About this episode
Host Michael Gold speaks with Angel Hsu, an associate professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. They discuss Angel’s journey into climate science, her academic path, and the importance of data in evaluating climate policies. The conversation explores the evolution of climate-change awareness, the role of sub-national governments in climate action, and the challenges of bridging the gap between science and policy. Angel shares insights from her work at the Data-Driven Envirolab and her engagement with global climate bodies like the IPCC. The episode concludes with a focus on inspiring the next generation to take action against climate change.
Notes and resources
Full Transcript
Michael (00:00)
Hello everyone, and welcome to Climate Swings, the show for people reaching for the next vine of climate and sustainability in their professional lives, produced in partnership with climate education and action platform, Terra.do. I’m your host, Michael Gold.
Michael (00:19)
On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Angel Hsu. Angel is associate professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she runs the Data-Driven Envirolab, an interdisciplinary research group that applies quantitative approaches to pressing environmental issues. I’ve personally known Angel for over a decade, when we were both living and working in Beijing at the beginning of the 2010s. We have a wide-ranging discussion about her swings from the jungles of Costa Rica, to Chinese climate policy circles, to higher education, to the halls of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She opens up about the difficulties bridging the gaps between academia and policy, what it’s like to contribute to the world’s top scientific authority on climate change, and why “show me the data” is how she would describe her life’s work.
Michael (01:13)
Angel Hsu, welcome to Climate Swings. It’s so great to have you here.
Angel (01:16)
Thanks, I’m really excited to be here.
Michael (01:18)
So to start, could you just provide a quick sketch of your academic and professional background and what brought you to your current position?
Angel (01:27)
Sure. So I’m an academic, I’m a professor, a climate scientist, and I research climate policies, particularly how we can use data to evaluate whether or not they’re effective. And I’ve been working in the climate space for quite a long time. I dare even try to count at this point. Maybe I tell people like close to 20 years, but I like to still think of myself as a young person. And you would—might look at my career and say, it seems like it’s a pretty straight shot, but I don’t think it really was because I never really had anyone in my family who served as a template for what I’m doing now in my career as an academic.
No one in my family got a PhD. They didn’t go into academia. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan. So they came to the United States for graduate school and they studied computer science and physics and engineering. So it was really coming from these very technical backgrounds. And that’s what they encouraged me and my two sisters to pursue in our careers, which was science or for my sister who was like terrible at math and science, they wanted her to become a lawyer. And I realized very quickly as I was in undergraduate, in my undergraduate studies that like I didn’t want to become a lawyer. So, but I had always had this interest in environmental science and climate change. So my sixth grade science project was on the greenhouse gas effect. And I remember I had these little hydroponic solutions and I was able to alter like the chemical composition of these different solutions. And then one of them had altered carbon dioxide exposure. So wanting to understand whether or not that could actually act as a fertilizer to help these plants grow faster. And of course, the conclusion is yes, because plants take in CO2 and then they use that to generate glucose and energy. And then they, of course, output oxygen for us to breathe. So I always had this interest. And then when I was in college, I thought I would be a hard science, a chemistry major.
But I realized that being in a chemical synthesis lab was not really that interesting for me. And so I applied for a program called National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates. And that dumped me into the middle of the rainforest in Costa Rica. And it was just an incredible, incredible experience. It was so eye-opening because I was living amongst the howler monkeys and in the jungle. I was studying these plants with these insects and their interactions. And I left that summer thinking this was awesome, but who’s really going to care about this rainforest if it’s not protected, if it’s no longer existing in 10, 20, 30 years for other students and researchers like myself to really learn from and enjoy. So that’s when I pivoted from my chemistry major and I said, okay, I’m going to do biology because I still want the scientific training and I want that pedigree and I want to be able to have that understanding of biological and ecological systems.
But then I also added political science realizing that I wanted to have like that type of policy training and that policy lens to really understand how we can conserve these areas.
Michael (04:30)
And so in graduate school, you essentially started studying how climate change affects society. Is that correct?
Angel (04:39)
Yeah, so I went to a small liberal arts college here in North Carolina called Wake Forest. And at that time, many universities and still many universities today don’t necessarily think about climate change as its own field of study. So I had to kind of pick and choose climate-related classes in economics. I took like natural resource economics. And then in my biology major, I took chemistry and physics of the environment. And then there wasn’t really anything on environment for political science, but I still wanted to have that training.
And when I finished my undergrad, I was like really yearning for something that could really cross across these disciplinary lines and really helped me think about what it means to actually do environmental policy. And so exactly as you say, this intersection between society and climate. And so then I did a master’s at the University of Cambridge in environmental policy. And that really gave me a more well-rounded understanding of how do we actually address environment and climate-change issues from a more holistic and interdisciplinary viewpoint. And that really, I think, opened my eyes to the fact that, you can’t really solve this problem just from biology alone or from physics alone or even from anthropology or political science. Like you really have to think about these problems in a new way and think about how you can combine approaches or methods or data or various lenses to the issue in order to really try to tackle what’s been now referred to as a super wicked problem, which is climate change and the climate crisis.
