Enduring impact: Navigating science, politics, and resilience at Woodwell Climate

Good evening everyone. Thank you for being here tonight. I'm Max Ohms, president and CEO of Woodwell Climate Research center. And it's wonderful to look out and see so many different faces, faces that I recognize from a long time ago. Employees who I haven't seen for a number of years have come back this evening. That's great. Some of you who have been coming to this monthly series of Woodwell climate conversations, every time the die hard, loyal folks. It's good to see you and it's also good to see some faces I don't recognize. And one thing we want to do is get new people in the door to learn about the work that we're doing, the importance of the work, and join the Woodwell team. So you are all deputized to come back, to come back to get another ticket for one of these events. You have to bring somebody new. So that is your job. This is the sixth one of these things. Sort of pre Covid, we routinely had public events at Woodwell. Covid shut it down and it took us a while to get it restarted. And many of you were sort of asking, when are you going to do this again? And finally we got it going and we kind of reformulated it in this way that is. Well, it's in the title, Woodwell Climate Conversation. So it's not somebody standing up with a PowerPoint going through a whole bunch of detailed information which can be important certainly, but it's more a conversation with really interesting people. And my role in this is really easy because I just have to ask some open ended question and then they go. And you'll certainly see that tonight you also will all get the opportunity to ask some of those questions. So we'll talk for a while and then we'll open it up and given the topic of the evening, which is, well, it's whatever we want to talk about. But I'm sure we will stray into what's going on in this country and what can be done about it. What does it mean for science, climate science, et cetera? I expect that there'll be plenty of questions there for the next 45 minutes. I'm going to hit some of the highlights of John Holdren's career.

No, no, no, no.

If you don't know who John is, Google it and spend a few hours reading about it because he's done everything everywhere. There's not a more impressive person you'll ever meet. In fact, the way I often describe John to other people who haven't met him is, I'll say Okay. When you're in fifth grade, you look up at the sixth graders and they're big and impressive. And then when you get to sixth grade and you think, oh, they're not really that different than I am, it's no big deal. But you think of the junior high kids, and they're big and impressive, and you get there. I don't know if you've ever heard this, John. You get in junior high and they're just a bunch of bozos like I am. High school, college, undergrad. Every step along the way, John Holdren is the one person I never get any closer to. It's absolutely true. I mean, an incredibly impressive person. So, yeah, let's just start. And, John, you've been. Well, no, I have to hit a couple of the highlights of John's career, but we'll say more about that. Of course, the crowning highlight of his career was being the. The president of the Woodwell Climate Research center. At that point, the Woods Hole Research Center. But he's done some other things along the way. MacArthur genius, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Pugwash Conferences. I came to Woodwell in 2005 when George Woodwell was the president. When I interviewed John was the second person I spoke to. And then maybe six months after I had been here, is when George retired and John took over. So John was at the helm from the middle of 2005 until this election when Obama was elected and then plucked John away from us. And he served for all eight years in the White House as the. Well, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and assistant to the President for Science and Technology. And I'm sure we'll hopefully hear some of those stories this evening, and then we'll also kind of bring the conversation up to the current date. But before we go there, John, talk a little bit about how you got connected to this institution.

