Hilary Boudet Oral History Interview, April 9, 2018

ELIZABETH THORLEY: Today is April 9, 2018. We're at the Valley Library. I'm here with Dr. Hilary Boudet, an academic in the School of Public Policy at OSU. Today we're going to be talking about climate change and her research related to it. But, I'm going to start out with your background. Where were you born?

HILARY BOUDET: I was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

ET: Is that where you grew up?

HB: No, I spent two years there and then my family moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

ET: What did your parents do?

HB: My mom is a social worker, so she does counseling and other things for families. Then, my dad is a science and technology writer. I guess that's kind of the best description. He has a Ph.D. too in history and initially did some work on plan communities, and when we moved to Tennessee he got a job with the 00:01:00Tennessee Valley Authority and was working in their sort of history and archeological department as they were doing excavations trying to understand the historical implications. Then he's been a communications director for science organizations and journals.

ET: What were your interests growing up? Did you spend time outdoors?

HB: Well, yeah. Tennessee, well, actually Oak Ridge is a lot like Corvallis. It's a one-company town. It was one of the secret cities for the Manhattan Project, for the creation of the atomic bomb. A lot of people that I grew up with, their parents worked in the national lab in town and there's not a lot of other stuff going on. It's a lot of playing soccer. We would go to the Smokies quite a bit and you know do that kind of thing, so yeah.

ET: Did the fact that you lived in Oak Ridge have a strong impression on your engagement or understanding of the energy sector from a young age.

HB: Yeah, well the place itself is very science and technology focused. A lot of the people, a lot of the parents and kids were very interested in science and math and technology and so the schools were really good. A lot of focus on education because a lot of people, a lot of the parents had Ph.D.'s of their own in nuclear physics and things like that. I think the thing that most influenced me about growing up there was the relationship between the town itself having a large-scale industrial development there and the community's relationship to 00:03:00that development because there were definite benefits and drawbacks from that relationship, so I mean obviously the lab provided a lot of employment and people were quite proud of the history of being involved in ending the war, but then there was a lot of leftover contamination because when they were developing the bomb they didn't know exactly what the long-term consequences would be disposing of some of the chemicals and radioactive materials that they were using. A lot of times they just got sort of put in the backyard of the facility and so one of the things that I didn't think was odd at the time growing up but now looking back was odd, so I played a lot of soccer and when we would practice and the ball would go in the creek by the field we weren't allowed to go get the 00:04:00ball because the creek was contaminated with mercury. At the time that just seemed like okay that's the rule. We just don't get the ball. Then when you talk to other people not many other people have a rule about chasing soccer balls into a creek. That left a big impression on me I think growing up. It was more that side of it. Both the focus on education which was really important but then also the drawbacks of being in an industrial, a post-industrial site.

ET: It sounds like there were people around you pushing you to go to college after high school?

HB: Yeah, definitely. My parents for sure. Both of them had graduate degrees of some kind. Then the town, I mean I think at Oak Ridge had the most Ph.D.'s per square mile because of the lab. Many of my friends went on to do graduate school of some kind, yeah.

ET: You went to Rice University for your undergraduate degree?

HB: Mm-hmm, yep.

ET: How did you end up choosing environmental engineering?

HB: I actually did an interdisciplinary degree. I did environmental engineering and political science. Part of what was happening was Rice itself, Rice University, has a strong focus on engineering and tech for a small school. There was a lot of emphasis to get a degree in some kind of science or tech or engineering. I was taking classes on that path, but I was sort of getting frustrated with not talking about people. Then I took some classes in different disciplines in the social sciences that would engage actually policy and people and ended up meshing them together because when I would take those classes I would want to learn more about technology and science so it was kind of a nice mix for me to have both of those together.

ET: Did you do any research as an undergraduate?

HB: Yeah, I did. I did an undergraduate honors thesis as part of the last year you could sign up for a class. I'm trying to remember on what it was. It was something to do with Houston, because that's where Rice is. It's to do with, I think it was about annexation policy in Houston, because Houston has-I don't know if you know-for those who know Houston is an aggressive annexation city. They tend to annex surrounding communities, and so it was-I can't exactly remember the research question but it was something about annexation policy in Houston.