Michael (06:07)
And how did you decide to go into academia sort of as your career and sort of as your lever for change?
Angel (06:13)
Yeah, that’s a great question. And it was never in the cards. I mean, when I did my master’s, I remember seeing the PhD students and thinking, oh my God, they look so miserable and really pitying them and saying, I definitely don’t want to do this because they would be locked in a room by themselves and just left with their own thoughts. And like, I’m an extreme extrovert. To me, that sounds like my worst nightmare. And so after that, I said, you know what? I don’t think I’m going to do any more school. I’m going to actually move to Washington, D.C. And I actually want to work in policy. So then I landed in D.C. and my family was like, what are you doing? Like, this is completely crazy. You don’t know anyone in D.C. You’re never going to get one of these fancy policy jobs. Cause you know, D.C. has like more per capita people with master’s degrees and like masters of international relations and policy than anywhere else in the world. And so they, really cautioned against just going there without knowing anyone. But I did something similar to what you’re doing and sharing stories. I said, you know what, let me try. I know I don’t have much of a network, but I’m going to try. So it was like, friends of cousins I was reaching out to and saying, hey, you work at this environmental think tank or you do this policy job. Like, can we have coffee? Can we have a conversation about how you got there? And that was super helpful because those people that I had just met in moving to D.C. were willing to act as mentors for me. And so then I applied, I think, to maybe like 40 or 50 different environmental think tank jobs, like wanting to stay in the public sector. But then I also applied to a couple like consulting jobs just to see like what case interviewing was like and other, I applied for a couple of private sector jobs. There was one like company that was trying to create like carbon offsets. And, then I ended up, really narrowing my job search to, to climate because, know, when I was just like writing these generic cover letters, I realized that that wasn’t really getting me a lot of, callbacks. But then when I started to think about in grad school and then undergrad, like what were really the issues that were really, that really stood out to me. And that really seemed like they needed a lot of focus and a lot of energy and a lot of work. And that really was climate. And so then when I started to re-craft my cover letters to say, this is what I’ve done on climate change. This is what I observed in my studies. And then I immediately got like three interviews for in-person interviews. You this is before Zoom and like Skype and all that kind of stuff. Then, yeah, so I got really lucky and landed my first job at the World Resources Institute. At that time they had one office in D.C., and I landed in the climate change and energy program working for a program called the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which develops standards and tools for companies and organizations to measure and account for their greenhouse gas emissions. And that was really eye opening because it really, I think for me, emphasized the importance of data and evidence to underpin solid environmental management and climate management strategies. And then at that time, they were looking to set up some programs in China.
And so they said, you’re Chinese, even though my Chinese at the time was really awful. It was like very elementary, very rudimentary, and no one else in the office spoke Mandarin. So that’s why I always tell students like, make sure you have skills and that you really promote those in your resume, because like that can help you stand out often amongst like a sea of applicants. So then they sent me to China to help open up the Beijing office. And that really then opened my eyes to the fact like, we need to really be engaging China on these climate issues because I mean, now they’re the number-one emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. Back then they were number two, but quickly it was very clear that they were gonna overtake the United States, which they did in 2007. And it was just like the excitement. I think there were just so many people there who were like interested in climate at the time through an energy lens. And so I felt like there was the possibility to really, I think, affect a lot of change in China. And so…then I was like, okay, my Chinese is really awful. So I have to go back and like really learn Chinese. And also I need to get a PhD because working in China and in the policy context, nobody listens to you unless you have a PhD. And so I said, if I really want to be effective, if I really want people to be able to listen to me, I need to get a PhD. And so then I applied to only one school, Yale, your alma mater as well. And my mom again said, what are you doing? You’re crazy. So that’s like another life lesson I always tell my students is that sometimes you have to defy your parents and you have to just go with your gut and it’s not gonna be easy and they’re not gonna be happy. But sometimes you just have to trust yourself. And so she was like, what are you doing? Like, what if you don’t get in? You need to apply to other schools. And I said, you know, I really don’t wanna apply to any other schools. Like I’m not convinced that a PhD is really for me. And if it works out, then that’s great. If not, I stay at a job that I love and I’ll just move to China.
So thankfully I got in and I was able to still keep that connection with China because I based my dissertation on China, really bringing together a lot of what I had learned in grad school and in D.C., which was the fact that we need solid data information to underpin environmental policy, which it sounds like a foregone conclusion now, but this again was like 2008, right when China hosted the Olympics for the first time, where it was not at all a foregone conclusion that you need to have solid data to actually underpin and guide policymaking. I mean, a lot of this was just, what is the US doing? Or what is this country doing? And let’s adopt their carbon pricing policy. Or let’s try their cap and trade. It wasn’t based on, OK, what could actually work in this context? And what kinds of information do we need to really understand whether or not this is actually driving policy and society in the right direction? So yeah, that’s how I ended up at Yale and really created this like, PhD that was very interdisciplinary. Also not thinking I would go into academia. I thought I would get the degree, go back to China and just like, then everyone would listen to me. And then about in the fourth year of my PhD, which I always recommend like students, if you want to do a PhD, you want to go to academia, don’t do what I did because you make it so much more difficult for yourself. But then I said, you know what? In my fourth year, I really, really love research. I mean, this is like really where I want to be. And I love working with young people and students. So then I said, you know what, let’s try. And so then I decided at that point to kind of pivot and stay in academia.