Well, thank you, Max, for that outrageous introduction. I met George Woodwell in 1969. My wife Sherry, who's here in the back, and I had become friends of the great Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford population biologist with whom Sherry ultimately did a PhD. And we met all kinds of amazing people from the environmental movement in the Ehrlich's living room when they would have dinner parties for the visiting dignitaries. And in 1969, one of those visiting dignitaries was George Woodwell. And we hit it off. And after that, George was always after me to come east. We visited George on Long island when he was at the Brookhaven national labor doing a number of the pioneering experiments that initially made him famous. And in 1992 he finally persuaded me to take a sabbatical here. And Sherry and I spent the beginning of 1992, starting in January, as visiting scientists at the what was then the Woods Hole Research center and liked it so much that after six months we had been renting an old farmhouse, the Mixter Farmhouse, next to the NOBSCA light, and loved it. Waking up in the morning and looking at the sun rising in the east and I walking down the short path to the water and catching striped bass fly fishing off the rocks. And the only problem was we were paying $600 a month and it was going to go to $6,000 a month on the 15th of June. And obviously we didn't want to pay $6,000 a month. So Sherry went house shopping for a house that we could buy and use initially as a sabbatical home. And we were already thinking about the possibility of moving here. And she found a house on Turtle Pond. Was it Turtle Pond Lane? Snapper Lane, next to the Turtle Pond. And we closed on June 15 and avoided paying the 6,000amonth. But I became obviously deeply attached to this center and even more attached to George and to Catherine and to the amazing set of people that they had recruited and engaged in the work of the center. And so of course I was deeply honored when it was George's opinion and he somehow persuaded the board that I should succeed him in June of 2005. So that's how I became connected to this institution. And as Max has related, I did leave at the beginning of 2009 to join President Obama in the White House. And the only thing I can say about being a semi honorable person is I had warned the board at the time I was recruited to the position that there was in my judgment, a chance that Obama would run for the presidency. There was a chance that he would win. And because I was advising him when he was a senator on issues related to climate change, sustainable energy policy, nuclear weapons, there was a possibility that he would ask me to be a science advisor. And if he did, I warned the board I would say yes. And I thought it was. I sort of went through the probabilities and I thought it was a low probability event, maybe a 15% chance that I would end up Obama's science advisor. But that came to pass and so I left, spent eight years in Washington D.C. retired the trophy for the longest serving science advisor to the president. People ask me how I did that. I said there are really two criteria for lasting In a job like that in the White House, the first one is you have to have a very thick skin. And the second is you have to have a sense of humor. Anyway, that's the story I told you.

I just had to ask an open ended question and it would go for a while. And when you left the White House, you decided to relax and just kick back and.

Well, what I did not mention is that from 96 on, when we moved here full time, after a series of sabbaticals and summers spent here, we moved here full time and I took a faculty position at Harvard, both in the Kennedy School of Government, in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. And even while I was director of the Center, I, I was doing the directorship halftime and the Harvard post halftime. And when I left the White House, Harvard rehired me is not widely known, but Harvard only gives its faculty two years of public service leave. And if you want to stay away after two years, you have to resign your tenure. And of course, Sherry said to me, nobody resigns tenure at Harvard. I did it in a millisecond because I was not about, after two years, to abandon the fabulous president for whom I was working and who had the highest regard for the importance of science, technology and innovation in the work of the nation and was brilliant, attentive, committed, and by the way, always had my back. I have a certain tendency to candor which occasionally led to other members of the President's staff suggesting that I should be fired for saying things in public that they wished I had not said. And the first time that happened, Obama responded by saying, holdren is my science advisor. He only told the truth. That's his job. After that, when it was suggested I be fired, after that, when it was suggested I be fired, which happened a couple more times, he simply said, chill out. But at the end of the Obama administration, I last met with the President at noon on January 19, 2017, the day before the inauguration. I told the President, sherry and I are unfortunately going to miss your farewell at Andrews Air Force Base because we cannot bear to be in town on the day that Trump is inaugurated. He said he'd forgive me and I left and we left and I was starting to think about what I would do for a job after eight years in the White House. And. And a week later, I got a letter from Harvard saying, we're rehiring you. So I couldn't think of anything better to do with my time. So I went back to Harvard and joined the center as the pro bono senior advisor to The President. And so I have an office in the next building. I work very closely with Sue Natali in the Permafrost Pathways Project. And from time to time, I offer advice to the President.

Yeah, I mean, of the many astounding things, this is one. And John obviously remains incredibly busy, and I'll send him an email at whatever hour of the day, and he'll either quickly respond to that email or if he's in town the next day, he's at my office and providing incredible advice on John. Challenging issues that we're working through, of.

Which we have plenty.

We have plenty. So I've called on you multiple times, so thank you for that. Yeah. John, I don't know if you want to say a little bit more about the work that you're involved in in Permafrost Pathways. This is a really big, exciting project led by Sue Natalie in the back.

