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Q: What’s your favorite Drawdown Solution and why?Ī: It’s hard to choose a favorite. I really think I can have an impact here.

Moving to Project Drawdown is a logical next step in the trajectory of my career from siloed technical work to impact-focused and policy-relevant. Later, when we moved to Minnesota, I wanted to stay in an environmental field so I took a position at the Institute on the Environment at the intersection of environment and agriculture. I felt the world did not need another postdoc but I could make a difference with wave energy so I took the job in renewable energy. I was offered a postdoctoral position at Princeton in Environmental Science, and I was offered a job at a small startup doing ocean wave energy. Q: And how did you get from there to here?Ī: I did my postdoctoral work on wave theory in Paris, then we moved for my wife’s job to Princeton. dissertation?Ī: Acoustic propagation through internal waves in the ocean. This guy slammed on his brakes and did not hit me.

#DRAWING SPACESHIP DRIVERS#

In America I might have been, but French drivers are really good. I turned into traffic next to me and fell over-I thought I was going to be squashed. I was pulling on the handlebars and peddling, and all of a sudden one handlebar fell off. I was super poor, so I took a bicycle out of the trash and started biking around. Q: What is the best (or worst) experience you’ve had that involved a bicycle?Ī: I did my junior year in southern France. So there’s this knowledge problem and there’s this momentum problem as well.Ī: I feel like I'm a pretty good programmer, in that I think I come up with clever algorithms to solve data analysis issues. There’s no lobby for industries that don't yet exist, but there are lobbies for things that society might want to sunset. Also, there are often vested interests in keeping things the way they are. So a lack of knowledge, and maybe a little bit of pessimism that goes along with that. There are so many things out there that are win-wins and will pay for themselves and have all sorts of good co-benefits, and people aren’t aware of that. Q: What do you see as the biggest obstacles to solving climate change?Ī: In some ways people don’t realize how doable it is. What I’m excited about at Project Drawdown is taking the next step and helping to formulate those solutions in a way they can really easily be implemented to achieve climate and other goals at the same time. For the last 13 years I’ve been in a somewhat academic world defining what problems are in the land use sector, particularly with agriculture, and showing how big the impact is and looking at what some solutions could look like and what sectors and regions they could be most effective in, but those were not necessarily actionable. Project Drawdown is really focused on making solutions happen. Q: When people ask what you do with Project Drawdown, what do you tell them?Ī: I haven't been here very long, so my answer is based on what I think I’ll be doing and why I was so excited to get this job. Here, James explains how he got from wave physics to climate change mitigation, trash talks American drivers, avoids sharing his favorite drawdown solution, and nails the answer to the most important question ever asked. in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was a lead author for the Sixth Assessment Report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and has consulted on a wide variety of projects for nongovernmental organizations, including The Nature Conservancy, The Packard Foundation, and The World Bank.īefore he started researching land use, James worked on optimizing conversion of wave energy to electricity. He uses various analytic techniques to assess the effect of climate mitigation solutions in the land use sector.Īs a researcher with the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, James studied connections among agriculture, ecosystems, climate, and food security. James Gerber is a data scientist with expertise in agriculture, impacts of land use on the environment, modeling of crop yields, and ocean wave energy.

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This article is the third in a series introducing the members of Project Drawdown’s new science team.

Drawing spaceship