This was a casual interview with a very loose agenda. Christine Ayala was the interviewer. Christine is an editor who published several opinion pieces written by Craig and Bill Fletcher when she worked at The Hill and The Messenger. Craig and Bill Fletcher are coauthors of “Reaching Net Zero: What It Takes To Solve The Global Climate Crisis” (2020) and “The Global Climate Crisis: What To Do About It” (2024).

Question: What is most interesting to you about researching, learning about and writing about climate change?

Craig Smith, Ph.D.: What I find most interesting is the reluctance of people, who I consider intelligent and informed, to really admit that we have a serious problem. It bothers me to no end that people are not jumping on this issue and supporting efforts to do more about it quickly. I think, particularly any people in my age group or even in my children’s age group who are not really committed to doing something about this, I wonder what they feel about the world they’re going to be leaving for their children and grandchildren. And that’s my overall preoccupation. It’s not something that’s going to affect my life. I’ll be dead, to put it bluntly, but I worry, and I’m concerned about the world we’ll be leaving to our younger children. And the other aspect of that, I guess, is that we live in a fortunate situation in the United States, as do most countries of Europe and the more highly developed countries of the world. And having myself lived in the past in some very poor areas, briefly as an engineer and researcher or project involvement, I know that a huge part of the world is not prepared for what’s coming. It’s the poorest people that will be affected the soonest and the most severely. So that’s kind of where my thinking is now. And, if I have any regrets, it’s that we don’t seem to be getting the word out as much as we would like to in terms of raising people’s awareness.

Q: Do you have any other concerns about the state of the climate crisis beyond apathy or reluctance?

CS: I think the other thing that, as a result of our six-years of research and study of this issue in general, we’ve developed some perspective, and, you know, we’ve been looking particularly at, changes, what’s changing and what’s not changing. And, as a result of that, I guess my other concern is, of course, a lot of things are changing, but that’s maybe the lesser problem and the greater problem of being the fact that changes are occurring much more rapidly than in the past. So, it’s not just changes occurring, but changes accelerating.

Q: How old are you?

CS: I will be 86 in July of this year—two months more.

Q: Are you completely retired or are you still operating in a professional capacity outside of your writing?

CS: No, I’m completely retired. I formally retired in 2003, from my position with AECOM technologies. And shortly after that, I formed a small, publishing company. I did some consulting work for my former company for a couple of years, and for some of its clients. That had mostly to do with cleaning up legal matters—something that it turned out I was good at, but I didn’t really enjoy doing. Shortly after that, a couple of years later, one of the books I was writing was about Lightning. I had a literary agent at that time, and he had suggested this topic for some reason. I never did find out why he thought that it would be good, other than he knew I was an electrical engineer. And, long story short, he was promoting this manuscript along with another book. At one point, he wanted me to get a proposal to him very quickly. I said, “Okay, I’ll do that — but if you get a book deal, it has to be for two books, with this other book, which was about Extreme Waves, and Tsunamis, as well as the lightning book. He said, “well, I don’t know. I’ll see if I can.” And he ended up doing that. He got a contract for two books, but of course they wanted the book on Extreme Waves first, (this was right after the SE Asia tsunami) and I had done the least research on it. The other book, I had done a lot of research. So, I delivered the first book–it was the fastest book I ever wrote. I finished it in eight months. And it was a hot topic because of the Southeast Asia tsunami at that time. Then the lightning book was due a year later. So, I was really happy with my position in life right then. I would write a book. It would take them a year to put it out. Meanwhile, I’d write another book, and so on and so on, or so I thought. This was going to be fun. But it turned out that when I got the lightning book about 90% complete, the publisher called and said, “well, sorry, Craig, we have to cancel your contract; our board is not going to allow us to publish these kinds of books anymore. This was a publishing arm of the National Academy of Sciences , and they were going to restrict their publications to very scientific things, not so-called trade books, which is what my book was considered. So, with that, I had interviewed a lot of people who had been victims of lightning strikes, and I felt I owed it to them to tell their story. So, I decided I would publish it myself. I went through a painful learning process and, did that successfully. And then somebody else approached and said, “hey, can you publish my book?” And presto, there we were. We set up a company. In fact, my wife and I were driving up to Santa Barbara to see our kids as that was all happening. She said, “you’re going to go back to work. What do you want to call this company?” And I said, “oh, anything that I can do, working on my boat. So, we called it “Dockside Sailing Press.”