Yeah. The Permafrost Pathways Project has a number of routes. When I came back to Harvard, we set up in the Kennedy School an Arctic Initiative. But in the meantime, at Woodwell, there had been work for years, for many years on the Arctic, including work by Max on the great north flowing rivers that flow into the Arctic. As many of you know, Max studied, among other things, the water chemistry in those rivers as a way to tell what was happening in the ecosystems that those rivers drain. And Sue Natalie and others here at the center had been active in research in the Arctic. I set up, with colleagues at Harvard, an Arctic initiative there, in part because I had had quite a lot of responsibility for US Arctic policy when I was the president, science advisor and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. I helped draft the Arctic strategy during the Obama administration. And he made me the chair of something called the Arctic Executive Steering Committee, the White House, which had the responsibility of getting the 25 cabinet departments, agencies, and offices with Arctic responsibilities to talk to each other, which, of course, traditionally in the federal government and a lot of other places, people who should be talking to each other aren't. And I had the responsibility of herding these cats, better said herding tigers. The Cabinet secretaries, the heads of NASA and NOAA and epa, the State Department folks, to work together on Arctic initiatives of a variety of kinds. We got the President very interested in the Arctic. He became the first sitting US President to visit the Arctic. When he was there, by the way, he went for the first time to a conference we had organized with the State Department called the Glacier Conference. And it was all about the science and policy implications of rapid Climate change in the Arctic. We had, like, 21 foreign ministers attending this meeting, but we had scores of indigenous leaders. And when President Obama arrived, the first thing he did before he shook the hand of a single foreign minister is he spent four hours locked up with the indigenous leaders, talking about the challenges faced by indigenous people in the Arctic and how the United States government could be more helpful in the future than it had been in the past in addressing those challenges. That, by the way, made President Obama very popular with indigenous folks across the Arctic. They weren't just from the United States, they were from Siberia. They were from Lapland. And it made me very popular with indigenous leaders because they knew that I had been involved in bringing Obama to the Arctic and persuading him that the first thing he should do is meet with the indigenous leaders. So it was sort of a natural, when I came back to Harvard, not to waste the learning that I had undergone. I was on a very steep learning curve about the Arctic. I'd been going there since 1990 when our daughter, after graduating from college, became a ranger in the Chugach State Park. And Sherry and I started to go to Alaska at that time. But I didn't really understand much about the problems of the Arctic. I had to learn in the Obama White House. And I thought, well, since I've done this learning, I should put it to use. So we started that Arctic initiative in, like, March of 2017. And of course, I knew the extent to which what is now the Woodwell Climate Research center was involved in the Arctic. And so I interacted with all these folks whom I'd known before, most of them before moving to the White House. And ultimately, folks here got the idea, the idea of proposing a project that we ultimately called Permafrost Pathways to the Audacious Project of the TED Foundation. And again, I hasten to say, this was not my idea. I think it was probably Sue Natali's. But in any case, I joined with sue and others, and most of the people in this room know in Falmouth, Woods Hole, there are five scientific research institutions, six if you count the Sea Education association, which does some research as well as a lot of teaching, and most of them are much more dependent on federal funding than this center is. Obviously, at the NOAA and USGS research centers here, it's 100% dependent on federal money, and they've already had significant losses of staff at both those places. At the biggest of our local science institutions, the Oceanographic institution, they are 80% dependent on federal funding. At the Marine Biological lab, it's about 30% and everybody is nervous as can be again. Already the damage is being felt. At the Stand up for Science event in woods hole on March 7, there was only one head of the five or six research institutions in Falmouth and Woods Hole who was willing to stand up and speak at that event. And it's the gentleman on my right, Max Holmes stood up and gave a powerful talk on the danger to science, the danger to the community, to the country and the world of slashing federal support for research in science, technology and innovation. And it's not just research on climate change. It's been much carbon dioxide and methane are coming out and how fast and other aspects of change associated with permafrost law. More good people were hired, brought to the center to work on that stuff. And by the way, we have with us an indigenous leader, Morris Alexi, sitting in the back, I think. There he is. Hands up, Morris. You could even stand up. Morris is a leader. Morris is a, a leader in issues in indigenous communities in the Arctic. He's been participating for a long time in the work of the Permafrost Pathways Project, has attended meetings here and at Harvard, and we're delighted that he's now a member of the Woodwell staff. Great to have him on board. But that has been a big focus of the work, that engagement with indigenous communities. And it's been enormously helpful to us in understanding what's happening on the ground and how and why it matters. We hope it's been helpful to those communities as well and will continue to be as we try to figure out better ways to address that challenge.

