program called Operation Free, to get more veterans involved in clean energy. One of the really enlightening experiences for me, was when we hosted a racer named [inaudible 00:00:11:57], who actually just retired this week out at the Kansas Speedway. We took a platoon full of veterans into Kansas and had 10,000 people stop by our tent to learn about climate change because we were hearing from a messenger that they trusted, which were folks… military veterans.

Jon Powers:       For me, it was really enlightening to see how that messenger could affect the current debate that was happening and I mind you, this is about 10 years ago. It was also about 10 years ago, when you launched your study with George Mason on the Global Warming’s Six Americas and you dug into six different categories, which I want to talk about more in a second. But, you had the alarmed, the concerned, to the cautious, the disengaged, the doubtful and dismissive. Tell us more about those sort of different types and what’s usually sort of factoring into, we talked a little about this earlier, about factoring into what makes those folks fall into those different categories.

Anthony L.:        Sure. So early in our work, we realized of course, that Americans don’t have a single viewpoint on climate change or frankly, any other important issue. So then, you’ll hear a lot of people out there say, “Well then, there are believers and they’re deniers.” That’s unfortunately, way too simplistic and does real violence, in fact, to the reality, which is that there are a lot of different perspectives on this.

Anthony L.:        In the course of our work about, starting over a decade ago, we did an analysis and basically, realized that at least one way to look at this is that we found what we call, Global Warming’s Six Americas. Six very distinct audiences that are each coming at this issue from a very different starting point. One of the first cardinal rules of effective communication, as well as education, is know your audience. Who are they? Where are they? Who do they trust? What are their underlying values? What do they already know or think they know? So on and so forth.

Anthony L.:        Because only then, can you try to meet them where they are, not where you are. So often, unfortunately, in this space and many others, people start from where they are and they themselves are and say, “Let me tell you everything I know and why I think this is so important.” Without taking the time to think about, well, where’s their audience? I mean, that can be as simple as a person in climate change or clean energy spewing a bunch of jargon at people who are like, “What are you talking about?”

Anthony L.:        Because you’re assuming that they have all this background knowledge and frankly, interest, that they probably don’t. So anyway, it’s just a case in point of how important it is that you know who your audience is. So the alarmed are, in fact, we were just releasing these results now, are 29% of the country. They are firmly convinced it’s happening, it’s human caused, it’s urgent. They strongly support action on climate change, but they often don’t know what to do. That’s the primary question in their head is, “What can I do? What can we do collectively?” And they’re really hungry to know those solutions. We’ve actually done a better job communicating the scale and scope and seriousness of the problem, then we have, what can be done about it.

Jon Powers:       Yeah. I get that question all the time from folks.

Anthony L.:        Yeah, I bet. The next group is called the concern. That’s 30% of the country and these people also think it’s happening. It’s human caused, it’s serious, but they tend to think of it as distant. That the impacts are distant in time. We won’t feel them for a generation or more and distant in space. This is a problem really for polar bears or maybe some developing countries, but not the United States. Not my state, not my community, not my family, my friends or me or any of the people in places I care about. As a result, that means it’s psychologically distant. It just becomes one of a thousand other issues that’s out there and maybe I wished somebody would do something about it, but I don’t see why is that important. I don’t see why it’s a priority. I don’t see why it’s urgent.

Anthony L.:        The third group is what we call the cautious, about 17% and they’re still on the fence. Is it real? Is it not? Is it human? Is it natural? Is it serious or is it overblown? They’re paying attention, but basically, are confused. Then a small group, but important about 5%, that we call the disengaged, and these are people who basically say, “I think I once heard that word, global warming, but I don’t know anything about this issue. I mean, I really don’t know anything about it.” So it’s not ideology or politics or anything that’s in the way. It’s just, they just really lacked basic awareness. Then comes a group we call the doubtful, 9%. These are people who say, “I don’t think this is real. It’s actually happening, but if it is, it’s natural. It’s nothing humans had anything to do with, nothing we can do anything about. So I don’t see it as much of a risk and I don’t think about it all that much.”

Anthony L.:        And then last but not least, is a group, we call the dismissive and they too are only 9%. But they are firmly convinced it is not happening, it is not human caused, it is not a serious problem. And most of whom just quite literally tell us, that they’re conspiracy theorists. They say it’s a hoax. It’s scientists making up data. It’s a UN plot to take away American sovereignty. It’s a get rich scheme by Al Gore and his friends and many other such narratives. Now important to note, is that group is only 9%.