Then, one thing led to another. I started hearing from other authors. We never had to go out and seek manuscripts. I would say in a given year, we would get about 10 submittals and reject seven or so, and we ended up publishing about three books a year. I mean, there were some things that were just, you know, they weren’t really worth even considering. But I felt we published some very good books, and we republished a few books that had gone on out of press. One in particular was written by a young Polynesian woman named, Florence (“Johnny”) Frisbie. She lived on Puka-Puka, a small island in in the Cook Islands group in the South Pacific. At age 16 she wrote a book about life there. It was the first book written by a Polynesian woman that received national publication. It had gone out of print and we republished it. It was one of our best sellers, and there were a number of others that were quite interesting. Then It got to be a burden, for both of us (me and my wife). And at that point, we were contemplating a move to Santa Barbara to move into a retirement community. In 2020, I closed publishing company.  Then even after it closed, I did a couple more  books. Somebody would get back to me and say, oh, can you please help me? In those cases, we basically put the book together and then gave it to the author  and told them to “take it this printer or that printer and print it yourself.” That was the extent of our involvement. So, then I guess I could say I really retired in 2020, but my wife would probably argue with you and say I never have retired.

Q: When you were working on those couple of books, especially the Extreme Wave book, did that pique your interest at all in extreme weather, or did you have any thoughts on, extreme weather and climate change and their connection at that time? Were you already pretty passionate on the climate change front, or was that, prior to you really engaging in climate research?

CS: I think that was prior. That (climate change) was not a concern at that time, in my mind. Extreme weather was because I was a sailor, and I had a very solid boat. It is a boat that people have sailed around the world in, the same type of boat. It wasn’t a large boat. It wasn’t a racing boat, for example, but it was a very rugged boat. I’d taken it down to Mexico and all the offshore islands around here. And then I’d done a lot of other sailing also in chartered boats in different parts of the world. So, I was very concerned about weather. I tried to educate myself about weather in the sense of impending storms and high seas, things that can be dangerous to people in a boat when you’re offshore and hundreds of miles from the land, but that I didn’t really associate that with climate change. I think today there is a lot of evidence that climate change is making weather worse, on land and on sea, with the frequency and intensity of storms. But that all came later.

Q: Has the concern around underserved communities or populations been something that you’ve intentionally focused on through your career? You’ve mentioned how now, in what you know about climate change, that you have a real concern about how the poorest people are going to be soonest and worst affected. And it sounds like in your publishing work, elevating voices, was something important to you. And it also sounds like in your work that you did with rebuilding Cal State Northridge after the Northridge earthquake, and the Pentagon, after 9/11, that hiring minority contractors and women-owned businesses was often a priority.

CS: Yes, I had some experiences early on. I got married in 1961 while a graduate student in engineering at UCLA. My wife, at that time, was a year behind me, she had just graduated, gotten a teaching credential and was teaching elementary school and basically supporting me. We decided we were interested in joining the Peace Corps. We  applied for a project and  were accepted for training for a Peace Corps project in Peru. But meanwhile, a professor at UCLA came up with this idea of designing and building small industries in northeast Brazil, the very poorest part of Brazil. It was politically motivated by the fact that the Cuban revolution had just occurred, and they were thinking it could be the next Cuba because of the poverty. This Professor—Morris Asimow—his idea was to take a group of graduate student engineers and architects and business guys down to this remote area and, in partnership with a Brazilian university, design and build some small factories that would create jobs and supply goods that were needed in this remote area. Nancy that I went to northeast Brazil, the boondocks in the interior of the State of Ceará. I never been anywhere prior to that. I’d hardly been away from Los Angeles. I guess the farthest I had ever gone was San Francisco. There were no hotels in that area. In this town, it had just gotten electricity the year before. It was mostly dirt roads, you know, wagons pulled by cattle or horses. We elected to live with a Brazilian family. There was no hotel. We became fast friends with this family, and that’s how we learned Portuguese and learned what life was like there. And we came back to UCLA during the academic year, worked on the design of the factory with the Brazilian participants also. And then the next year we went back and started overseeing the actual construction of the factory buildings. In the interim, we had formed corporations for six different projects, and I worked on one that was a factory to build transistorized radios. After two summers there, I had to continue finishing my dissertation. So, there were other people that took over and saw the project through completion of construction and operations.

That was a life-altering experience. Frankly, I can’t describe it any other way. Many people t were desperately poor. In the course of our market research to decide what kind of industries  we’d make, we went around and just met people in the community. One of my most vivid memories is going into a house that was made of a thatched roof with palm leaves and a dirt floor, one room, with kind of woven branches making up the walls. An opening for a door with a cloth hanging in it and walls plastered with mud and cow manure. In  it lived  two70-year-old women, and they did washing and ironing for people. They would wash clothes in a nearby stream, and then lay them out on bushes to dry and iron them with a charcoal iron. They had no lights or electricity, obviously. When we came to visit with them, another guy and myself, they had a pot of beans cooking on the stove. Black beans were the primary food in Brazil for the poor. Black beans and rice. But they started apologizing to us that they had no coffee to offer us. So, that was what normal hospitality would have required. I don’t remember, but I think they made about a dollar a day, something like that, on their labors. And that’s how they survived. That was just one of many examples of how people lived in different circumstances.

Q: I can see why,  when the science is pointing towards who’s going to be most affected, these long-ago experiences where you started, probably live pretty heavily in your mind, knowing this is the kind of people that will be impacted.