ET: You worked after your undergraduate, right? You didn't go to graduate school immediately?

HB: Yeah, I worked-I knew I probably wanted to do graduate school eventually, but I wasn't quite sure what in, so I worked for 3 years for Exxon Mobile.

ET: How did you get that position?

HB: So, my net was pretty wide, I cast a pretty wide net coming out. I applied for some internships with cities. I applied for some engineering, some more sort of straight engineering positions. Then I did some sort of informational interviewing on campus and Exxon did one of those and it was the person who came had asked really interesting questions, had interesting stories to tell about the type of work that might be possible there. I have to say I was kind of skeptical going on because of Exxon Mobil's reputation, particularly coming in from the environmental side. But I think the informational interview convinced 00:08:00me to apply and then coming out on the other end I had a couple offers and that was definitely the most interesting one of the bunch. That's how I ended up there.

ET: What kind of projects did you work on?

HB: Most of the time I spent there I worked on an oil and gas development project in Sakhalin Island in Russia, so it's not technically the far east but very close. It's an island just north of Japan. There were several multinational companies developing offshore resources in Sakhalin Island at the time and I ran the socioeconomic impact assessment program and the public consultation program for the project, so it was a lot of learning in a very short amount of time 00:09:00coming in as a 22-year-old and being thrown into a development project like that and interacting with the public in a foreign country, but I learned a lot. I learned really a lot.

ET: Did you get to travel there and learn Russian?

HB: Yeah. I travelled. I didn't ever live there but I traveled back and forth quite a bit. I did take Russian lessons and tried to learn as much as I can. It's a really difficult language. A different alphabet. I tried to learn as much as I could, but we also had translators most places we went. I would say I got pretty good at sort of travel Russian but most of the work that I did I tried to do we used translators to make sure everything was said correctly.

ET: What inspired you to return to grad school?

HB: I was getting to this point working where Exxon Mobil has kind of, I don't 00:10:00know if they would describe it this way but this is how I would describe it, they have their way of trading up staff is short stints in multiple places. They want you to do like 2 years in environmental regulatory stuff and then 2 years in production engineering and 2 years in-so they want you to try construction engineering. They want you to try all the different pieces of the business. That just-my interest was in environmental stuff, social environmental stuff. I didn't really want to go. They were calling it kicking the tires. I didn't really want to go kick the tires as a production engineer in a field project, so when they started talking about that, that's when I started thinking about going back to school because that wasn't what I saw as my path long-term. It was also 00:11:00working in a big company like that where their main goal is revenue, right, from production and sales and so when you're working in something that's not part of the main goal it can be somewhat tiring because you're in some ways some of the things that I was doing was almost like the internal police of the company, and so it can be a draining position. I was noticing that about the people that had been there for a long time in those roles, so I wanted to go back into a place where I would be in the main focus of the organization.

ET: How did you choose Stanford University?

HB: Well, after the 3 years at Exxon, well one of the things when I was thinking 00:12:00about going to graduate school is I thought maybe I wanted to do law. I think the experience at Exxon Mobil taught me that I really didn't want to do law. That kind of took that off the table. I started thinking about research more seriously and I knew I wanted to do environmental so I applied to a wide variety of different interdisciplinary environmental graduate programs around the U.S. and it just I mean again the Stanford opportunity turned out to be the best one, the right fit, for me. One of the things I was really looking for was access to social scientists as part of the program and a lot of graduate programs, the interdisciplinary environmental graduate programs they tend to have more, I think this is changing now, but at the time they tended to have more natural 00:13:00scientists and engineers among the faculty and maybe one social scientist. I thought that the program at Stanford because of the way it was set up, you still had to find those people but you have more access than in some of the other programs I was looking at.

ET: What was it like moving to the west coast?

HB: It was a culture shock a little bit. I think it was as much a culture shock for me as it was for the other people in the program, because none of them had come from the oil and gas industry, I can tell you that. They were mostly coming from either directly from school or nonprofits or government. I think in some ways they were more worried about who I was than the reverse. I guess there were a lot of sort of misconceptions about what someone who would be like coming from 00:14:00the oil and gas industry and from Texas to California. That was an interesting learning I think on both sides. Then just it's a different place. I really like it now, but at the time it was very different than what I was used to.