Jon Powers:       Exactly. Yeah.

Anthony L.:        It’s only 9%, but they’re a really loud 9%, they’re a really vocal 9%, they’re a 9% that is tended to dominate the public square and they’ve made themselves look to policymakers, to reporters, to many of us in society, as if half or more of the country is in this category, but they’re not. They’re just loud.

Jon Powers:       Yeah, I mean, I feel like that 9% has been empowered. I mean, going back to 10 years ago you had… And I’d be interested to know how those numbers have adjusted over the 10 years, and especially, in the recent surge of interest. But, Al Gore came out with the Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar winning documentary, and really, people began to gain the understanding that this was an urgent threat. But of course, the backlash to that was pretty severe. You had stakeholders, like energy companies and oil companies take that 9%, which may have been larger then. I’m not sure. But, actually fund them to make those voices even louder. Right?

Anthony L.:        Without question. So yes, this is where this issue, unfortunately, in many ways, gets bound up in our politics and of course, you cannot evade our economic system. There are enormous political and economic forces with big stakes in this. I mean, so you mentioned the fossil fuel industry, before that it was the fossil industry, as well as the manufacturing industry. These, and the fossil fuel industry, to this day is the most profitable industry on the planet.

Anthony L.:        They are perfectly happy with the status quo, thank you very much. They have spent enormous sums to basically, keep us locked into the status quo for as long as possible. Including, and there’ve been many studies that have shown this, essentially adopting the exact same policy, the same strategy, communication strategy that was developed by the tobacco industry, which was, and this is in the tobacco documents, doubt is our product.

Anthony L.:        They knew they didn’t have to convince Americans that smoking was good for you. They just needed to convince Americans that the science was still unsettled. It was still uncertain whether smoking was good or bad for you. Even though, the surgeon general declared smoking was bad back in the 1950s. Because they kept that element of doubt alive in the American public, especially by having paid scientists going out there and saying that the science was still uncertain, the industry was able to rake billions of dollars, additional dollars into their bank accounts. It worked.

Anthony L.:        That exact same strategy, including some of the exact same scientists, have been deployed in the climate change war. So yes, there’s been strong, strong interest there and then, there’s the politics. But let me actually, before… We all know that the politics are pretty strong for this issue. Democrats overwhelmingly, accept climate changes as a real and serious problem. Republican’s remain much more skeptical, though there are differences among Republicans too.

Anthony L.:        But I’ll just take you back to where we were in 2008, when basically, both parties had adopted climate change as a serious problem. Because in 2008, the nominee for President of the United States by the Republican Party was Senator John McCain, who for years, had been one of the primary champions of climate action in the Congress. In fact, climate change was in the Republican National Party platform saying, “Yes, this is real. Yes, this is human cause. Yes, this is a serious problem and we want to solve it with our conservative principles.” You only have to go back 10 years and you saw that.

Jon Powers:       I mean, even cosponsor legislation with Senator Kerry. That would have been the balance of the House of Legislation that actually passed.

Anthony L.:        That’s right. That’s right. Now, of course, all of this is history, because he lost that election and Obama took power and the reaction to that. Especially, what we’ve shown in our research, the rise of the Tea Party, in particular and that rightward lurch of the Republican Party from 2008, saying climate change was real human cause and a serious problem. To just a year and a half later basically, going out to the very last end of the last twig on the last long as branch where the talking point became, climate change is a hoax.

Anthony L.:        That’s an amazing shift for one of our two political parties, where they remain stuck for a good part of a decade. Though that has changed pretty significantly, in just the past few years. Where now, Republican views and concerns about climate change are at all time highs, even though president Trump and Republicans are still in control of the Senate.

Jon Powers:       Yeah. So let’s talk about that for a second. I feel like obviously, on this show, and I imagine for most folks you talk to, that the science is settled. But, I’ve been arguing that we’re sort of at a very recent sort of cultural moment around climate change.

Jon Powers:       In your recent New York Times editorial, you highlighted your recent survey that a record number of Americans understand climate change is real. Just in beginning of the year, Chuck Todd, courageously declined having climate deniers on Meet the Press and talked about it from an action perspective. Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, opened up the new house session, call on climate change, an existential threat of our time, which I agree with. And of course, Budweiser came out in the Superbowl this year and had renewable energy in their ads. People are beginning to move. You’ve got Evangelicals and the Christian Coalition doing amazing work educating folks on it.