CS: And in my travels, I encountered similar situations in other countries, perhaps never in such intimacy as in Brazil. But, the other thing, and this is maybe irrelevant, maybe it’s relevant, I don’t know, but there were about eight or 10 key people on this project — counting myself as a key person — who were graduate engineers or architects or business majors. And then there were some faculty members that were involved also who were, of course, really important because they led the whole thing. We were equal in number, the American students and the Brazilian students from the University of Ceará. This was in the state of Ceará. And by the way, Ceará is a state in the “hump” of Brazil, if you look at the map. But, every one of the people in our team,  every one of us went on to become an entrepreneur.

So, that experience, obviously affected me. But I wasn’t the only one. The Brazilian guys all went on to start companies or become major players in companies. One of the guys, one of the most successful ones, became a multimillionaire. He had a chain of hotels in Brazil. A couple of times, much later in life, Nancy and I went back to Brazil and visited him, and he would always put us up in one of his hotels and he would not allow us to pay anything. The most interesting thing was returning to the small city in the interior where we’d spent 2 summers in 1962-1963. There was a bustling economy—even high-rise buildings. The dirt roads and ox carts were gone, replaced by paved roads, automobiles, and hordes of motor cycles.

Q: I think nowadays a university would call that an “incubator,” an “entrepreneurship incubator.”

CS: An incubator. It definitely was and there was no American money involved in it. That was the other thing that was very rewarding. We had two grants from the Organization of American States to pay our travel expenses. But other than that, the  capital for the factories  all came from Brazil. The way it was done at that time was with local investors.  There were people who had money in that remote agricultural area. There were people that had, farms or ranches, and they had nowhere to invest any money, other than to buy more land. So, they put up half the money. And then the Brazilian Development Bank gave them loans for 50% of the money to capitalize the projects and pay for the construction. It was a true, bootstrap process. There were no American dollars donated to it.

Q: Do you think one of the reasons that Americans, are, you know, as you mentioned at the start of our conversation, people who are intellectuals and you would assume they could clearly see the urgency of tackling climate change, that perhaps one of the reasons that there is either a lack of interest or even an apathy among Americans is their lack of awareness of the realities outside of the country. I would doubt that most Americans have been to somewhere as remote as Northeast Brazil? Do you think that plays a part?

CS: Well, that’s probably true. I think Americans have traveled a lot. And of course, considering the wars, the military, the soldiers, have seen  that kind of situation in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan— but how much they focused on  poverty given what they  were doing is  another question. But, yes, most people would travel to other countries, unless they were scholars or researchers, they would be looking for pleasant places to visit. They certainly wouldn’t want to go to some of the places I’ve been. I think the same is true for Bill. He has lived overseas and traveled to some pretty remote locations.

Q: Generating energy is, typically not a not a pretty process, is it?

CS: No,  but getting adequate supplies of energy is a universal concern. In those early days, Brazil had no oil. They were importing oil. It was decades later that they first discovered oil, and then Brazil became, not self-sufficient but much better off than during the early days when we were there. In fact, one of our projects, was a plant to make cement for that area. At the time we were there, and it was 3,000 miles away from southern Brazil, where all the industry was, and the area was connected by very poor roads, mostly dirt roads.  Bringing goods from the south, which was the wealthy part, to that part of Brazil was expensive and slow. Cement was obviously a necessary thing for building. So, we came up with a design for a cement plant that used a vertical kiln, not a horizontal kiln, like most cement plants that you would see here. It was a German design, and we could use charcoal as fuel for it, which was novel. This project involved not only the plant and developing the resources to mine limestone, which is one of the raw materials and was available there, but also to create a tree farm to raise fast growing eucalyptus trees, to create charcoal to operate the plant. Because of these complications, this plant didn’t actually get into operation until a number of years later, because of all the complexity of government permits for the tree farm and so on. But it did get into production just before the Arab oil embargo. And, it turned out then, in 1973, it was the only cement plant in Brazil that could operate because it didn’t need oil as a fuel.

CS: So, there was a lot of publicity about that. It had a small capacity. It wasn’t a huge plant, but it was kind of record breaking in a certain sense.

This is typical of the energy issues in  developing countries, most don’t have those resources. And even today, China and India, they have coal but don’t have oil. And, that’s another of the real promises of the effort that we’re putting forth — that renewable energy, wind and solar, it exists everywhere. And it’s free, basically, if you develop the resources to use it. So, “energy independence” becomes not just a slogan. It becomes a possibility for every country in the world if they really address it and work on it. And some of the countries that are exploiting renewable energy sources are developing countries. They recognize its importance. They’re doing more than we are doing. They’re moving faster, and they’re not wasting money on expanding fossil fuel production. They’re going directly, jumping ahead, to the new technology that’s cheaper, free, more efficient and non-polluting.

Q: I’m curious: in your career, looking back — now that you are working so intentionally on climate change — what throughout your career has now become very applicable to seeking out tangible solutions for climate change?