John, I suspect there are some people who are curious about your thoughts related to, let's say, the current situation in this country. And I think everyone recognizes it's an incredibly challenging time to do climate science, to run a independent non profit climate research center. And yet the work that we do has never been more important. So how do we get here and how do we. What's that?

That's obviously a big question, but one for which I'm prepared. But I would first add that it's also a big challenge to run a university is in this situation. And you know, I sit some of the time at Harvard and some of the time here, and I'm very much embedded in the problems of trying to run a great university, a research university in this situation. Harvard is paying a very high price for its refusal to bow to President Trump's overreaching demands that were really impossible to accept as a private University really impossible for any university to accept. Trump wanted widely known that the contribution to research and development in this country by the private sector is more than 3/4. Private sector is enormously important. And so people ask why should you worry about the maybe 20% that's contributed to research and development by the federal government? And the answer is the federal government supports the largest proportion of fundamental research and early stage applied research, research whose economic return is too uncertain, too distant for the private sector to spend very much money on that basic and early stage research. And yet that basic and early stage research is the seed corn from which future applied advances are going to come. And you know what happens if you eat the seed corn by and by, you starve. And that's what's happening to the US Science and technology ecosystem, if you will. It's an ecosystem. Federal support is important. Independent research labs are important, national laboratories, federal research labs are important. Businesses are important. But that ecosystem depends so heavily on fundamental and early stage applied research by the federal government that it will fall apart if the kinds of savage cuts that the Trump administration has been imposing are sustained. That's a short description of the problem. You can ask for more details and I'll happily provide them. But it's discouraging. I mean, let me just say the Trump fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, which doesn't become law unless and until the Congress passes it. But that budget proposal cuts $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health. That's 40% of the National Institutes of Health research, which is the most powerful engine of biomedical research in the world. Trump wants to cut it by 40%. He's cutting the budget of both the National Science foundation or proposing to cut the budget, both at the National Science foundation and the EPA by 55%. He has cut US foreign aid, USAID, other aspects of US foreign aid by percentages ranging from 90% to 100%. It's a meat axe.

We're going to open it up for questions in a minute. But I well, first, John, thanks for all those comments. Thanks for the comments you made about how this institution is responding. And I'll say I am really proud of the way we're responding to what's happening. And we sort of huddled early on and had conversations about should we just sort of duck and cover and hope the storm passes us by, or should we stand up and sort of speak our truth? And it was across the board with staff and with our board to stand up strategically, speak out to try to make a difference for climate, for people, for nature for our mission and it's been challenging to do that. But I think we've struck about the right, done it about right so far. You mentioned, John, that it's about 15% of our funding now comes from federal sources. If you go back to say 2016, 2017, the majority of our funds came from federal sources. And after that election, if you remember that election, we were concerned. We recognized the vulnerability how federal funds could be cut off. So we made the decision to diversify, to focus, not to stop trying to get federal funds. And we continue to get federal funds. But our philanthropic support has increased greatly. So this is a warning to all of you. To exit this building, you'll have to go through a Gautland to development staff. So good luck with that. It is, you know, that's what key would be more difficult if we were questions from the audience. John. Two easy ones. When the volcano Karakatoa exploded and filled the atmosphere, the temperature of the earth keeps us going. That's what allows us, gives us more freedom to stand up and speak our truth. Right now that is not entirely reliant upon federal sources. Those decisions declined a few degrees. Could you give some thoughts about geoengineering as an option? That's an easy one. Yeah.

You said you had two.

Yeah, I did. And, and the second one is former President Obama goes through Woods Hole to Martha's Vineyard regularly and I'm sure he stops off to check in with you.

I wish, yeah.

Are we going to hear anything from him? Because he's been pretty quiet.

Well, let me answer the second one first. I have not had a lot of contact with President Obama since leaving the administration. Few email exchanges is all. Haven't seen him. All of us wish he were speaking out more forcefully. I get lots of mass emails with Obama's name on them saying we need to do more, we need to give more money to Democrats. I responded to one of those by saying I'll give more money to Democrats when they start running advertisements, explaining that Trump has been lying at everything and running side by side ads with images of what he said and then examples of what he's done. When the Democrats start doing that, I'll start sending them more money.

This is the point where I remind everyone that Woodwill is a nonpartisan organization.

