David Kroodsma biked through South America to raise awareness of global warming.
(Courtesy David Kroodsma)

David Kroodsma is a Hopenhagen ambassador and an outreach coordinator for Climate Ride and 350.org.  He holds a B.S. in physics and an M.S. in earth systems from Stanford University and covered the U.N. Climate Change Conference in December as a citizen journalist for the Huffington Post.

Julia James: In the months leading up to the climate summit, there seemed to be widespread hope for a binding international agreement that would limit atmospheric carbon dioxide to as little as 350 parts per million. We ended up with a treaty that presents no carbon targets and is not legally binding. What went wrong?

David Kroodsma: First of all, there were unrealistic expectations. What you just said -- the fact that people had those expectations means they weren't paying attention. The problem with the climate movement is that we're too focused on targets and timetables when what we need to be doing is massively investing in clean energy. The International Energy Association estimates that it will take 10.5 trillion dollars of investment, more than we're already doing, over the next 20 years in order to keep CO2 to 450 parts per million.

JJ: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a global ambassador for the charity Oxfam, said of Copenhagen: "A higher purpose was at stake but our political leaders have proven themselves unable to rise to the challenge." He at least had expectations that weren't met. Is it too early to give up on government? Should we be looking for change at an individual level?

DK: I think that eventually we need regulations, but the government, as much as we deride it and complain about it, is ultimately beholden to us. The fact that the leaders of the world didn't come up with an agreement reflects that they didn't feel the political pressure they needed.

JJ: Negotiations at Copenhagen almost fractured along money lines. We saw the have-nots [developing nations susceptible to the most immediate effects of climate change] arguing for radical reductions, and the richest countries arguing for -- essentially -- the status quo.  Who owns the economic burden of addressing climate change?

DK: Again, I don't even like that question. Economic burden... That's true, it's going to be a burden.  But it's also really an investment. You look at Denmark, that 20 years ago decided -- Oh my gosh, we have an oil crisis, we want to do something -- so they decided to invest in wind power. You could say they have a burden because they decided to do something. Now, what's the world's largest wind power company? 

JJ: Vestas [a Danish company].

DK: GE and Vestas.

JJ: But the sense I get is you can't quite get clean energy to be cost-competitive without giving it some external advantage, through taxes or restrictions on carbon emissions.    

DK: You're absolutely right. I desperately want a price on carbon. The challenge is just getting that to pass through Congress. 

JJ: That brings me to the rat's nest that is domestic climate legislation. What chances do you give the Waxman-Markey bill for passing the Senate, now that the Democrats have lost their super majority?

DK: I think people are overplaying losing the super majority, but it's going to be hard. What gives me hope is the power of people to innovate and solve problems, and the power of new technologies, and the power of social movements. I really want that bill to pass, but I wouldn't bet either way. It's hard because most Americans want some type of limit on carbon dioxide; it's always a question of at what price.

JJ: Jared Diamond recently cited Walmart, Coca Cola and Chevron as large corporations that have adopted environmentally "sustainable" practices on economic logic. Is the idea that we have to balance the environment against the economy indeed fallacy?

DK: There's a very interesting argument that almost every environmental regulation ends up costing less than expected. People are clever; once you actually lay down the law and say, 'Okay, this is the way it's going to be,' it's really amazing how companies innovate and how people figure out to get by with the new regulation. There are even some people who say certain regulations boost the economy because they spur innovation.

JJ: But I'm curious about this example of Coca Cola. You know, the idea that they have an interest in keeping water systems clean because H20 is a big part of their product...

DK: I'm not going to get into Coke because they're one of the sponsors of Hopenhagen. I'm going to plead the fifth on that one.

Corporations are ultimately going to do what's in their self-interest. There are places where that clearly aligns with environmental action, and that's great. For example, making their fleets more efficient saves them money. A lot of the green stuff Wal-Mart does is a great investment, and they should do it, and they should be applauded. Likewise, the shitty stuff they do, we should highlight as well. They're going to do what's in their best interest, and unless there's meaningful regulation, that best interest does not have to line up with the best interest of the public. 

JJ: For a quite different perspective, I've been reading a little Wendell Berry. He's a big fan of moving away from our corporate economy to one based on individual stewardship of the land.  Is the only viable future a Jeffersonian one? 

DK: There's this real problem for me in activism, which is that we have this modern way of living which has made us incredibly wealthy. Corporations are part of what has generated this incredible wealth.

JJ: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others have put much of the blame for the failure at Copenhagen on China. But let's be frank: The United States is home to only 4.5 percent of the world population, and we account for a quarter of global energy consumption.  Is climate change really an international issue, or should we be taking a long, hard look at our own backyard?

DK: You know, China did a really bad job negotiating, but they also did a bad job explaining their position. Cumulatively, they're still emitting much less than the U.S. and they have lower per-capita emissions. 

There's this problem in how we look at climate change in that we look at yearly emissions and opposed to cumulative emissions. CO2 stays in the atmosphere. So you shouldn't worry about how much we emitted this year; you should worry about how much we've emitted throughout history. When you look at that, the U.S. is responsible for almost a third of what's in the atmosphere, and China's responsible for less than 10 percent. But that gets tricky, because you can estimate what's going to happen in the future, and you can see the developing world is going to balloon and we're not. 

I don't like thinking about it in terms of responsibility. I like thinking, who has the ability and the opportunity to reduce pollution? We can afford to do so much, much easier. Someone's going to have to make renewable energy cheap. And fundamentally, we're the ones that have extra money to do that. 

JJ: Because it's all the rage, and as a journalism graduate student I'm obligated to ask, what's it like being a "citizen journalist"?

DK: I felt like I was part of the death of journalism.

JJ: You are. I blame you for my job prospects. 

DK: I think what was really nice about it -- I wasn't getting paid. I could be my own voice without having to worry about the editor and the deadline. To me, what was most interesting was seeing the inside of the Huffington Post. And it's just a bunch of kids with laptops. You know -- aggregating news and killing journalists. 

JJ: From a Jan. 21 editorial in the journal Nature: "Empirical evidence shows that people tend to react to reports on issues such as climate change according to their personal values.  Those who favor individualism over egalitarianism are more likely to reject evidence of climate change and calls to restrict emissions." As journalists, how should we reach out to climate change skeptics? 

DK: You're absolutely right. Conservatives reject climate change because they don't like the solution that's proposed by environmentalists. But even within their worldview, there's still a way to sell this idea to them. Terms that really work are energy security, energy independence. Those are the buzz words -- and also the potential of green energy as the next new big industry, the next new big thing. Any individualist who's worth their individualism will realize that if they want to be a successful entrepreneur, they need to go build cheaper solar panels.  

JJ: You wrote in a Jan. 21 Huffington Post column that you found three beacons of hope in the wreckage of Copenhagen: high level of youth involvement; climate action at the city and regional level; and unprecedented participation and scientific fluency on the part of world leaders.  I'm interested in the first point. Are young people really involved in a substantial way, or are we part of a larger cultural green washing?

DK: The coolest thing to me is how international the movement is. Obviously not all of the youth are engaged, but I think it's real. 

JJ: At what point do you stop being optimistic?

DK: I think I stop being optimistic in 2050. No, 2030. I really think we have 20 years to get our act together. I think people can actually respond really quickly once we get mobilized.   One of the best statistics I've heard is that during World War II we built 300,000 airplanes.  We only need 100,000 wind turbines to power the United States.