ET: How did your engineering background help you through this program? I imagine it sounds like it was a different technical training than other students possibly had.

HB: Well, I think actually my engineering background, I wouldn't have gotten the job at Exxon Mobil without an engineering degree, because my first title was a project engineer. Even though I had a political science, they were interested in the political science because of what they wanted me to do but they didn't seem to bring in people that didn't have an engineering degree.

It was part of their culture. It was interesting that the credential was 00:15:00important to get the foot in the door for that job. I think it did help again in graduate school because a lot of the coursework that I took was pretty math heavy and even when you do social science and statistics and things like that you have to think in that way and so I think having the engineering degree helped to be able to do that piece and not be scared of it.

ET: Your research was on politics conflict around energy siting?

HB: Yeah, I did a series of case studies in different communities around the U.S. where they have had proposals for large scale energy facilities trying to understand how the community responded and I used theories both from planning 00:16:00about the siting of unwanted facilities and then theories from social movements, studies from social movements, about when movements emerge to try to understand why some communities respond quite forcefully and with a lot of protests to these types of proposals and why other communities are more accepting. That was kind of the main focus of my dissertation work.

ET: Did you teach while you were a grad student?

HB: Yeah, I did. Teaching is not as big a requirement at a private institution as it is. I see our graduate students teach more than we were required to, but I actually liked teaching. I really liked teaching. One of the things that was happening, my program, my Ph.D. program was relatively young, a relatively new 00:17:00program. I think I was the third cohort. We were really trying to figure out what is the right mix of coursework for this program, because there's not necessarily a model. I worked a lot with some of the faculty that were really engaged with the program on some of the core courses that would be offered. Then I also taught a sustainable cities course the last couple of years I was at Stanford which involved applied research projects. It was working with undergrads and they would work through, Stanford's also on quarters, so over the course of a quarter they would work through an applied research project with a community partner, so we partnered with one of the local cities, Redwood City, to do some projects for them. One of the things that was happening at the time was they were putting in those, like we see in Corvallis here, the bike rental, 00:18:00I forget what it's called-it has a name. The bike rentals around town where you can take them from one place to another. Redwood City was trying to figure out where would be good locations for those. The students worked using GIS to do like a heat map of where people really would, where they thought those bike stands would be most useful and most used. It was things like that.

ET: Did you at that point when you were finishing your Ph.D. did you think you wanted to stay in academia?

HB: Going in I wasn't sure. I thought well maybe I'll get the degree and then go work for government or nonprofit. As I was finishing up my degree, actually my advisors were the ones that were saying you should really think about an academic path. I mean probably until like, I think my degree I took 6 years and 00:19:00probably until year 4 I wasn't sure what I was going to do. They started saying that, and so I was like well maybe I should listen. I still applied for other types of jobs, but the main thrust of my applications was for academic jobs.

ET: You did a postdoc at Stanford?

HB: Yeah, as I was finishing up I was applying for jobs. The academic job market is tough, and so I was starting to realize as I was applying that one of the things that really would help me on the job market to have a postdoc to get out more applications but also to build a new skill set. Because a lot of the work that I had done as a graduate student was more qualitative but it was also I'd used a relatively new method to compare the cases.

I think part of what I learned going on the job market at the end of my Ph.D. 00:20:00was that I needed to do a little bit more on the quantitative side so I purposely chose a postdoc that would push me into that domain and give me I guess street cred that I could do that kind of work and it turned out to be a really good experience. I worked on a Department of Energy funded project on the demand side of energy as opposed to the supply. We worked with 30 girl scout troops on a randomized control trial where we taught half the troops about things they could do inside their home to save energy and half things they could do in terms of food and transportation to save energy and then did surveys before and after and three to six months later with both the girls and their parents to see whether or not we changed behavior, and those who were in the 00:21:00curriculum about the home energy, things they could do at home did report, both the girls and the parents, reported changes in behavior after and even at follow-up. It was a really large, it taught me a lot about project management and the quantitative skills that I wanted to get and then it was a really interesting project. It was really fun working with my 10-year-old girl scouts. It's a fun group.