CS: Well, my career went through a number of iterations.  I taught engineering at UCLA for seven years, and we had a required course for engineering students that was called “The Professional Duties of the Engineer.” It was supposed to be about ethics,  professional registration, etc. I took great liberties with the curriculum. I did cover the required things, but I decided that engineers needed to know how to communicate better. So, I did some things that students hated. I had them compose a poem and read it in class or work on a short story. I would call people without warning, and they had to come up and make an impromptu speech on the subject. But I think in retrospect, I found that a lot of those guys really had creative abilities that they weren’t aware of weren’t tapping. On the other hand, one student said, “why do we have to do this, Dr. Smith? My secretary will write my reports for me.”

I said, “listen, do you think you might like to get a raise at some point? You better know how to write a request to get a raise, you know? Your secretary won’t be able to do that for you….”

Q: Do you think that this continues to be an issue, and particularly an issue in conveying some of this urgency around climate change. You noticed this decades ago. Do you think this has been a hindrance?

CS: Yes, I do, and Bill, I know, would agree with me. At the time these were young engineering students just beginning their careers. Our problem today is a little bit different. We have some very talented scientists, oceanographers, meteorologists, people working on all the different sciences related to climate change. Bill and I read the reports, and while they’re technically brilliant and they bring up a lot of key points, I just think of my neighbors here, they would read about two pages and throw the document away. Most won’t wade through all this technical jargon you know? That’s been one of our goals, to try to translate it into terms that the general public can understand without losing sight of the key elements of it. So, yes, I think it’s a big problem. I used to call it the “White Coat Syndrome.” We used to have nuclear scientists who would stand up and give a talk about radioactivity and nuclear safety. And no one could even understand what that they were saying, but the white coat meant that you were supposed to just believe them, because they were experts. Well, people, after a while, didn’t believe them anymore. Things started going wrong. We had Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011). The white coats had said that these were “fail-safe” systems.

So, I think communication has been a problem when scientists to write for the general population, trying to not dilute the technical accuracy, yet make the material understandable at the same time. Also, because if they are academics, they don’t get paid for writing, they don’t get bonuses, they don’t get tenure for writing for the equivalent of Life magazine or The New York Times or those types of publications. They have to write articles that are in refereed scientific journals, and the general public is probably not even aware of these and certainly doesn’t read them.

Q: So, the academic metric doesn’t equate to public awareness?

CS: Right.

Q: Returning to the earlier question about what in your career has been applicable or informative in what you’re working on now, is there anything else that that in retrospect was helpful?

CS: Yeah, I think the main thing that has been a foundation for me was all that I’ve learned about energy, and going from the situation prior to the Arab oil embargo, which is a good milestone to consider, to where were in the next couple of decades [following the embargo] and where we are today.

I was encouraged in this direction by Dr. Chauncey Starr, ex-President of Atomics International and the former dean of engineering at UCLA.  We got a big stimulus from the Arab oil embargo and the long gas lines and people not being able to get gas for their cars. The oil price jumped from $3 a barrel to $10, $11, $12 a barrel and it had huge economic repercussions. What that did, that price increase — and there’s a lesson here that we’ve forgotten, and I want to bring that up — that price increase drove innovation. It triggered all kinds of efforts to make the use of energy more efficient. So, out of that crisis sprang hundreds of developments.

You can visualize LEDs, light emitting diodes. We went from incandescent lamps in the 1960s to higher efficiency fluorescent lamps, and then the LED just came out like gangbusters, they  just blew  the competition away. I mean, they were so much more efficient. They produced very little heat, so that reduced air conditioning loads in buildings. There are all these different benefits that came about. I was very much involved in this transition. We did a lot of projects and studies for hospitals, schools, industrial plants, and military facilities, going through building by building and looking at what they were doing and saying, “Well, now you change the air conditioning to this, you get rid of that lighting and put in better lighting and put in different controls.” And suddenly you have the utility bills go way down. The investments they made were paid for in three years or something like that. In 1980, I wrote a book called “Energy Management Principles” that summarized all the technologies we’d learned and gave case studies. In 2016, with Dr. Kelly Parmenter as coauthor, I wrote a 2^nd edition of that book, showing that efficiency could still be improved.

Bill and I have included efficiency improvements in our action plan. We say that energy use efficiency continues today. I would say that, from our data, every year, we use about 2% less energy to produce $1 of global national product. So we say, “well, we can increase that from 2% to 3%. Just improve it one more percent. And over the term of our action plan, that cuts out 30% of the quantity of energy that would be required around the world.” Being able to use energy more efficiently has been a big component of my background in terms of dealing with global warming.

Q: Do you see do you see any parallels now with anything that could or is prompting any type of similar sense of innovation?

CS: Frankly, I think it’s across the board. I mean, there are all kinds of people looking for these ideas. Just pick something. Take solar panels. Solar panel efficiency has gone up and up over the last 20 years. The cost has gone down and down. They’re making panels that are more efficient and can produce more electricity for each lumen of sunlight that hits the panel. There are panels that produce a small amount of electricity, even at night, because they have a thermistor, a device that converts heat into electricity on the back of them. The temperature difference from the front to back produces small amounts of electricity. Researchers have come up with ways to include reflectors that focus more solar energy on solar panels.