Jon Powers:       The momentum is here. How do we keep that momentum moving forward and how would you empower a listener to this show, who may be in the industry and knows that we have record number of corporations buying renewable energy? There’s ways to vote with your dollars that are new that we never even imagined 10 years ago with apps and with other tools. How do you empower them to help us continue to build a momentum, so that we can take that group that’s alarmed and concerned and grow it even more with action?

Anthony L.:        Yeah. So a lot of different things here. So first of all, that group that I’ve called the alarmed, that’s 29% of the American public. That’s about 73 million Americans. That’s a group that we would call in political science terms, the issue public. The people who are deeply invested in and concerned about a particular issue and you know what issue public’s are. Think of the pro or anti-immigration movement or the pro-choice or antiabortion movement or the pro or anti-gun control moment. Think the NRA. The NRA, now that is a powerful well-organized issue public of about 4 million members in a society of 252 million adults.

Jon Powers:       Wow.

Anthony L.:        Four million of them are members of the NRA and yet, they clearly punch way above their numbers, in terms of their political influence. Okay. I would suggest that the climate community has yet to coalesce into a powerful political force and that is one of the big missing ingredients.

Anthony L.:        Not the only thing. There’s always got to be… The economics got to get right and there’s still an importance of policy development and economic analysis and lobbying and campaign donations and yeah, there are a lot of other things. But what’s been missing in this community is the voice of people demanding that their elected representatives take action on this issue. Right now, there’s not yet been enough, either political opportunity or pain for not being a leader on climate change, so I think that’s shifting.

Anthony L.:        One is that there’s this enormous segment of the population against 73 million people who are very, very concerned about this issue right now. They have yet, however, to be organized into a powerful movement. I would say, to your industry, the clean energy industry, that is doubly true. The clean energy industry has been the fastest growing industry in America now, for several years. You’re beginning to see a number of big players, including both the generators of energy and the buyers of that energy. Like you just mentioned, Budweiser, but we could go on with Google and Apple and many, many others.

Anthony L.:        At what point does that industry finally begin to create and organize itself into a counterweight to the American Petroleum Institute? Because they have a lot of political power. But the clean energy industry, and you know this better than I do, but at least what I’ve been told, is still too busy clawing each other for market share, to actually organize together to reshape the political climate of climate change.

Anthony L.:        So it’s not just about citizens getting organized and demanding action from their leaders. I think it’s also and at least as much, about the business community getting organized and demanding action and demanding that the rules be recalibrated to support and accelerate and amplify the transition to a clean energy future.

Jon Powers:       So I feel like there was movement around this with the post Paris, “We’re still in” effort by series, but I completely agree with you that there’s not enough initiative from an industry that’s been on its heels for the most part, trying to defend it’s position into being the aggressor and saying, “Solar and wind are the fastest growing electricity generation types out on the grid today. The largest eight states in this country have solar jobs as the number one growing job in that state.” We’re not telling that message enough and I think that as an industry, we need to take it upon ourselves to do things.

Jon Powers:       Like we do at Clean Capitals, we actually track our projects by what congressional district they’re in. So we can send letters to those members and let them know that we’re in their seat. Not lobbying them per se, but just let them know that we’re there, right?

Anthony L.:        That’s right.

Jon Powers:       That we are a stakeholder for them to worry about.

Anthony L.:        Oh, and not just a stakeholder. You have an incredible story to tell of, first of all, the fastest growing set of job creation in the country, period. At a time, when people are still very hungry to find those good quality, high paying jobs. And that it’s also, of course, we’re just in the beginnings of what will be probably, the biggest economic transition in world history.

Anthony L.:        I mean, as I understand it, and again, this is your field better than mine, but this transition to a clean energy future is bigger than the computer revolution. It’s bigger than the cell phone revolution and so on. I mean, this is involving trillions of dollars that somebody is going to own and somebody is going to make. That’s really the question is… I mean, as fast as solar and wind and other clean energies are growing, there’s still a tiny proportion of the mix, with the few exceptions, like Costa Rica or say Iowa, as an example. It’s still a tiny proportion of the overall mix and the growth potential is absolutely staggeringly huge.