ET: Why target children in education them about energy usage?

HB: Well, one of the things we were thinking about is, so we talk a lot about learning as coming from parents to kids, but particularly in like research on consumption basically and other areas we're starting to see a lot more research come out about how kids influence parents. So, thinking through if we're in with 00:22:00the children not only can they set good habits, routines for later in life so that they use less energy, because those are formative years, right? But also, then they could influence their parents. Because now I'm a mom of 3, actually, and so it's hectic. Family life is busy, right? So, especially if both parents are working, and so a lot of times kids set agendas of what's happening in the household, what the discussion is about. Right now, we're into dinosaurs, so we're talking a lot about dinosaurs. To have the kids set an agenda setting role like that, I think that was part of the thinking behind it. Right?

ET: Did you get your position at OSU following that postdoc?

HB: Yes. So, I did two years in the postdoc and then in my second year I was applying and I got the job at OSU.

ET: What were your initial impressions of university and Corvallis in general?

HB: First, it reminded me a lot of where I grew up. Because Oak Ridge was like 30,000 people and almost everyone was in some way involved in the national lab and being in Corvallis it's like 50,000, so it's bigger but almost everyone has some sort of connection to the university or the hospital, I guess. That reminded me of the small-town aspect of it, it reminded me a lot of where I grew up. Then the university, so I think the thing that I was really drawn to about the university was I thought that the faculty leadership that I met with in the 00:24:00School of Public Policy really had a clear sense, a clear idea of where they were going with the school and I felt that what the type of work that I like to do, the applied, community-based environment and energy focus, I felt it was a really good fit for where the school was, the leadership of the school wanted to go. For me it was really nice to land here and have that confirmed. The other thing I have since learned about OSU that I didn't really know coming in was that in other places, I mean the main other place that I'd been at Stanford, some of the disciplinary boundaries, like the borders between the disciplines 00:25:00are much higher.

You know, where you publish is supposed to be in the tippity-top journals of the discipline, which I think sometimes makes this harder to communicate to people outside the discipline, because you're so focused on communicating with your own discipline that you can lose some of the breath that you need to talk to people in other disciplines and so for me for someone who likes to do things that spans disciplines it was a nice, people told me that coming in but to actually experience it has been really nice, too.

ET: Speaking of interdisciplinary work, you're also associated with George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication, is that right?

HB: Yeah.

ET: How did you get involved with that organization?

HB: That's kind of a network story, right? So, well, first of all I followed the 00:26:00work of, it's actually George Mason also has a partnership with Yale University where they do this regular surveying on attitudes towards climate change in American minds. I'd for a long time I'd followed those surveys and the results of those surveys and then it turned out that when I was a postdoc at Stanford one of the people that worked on that grant with me, her name is June Flora, she had been a faculty member at Stanford who was the advisor of Ed Maibach who runs that center. So, they had been talking about potential questions for the survey because they're usually doing those biannually, and she had forwarded that on to me and I had sort of said something to the effect like we should be asking questions about hydraulic fracturing because at the time it was a relatively new 00:27:00technology for oil and gas development and I hadn't seen a lot of people asking public perception questions about it. It seemed like it was going to be really important going forward and through those conversations I ended up at one of their annual planning meets and I kept saying that we should ask questions about hydraulic fracturing and they did. I drafted some with June and they put them on the survey and that was, I mean it was great for me because then we wrote a paper up about it and it turned out to be a really well-cited paper, very useful because at the time there hadn't been a lot of research on public perceptions and since then I've stayed connected with that group.

ET: You're also involved, or, it sounds like you incorporate community research 00:28:00here in Corvallis with your classes?