Michael (12:21)
And so when did you kind of realize that you were working in climate or when did sort of climate considerations become sort of the core central aim and focus of your work? Because it seems like it was, it started in graduate school, but maybe it was a bit more gradual than you know, some people now who sort of are just thinking, I need to do something and they become sort of a climate practitioner, right?
Angel (12:43)
Yeah, and you have to again think about like the time when I was going through school, which is like in the early 2000s, this is like right after the Kyoto Protocol went into effect. I mean, it went into effect in 2005. That’s when I graduated from college. Stern, Sir Nicholas Stern from the UK, he had just come out with his first report about the economic damages of climate change. So there was still a lot about climate change that was not really as well known as it is today. So I think, again, reflecting the circumstances and the fact that my professors also were not trained necessarily in the science of climate change. Let alone, there was not standalone classes on climate change policy. I think about the class that I teach, which is, it’s got a very sexy name. It’s I think it’s called Confronting Climate in the Anthropocene, Science to Policy Solutions. It’s something very sexy like that. It’s exactly everything I would have liked to have in a class. We start from the science.
And then we move into the policy responses and they have a little bit of like econ. There’s like physics, there’s chemistry. You know, it’s like a little bit of everything. I would have died for that class as an undergrad or as a grad student. And frankly, you know, we just didn’t have that kind of information. So I would say, and this is going to sound really geeky, but when I was at Cambridge, I took an environmental law class and we were asked to write a paper on environmental treaties. There was, mean, I don’t even, yeah, I think like the Kyoto Protocol had just come out then. So I think a lot of other friends, they looked at the Stockholm Convention, which is regulating persistent organic pollutants, or they looked at the Montreal Protocol, which is regulating ozone pollution. And so for me, ozone depleting substances. And for me, was like, you know, I’m really interested in the Kyoto Protocol. It’s still quite new. I’m really interested in how it divides the world up into basically like developed versus developing countries. And that’s a way to try to get, you know, all actors together on one—on one page, but then there’s clearly domestic politics that shape how countries negotiate at the international level. So I was really interested in these two-level dynamics, which Robert Putnam, who’s a political scientist, talks about these two-level game theory. And so that was a really fascinating dynamic for me. And so I focused on climate change in that class. Really, I mean, and this is kind of ironic because I’ve always pushed against law, but my paper was really about, yeah, I mean, looked at the principle of common, but differentiated responsibilities, but not wanting to go into law. And then I think that really, for me, started to open my eyes up to the world of international climate policy. And so when I got to WRI, the program I was in, they really very much wanted me to work with developing countries to help build capacity for them to measure and report their greenhouse gas emissions, recognizing that even under the Kyoto Protocol, they weren’t responsible for reducing or mitigating their emissions, but they would eventually need to, like China. I was working in Brazil, Mexico, Korea, the Philippines. These are all countries now where you’re like, yeah, and India too. You’re like, yeah, they should have been doing something on climate change. But really at that time, it was like still a very sensitive issue. I mean, I remember the first time I went to China and I was working with the Chinese government, I had written a report and I had included the fact that China’s emissions had surpassed the United States in 2007. I wrote this report in 2008 and they took a pen and they crossed that out and they said, at this point, the Chinese government does not recognize this. So it was still like very political, very sensitive. In the very early days, speaking with Chinese companies, the Chinese government, we had to talk about energy conservation, energy efficiency. And, we basically framed it as jian neng shi jian pai. So if you reduce your energy, then you are reducing your climate emissions. That’s how That was like the motto we had put in our like opening line to try to engage Chinese companies because they didn’t want to talk about climate change. Like it was very sensitive at that time and they didn’t want to be seen as having any of the same responsibility that developed countries like the United States would have under the Kyoto Protocol because it meant that they would have to then take on all these costs to reduce their emissions. So I think that was like really I think a turning point for me was being in that law class and then studying the Kyoto Protocol and really like understanding how that’s like shaping then international dialogues and discussions on climate change and then really wanting to understand that dynamic better, particularly from the global south and the Chinese perspective.
Michael (17:04)
Did you find that, I guess, in the academic and the think-tank community at the time, sort of in those early days when you started focusing on climate change, what was kind of the sense of urgency around the problem? Because it seems like from what you’re describing that it was sort of one environmental problem among many. And I presume that’s changed since that time, right?