And I speak only for myself. I'm not speaking for Harvard, I'm not speaking for Woodwell, but I am speaking for myself. And most of the time I'm also speaking for my wife Sherry, who will probably in the back pipe up if I say something she doesn't agree with, but we've been married for 59 years, by the way, and so we know each other pretty well. What the reason is for Obama not taking a more forceful public stance. I'm not sure there's a long tradition of presidents not interfering too much in the work of their successors, but it seems to me, in light of the extraordinary characteristics of the current circumstances, that tradition should be cast aside. And I wish we'd hear more from Obama. I just sent to Obama an essay that I wrote with another former science advisor to a president, Neil Lane, who was the science advisor to Bill Clinton, and we wrote a paper of some 2,000 words, about three times as long as a normal op ed that was posted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on its website last Friday, and it was called Time for Congress to Rescue American Science and the Nation. And it lays out all the things that Trump is doing, how damaging they are, and what we need to do as a society to reign Trump in from these immensely destructive policies and actions. I haven't heard back from Obama yet, but I trust he will read it and maybe it will give him a little push. But a lot of people have to be pushing on Obama to do more, and I don't know why he's not. First question was about geoengineering. All right, all you have to do is go to www.thebulletin all one word, no caps, just the bulletin.org and you will find it in the most prominent position on the website that comes up.

We can also, I think we have all your contact information so we can send that out in a follow up.

The second question, the first question was about geoengineering. And I have to tell you another story. In the first day after I was confirmed as the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which took two months after the inauguration, I was able to start acting as the President's science advisor on day one. But because the Office of Science and Technology Policy was created by statute, it requires Senate confirmation for the director, and as many as four associate directors took two months to get confirmed. And until I got confirmed, I was not allowed to give interviews. I could advise the President, but I couldn't in any sense advise the public. So the first interview I gave was to a reporter from the Associated Press. We Talked for about 30 minutes. Ten minutes was about climate change and two minutes was about geoengineering. And he asked me the following question in March 2009. He said, Is geoengineering ever discussed in The White House, and if so, why? Or why not? And my answer was very much the way I would answer your question. It was absolutely. We talk about geoengineering in the White House because it is very likely that given the inadequate pace of other measures that society is trying to take to reduce the pace of climate change, that by and by countries or even sub national groups will grasp in desperation at geoengineering as a possible remedy. And when they do, if we have not studied geoengineering, if we have not figured out what, are there any geoengineering approaches that will have benefits bigger than their liabilities? Which ones are they? How can we learn to maximize the benefits and minimize the liabilities? We absolutely, in all responsibility, have to know that we have to study geoengineering or we will be badly surprised when some country embraces it as the answer and it ends up doing more harm than good. I have been involved since that time in many studies of the problems and the potential of geoengineering, including the enormous problem of governance of geoengineering. How do you control and manage a technology which, relatively speaking, is inexpensive? It's much less expensive than building a new energy system to drastically reduce emissions, for example. It's less expensive than many of the approaches to adapting to the changes in climate that we can no longer avoid. But again, it has enormous liabilities. You go back to the Krakatoa example. What happened when the temperature of the Earth went down by two or three degrees. What happened was basically three years with no summer, drastic impacts on agricultural production as a start. Other problems with the idea of injecting particles into the atmosphere as volcanoes do, is the danger of wiping out the ozone layer and causing an enormous increase in melanomas and other skin cancers as a result, plus enormous ecological effects that could seriously damage world food production even beyond the reduction in in solar radiation. My position continues to be we have to understand geoengineering. We have to invest in research that will tell us if there is an approach to geoengineering that would be worth it, that would have benefits greater than the liabilities. But again, one of the liabilities you have to think about is you start doing geoengineering on a large scale and then for one reason or another, you stop. And what happens then when all of the accumulated momentum of the increased greenhouse gases in the meantime descends suddenly on the climate system of the Earth? It's a very tricky business. People are studying some interesting possibilities, including trying to monitor the chemistry of the ocean in a way that causes the ocean to take up more CO2. Maybe that will work. But again, we got to look very carefully at the liabilities. What happened, by the way, with my interview is the next day in the Washington Post and other newspapers around the country. There was a story. It was on page two in the Washington Post. It said, geoengineering part of Obama climate strategy. That is not what I had said. But it led his communications director to demand my immediate dismissal. And that was the first time Obama said, because I had actually taken the precaution after this interview and not trusting the reporter to tell Obama exactly what I had said about climate change and about geoengineering and about the administration's deliberations on the topic. So Obama knew what I had really said, and that's what Obama said. Holden just told the truth. He's my science advisor. That's his job. But it was a dicey issue then, and it's a dicey issue now. You tell people we're going to study geoengineering and they think that's the same as saying we're going to deploy geoengineering. It's not. But we need to continue to be concerned about whether somebody will deploy it in desperation. And it's one of the many, many reasons that we should be accelerating our efforts to reduce the emissions of the gases that are driving climate change, the emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, because we don't want the world to get desperate enough to seize approaches that will end up doing more harm than good. We also don't want the world to suffer the unabated consequences of this continuing increase in greenhouse gas emissions. And as you know, Ken, and as I think everybody in the room knows, the world is already experiencing severe consequences of climate change in heat waves and floods and droughts and more powerful storms and wildfires and massive changes in ecosystems and reductions in food productivity in many places around the world. And the sad reality is that the goal of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed in Rio in 1992, which was to avoid dangerous human interference in the climate system. That goal is dead. We crashed through that years ago. We are already experiencing dangerous human interference in the climate system.