HB: Yeah, so I teach like I taught the sustainability cities class prior to coming here. I teach an applied research methods class to the masters students. It happens during their first year as a masters student and in some ways I feel like it's a little bit of a capstone of the first year where they have all these classes sort of in the abstract about theory and methods and then for this class we do an applied research project with a community partner. They work as a team on the class project. That class is really fun to teach because it's not like a standard lecture class because we're working on this project the whole time and we have a client. It's much more like getting a project done, it's more about 00:29:00the actual research methods and project management. It changes every year, which is really nice. We've worked with, let's see, I've done that now, that class 5 years now. We've worked with the Corvallis Sustainability Coalition. We've worked with Energize Corvallis and then since then we did a couple projects on the coast, so we worked with the Oregon Coastal Zone Management Association and most recently we worked with Oregon's Ocean Policy Advisory Committee, and so it's just been a really rewarding class to teach and I also think it's a really rewarding class to take for the students, because there's only so much a grade matters but to have to present and put something together for a real client I think really helps the students.

Now, actually, this year I'm teaching that class online, so that's been sort of 00:30:00getting my head around how to teach that online has been somewhat of a challenge, but it's nice to be challenged. I think we've figured it out. We'll see. I'll tell you at the end of this 10 weeks.

ET: Do you approach teaching online in general differently than in classes?

HB: Yeah, in some ways it's-so some of it is... there's a lot more upfront work that has to go in into, because it's asynchronous. You have to have all the content of each week worked out at the very beginning, whereas when you're teaching on campus you have the readings and the assignments worked out ahead of time but the actual things you're going to say in class you may be working on or updating right up until you go in there. So, that part is a little more 00:31:00challenging, but I think it enhances your on-campus teaching because you have to do that for the off-campus, the online students, I think it encourages you to think a little bit more in that way for the on-campus students, too. I taught one class last quarter and then I'm teaching again, this is the first time I've done that in the off-campus stuff, and I do miss, we do a lot of writing back and forth to one another, but there's less, unless the student requests a call or something, you have less of that face-to-face, so that part I kind of miss. You get to know the students quite well writing back and forth to one another, but there's something different about hearing someone's voice. A lot of times I'll try to have them do a presentation where they have to voice over something just so I can hear their voice or see them in some way.

ET: I'll move on to some questions more broadly around your research. In terms of mobilization around energy siting, can you touch on some of the factors that influence how a community reacts?

HB: Yeah, sure, of course. I think in putting together, well first I want to say there's a really wide variety in the way communities respond. I think sometimes particularly if we've been in a community where they've had a project we might think that every community's response is similar to the response that our community had. But it's not true. Some communities are much more active in terms of opposition and some communities are very active in terms of trying to facilitate development. Some communities there's a lot of conflict because there's groups that feel both ways. I think first and foremost is to say that is 00:33:00important. And then some of the main factors I started to identify as part of the project were the community context, so thinking through what kind of experience does this community have with energy development or just development more generally? What kind of experience do members of the community have with mobilization or movement activities or opposition? Those kind of factors that are specific to the community can be really important. Also, the economic situation of the community can be really important, because some communities see this sort of development as providing a way for, particularly in rural areas, for the community to continue to be in existence, right? Thinking through those 00:34:00types of, like the context within which the project is proposed and how that then shapes perceptions of how threatening the facility might be. Because a lot of times we talk about mobilization. We talk about the threat posed by something as a motivator and it really depends, how people perceive the safety and environmental health, community risks of a facility is really shaped by the context. Really thinking through the relationship between those two factors. Some projects that may seem very threatening in one community seem much less threatening in anther community because of their underlying experiences. Also, resources that are available within a community, not just monetary but organizational, experiential to put together mobilization efforts are very important.

Then the decision-making structure. How are decisions being made about the facilities? In some states, in some localities there's a lot more points at which local or state level officials have a vote on a project, whereas in other places for other types of development the federal government has much more control over siting. Thinking through how those decisions points matter in terms of where the levers of influence local community members have I think really matters for mobilization efforts. That was one of the pieces that I think is really important in terms of communicating results to community members, because regulatory process are often opaque and hard to piece together. So, for community members to understand where people that might be sympathetic to their 00:36:00concerns have a say, where decision makers have a say I think is really critical in terms of getting results from mobilization efforts.

ET: Do you find that there's a similarity in response or maybe how perceive a threat between renewable and nonrenewable energy siting?