Angel (17:19)
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it was interesting because at that point, there weren’t a whole lot of think tanks. Like I’m thinking about like WWF and I mean, believe NRDC had a climate program then, but I don’t remember WWF having a standalone climate change program, like Environmental Defense Fund. They had maybe some folks working on climate, but yeah, it wasn’t like this whole on, we need to have a standalone program on climate and we need to think about how climate cross cuts all these other issues, including like biodiversity and water and pollution. I mean, it really does—now, if you have these conversations in policy and in the nonprofit sector, it’s all about like, how can we link this particular issue to climate and talk about co-benefits? I mean, co-benefits that was thrown around quite a lot, like, if you tackle climate emissions, then the sources of those emissions are also generating air pollution. So thinking about about the two in terms of co-benefits, but it wasn’t as like—now, I think it’s like a lot more just like common to confront people in these spaces where they have already made those connections. Whereas I feel like back then we were actively trying to make those connections for people and yeah, and in the policy circles. And it was also, I think at that point, like very domestically focused. So during that time, like 2007, 2008, that’s when we had the first comprehensive climate legislation, the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the house. And that was like so incredibly exciting. And I tell my students now like, imagine if, imagine if we had actually passed that bill in the Senate, how much of a difference that would make in terms of where global emissions, where US emissions and where we as a society would be with respect to the climate crisis today. It would made such a huge difference. So yeah, and that was the time that I was in D.C. and working on these issues.
Michael (19:12)
And it sounds like just from your own personal perspective, you’ve made climate like a much more central focus of your career. And it’s essentially kind of the top sort of line of your bio at this point. Yeah.
Angel (19:25)
Yeah, that’s right. That is true. I never thought about it that way. But yeah, I mean, and like I have worked on air pollution. And then, of course, when I was at Yale, I ran the Environmental Performance Index, which is this flagship index that ranks countries on environmental policies. And climate was just one category out of like 10 different dimensions, including like environmental health and biodiversity and agricultural ecosystems and forests and things like that. So yeah. And then—so that kind of forced me to be like a generalist, it was like nice because then I got to learn about all these different issues and like work with experts. But I always had this like climate thread underpinning and that really has its roots in grad school. But then also my first job at WRI really like working on climate. And then, yeah, and then I found myself like really kind of doubling down, like in the lead up to the Paris Agreement in 2015, where, you know, I got a call from the UN climate change secretariat, and they were like, yeah, we’re really interested in this emergence of private companies and financial institutions and some national governments that are also making their own pledges on climate change. But we don’t know how to manage it. We’re really worried about greenwashing. If we elevate what all these different companies are doing in Paris, is that going to detract away from a very solid national government Paris agreement that we really want to get secured?
Or so is it gonna be a distraction? Is it gonna fragment? And so they really wanted me to do some data analysis to help support the emergence of all these different actors. And I think that’s really where it was an inflection point in my career of saying, okay, you know what? I should go back to like what, you know, like really got me into the environmental space in the first place, which is climate. And then realizing how just gargantuan the challenge is and then how it’s really an-all-hands-on-deck effort.
Yeah, that really, I think, forced me to really focus and pivot on, yeah, like focusing on particularly like this area of non-state and sub-national climate policy and how we can use data to evaluate what these actors are doing. And so, yeah, I would say that that’s true. now, yeah, climate is a pretty prominent part of my byline.
Michael (21:32)
And have you sort of found, because something you hear a lot, I think, in the climate dialogue is that climate underpins all kinds of other problems, not just environmental problems, but various social problems and economic problems and whatnot. So is that something that you sort of buy into? I mean, is that something that you would promote, like that idea that climate is really sort of like the foundational almost environmental problem of our time?
Angel (21:59)
Yeah, I mean, I think absolutely. And there have been many different ways that different scholars and people have talked about it. Some people call it like a force multiplier and it’s or a perfect storm where it just kind of is this confluence of all these different challenges that kind of all merge together. And so that’s yeah, I think what makes climate change particularly unique compared to some of the other environmental challenges like biodiversity loss, which you can tie perhaps to like habitat destruction. And, you know, some of that can be due to climate change, but a lot of it can be due to like human-caused forces, like through agriculture or just deforestation, for example. So I think, yeah, and then you just, you know, like I think about my lesson on climate impacts and like literally on all the different impacts. It’s just in like health. And you think about like, yeah, conflict. And you think about social instability. And as you said, like economic instability. I mean, COVID was a perfect example of this, where during that time, and then also because of droughts and like heat waves in China, it disrupted supply chains. And so then people couldn’t get like computer chips and they couldn’t get minivans, couldn’t get a lot of the goods they were used to getting or agricultural products. And that also like ties back to climate change and climate-related events. And then that leads to economic instability and inflation, right? So I think, yeah, certainly. I mean, it’s, it’s really difficult. You know, I’m in a public policy school right now. And so like I work with a lot of economists who talk about causal inference and being able to exactly attribute A to B. So a lot of them like really don’t like my work because they’re like, well, how can you like, you know, definitively attribute like A to B? And I don’t think that that’s necessarily like the point. I think the point is to recognize that climate, even if it’s not directly like A causing B, it’s definitely one of the many factors in the background that could amplify the intensity or the severity or the magnitude or the direction of a particular trend. So think that that’s like another way to think about it.
Michael (23:53)
And so now you run a sort of data-driven climate lab basically, or environmental lab at UNC. Can you just give like a couple of sort of key highlights of some of the sort of standout projects or pieces of work that you guys do?