Over sort of recent years. The scientists at Woodwell increasingly have been asked what their position is, and our position is on geoengineering. And I think it was a question that probably many times they would avoid answering. You know, it's a controversial topic, but we decided to go through an internal process to see if we could arrive at an institution, institutional position. And that was maybe A year and a half ago, several month process, we brought in several external experts and the position we arrived at is very much what you described. Yes, the research should be done both on the science to figure out what works, what doesn't work, if the pros can outweigh the cons, and also very much on the governance. Is there any way that this can actually be managed? And so on. So, yeah, it is an incredibly challenging issue. But I like what one of these outside experts said was the only thing crazier than studying geoengineering. It's not studying geoengineering.

John. I'm old enough that I remember when I was a senior scientist with U.S. geological Survey in Reston during the Reagan administration, that we suffered some of the same setbacks, the reductions in funding and the deemphasis on science as what we're dealing with now. I think the difference is back then, and it came to pass, I mean, once Clinton came in, things sort of returned to normal. But I think the difference is that we had public support back then for science and the importance of science and engineering. And what troubles me now is that we have 30 or 40% of the country that agree that what Trump is doing is a good thing. And I think that's very different than what we were dealing with 40 or 50 years ago. Yeah, let me make a couple of comments on that. The first is that I think as time goes on, an increasing fraction of the people who voted for Trump are going to come to the conclusion that what he was offering in the campaign is not what he's delivering. And in fact, many of his policies are hurting everyday Americans and are going to hurt them more and more. Prices are going to be going up, people are going to lose their access to medical care, they're going to have more difficulty getting their Social Security benefits. Veterans are going to lose services. And those impacts, not to mention the loss of jobs and the loss of jobs across whole communities because the science and the education institutions, which are important parts of their economy, have been, have been ravished. That's going to change. Second thing is it is still true that public respect for science is far higher than the public's respect for politicians, far higher than the public's respect for lawyers. You know, the public support for the Congress is roughly equal to public support for colonoscopies. And. But the second thing I want to say is that the circumstances that existed in the Reagan administration and which allowed things to return relatively rapidly to normal in the administrations that followed are no longer with us. We have really unprecedented circumstance in that, number one, there are virtually no adults left at the high levels of the US Government, nobody to rein in Trump. Even in Trump's first term, there were always at least one or two adults in the room who had a substantial effect in constraining what Trump did. That's all gone. The only identifiable criterion for a high position in the Trump administration is if you will swear that the 2020 election was stolen. If you won't swear to that, you don't get hired in the Trump administration. Second thing is that Trump has weaponized the Department of Justice. He's weaponized the FBI, he's in the process of weaponizing the military as personal agents of the president's vengeance against his enemies and perceived enemies. That's never happened before. The guardrails are falling. He's going after the media. He is trying to abolish both public television and National Public Radio. He has already abolished Voice of America, by the way, in terms of influences of the media around the world, the ones he doesn't think he can abolish immediately, he's intimidating quite successfully. He's tried to intimidate law firms. He's actually gone after museums and libraries. I mean, any source of independent opinion, any source of fact based analysis, not just science, but any fact based analysis is a target for Trump. And one has to be concerned that the damage he's doing in removing the guardrails and driving people out of the kinds of activities that have supported American prosperity up till now is really without precedent. You know, he has already fired or induced to retire early about 240,000 people in the federal workforce of 2.3 million. So he's. Over 10% of the federal workforce has already just disappeared. That didn't happen under Reagan. Nothing like that has ever happened. And he's just getting started. If you look at the, again, the budget proposal for FY26, he wants to abolish climate research. He wants to abolish investments in renewable energy. I mean, this is a guy who finds windmills an abomination.