HB: I've done, we had one of the cases that I looked at in my dissertation was a renewable project. It was a wind project in Idaho. Since then we've moved on to do a study comparing different counties around the west that have had wind energy proposals. I haven't been thinking about as much about what's similar. I've been thinking a lot about what's different between more traditional energy development and renewables. I think one of the things that I've been focused on is that last factor I mentioned about political opportunities. In the original 00:37:00research that I was doing as part of my dissertation a lot of the projects we were looking at were large scale and had some sort of federal involvement in the decision-making process because the way we selected cases was they had to have gone through a final environmental impact statement and that required federal involvement in some way. But for wind and similarly for fracturing, for hydraulic fracturing, a lot of the decision making is local. Unlike in those projects where the federal government always had a say and in some cases they had the only say, depending on state and local regulations, in the wind projects that we've been looking at and proposals we've been looking at the default is local. It's only when the turbines are located on public land or transmission 00:38:00lines go through public land or something else that pulls in federal government involvement. Otherwise, the default is like a county level permitting process. I think that to me has been a really interesting difference, because one of the things that we've found in those traditional projects is that the more local elected officials you had involved in the decision making, the more politically opportune the environment was for opponents, because the local elected officials, if the opposition gathered momentum, right, they would start to side with the opposition because they wanted to be voted in again. Having more local elected officials involved seemed to make those projects more opportune for opposition. Whereas, because the default is local involvement in wind, that 00:39:00doesn't seem to be the determining factor for whether or not the decision-making environment is politically opportune for opposition. Actually, sometimes having the fact that that federal government gets involved and has sort of more, how do I want to say this? The systems for their decision making involve the creation of environmental impact statement often, so the decision they have multiple hearings and things like that. That involvement actually in some ways helps the opposition, provides more opportunity for the opposition than when it's just a purely local decision. In some ways it's a little bit the inverse of what we're seeing on the other side.

It's forced me to really think through, rethink what is truly important about 00:40:00political opportunity for opponents? It's not local elected, because that's not the case in wind. I don't think we've gotten there yet, but really thinking through what it is that creates politically opportune decision-making environment. Maybe there isn't one that's consistent across all types. Maybe it does depend on type of development. We'll see.

ET: Do you interact directly with energy sector during your research? Do you get feedback on their response to your research?

HB: I usually try to have either myself or students interview company representatives, the proponents of projects when we do this kind of work. I've been pretty successful in getting them to talk about it. But I haven't done as much sort of gathering feedback from them on the results. I actually in some 00:41:00ways I think the industries themselves, they have a lot of reasons to pay money and to have consultants on board that know some of these things already. Actually, I think some of the research is that much more beneficial for policy makers and community groups who maybe in places where they've never had anything like this come through and so to be able to learn from the experiences of other communities I think is one of the real benefits of doing these kind of comparative casework around the U.S. Because a lot of times when these projects, sometimes they come to the same communities over and over and over again, but sometimes they come to new communities so helping them to be able to have examples from other places-I think they're often seeking those out, anyway, so 00:42:00putting them down on paper I think helps.

ET: Some of your more recent research has been on people's responses to extreme weather events?

HB: Mm-hmm. So, I just-actually, we're in the process of doing a lot of writing up from a project that I got funded through the National Science Foundation a couple of years ago looking at 15 communities that have experienced extreme weather events and trying to understand if community members in those places were connecting the event in any way to climate change, and even if they weren't what kind of policy outcomes happened in the wake of an event related to climate change, adaptation or mitigation. Trying to understand, because there's been a lot of theoretical work that in psychology and sociology that talks about the 00:43:00role of these sort of personal, visceral experiences of climate change in shaping beliefs and ultimately action, so trying to see if that's actually what's happening in communities that do experience events. We've finished all the, we did case fieldwork and we did surveys in all the communities. We're now in the process of writing all that up.

ET: Do you have an initial sense of-

HB: Yeah, so I mean one of the things that struck me in working on this project is that even in place, so one of our cases is the Colorado floods from I think it was September 2013 that hit Boulder county. That's a place where given the presence of the university and all the research institutions that focus on 00:44:00climate change, you sort of expect that these type of events would be connected to climate change and would create action, and we just actually published a piece showing that, yes, the community members did readily connect the floods to climate change, even despite the fact that some scientists were saying maybe this isn't connected to climate change. There was a ready connection there, particularly in terms of-but it didn't necessarily change views, right? People in that community were already, most people in those communities, maybe in rural areas of the county might be slightly different, but particularly in Boulder itself were already quite concerned about climate change to begin with. It wasn't like the event came in and changed a lot of people's views.

