Jonathan Gilligan is a Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Climate and Environmental Studies at Vanderbilt University. Gilligan has published a book, entitled “Beyond Politics: The Private Governance Response to Climate Change,” and more than 100 scholarly articles. They spoke with SSRN about the importance of involving scientists in climate change policy discussions and how private governance can fuel environmental and sustainability progress.
Q: A lot of your research has focused on understanding environmental stress in coupled human-natural systems. This work is inherently multidisciplinary, combining natural science, social science, and public policy. How has your career and research experience evolved to bring together elements of these various disciplines?
A: I’ve had a very interesting and probably unusual research career. My original training was in physics. I worked in very technical areas of physics, around precise atomic and molecular spectroscopy, quantum optics, etc. Then in the mid-90s, I made a move into environmental chemistry, focusing on the technical aspects of measuring ozone-depleting chemicals and things like that.
In the process, I started to get interested in why all of this really cool scientific research I was involved in wasn’t being used more effectively in policy making to protect the environment. I got very interested in questions about how we use science and engineering in making and informing public policy and how we [can] do a better job of understanding the benefits of basic science and engineering research for society. That got me into talking with a lot of social scientists, political scientists and so forth.
Then in the early 2000s, I met law professor Michael Vandenbergh, who had experience both in the private sector as a partner of a major environmental law firm and as former Chief of Staff of the Environmental Protection Agency. The two of us working together [brought] Mike’s expertise in law and policy together with what I knew about natural science. Both of us had a lot of interest in how learning about human cognition, risks, hazards, and behavioral science – what things actually lead people to change their behavior – could be useful for better understanding environmental policy. […] By doing that, we can start to understand some of the obstacles to making effective environmental policy and new directions that people hadn’t appreciated until they started looking at the role of social and behavioral sciences.
Q: Why do you think it’s important to have people with a scientific background involved in discussions about climate policy and the social and economic effects of climate change?
A: This is important because we have to understand the problems we’re working with. A framework Mike and I came up with, together with some great social scientists Tom Dietz, Paul Stern and Gerald Gardner, breaks this down into a three-part analysis. The first part is, when we’re looking at potential policy interventions, what’s the technical potential? How well would this policy work if it was implemented effectively? To do that, we need to know the science and engineering parts: what are the hazards of climate change? How much do we need to reduce greenhouse gases? What are the different kinds of energy use, land use, and other things that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions? How would these behavior changes actually work out in terms of quantitative emissions reduction? That needs the science part.
The second part is we bring in the behavioral sciences and look at behavioral plasticity: how much would people be likely to change their behavior in response to incentives, information, and other things? Then we look at what we call initiative feasibility, [analyzing] the policy process and saying, “is there somebody who’s actually willing and able to implement this initiative?” We look at the initiative, how feasible it is to implement, and if we implement [it], how much are we actually going to change people’s behavior? And then, from the natural science and engineering side, how much would that behavior change affect emissions?
Recently, a paper we have up on SSRN [looks] at the growth of artificial intelligence. A lot of people are concerned about the greenhouse gas emissions that are resulting from this rise in the use of data centers and all the energy we consume. We ask, “how do people think about the use of large language model queries and the environmental impact of them when they’re deciding if this is a good use of AI?” We look at, first of all, how much do people know about this? Where do people find out about the energy consumption? We go into the engineering literature, and we go into studying some of the popular tools that are out there for calculating the greenhouse gas emissions, and we find there’s a lot of uncertainty there. People… depending on which tool they use, might get wildly different estimates, as much as 50 times different, between one estimate and another. This is going to affect the quality of information they can use for their decision making.
We also look at how people use this information. Where might it be beneficial? A very energy-intensive query might avoid other energy intensive behaviors. So, we start looking at the larger human behavior side of tradeoffs, and then how we can move forward to better provide useful information. This is an example of where we really need the engineering work.
Q: The paper you referenced, “The Energy and Environmental Footprint of AI,” discusses how informing the public about the electricity demand and environmental impacts of AI can help to reduce those impacts without disrupting the ongoing development of AI technology. What kind of information disclosure do you think would be most beneficial for the efforts to reduce negative effects of AI?
A: Right now, most of the big models are closed source. There’s not easy access to studying them and studying their energy use. Companies tend to provide summary information that doesn’t have the kind of detail that would allow us to look at different kinds of queries, such as what’s the energy consumption? What kinds of energy use are included in the calculations? Is it just the energy used to run the computer processors, or does it also include things like the cost of cooling and running the whole data center? Other questions come up, such as: how credible is this? Is this representative of the whole thing? What’s the cost of one additional query?
Where there are open-source models, people can study those in detail, but they may not be representative of what’s being done in some of the major proprietary models. There’s a lot of research that needs to be done and places where people could make better decisions if there was more transparency [in] providing information about energy use.