Angel (24:08)
Yeah, so the Data-Driven Envirolab, I founded around 2016 with the mission that we need to innovate new data where data doesn’t exist to evaluate some of these key climate-related trends or evaluate the impact of different climate policies and whether or not they’re actually having their intended impact. And we need to really try to facilitate and foster a more evidence and quantitative approach to environmental policymaking and for climate change solutions. And so I could have named my lab the Hsu Lab, but as you know, from your time working in China and living in Asia, that it’s a very common last name. It’s actually like the Smith of Chinese last names. So it’s like, there’s like so many Hsus. So I was, and a lot of people cannot pronounce it. Growing up in South Carolina, people can never pronounce my last name. So I was like, don’t want it to be like the Hsu Lab, like a lot of other academics just have like their last name and they say whatever.
I wanted to build something that was like a movement and something that’s more inclusive. And I want all the students and the researchers and our collaborators that work with us to really feel like they’re part of this movement to try to drive more evidence-based approaches to addressing environmental and climate change challenges. So that’s really like the origin of the lab. And then some of our flagship projects, there’s a running theme of data. If we don’t have data that exists, how can we innovate data, whether it’s from satellite remote sensing, crowdsourced data from sensors, from devices, from citizens, or from other new methods that we haven’t even thought of before. Now I have a project that’s focused on large language models and gen AI. I just got this National Science Foundation grant to create a new center or to think about plan for a new center, where we think about the societal implications of generative AI and what impact that could have on private sector or climate change commitments. What happens when a company is trying to use one of these LLMs to benchmark a new climate change action or to find what their sector is doing. And they’re confronted with hallucinated, right? Or frankly, greenwash content. What happens then? And how do we develop appropriate benchmarks to evaluate the accuracy of what’s being generated from ChatGPT or Gemini or a lot of these Q&A tools. So that’s like also just entering a whole new like X factor into all of this, like AI. So I’m also like thinking about how we can apply AI for good, but then also have appropriate guardrails to make sure that it doesn’t actually lead to climate misinformation and disinformation. So that’s like a totally new project. Like we have a new chat bot called Chat Net Zero, which is all about like how you can decipher and demystify complex concepts like net zero and ask very hard questions like what is Amazon or Microsoft doing on climate change and is it actually credible? So we’ve created like a high-quality tool for those particular questions like focused on climate policy.
And then another strain in the work is all about sub-nationals. For many years, you know, I was working on the level of national governments. And then you can look at all the climate change scenarios and it’s very clear that national governments are not cutting it when it comes to actually implementing the ambitious and necessary action to reduce emissions, to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change. I mean, we are way off. We’re headed to a two-and-a-half degree Celsius warming world above pre-industrial levels. I mean, we’re just way off that 1 .5 degree Paris Agreement mark. And so that really got me interested in, what are the role of sub-national governments and cities? Because cities are exploding and more than half of the world’s population is living in cities. Cities are becoming really critical actors in their own right. So there’s this whole other undercurrent about what can cities and also non-state actors like private businesses and financial institutions do to really fill in some of these gaps?
And then another big strand within that and looking at the sub-national level is also recognizing that cities not only do they have a lot of agency in affecting climate change, but they’re also some of the most impacted areas on the planet. And so we’ve done a lot of work to try to understand and using these innovative data techniques to understand what are the climate impacts and how do they affect people at a sub-urban scale in different ways.
So that really came out during Black Lives Matter. And I was living in Singapore at the time and thinking, gosh, I’m not doing anything to really help. And then I thought, well, wait a second, my lab, we can actually help because we developed these large-scale data sets. We can actually then answer questions about environmental or climate justice. And so that work, I really had no credibility in that space. And I don’t consider myself a justice or an EJ scholar. But I feel similar to climate change. Everybody needs to be doing whatever they can, even if they’re not like, an expert, right? Like I think if you’re trying to contribute, if you’re trying to help the movement in any way, I think that that’s a net positive. And so then I was like, OK, can I use my data to evaluate whether or not we’re seeing systemic environmental racism in cities and exposing poor minority communities to higher levels of heat? And how can we develop high resolution models to do that? And then thankfully, I got a very large NASA grant last year to actually do that. So after many years of applying for a lot of funding to try to establish credibility in the space, I finally was able to get some funding. And so now we’re doing this super cool project. We’re partnering with the city of Durham. This past summer, we had 40 low-cost sensors all throughout the city of Durham, collecting air temperature and humidity. And we engage, we put together this community council of local community organizations and local government to advise us and to tell us about what kinds of questions they have with respect to climate change and heat and how it can affect different communities in different ways.
So that’s been really cool also to see that your data and your work can also be done locally and also in a co-produced way. So those are some of the projects that we’re working on now.
Michael (29:54)
Very cool. Thank you for that summary. So some of your sub-national and sort of city-based work is sort of drawn the attention of the UN and some of those very high level international agencies. So you’ve worked on the UNEP Emissions Gap Report and you’ve also contributed to the IPCC’s Synthesis Reports, the Assessment Reports. Can you talk about that experience and kind of like how you got involved with that and what working with those bodies is like?
Angel (30:03)
Thank you.
Yes. Yes.