Some of the things we did here talking to people there was that it did actually 00:45:00have an impact on how they perceived the risks of climate change and it made it more, it seemed more real, particularly extreme weather risks. A lot of the policy outcomes, then, were about adaptation for future extreme events. That's most of the policy outcomes that were discussed when we talked to people about it in the newspaper post event were about adaptation to future extremes and particularly interestingly in Boulder they focused a lot on building social resilience, which I think some of that might be about because they had already done a lot of work on physical resilience because they have flash floods there quite regularly and so it was sort of moving into the social resilience category. Trying to get people connected to one another so when these events happen they have a network of community members and groups to draw on to recover and be resilient, right? I think in that case we did see some of what scholars 00:46:00and theorists have talked about but some less of other things, right? In places where we've gone where it's maybe a more conservative community and climate change is not something that people are actively discussing or reporting lots of concern about, we're not seeing much that these events are spurring much discussion of climate change, particularly not overt discussion of climate change. Maybe sort of coded discussion. I don't know what other way to put it. Sort of talking about climate change without using the words climate change. So, talking about new normals or permanent drought. Words that are implied from 00:47:00climate change, things that are implied from climate change but because that phrase and global warming have become so politicized in the U.S. in particular and you're in a conservative community I think people almost try to avoid that language and talk about it in other ways. Then in terms of action, I have to say I don't think we're seeing a lot of difference in terms of action post-event across the communities regardless of whether or not climate change becomes part of the discussion. I'm not sure why that is yet. I think we'll keep digging to try to figure that out. But I think a lot of the, regardless of whether climate change becomes part of the discussion a lot of the policy actions are quite similar. Even in places like Boulder or other places in our set that already think climate change has happened when the event occurs it doesn't seem that 00:48:00these type of events spark conversations about mitigation. They don't seem to spark conversations about how do we reduce emissions post event, and I think some of that is just because these events are very impactful, right? So, it's just hard I think to find space for that when you know there's fatalities, injuries, a lot of property damage. Dealing with that piece alone takes up a lot of emotional and policy space and so trying then to move into how do we reduce carbon emissions from that, we haven't seen a lot of that in the events that we've looked at.

ET: I'm going to move on to a final set of broader questions around climate 00:49:00change. What were your earliest conversations on climate change like and how have they shifted over time?

HB: I don't know. Maybe I think one of the first times I really dug into the issue was part of a class I took at Rice, actually. I was part of an applied research project class. Now that I'm thinking about it-I haven't even thought about this before-where we try to catalogue the carbon emissions of the university. It was a group of undergrads and a faculty member and I remember we had our excel spreadsheets and we were talking to the facilities people and went and visited the Cogen plant and trying to figure out how to tally up carbon emissions from the university. I think that was some of the first conversations I had like in any sort of in-depth way about climate change.

I guess maybe in that sense it was a pretty sort of taking stock kind of engineering focus to it, right? How do we catalogue emissions? With the ultimate goal being how do we reduce them? First getting a baseline handle on the problem. Then I would think, so-given that is the first time I think maybe how my studying of the issue and research on the issue and thinking about the issue has evolved to incorporate much more thinking about the social science side. How do people think about this issue? What actions, if any, do they take on the issue? What factors matter in terms of sociodemographics in terms of how they 00:51:00perceive the issue? Yeah. How have we arrived where we are? We're so politicized. I think that's really been the major changes in how I've examined the issue over time. It's funny I didn't think about that.

ET: Do you foresee being impacted by diminished funding for climate change research during the Trump administration?