Q: AI is a new and constantly developing field, meaning that there is a lot of research still needed to fully understand its consequences now and in the future. Do you have plans to continue exploring the impact of AI on the environment?
A: I think this is a very important field. […] I’m interested in pursuing how the use of AI tools would potentially help improve transparency and accountability. I’m also very interested in the human behavior side. As these tools become more widespread, how do people use them? There’s potential for them to increase energy consumption without adding a lot of value, but there’s also potential for these tools to reduce [energy use]. If I do, for instance, a very energy intensive query to an artificial intelligence tool, if that saves half a day of somebody working in an office – where you have the heating and cooling of the office, the lighting, the commuting to work and back, all of those kinds of things – there may be opportunities to reduce the total labor input or total energy use. Or these things could end up increasing the demand for using AI tools and lead to a large net increase in energy.
We want to understand individual behavior and institutional behavior of how businesses will use these tools. There could be benefits or there could be real harm to the environment, and a lot of that’s going to come out of the details of how people decide how to use the tools.
Q: Your book “Beyond Politics,” written with Michael Vandenbergh, explains how businesses, organizations, and other private groups can take action to reduce the risks of climate change, even when governments are slow or resistant. Tell me a little bit about what went into researching and writing this book.
A: We started with… the perception many people have that greenhouse gas emissions are predominantly driven by large industrial and corporate activity. Behavior is really important because there’s a lot of greenhouse gas emissions that come from people in their individual and household lives: the energy people consume at home, the energy people consume driving their vehicles. We started saying that the kinds of command and control policy tools that work well for controlling emissions, when most of the emissions are under the control of a few large industrial actors, don’t apply when you’re talking about emissions that are aggregated across 300 million people in the U.S. In fact, household and individual emissions are the largest single sector of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., bigger than the industrial sector and bigger than the commercial sector.
We started looking at behavior at the individual and household level, and… also what happens to behavioral things in the way that businesses work? Mike started looking at case histories of places where there were significant emissions reductions happening because of corporate decisions that had nothing to do with government mandates or regulations.
Walmart, around 2005, started to say, as a corporate policy, “we’re working on reducing a lot of our environmental impact. We’re interested in being more sustainable as a corporation.” They realized that there were opportunities for people in their homes to save money and reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by buying more energy efficient light bulbs. But nobody was selling those bulbs in a way that was convenient and easy for people to get at. So, Walmart went to their suppliers and said… “if you can produce an inexpensive, high quality compact fluorescent light bulb, we’re going to help you sell literally hundreds of millions of these.” They set a goal in 2007 for selling 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs. That year, they met their goal in October and continued to sell those bulbs, so they were more than 20% ahead of what their target was in the first year they had that program.
Later, LED light bulbs were becoming clearly a great thing. But again, these bulbs were difficult to find. They were expensive. Walmart, again, came in [and] told their suppliers, “if you can get me a high-quality LED bulb that I can sell retail for under $10, we’re going to help you sell a lot of these.” When this went live, around 2013, they started selling huge numbers of LED bulbs. A little bit after Walmart started their voluntary compact fluorescent light bulb program, the U.S. government implemented mandatory light bulb efficiency standards. Then a couple of years later… Congress withdrew all the money from enforcing those regulations, but the private sector kept going because they saw this is good for business, this is good for the environment, and there’s real consumer demand.
Then, looking at corporate activity, we saw that businesses were also looking at places where they could reduce emissions internally, and some of this was driven by cost savings. Companies found they could save a lot of money by reducing unnecessary energy use.
Then, we started looking into what some of the incentives are for why companies do this. Some of this is wanting to look good to consumers, which we found is somewhat misunderstood. It’s widely known that a lot of people like green products, but almost nobody’s willing to pay a lot more to buy a green product. It’s not just that companies go green because they think consumers are going to want to go out of their way to get green products. What we find more common is people don’t want to buy the worst product. If a company gets a reputation as one of the worst companies for the environment, people are likely to buy from a competitor.
Another part that goes into this is employees. People want to work for a company that they feel proud working for. […] Being a company that the employees feel is a moral company, that comports with [their] values on the environment, is really valuable for attracting the top talent and retaining them.
People aren’t necessarily going to go way out of their way to spend a lot of money or reduce their quality of life to be more environmentally friendly, but where there are opportunities to have a good quality of life in an environmentally sustainable way… people do tend to migrate towards the better choices. A lot of companies find this is an important part of being competitive in the marketplace, both for consumers and for employees.
Q: This book was released in 2017. If you were to write or revisit it today, would you put any different emphasis on certain points or add anything new that maybe you couldn’t have predicted then?