Anthony L.:        Meanwhile, we’re competing against other countries that fully understand that. I mean, I think, the Chinese had recognized this a long time ago and said, “We’re going to try to own as much of that market share as we possibly can.” So, at what point does the clean energy industry get organized, exert its own political power to help tell an incredibly positive and opportunistic story that isn’t just simply about protecting us from the harms and coming ravages of climate change, which should be incentive enough. But it also is about building the clean energy future that I think most human beings want to live in.

Jon Powers:       So, I’m going to just return it to the cultural piece for a second and sort of my final question. We’re obviously, living in a time where we’ve got a president in the White House that’s driving a lot of debate through social media and obviously, throws out… He’s targeting those 9% of the [inaudible 00:29:58] and giving them a bigger voice than they should have.

Jon Powers:       So, what tools are available for the listeners to help counter to that debate? For instance, I know that communication or climate change communication program has some great research. What’s out there to help them reach out and have a dialogue with folks to help move them in the direction that we need to move them?

Anthony L.:        Well, again, I just got to come back to where’s your trade association? Where is the investment in developing that common voice and that common political strategy to effect the rules by which this game is being played? That’s it. I mean, I can’t tell you that.

Anthony L.:        I will say that I think this is a great opportunity, in fact, because for as much as the president goes off saying climate change isn’t real or attacking the clean energy industry or trying to bring back an anachronistic sources of fossil energy, we know that the tide is not with him. Those are not sustainable positions and I think many, many people in Congress already understand that quite clearly. They are on the wrong side of history on this.

Anthony L.:        So the question is really, not if, it’s how fast. I think, as an industry, getting organized and developing a powerful common voice is going to dramatically increase the speed at which that transition happens. If you don’t do it and you continue to fight amongst yourselves, the the status quo is chuckling all the way to the bank.

Jon Powers:       Yeah, absolutely. So I’m going to end with reflecting on your trip out to Aspen after you graduated college to go become a ski bum. If you could go catch yourself as you’re pulling into Aspen and sit down and have coffee or grab a beer, what a piece of advice would you give to yourself?

Anthony L.:        Oh my.

Jon Powers:       Other than enjoy ride, right?

Anthony L.:        Yeah, I mean, that is basically what I would say, frankly because my younger self didn’t know what was about to happen, didn’t know what I was going to get exposed to, didn’t know how opportunities would come my way. I think, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more and more fascinated by serendipity. Especially in today’s world, I think the world is so complicated. There are so many cross cutting currents of influence and change happening all around us, that you can’t build a longterm plan that, “I’m going to get this degree. I’m going to go get a job at this company. I’m going to spend the next 40 years at that company. I’m going to retire with a gold watch and then, go play golf the rest of my life.” That’s not the way the world works anymore.

Anthony L.:        I think a lot of it is just, you’ve got to not try to plan everything out and just think that you’re going to have one line through this. You got to be open to opportunity and able to be flexible and nimble and move when opportunity arises. You’ve got to just hold that philosophy all the way through. I think it doesn’t matter whether you’re an individual trying to make it through the world or a giant corporation. It’s that agility that is going to make or break you.

Jon Powers:       Yeah. Anthony, thank you so much. Listen, I really, first of all, appreciate the conversation. The data you’re putting into the dialogue is so important and I love the research and obviously, we’d love to have you back and find ways that we can help engage, not just our industry, but the community as a whole. That’s one of the things we’re trying to do here, not just at Clean Capital, but at Experts Only. So, honored to have you on and thank you so much for the work that you’re putting into the community.

Anthony L.:        Thanks Jon. It was great to be with you and Godspeed to everybody.

Jon Powers:       Thank you Anthony, for joining us today. What an interesting conversation. The fact that NRAs only 4 million people and there’s 73 million folks who are alarmed by clean energy. We need to work as an industry, to grab that attention and drive change in this climate moment. So thank you for Anthony for joining us.

Jon Powers:       You can learn more about Yale’s program at their website, and I’d like to thank our producers, Emily O’Connor and our intern Darnell Lubin for their hard work. You can get more episodes at cleancapital.com and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Jon Powers:       Thanks for listening in today’s conversation. Find more episodes on cleancapital.com, iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you’re here, be sure to subscribe and leave us a five star review. We look forward to continuing our conversation on energy, innovation, and finance with you.