HB: You know, I think because I do energy stuff too I think you can talk about energy, like reducing energy demand with multiple frames, right? One frame can 00:52:00be about reducing energy because of carbon emissions or switching supplies because of carbon emissions. I think on the demand side it's easier because you can also talk about it in terms of saving money, being more efficient in general, not with efficient like about carbon but just efficient in general. Less pollution. I think there are other ways you can talk about, particularly on the demand side, that maybe if I were more like trying to catalogue the impacts of it, like many people on the campus are doing here, I think that might be a more direct hit than some of the work that I do. But, I mean, we'll see. I think it's not just funds, at least from the government that are going to decrease for 00:53:00climate change. I think it's going to be around academic research more generally. But, I also think there is the possibility that you know foundations may pick up. There may be private sources of money that pick up some of the slack because of the-there's a lot of concern about the issues, so yeah, I think some of it's going to be reframing and some of it's going to be hopefully some private monies will come in that will prop up some of this work as the funding sources in the federal government dry up. I want to be optimistic.

ET: What kind of policy change would you like to see happen within the U.S. with regards to climate change?

HB: Well, you know I'd like to see us be more active at the national level for 00:54:00many of these issues. But at the same time, I mean not even just for climate change but also just energy. Most of our strategies around energy policy are devolved to the state and local level, so I'd like to see us maybe rationalize at a higher level, think about regional planning efforts in that sense. That's the sort of planner in me talking, you know? At the same time, I also recognize the importance of having those local access points for decisions, because of the movement side. The social movement scholar in me is like but we don't want to take away the local decision points. So, you know I think that I've been, that's been dueling within me my whole career.

How do you maybe, you know, think about something like energy facility siting at 00:55:00a more rational, regional, or national level without losing local involvement? I think you can find a balance there. In the U.S. we tend to go to the local, state. In other places, in Europe and other, they tend to centralize. There has to be some sort of I guess happy medium in there where you can have more centralized planning but maintain that local involvement I think. Then, I guess on the demand side, I think we've seen a lot of very effective policies. There's one thing nice about devolving things to the state is it creates this sort of experimentation, right? States can try things and see what works and somewhere 00:56:00like California has been very successful in implementing policies around energy efficiency. Thinking about how do we move beyond, then replicate those successful models in other places given contextual factors that may change.

ET: What about changes to public education that could help Americans better understand climate change or potentially change their behavior?

HB: That's a huge question. Well, I think on any-some of the survey work that I've done shows that on any one issue that's very specific, like climate change or hydraulic fracturing, it's only a certain segment of the population that 00:57:00really gets engaged and knows the science of it and everything. It might be nice to implement things in lower level so that size of the population would grow. But I'm not sure that, I just think anytime we ask about a specific issue you lose a lot of people. People lead busy lives so it's hard to get attention any one specific issue like that. You asked about changing behavior. Well, I mean I think some of the things that I've been trying to do with getting kids engaged I think could be helpful. At the same time, I think it would be also helpful to pursue-I don't think there's any silver bullet in any of these, particularly 00:58:00behavior change. I think it's important to focus on behavior change but I also think you want to do things like make sure the technology itself puts the least onus on the individual with the fewest carbon emissions. Ways we can make homes smarter so that individuals don't have to develop their routines so much around the house itself almost does it. Like automatic lights. Things that turn off when you're not using them. Those kind of things, because those kind of repetitive behaviors are really hard to change. They get routinized. To the extent that we can engineer and mandate engineering that takes out some of those, that takes that off the onus of the individual I think is a good thing. I 00:59:00think you have to pursue these multiple prongs of approach to solve the problem. I think some of that is, and that also means that when one is unsuccessful you have other things happening that can create change. I think it was the 2010, the failed cap in trade at the national level. Having multiple ways that you're approaching the problem I think makes any of those one failures less daunting.

ET: Are you hopeful about the future of the planet in the context of climate change?

HB: You know, maybe 6 months ago a little bit more hopeful. You know I think, I 01:00:00think one of the things I'm hopeful is we don't have to get to a crisis point to address it. But there's a lot of things going on in other places in the world that are hopeful and in particular states that are hopeful. Yeah, I do think we'll figure it out, it's just are we going to figure it out without tremendous socioeconomic dislocation. I think that's the question. Are we going to figure it out in time to avert some of that? I'm not sure.

ET: Well, on that note.

HB: It's not the most positive note.

ET: That concludes the interview. Thank you for participating.

HB: Yeah, sure. No problem. Thanks for inviting me.