A: Yes, I think there are some things that we are confronting now that we didn’t see then. We had the book under contract in 2016, we were just putting the final edits together, and we expected that probably Hillary Clinton was going to be president of the U.S., and this was going to be… about how even with a Democratic-controlled federal government, it was going to be really difficult to get environmental regulations through. Democrats were not voting heavily for carbon taxes, and so even with the Democratic government, this would be hard. So, the private governance aspect – how corporations, community organizations, people in their private lives do things to be sustainable – was going to be important.
Then Donald Trump surprised us and got elected, and we quickly realized we needed to actually rewrite a lot of the book, anticipating what a Trump administration might look like. Now there was going to be more active hostility towards government regulation in a lot of ways that made our arguments stronger.
Coming into what we saw then, a lot of things fit our model. Corporations were taking a lot of action, even when the U.S. government started rolling back environmental policies. Corporations saw that sustainability was important to their business. Climate change was threatening business. It was causing huge losses to insurance companies. Banks that make mortgages are worried about what’s going to happen to the property that we own a mortgage on. People were looking at industrial companies: how’s climate change going to disrupt our supply chain? There was a real move towards corporate action on sustainability, which fit the thesis we had written.
Then, over the last five years or so, we’ve seen a real shift of public hostility towards corporate action. We’re seeing a backlash against what are deemed “woke” corporations, and so we need to adapt our theoretical framework to account for the fact that when we wrote this, conservatives who might be anti-environmental regulation tended to be pro-business and pro-markets. We saw that corporate initiatives might improve public acceptance and embracing of sustainability policies when they saw that this was coming from profit-seeking companies.
Over the last several years, public opinion polling has shown that there is a growing bipartisan consensus among Democrats and Republicans in the public that big corporations cannot be trusted, and so we need to think about how private governance works in an environment where there’s strong bipartisan suspicion and hostility towards large corporations. Small businesses are still seen favorably by Democrats and Republicans alike, and so I think looking at the role of smaller businesses is an important thing that I’m looking at as we move forward. Their role in private governance… [is] an area that’s been very understudied. There’s a lot of room for understanding how small businesses fit into all of this.
Q: Are there any of your papers or work that you want to highlight as particularly interesting or timely?
A: There’s a paper that Mike Vandenbergh and I did with Stephanie Stern and David Dana, “Adaptation As Mitigation,” about looking at how to integrate climate adaptation and climate mitigation. Big cities are facing climate threats from wildfires, like we saw with the Los Angeles wildfires last year, or sea level rises that threaten big cities along the coasts of the world. […] As people look at adaptation, both in the short term of rebuilding after disasters… or as we look longer term at how cities are going to adapt to rising sea levels, to greater wildfire threats, and potentially look at rebuilding or relocating cities, it’s useful to adopt an integrated view of looking at the energy impacts and the climate impacts. These can range from the short-term impacts of all the carbon impact of manufacturing those building products and the energy use of rebuilding buildings… but also longer term, as we reconfigure cities to be more sustainable and resilient in the face of a growing threat of natural disasters.
Can we think about rebuilding these cities in ways that encourage more energy-efficient, low-carbon living – cities that may require less driving or that may be more efficient to heat and cool the buildings? Can we develop approaches to integrating mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions with adaptation to making cities more resilient to climate change?
Q: What do you think SSRN contributes to the world of modern research and interdisciplinary scholarship?
A: SSRN makes it easy to post preprints or off prints in a place where people can easily find them. SSRN is uniquely interdisciplinary, so I’ve published in a lot of literatures: from the deep environmental science journals to technical journals to law reviews. […] I’ve got papers on SSRN that come from law review journals, but also from satellite remote sensing journals, geography journals, and proceedings of computer science conferences. It’s that really broad multidisciplinary nature that lets me put work that I’ve published in so many different disciplines all in one place. I feel like that increases my ability to help people find my work and see these connections across all the different areas that I publish in.
More About Jonathan Gilligan
Jonathan Gilligan is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Professor of Climate and Environmental Studies at Vanderbilt University. They received their BA in Physics from Swarthmore College and their Ph.D. in Physics from Yale University. They were a National Research Council Postdoctoral Associate at the Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. They led a team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado using a multichannel gas chromatograph on a NASA airborne mission to study ozone depletion. In 1994, they joined Vanderbilt’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and later joined Vanderbilt’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Gilligan has published one book and more than 100 scholarly articles and holds two patents. Their book, “Beyond Politics: The Private Governance Response to Climate Change” (co-authored with Michael Vandenbergh) was recognized with a Vanderbilt Chancellor’s Award for Research in 2018 and was named one of the most important books on environmental policy of the last 50 years by Environmental Forum.
You can see more work by Jonathan Gilligan on their SSRN Author page here