Leadership Spotlight: Frank Loy, SSC Board Chair & Former Undersecretary of State
This is the first of a series of blog posts highlighting prominent members of our Smart Surfaces team. Over the coming months, we will publish interviews with Coalition leaders as they talk about their work, our environment and the Smart Surfaces mission.
Frank Loy is the chair of the Smart Surfaces Coalition Board of Directors. Loy was Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs from 1998 to January 2001. His portfolio included human rights, the promotion of democracy, refugee issues, international law enforcement and counter-narcotics, and the environment. During this time, he served as chief U.S. climate negotiator. Loy has also served as chair at the Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Defense Action Fund, Resources For The Future, The League of Conservation Voters and other environmental nonprofits.
PL: From your perspective, what’s the mission of the Smart Surfaces Coalition?
FL: I think the Coalition’s job is to find a way in which cities can and should change their surfaces from dark to light and from impervious to pervious, while recognizing several things. One, if they can do that, that’s a huge deal, in terms of environment. Two, we’re dealing with long-living assets that nobody is going to want to rip up and change because there’s a lot of money involved. So you have to help cities understand the true economic consequences of doing so. And of failing to do so. They will ask – and should ask — are there benefits that counter the expenses incurred through changing city surfaces? And they need to understand that the answer is yes, and that these benefits include the physical health of communities, the political support of minority communities, and the cost of borrowing money to serve the cities. Many of [these benefits] are measurable, a few are not easily measurable — but all are significant to helping cities counter the cost of changing the surfaces. And we need to help the cities compute the costs and benefits themselves because (a), you can’t do it for all of them, and (b) they may not want you to do it. So it’s key that we find a way to help them do that.
PL: After serving in leadership roles of so many environmental organizations, is there anything you find unique about the Smart Surfaces Coalition?
FL: Yes, absolutely. I’ve never worked with a coalition like this. I think the magnitude of the potential is greater than most other things I’ve worked with. We may never get there, but the magnitude of good that you could do if we make progress toward changing surfaces, changing albedo, etc. — that would be large. More generally, I think the environmental community has not paid enough attention to cities, yet cities are the largest growing part of our world society, so we’re dealing with a somewhat-neglected growth area.
PL: Tell me about your first encounter with the idea of climate change.
FL: It was in the early 1980s, and I was then chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund, and it had on its staff a Harvard physicist, Michael Oppenheimer, who talked to me about climate change, a term I had not heard of before and knew nothing about. I could tell right away that if he was at least 80 percent right, this would be the major issue for the environmental community for the next substantial periods of time.
PL: At what point in your career did you decide you wanted to engage with the issue to the extent you are now?
FL: At one point in my career I was thinking about where I should focus my philanthropic efforts. I had never had the resources to think about this seriously. I decided I should concentrate my efforts, and that I would do so on environmental issues. What intrigued me about the environment was that it required you to think about politics, society, economics and science — that combination was not true of other philanthropic efforts. The idea of working in an area that combined these elements was interesting to me.
PL: Tell me about the work you’ve done with the State Department regarding climate change and environmental policy.
FL: As you have noted, in 1998 I took on a post that included several portfolios. One of those was the environment. In that role, I ended up being the lead U.S. negotiator for the International Agreement on Climate Change. The first international agreement on climate change had been launched at the Rio de Janeiro conference in the George H. W Bush administration. That was the first agreement that declared climate change to be a problem for the world. That was followed by the Kyoto Protocol, which had structured a mandatory regime to deal with climate change.
I came to the Department right after Kyoto. Kyoto had several big problems, as far as I could see: First, it put mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions from each country, with penalties for non-compliance. The U.S. Congress viewed that regime as giving away parts of our sovereignty, and it was unlikely it would ever let the U.S. become a party to that agreement. The second problem was that it was becoming clear that if a country actually ran through the Kyoto limits, nothing would really happen. Or did.
The post-Kyoto couple of years thus involved finding a road to a replacement for Kyoto. The process took over 15 years, and culminated in 2015 with the Paris Agreement. It got its start in the 1998-2000 period. The new agreement was, of course, very different from the old one. It had goals and standards, and you had to report on whether you were meeting those goals and standards, but it was not mandatory. It was clear that by that time we had evidence that Kyoto was not going to work in the sense intended. When Japan broke through its Kyoto-mandated top level of emissions, nothing happened. Then, another country broke it, and nothing happened. It was clear that the world was not in a position to enforce that pact.
A third issue was that developing countries were increasingly the source of substantial greenhouse gas emissions but had neither the will nor the money to curb those emissions. We developed a system whereby if they reduced their emissions in a certain fashion by a certain amount, they would get paid for that by a system of transferable credits that other countries could earn by reducing their emissions. The current climate agreement, the 2015 Paris Agreement, a very sound pact, incorporates and improves upon a number of these mechanisms.
PL: What would you say are the most important steps people can take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions right now?
FL: The first thing is for [individuals] to reduce their use of energy. That includes the lightbulbs they use, how long and when they run their dishwasher, the use of outside lights that go at night and go off in the early morning. People should also create their own energy in the form of solar PV. I have solar on my roof, and I happen to live in the District, where it is financially affordable — and better than that, actually — because the District has a law that requires its energy supplier, Pepco, to get a certain fraction of its energy from clean, non-greenhouse gas sources. Pepco has difficulty doing that, so there’s now a system where homeowners like me put a solar roof on their house and sell the electricity it produces to Pepco. It’s a little more complicated than that, of course, but we do get paid for that. Also, the transport sector is a very large producer of greenhouse gases, and a major way to reduce use of energy from fossil fuels, is to drive an electric vehicle.
The second big thing is to support political action that will really involve a national regime to reduce GHG emissions. One of the tragedies of America — and we are almost the only industrialized country that has this problem — is that the public’s attitude toward climate change is significantly determined by their political party affiliation. Other industrialized countries are not so divided along party lines. We need to address that issue.
Third, we need to encourage and enable philanthropy as well as financial organizations that invest in new technology, to focus on climate. Our present technologies and strategies are not good enough to address the problem at the level it needs to be addressed.
PL: On a scale from hopeful to terrified, where are you in terms of where we as a society are going with climate change and our efforts to combat it?
FL: I’m not sure I want to answer.
PL: You don’t have to.
FL: You know, I think the only way to answer that is to say that I’m optimistic that we can make very large progress. Whether we can make enough progress to avoid really nasty consequences of climate change, I don’t know. I feel a little discouraged occasionally, but [being discouraged] is a totally useless attitude, so I put that aside and focus on what we can do.