Yeah, that’s a great question. And yeah, I had a student last week, I was giving a talk at Duke and then she came up to me afterwards and she was like, I’ve been such a fan of the IPCC for so many years and I was so excited to meet you. And that was just kind of like one of these realizations of like, yeah, you know, like, because a lot of times, I mean, it’s unpaid work. So that’s one thing, you know, all those right wing conspiracy theorists who say, those scientists are in the pocket of big corporations, no, we don’t get paid for any of this. So just to make it very clear, it’s all under the guise of service. But it really is, I think, just like it’s been such an eye-opening and incredible learning experience for me to understand how these big global assessments work and these big processes work. I think a lot of times we don’t get enough transparency or like an inside look into how this actually works. And so you just get this big report. It’s like thousands of pages long. And then you’re like, OK, but what does this what does this all mean for me? Right. And so I think being involved in some of these reports has really allowed me to better understand how these processes works. And I think also understand how political it is. It’s like as a scientist, we think that everything we do is objective. And you quickly realize in being involved in these reports that it’s not. It’s like 100 percent political, because they are based on intergovernmental bodies that are formed by governments. So governments then nominate the scientists and the experts who are representing these various reports. And then we can invite other authors to join if we say, this person has this expertise and be really great if they can contribute this perspective. But it’s still like very, I think very political, right? Who gets in the room and who doesn’t get in the room, whose research gets cited, whose doesn’t.
And then, of course, it goes out for approval by the governments themselves. So the governments still have a lot of sway in what language gets included, how different things are worded, and how strongly they’re worded. So I think that’s one of the blessings and think one of the advantages of these big assessments. And then I think one of the downsides. I think on the upside, then when you read one of these reports, it really has been agreed upon by like thousands of scientists and all the governments engaged. So I think that, so you can really feel like there’s a lot of heft behind whatever conclusions come out. Like I think from the Sixth Assessment Report, from the first working group, I think one of the lines that stands out to me the most is the fact that they conclude, they say something like it’s incontrovertible or irrefutable that humans have been altering modern day climate. I mean, I’m kind of like paraphrasing there, but like they use like a very strong word like incontrovertible or irrefutable.
And for scientists to use like that strong language when scientists are like very cautious people by nature, it really shows and I think communicates like how much consensus had to go into that process for them to be able to put that as a main conclusion on the IPCC. So I think that’s like one of the major like upsides and advantages and like the, I think one of the strengths of these processes. I think on the other side, so I had the opportunity to represent the US, I was one of six scientists that were nominated for the expert working group for a special report that’s focused on cities and climate. And that’s the only special report that’s going to be in this new seventh cycle for the IPCC. That was really eye opening because then you’re starting from a blank board. I mean, there’s nothing like no outline, there are no keywords. There’s like nothing. You’re literally like, okay, you’re going to be put in a room with like several hundred other people. And then you’ve got to like come up with what the authors are going to actually write. And that was like a very interesting experience. And I think for me really eye-opening because they invited practitioners for the first time to provide their perspective. So actually like urban policymakers. And I think that was like really interesting because you realize it’s like the science is one thing, but then if someone can’t implement any solutions and take away like specific action items from whatever you synthesize, then it really limits the utility of what you’re doing. So it’s, I mean, that’s like kind of like a perfect encapsulation of my climate career, which is like working at this interface of the science with action. You know, like I don’t want to be doing anything, whether it’s academia or research or whatever, if it’s not going to have an impact. And for me, you know, like, again, I never really like saw myself being in academia, but then I see this ability to act as this interface and be seen as like, you know, a more objective source of information. Whereas if you work for a think tank or if you work for like an advocacy organization or for a company, right? Like people are always questioning your motives. And I feel like in academia, it kind of gives you a little bit of cover of being like more like neutral. But yeah, I think that’s, yeah, it’s been really like incredibly eye-opening. And I think it’s been just such a privilege to have a seat at that table. So I try to like talk about that experience as much as possible, like in my classes or in lectures or like one-on-one with students, because I think it’s just, you know, only a few number of people get to actually participate and contribute to these processes.
Michael (35:28)
And you’ve obviously kind of been at the sort of intersection of science and society for like pretty much your whole career. So when you come into that process and you see that it’s like heavily politicized, I presume that’s something, that’s sort of like a needle that you’re probably able to thread maybe a little bit better than like your hard science colleagues.
Angel (35:33)
I thought so, but I was unprepared this last April for that meeting. I mean, it got like really tense and really ugly in some cases. And like, I was like, whoa, you know, like, yeah, people.
Michael (35:55)
Wow. Do the hard scientists get sort of more—are they kind of caught off guard a little bit more by the level of kind of involvement of sort of non-scientific actors?