There are hundreds of things happening in the renewable energy field. New types of batteries. Some people say, “oh, geez, we’re going to run out of lithium,” or “lithium is the problem,” mining it, waste, and pollution. There are batteries being developed now that don’t use lithium. Batteries that will not discharge in a few hours but last a few days. And there are batteries that are probably going to last a few weeks before very long. There is just a tremendous number of opportunities. Many people, especially creative scientists or engineers,  innovators, see business opportunities in these various fields. It’s the same thing that happened with the LEDS and what’s happened with improved efficiency in motors and so on.

Q: In terms of the language that’s used around climate change now, do you see the business side or the cost-reduction side of things being the most compelling argument for action versus the human-impact argument?

CS: That’s a good question. We’ve tried to pay attention to the economic side of things because that is an incentive. And, it counters the argument of, “Oh well, we can’t afford to do this.” In reality, we can’t afford not to do it. So, I think it takes kind of a mixture. Some people are going to be moved more by one argument or the other.

Q: The other the other thing that stood out to me in your long, work history is the project management side of things. You’ve worked on a lot of big projects. And one of the themes that has come up in several of your pieces with Bill has been about the challenge around implementing climate action. That seems to be a project management issue. How do you see it? What do you think from a project management perspective?

CS: I think project management is important. There are two different categories. I think that project management in the private sector and in the Government sector are two different animals.  

Bill and I both had a lot of experience with big projects and projects that had tough deadlines and required a lot of complexity in bringing the resources and the people together. We don’t see that happening right now. We see some efforts that are really contrary to helping matters. There are some resources and talent devoted to really flawed approaches. Two that I just will cite off-hand is so-called geoengineering and the other is carbon capture.

Regarding “carbon capture”—really the idea of sucking CO₂ out of the atmosphere–you don’t have to be a genius to put the numbers together and say, “there’s no way in hell this is going to work.” I mean, we’ll be at it for 50 years and we’ll barely make a dent in it — if all this hypothetical stuff would work.

The other thing is so-called geoengineering, where some want to sprinkle powders on the ocean so they reflect heat or shoot solar shades up in the sky and all kinds of crazy ideas in between. Things that, you know, no one can predict what would happen. They could become catastrophes and we’d have no way to recover from them. There’s no way to test some of them.

We have some things that are just wasted effort, just spinning our wheels. Instead of getting right to the real thing, we know solar panels and wind turbines will work. We know how to do it. We know what it costs. It’s getting more efficient, cheaper every day. Why screw around? Let’s do the obvious things that we know work. And then if we don’t get there that way, it buys time for us to do some of these other things. There will be new things to discover, there’s no doubt about that. That’s the history of mankind. But we can’t delay with the obvious things that will help right now.

Recently, there was a list of the countries that are already getting 95% or 100% of their energy from wind and solar, and it was about 12 or 15 countries, all very small, that have actually made that conversion. Yet, here we are, the U.S. — a technical leader with huge resources — we’re diddling around. I think we’re about 30% of our electricity generation with wind and solar at present. We should be miles ahead of that.

Q: Why do you think that these ideas — what we might call shiny ideas or solutions — like geoengineering and, carbon capture get the attention that they do when there are such obvious solutions like renewable energy?

CS: Some of them are driven by the oil companies, to be blunt. They hold out the promise that: “Well, maybe we don’t need stop using natural gas and oil because it’s been so good for us and all that. But if it really becomes a problem, we’ll work away and develop these technologies, so they can be used at some time in the future.”

So, it’s an idle promise in a way, and it diverts people’s attention from the real challenges. A good example is Marconi and Tesla. Tesla, a famous scientist, a brilliant guy, and he just missed the boat. He was going to transmit electricity through the air and he built huge towers —one in Colorado — to transmit electric  power through the air without transmission lines. He failed to recognize that the losses in transmitting electricity through the air would doom that process to failure. Another guy, Marconi, watched what Tesla was doing. And he thought, “No, no, that’s the wrong way. That’s the wrong application. What we need to do is send electricity through the air for communications.” And guess what? Radio was born. You can’t fault people for coming up with new ideas and trying. But there has to be some way of filtering out the ones that are obviously not going to work or pose new dangers or are not fully understood or explored from the beneficial approaches.

Q: And maybe, considering the urgency of the climate issue, that would be more obvious.

CS: Yes. Right. Back to your question about project management. Bill and I both have had a lot of experience with that. And there was a lot of, in the last number of years, a lot of new developments in the project managers tools.