I want to get in a couple more questions from the audience, but I also want to get your perspective on not just the long list of horrors you described, but ideas about what people can do to get on a better path. But let's go to.

Nothing like a good crisis to make us all wake up. So my question is, with all your experience in politics and science, if you by some chance had the opportunity and a positive opportunity to ask Trump to do three things, what would they be? Retire. You Know, I don't think asking Trump to do anything would have any effect. You know, number one, retire. If you won't retire, stop doing almost everything you're now doing. Question is, with all your experience in politics and science, if you by some chance had the opportunity and a positive opportunity to ask Trump to do three things, what would they be. Retire? You know, I don't think asking Trump doing in terms of trying to demolish the capacities of the federal government. Third thing, try to build relations with friends and allies internationally rather than dismantling our relations internationally. You know, many very experienced people have been speaking out, saying that the only way the United States could do anything would have any effect. You know, number one, retire. If you won't retire, stop doing. Almost everything you're now doing in terms of trying to demolish the capacity can flourish in today's world is with partnerships with a lot of these of the federal government. Third thing, try to build relations with friends and allies internationally rather than displiances with collaboration, even on issues of mutual interest. Collaboration with China. I've been engaged in collaboration with China, by the way, since 1984. And we've always been very careful to collaborate only on things that are in the mutual interest of the two countries, like collaborating on climate change. It's a global problem that can't be solved without both China and the United States workingsmantling our relations internationally. You know, many very experienced together, but Trump is demolishing all of that. So I would tell them, stop doing that. That's not helping. It's hurting the idea that you're going to make America great again. America cannot be made great. Never mind the again, which is a crazy thing on its own. But America cannot be great without allies and friends around the world and without partners around the world. But again, it's clear that there is no real benefit in telling those things to Trump. And the people around him are certainly not telling him those things.

I'm afraid it's not a very clear or thought out question, but I think it's relevant to just probe what your thoughts are. It seems like there's such a disconnect between the kind of high level science and research that we value and that is done and that you're citing and sort of the populist sentiment that has voted against their own interests and support what's going on. And so the one little example that I'm wondering about to help heal that disconnect perhaps is, for example, the Brazilian community here. There's a big Brazilian community just as an example on Cape Cod. And you guys do a lot of research in Brazil. I've met a lot of these Brazilian people and they're very nice people. The vast majority of the people I've met here support Bolsonaro. The vast majority are evangelicals. The vast majority are a little bit farther down the road than even American mainstream population is about not believing in any truth and just believing that everything's a lie. So I know it's a very complicated idea or complicated problem, but one of the things that I think needs to happen is, and I don't know how you would get funding for it or how you would justify doing it, but.

You know, how do we connect with.

The moral goodness and the inherent goodness of people like these Brazilian evangelicals who support Bolsonaro and think there's no truth with what you're doing and build a bridge to win back those people? And the same needs to happen here, obviously. I just think they're a little far ahead, farther ahead in the unraveling.