Angel (36:03)
Yes. 100%. And so I can’t like, it was basically Chatham House rules and a lot of it I can’t share. But I will say that that’s, I did observe that happening where in some cases, just because scientists are not necessarily those who are the most like vocal in the room and they’re not necessarily that experienced when it comes to these political debates and negotiations, I definitely saw in many cases the science getting sidelined in favor of political discussions. And that to me, I think was the most surprising thing because this is the IPCC. It’s a scientific body. Just as an example, you know, like I think about my first climate conference that I ever went to in 2009, which was in Copenhagen. And I followed what China was doing and the Chinese delegation very closely. And of course, China ended up being the big story. And it was largely because they brought all their scientists to the meetings. You know, it was like a bunch of my colleagues from Tsinghua and Beida. And I was like, hey, you know, this laoshi, know, Zhang laoshi, Wang laoshi, you know. And they were completely caught off guard because you had very expert diplomats and politicians like John Kerry and President Obama who were there negotiating on behalf of the United States and it really caught China off guard because yeah, they were completely unaware. They were viewing climate change from a very scientific perspective, a very technocratic perspective. Whereas the United States, they clearly view it as a more political problem. And so they were very, I mean, a lot more expert. They knew how to maneuver those conversations in ways that left China completely caught off guard and frankly taking the fall for the failure of the Copenhagen accord. But in a lot of my research and writing, what I argue is that actually the United States was the big spoiler. I they came to Copenhagen in 2009 without having passed Waxman-Markey in the Senate. So what could they really bring to the table? So yeah, that’s an example. But yeah, I think that that certainly was the case that took me off guard being in those meetings is just saying, my gosh, you know, it’s like, if I don’t speak up, then yeah, we could really be sidelining science and what is supposed to be a scientific synthesis report.
Michael (38:06)
And so it seems like from what you’re saying that the divide between science and policy sort of remains kind of as wide as ever in a way. I mean, like, what do you think, especially, you know, from the academic science perspective, because that is sort of where most of the hard science comes from, where do you think, what do you think the scientists can do to kind of help bridge those divides?
Angel (38:27)
Yeah, I mean, people say this all the time. Scientists have to communicate better. They have to share their findings better. They have to blog. They have to be on TV. I mean, I’m like, I also think it’s incumbent on the other side to also reach across the aisle. Like, I don’t think it should be completely on the scientists because frankly, we’re exhausted. I’m so tired. And it’s because like in my day-to-day job, I’m doing so many different things. I’m managing a lab. I’m fundraising.
I’m talking to funders, I’m doing tons of outreach. I give like at least three lectures that are not my normal teaching a week. I mean, it’s crazy. Like next week, I’m literally giving three different talks and like completely unpaid, just sharing because people ask me. So I often will take on a lot of this unpaid labor. We’re asked to review publications. We have to somehow squeeze in research of our own and writing, you know? So like we have to do a lot. And so I think it’s also incumbent on the other side. What questions do you have? What do you want to know? What about what we’re communicating already is not clear to you? Or what do you need more information on? So I think it has to come from both sides. I think scientists certainly definitely need to do a better job. I think they need to not be afraid of sharing information, even if it’s not 100% right or certain, because things change all the time.
I think getting stuff out there and the incentives are not necessarily structured to reward that, but I do think that journals are getting a lot better and allowing pre-prints. So now like if I have something done, I’m like telling my lab, we got to get a pre-print out there. That knowledge has to get out there and then we can let the peer review do whatever it’s going to do. I mean, I’ve had one publication on heat that has been in peer review now for six months and we haven’t even gotten like a first look. It’s just like, science cannot wait that long.
I put a pre-print up there. I’ve been sharing the paper. I’m like, yeah, give me your feedback. Let’s talk about this if it’s something that I think could really make a difference. And so I think it has to go, yeah, certainly both ways. We also need people to engage us as well and tell us, what do you need? I’m always asking policymakers, does this resonate with you? If it doesn’t, tell me how it could be made better. Or can you help work in this project, co-create? But I think that’s also a lot more energy and resource intensive, and it also takes a lot more time. It’s a lot slower. So I think if we could somehow also realign some of these incentives to encourage the scientists to take on greater risk in collaborating with somebody who’s not immediately in their discipline and then also having more incentives to engage with people outside of academia, I think that could be really helpful. Thankfully, I think I’m at a place that really does recognize that. And so I’m very thankful to UNC for supporting my work. And they gave me a prize last year for my research. And I think that’s really nice to see institutions—because it’s certainly not every institution is like that, where they’re like, why are you doing this stuff for local government? Or why are you talking to the UN? Or why are you doing these assessment reports? Should be only doing peer review publications. And I think UNC is like, they get it. They’re like, actually, this is really great. And we want to—we want people to do this. But it’s not easy. It definitely takes a lot of my time. You think about, I have to find local government, and I have to convince them to spend some of their time talking to me. It’s definitely a lot more time intensive and exhausting and resource demanding than if it’s just a scientist on their computer or in their lab doing whatever. We need also the engagement. We need people on the other side to say, yes, I will have that conversation with you. And yes.
And like, honestly, that’s been one of the greatest things about moving to North Carolina that I didn’t experience when I lived in the Northeast, like for 10 years or even in Singapore. I do find that people here are like very open. They’re very willing to collaborate. Local government, like they want to interface with us, the other researchers here. It’s been incredibly collaborative. And I think that that actually has been really great in terms of trying to get some more of these like cross-sector collaborations and getting people to talk to each other and understand both sides better.