We began using a program called  “Primavera” which is a very sophisticated scheduling program. You take a very big, complex job like building an airport or a power system, and you break it down into all the different tasks and subtasks. Let’s say, for example, building a runway. So, you’d say, okay, this runway is 1,000 ft long and 400 ft wide or whatever, and it’s going to have 3 ft thick concrete pavement. So, we have to excavate x tons of cubic yards of dirt and it’s going to take some kind of heavy earth moving equipment to do that. And that equipment can remove x tons per hour, and so on. Then we have to put in reinforcing steel, and how many tons of that goes in, with so many labor hours and at a specified cost. This program enables one to break a job down into different tasks. For example, if you want to build a brick wall in front of your house, you’ve first got to dig a trench for the footing. You’ve got to pour concrete in to  make a foundation. And you’ve got to stack up concrete blocks five courses high and put them in one row at a time with mortar in between. You can picture how each of those tasks takes a certain amount of time and a certain amount of material and unit costs for labor and  each material.

This program allows you to put all that information together and you input also the sequence of activities. So, you can’t start laying bricks or pouring the airport runway pavement until you have the ditch excavated, and then you have to put it in the reinforcing, so there’s a sequence. That sequence goes into the program. You get all that input data, and then you push a button, and it tells you how long the project’s going to take and how many tons of concrete, and how many labor hours and so on. It shows you what’s called the “critical path.” The critical path is that sequence of activities that determines how long that project takes. It tells how long it’s going to take to complete the job. Suppose you find out that, as you’ve programmed it, pouring the airport pavement is what holds up the whole job. So, then you can go into the program and you can say, “okay, I’m going to double the number of machines that are pouring concrete for the pavement, bring in more people, excavate the runway faster” and that shorten the time it takes to do that, which then speeds up the entire project. This is just an example of the tools that are available today.

The other things that are important in project management: What are the contracts? In private industry you use a number of different kinds of contracts. Some were fixed price, so the contractor comes up with a price — and that’s it. No changes. Some are cost-plus. In this, the contractor could get all his costs repaid and then get some fee on top of that. And there are variations on these types that apply more or less in certain situations. And if it’s something that’s been done a hundred times  you could use a fixed price contract, because there’s no doubt about what it’s going to cost, basically because it’s been done many times. If it’s the first time and it’s like building a spaceship or something new and complex, then you might have a cost-plus contract because there are a lot of unknowns and things happen, things have to be changed.

But we’re not seeing really good contracting being done when the Government’s in charge. The government advocates some of these methods, but they apply them poorly, based on my direct experience.

In general, not always, but in general, Bill and I have seen many examples of poor contracting. It doesn’t have to be that way. Here where I live in a retirement community, I chair a resident committee, called the “Sustainability Committee. It has no real authority, but we have a bunch of really smart and experienced people on it, and we make recommendations to the facilities department, those people that are charged with maintaining residences for 300 people and a number of apartment buildings, medical facilities, kitchen facilities, etc.

The organization received a large donation, which was dedicated by an anonymous donor who said, “I want to give some money to support the residents.” The donation included money to put solar roofs on three apartment buildings, including the one that I live in. The management here got proposals from some firms, and they selected a contractor based on the lowest cost. The contractor ran into problems and was delayed. It was six months over schedule to finish. Critical materials not ordered in advance, inadequate staffing the job–all things that could have been avoided. I suggested, “You know, there’s a different way to do this. You do it in two steps. One is you send out a request for qualifications from various contractors and say, ‘Here’s what we want to do. What are your qualifications to do it?’ And then you look at the people that are most qualified and have done projects like this. You select three of the best qualified firms and ask them to submit a proposal to do the job. Then you pick the guy that has the best proposal.”

Well, they didn’t do that, they didn’t want to do that. They just said, “ we’re going to have some proposals come in and we’re going to take the lowest bid, and we’re going to award the contract. That’s what our management requires we do.” I have a lot of experience and have learned that the lowest price is not always the lowest cost. In fact, rarely is it the lowest cost. So, project management offers a lot of opportunities to do things better, and we need to take advantage of it. That is not happening as the government throws money at renewable energy projects, improving transmission systems, and even carbon capture, with no overall masterplan and setting of priorities.

Q: There’s a similar theme here as to what you did with energy efficiency. You find what’s not efficient in a system and improve it, and then existing efforts work for a better payout. I feel like there’s a metaphor here as well. As you said, smart people with no real authority. That seems to be a major issue in the climate crisis, isn’t it?

CS: I’m reminded of projects and urgency and so on. You know, the Pentagon, the largest office building in the United States, was built in 1944 at the height of World War II, in 16 months.

Starting in the 1990s, the Department of Defense decided they needed to renovate it. And the reason was it had swollen to housing 25,000 workers. In the original design it had one electrical outlet, every 50 ft down the corridors. And that was for vacuum cleaners to clean the floors.

There were no electronic communications, no computers, no Wi-Fi ,set up in 1944. My former company and another company got the contract to manage the renovation project. It’s a Pentagon—it’s shaped like a pie with five wedges. We started with Wedge One  and moved 5,000 people out of it into different offices around the Washington, D.C. area and made sure they had internet connections and phones and so on. And then once they were all out of the building, we tore everything apart down to the structural frame, which was steel and reinforced concrete. Then we rebuilt it back up, strengthened the structure and installed all the modern wiring and installed blast-proof windows in place of the old windows. And because it was a historic building, the government wanted the windows looking exactly the same, so we had to make these blast-proof windows that look just like the old wooden ones.