It is a tough question, but let me make a couple of points very quickly. One, we need to get better at telling stories about why science matters, why the fruits of science and technology provide enormous benefits to people every day. We need to explain that it's basic research that led to the discoveries that have given us the cell phone, that have given us gps, that have given us laser eye surgery, that have given us cures for many of the diseases that afflict humanity. We need to talk more about the ways in which what science does and what fact based government does affect the concerns of people throughout the society. I argued at the beginning of this administration that we probably weren't going to get very far trying to explain to the American public the benefits of democracy and how democracy is threatened. People who are worried about where the next meal is coming from, whether they're going to be able to afford to raise their kids, whether they're going to have enough money for retirement. These folks are not terribly interested in the preservation of democracy unless one can explain how the preservation of democracy relates to those interests. I used to have this problem with the Congress. Many members of the Congress, particularly on the Republican side, saw no point in funding the National Science foundation because it supports fundamental research. And I would explain to them with example after example, that the fundamental research that the National Science foundation did, that nobody could visualize the applications for at the time has transformed the world. That's where Google came from. It came from basic research funded by the National Science Foundation. That's where lasers came from. That's where cell phones came from. That's where GPS came from. That's where enormous numbers of vaccines, drugs and therapies came from. We need to get better at telling those stories. But I'm worried. I'm looking at the clock and I haven't said anything yet about what everybody can do. And I want to say something about that. What I said at the end of this article with Neil Lane that's on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists site is it's not good enough to say we'll wait for the 2026 midterms and then we'll change the composition of the Congress and we'll fix it then. And the reason that's no good is that Trump is knocking down guardrails so fast that we don't know for sure that the 2026 midterms will happen or if they do happen, that they will be legitimate. And secondly, the damage he is doing in the meantime is so severe and so difficult to reverse that even if we do have a 2026 midterm, and even if it's valid and even if it does change the composition of the Congress, it will take in many cases decades to recover from the damage that Trump has been able to do in just two years. Second thing is people say, well, we have to rely on the courts. The courts are going to fix this. The courts are a better bet than the midterms. There are a lot of good judges in the courts who are making good decisions. The problem with the courts is, number one, that Trump is not particularly inclined to obey the decisions of the courts. He seeks ways to evade them, to postpone complying the decisions of the courts in the future. Of course, uncertain. The decisions of the Supreme Court are uncertain. The Trump lawyers are experts at lying and at creating delay. And in the end, even the Supreme Court can't be confident that Trump will obey them. So what can we do? In my view, the key is that we have to get about a dozen Republican members of Congress, Senate and House to grow spines, to realize that their obligation under their oath is to the Constitution and to the well being of all Americans. And if they are thinking that their obligation to Trump is a higher obligation than their obligation to the Constitution and to the well being of all Americans, they need to rethink it. And again, we don't need all the Republicans. We only need around a dozen to join with the Democrats to reign Trump in. Congress needs to take back its constitutional prerogative to control spending. They have to take back their constitutional prerogative to create and dissolve administrative entities in the government. Trump has taken those rights away. So how can we as individuals affect that outcome? How can we get members of Congress on the Republican side to take their responsibility seriously? Well, we need to get, number one, a larger fraction of the public behind us, and particularly Republican voters behind us. How do we do that? I have three answers. The first is what everybody should do. Everybody should be writing emails to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle about their concerns about the damage that's being done to their interests. Everybody should be writing letters to the editor, should be posting on social media, should be talking to everybody they know about why what is happening is a danger to the well being of our society. Second thing, people who are leaders in business, in education, in research, should be writing op eds. They should be talking to members of Congress they know on both aisles, both sides of the aisle. They should be going to Washington and meeting with congressmen in their offices. People who are leaders in business and research and universities can get that done, and talking to them about how their voters are changing. Their voters are going to come around and they're going to be thrown out of office if they continue to enable these outrages. Third thing, people who are active in NGOs need to get their NGOs to band together and create cooperative, joint, comprehensive strategies to better communicate what is happening in this country, what this country is doing to its own standing in the world, to its own future prosperity, to its own ability to limit the health impacts of environmental change, the impacts to everybody of climate change. Right now, the NGOs are uncoordinated, they're competitive. They don't talk to each other. They don't divide up the territory according to comparative advantage. We could have NGOs that are a much more powerful force in our country if we can get them to collaborate with each other and to plan jointly and to execute jointly. That's my quick prescription for what three sets of people, everybody, leaders, activists and NGOs, can do. And we used up our time.

We used up our time. John, thank you so much for spending this time with us. Thank you. Thank you all. Yeah, thank you all for being here. The next one is 7-6-17th. And if you thought John was unfettered in what he said, show up on July 17th. Gina McCarthy will be our featured speaker. So, yeah, thank you all again. Thank you all for being here. Thank you, John.

Sa.