Michael (42:37)
And you obviously talk to a lot of young people and even a lot of say, you know, older, mid-career people who are sort of interested in what you do and interested in kind of, you know, seeing what they can do to sort of help contribute to tackling the climate problem, right? Because this is becoming a problem of such great magnitude and people are trying to, you know, pivot their careers to focus more on climate or take individual actions or just do what they can. What do you say to them? Like, how do you try to be inspirational kind of just in your sort of day-to-day interactions?
Angel (42:50)
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s a great question. And yeah, that’s like a big part of what I do. I’m on the the what is it continuing learner circuit here. So I do a lot of talks at like retirement communities and local bookstores. And then also I give talks to high schoolers and then for middle school kids. And we do demonstrations and things like that and even elementary age kids. So try to get them at every level. I would say that every career should be a climate career. So it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. So I always tell people—because the climate crisis is incredibly daunting and it just feels like such an existential crisis that you as an individual don’t feel like you have any agency over. And I know that because like climate anxiety is real, eco-anxiety is real. And I talked to students about this on a day-to-day basis. And so they feel helpless. But what I like to say is, and we have the evidence now. So in the IPCC working group three on mitigation, that was the working group I was involved in. And we have evidence now, you go back into that chapter, particularly chapter five on demand side solutions. It was the first time in an IPCC, it was actually focused on individual action. And so what we found is that if we look across sectors, individuals, when added all the actions together, can reduce emissions an additional 40 to 70% on top of supply side responses. And to me, that’s like things like eating meat less and taking public transit, like one day a week, deciding not to take one flight a year, perhaps like, yeah, so there are a lot of things that we as individuals can do that added up can have an impact. And now we have like solid evidence for that. So I say that if you wanna pursue a career in climate and it feels like very daunting, then try to think about like other careers where you can insert climate as part of your day-to-day job and your day-to-day life. Like I think that that’s like also really important to recognize. So I feel like every career should be a climate career, whether or not you’re in consulting or you work for the government or you’re working for a business. Like think about how you can interject climate in all of those different domains. And I feel like there’s no excuse. Like I feel like we, you know, when I started my career 20 years ago, you maybe could have said, well, what maybe the science is not, a hundred percent there, even though there were still strong indications. But I think now the evidence is overwhelming. If you’re not thinking about what you can do to help the issue, then what is it that you’re doing? Like, why are we here, right? So it’s really about like human survival and human existence. I mean, the planet’s gonna be fine, right, with or without us. We know in geologic time over millennia, the earth has recovered, it’s gonna be fine. But it’s really like humans and our future generations and their future generations that are really gonna be affected. And so thinking about how in your day-to-day life or in your career, like how you can interject climate, I think that that’s like what could really make a difference. And so, you know, like now we’re at this point where it’s an all-hands-on-deck, all-of-society effort. So how can we really be persistent and think about like in every action what we can do to try to turn the needle in the other direction.
Michael (46:09)
And just sort of focusing it back on you for sort of one more question. So you obviously think about climate, you know, day in and day out, and you sort of try to do what you can to sort of promote positive outcomes. But I guess like if you were to think about kind of, you know, what you would want kind of your epitaph to be, you know, like if you think about sort of, not that, you know, not that we’re reaching the end of Angel Hsu or anything like that. But if you just think about, you know, would you say it would be?
Angel (46:42)
Yeah, so we have, I actually should show you my, I can send you one if you give me your address, but we have a lab. I just made these stickers one day when I was waiting for a postdoc. So I just made this on camera, but yeah, show me the data. I feel like this is like kind of my tagline. I’m in so many conversations all the time where somebody says something or they say, well, we should try this or this doesn’t work or blah, blah, blah. And I’m always like, show me the data. Just show me the data.
Michael (46:53)
Haha, that’s fabulous.
Angel (47:09)
So I kind of feel like that might be my epitaph is, she asked for the data and she got the data or something like that. Yeah. Or like she was really annoying and persistent and never left me alone until I gave her what she wanted. So yeah, that would also be like another piece of my advice is just to be persistent, be really, know, Cristiana Figueres, who is a former secretary of the UNFCCC, I have a t-shirt from her, which is like stubborn optimists, you know, like that’s the whole thing is like be stubbornly optimistic because like, yeah, the indicators are all pointing in a very negative way. Climate crisis is here, it’s getting worse. And so how can you still like work on this topic in—just knowing all that you know? And I think like being stubbornly optimistic and trying to see like, find those solutions, like being, you know, for me, I’m like a problem solver. I always want to like solve the problem. And so like not, giving up, think is like the number one thing. And so, yeah, maybe it would be something like, show me the data, never give up, be a stubborn optimist, something like that. But I want to be cremated. So I don’t think I want to take up more room. Just want my room.
Michael (48:19)
All right, I think we will end on that note. Angel Hsu, thank you so much for appearing on Climate Swings. This was wonderful.
Angel (48:23)
Thank you.
Michael (48:32)
Climate Swings is produced, hosted, and edited by me, Michael Gold, with promotional support from climate education and action platform, Terra.do. Opinions expressed on the show are exclusively those of the guests and do not reflect the views of Terra.do, its founders or employees. Show notes, transcripts, and other material can be found on the podcast section of my website, wordclouds.consulting/climateswings.
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