They were very expensive. Anyway, fast forward to 9/11. I was in a meeting in Chicago with a number of other executives working on the budget for the coming year. When we heard about the planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, my first thought was, “oh my God, I hope they didn’t hit the part we had just finished renovating at Wedge One.” We were in the process of starting to move people back in. Sure enough, that’s where the plane hit. The good part of that horrible story was that we had not moved too many people back in. So, it was only 189 people that died—64 on the plane and 125 in the building when the plane hit. The strengthening that we had done also no doubt saved lives. President Bush then declared after the initial cleanup and been done, that we were going to rebuild Wedge One in one year from the date of 9/11. The project up to that time had taken about 12 years. So, a new project was created. It was called the Phoenix Project, ,with the goal of completely redoing Wedge One in one year and moving all the people back in. We actually accomplished that with very careful planning and we had tremendous support from all over the country. I remember there were steelworkers who had come from Tennessee or somewhere to Washington, D.C. to say, “I want to work on this project. I don’t care if I get paid.” So, at that time, it was a situation where the whole country just came together. Not like some of the divisiveness we’ve seen today, unfortunately.

I was invited to go to the inauguration of the new building. A It was it was terribly impressive. Bush made a talk. There was a huge American flag that literally covered one side of the Pentagon. There were anti-aircraft missiles on the roof of the building and tanks in the streets of Washington, DC. It was like nothing you can imagine. There was not going to be any repeat of a terrorist attack.

Anyway, so that was kind of a profound lesson of what you can do if you set your mind to and you can organize it.

Q: Is there anything on the climate front that could ever parallel something that caused national urgency in that same way as attacks and ongoing wars have in the past? Do you think that there is any parallel that could encourage climate action, at such a rapid pace, and also with the type of support that has made some of these major projects possible in a short time span?

CS: Bill and I keep asking ourselves that question. You know, we have said in some writings that we haven’t had a national emergency. There hasn’t been a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11 or something related to climate change that would galvanize people into action. I hate to say it, I hate to think that is what we need to have, but it may be, and there are certainly a number of ways that could happen. We keep looking at some of these trigger events, things like massive flooding or other extreme weather events. We’ve described a number of them now in our publications and continue to monitor them.

Before we moved to Santa Barbara, Nancy and I lived in Newport Beach on the peninsula. The harbor at Newport Beach is formed by a long peninsula that separates the harbor from the ocean. And there’s a single entrance down at one end of it.  We were about a block from the ocean and a half a block from the harbor. The peninsula was just a narrow thing, two blocks wide and about 40 blocks long. During the time we lived there, 20 years, we had at least four different occasions when we had flooding on our street, where a combination of high tide and an overhead storm that reduced air pressure. So, the sea rose and came over the breakwater and ran down our street. Somewhere, I have a picture of my neighbor who put his dog on a surfboard going down our street. We were fortunate it didn’t get up to the level that it would actually enter our house, but it was over the sidewalks. I looked at that and our house at 10 ft above mean (average) sea level. I thought, “Craig, you don’t want to stay here forever. You’re going to have some very cheap property that nobody wants to buy.” A lot of the coastline of Florida and some of the southern states has homes and business that are 3 ft above mean sea level.

You can’t get flood insurance anymore in most of the coastal areas of Florida. It’s just it’s like a bomb waiting to explode.

Q: Along the course of your career, I think that you could make a case that you’ve already had an impact in terms of progress toward climate action. I think you’ve made an impact in your students being better able to articulate their work. And, I’m sure that there’s been some positive effect of that on the energy front and working on energy efficiency is an obvious benefit to reducing overall energy use and emissions. Now that you’re in full retirement, or quasi retirement, What drives you to focus on climate change so acutely now? You’ve discussed already how you can’t ignore the problem, and you want to leave a better, world for your younger family. But you are at a point in your life that you said this isn’t a real threat to you in your lifetime. So, why dedicate so much time at this point?

CS: I’m trying to think of what my wife would say. She would say, “He just doesn’t know when to stop working.”

No, I’ve always liked to try to deal with challenges. I feel that we all owe a certain obligation to try to make the world a better place. A lot of my friends would say, “Craig, that’s kind of a naive point of view.” But I guess I’ve always felt that way. So, I’m unapologetic, that’s just the way I am. I think we should leave the world a better place. It’s something I feel is an obligation.

I’ve been very fortunate. I mean, I came from a family with four kids, and both my parents worked. My dad supported his family. His father died when he was 16, and my dad had to drop out of high school, and never finished high school. He supported his family, educated himself. He made it very bluntly clear to me and my two brothers and sister that we were going to get an education, whether we liked it or not. Something that he didn’t have.

Q: So, about the evolution of your partnership with Bill, what in your early conversations with him made you think I want to write a book with this guy?

CS: It’s hard to remember exactly how that came about. Actually, I think he may have said, “You know, we should write a book,” and, I probably looked at him like, “What do you know about writing books?” I was thinking of all the headaches that can be associated with it. But, no, I don’t remember exactly how  it happened, but I think he suggested it.

You can ask Bill. I think he actually said “We should write a book,” and then I said. “Oh, yeah. Okay.” He knew I had written books.

Q: Since working with him, what has that process been like? Has that changed your perspective at all on your ideas of how to tackle the issue or anything like that?

CS: Well, I’d say both of us have changed ideas, as a result of listening to the other guy. We’ve had a very good working relationship. We’ve never had any arguments. We disagree. We talk about things. We have different ideas, but we always come together. As far as I’m concerned, I’m very fortunate to have worked with a guy like Bill. I’ve done other writing projects with people that were hard to get along with. They said, it’s my way or the highway, that kind of thing. But Bill and I always have been able to come to grips with a common approach.

I feel fortunate to have known Bill. He is a very smart guy. We have some experiences in common, but we also have some different experiences. Another thing is money, we split all the expenses. There are never any arguments about money or anything. Somebody takes care of it, and we divide it up at the end of the year.

Q: Aside from personality and getting along very well, has working on climate books, talking about climate solutions felt any different than your other writing projects? Your books?

CS: No, it’s pretty much the same. I guess the one difference is that it’s much faster these days. In the early days, I would write a manuscript and submit it to the publisher. They would go through. Sometimes they hired an outside editor, sometimes they had an editor. They’d have it for six months, and then they’d send me back what was called a blue line, which was my manuscript all typed up and all marked up by their editor. Then I would have six months or three months to respond to it and agree or disagree with what the editor suggested. I’ve always believed that good editors make me look good. So, I usually never argued with an editor. Then I’d send that back, and then it would take them another year to come out with a printed book. That was roughly the schedule. Now, everything today is fast, fast, fast. We submit chapters at a time.

Q: In the process of deciding what you guys wanted to tackle, did you find that you and Bill had a lot of the same ideas? There are surprising parallels in your backgrounds. Did you find that you guys were pretty much on the same page, or did you each bring to the table a variety of topics that you felt more strongly about? What was that process like?

CS: We each brought different things to the table. In other words, we weren’t 100% uniform, but we were highly focused on the same thing. But we brought different strengths to the process based on our different experiences.

Q: Between your various writing and your books, what message would you want to convey most to the public about climate change?

CS: I would like to see an upswelling of concerns and more realization that we’ve got to get moving and do stuff, more of a popular movement of people putting pressure on the government and saying, “Hey, we can’t just throw money at it, people. We have to come up with a plan. And you Senate, you Congress, you President, you Department of Energy — you have to start thinking about this and coming up with a concrete plan,” Not just dabble with it, hit and miss, with little subsidies and little donations here and there. That’s not going solve the problem. That’s not going to get it done — and it’s going to take too long.

Q: So, beyond a cultural climate movement, you’d like to see a concerted government pressure campaign?

CS: Bill’s mentioned things like the project to build the atomic bomb. It sad to use that as an analogy, but you know that became a great concern during the course of the war because there was a lot of scientific information indicating that the Germans were experimenting with uranium. Einstein had talked to Roosevelt and said: “I think the fission of uranium can produce huge amounts of energy, and we should look at that”. And then the government started the Manhattan Project. There was no sparing of efforts, and of course, it had to be highly secret. Giant laboratories were set up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and New Mexico, the state of Washington. Huge investments were made and it was just done all on a high priority. Rapidly problems were circumvented. Just the thing to do  in a national emergency.

We’re not doing that. Everything seems to take longer. Getting a damn transmission line from point X to point Y takes years. Then there’s one farmer somewhere that says, “I don’t want you to cross my land.” I mean, this is an emergency. We can’t have that kind of bologna.

Q: Do you think the bigger problem is that it’s not seen as an emergency, or that it’s not being treated as an emergency?

CS: It’s not being seen as an emergency, especially in the United States. But, if you go to a low-lying island in the South Pacific, like Tuvalu or Kiribati, there people watching their homes being washed away by the sea, agriculture land being flooded. To them it’s not just an emergency. It’s a catastrophe.

Some islands have purchased property on Fiji so they can move their entire population  there.

In some places, God help us if you live in Bangladesh or on the coast in that part of the world. People depend on the ocean for their livelihood, and then they’re going to lose their livelihood, their homes and everything. It’s all going to be under water.

You know, a cynical view of it is people are ignoring it because they just don’t know what the hell to do. What are you going to do with millions of desperately poor people who live along the coast. What are you going to do to help them ?

Q: So, for many Americans, as long as it’s not a pressing issue at their doorstep, it’s something a lot of people can ignore. Is that the impression?

CS: Yeah. That’s right.