Sarah is the Cofounder and CEO of Geospiza, a software company that helps corporations visualize, understand and take action around climate risks. Sarah has 10-plus years of experience in emergency management and public health, and she is committed to developing data-driven, evidence-based solutions to reduce risk and enhance resilience, especially for the most vulnerable. Sarah earned her Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Georgia and her Master’s in Public Health from Tulane.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at NORI, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon here in Denver in the Techstars office. Well, I guess it’s actually the Nature Conservancy office. Which is it? Who’s on the lease? We’ll find out today.
Christophe Jospe: Well, Nature Conservancy is upstairs. I think this is owned by Techstars. Okay. It’s an exciting day because we have a fellow Techstar alum, cohort, not cohortee. I don’t know what we’d call her.
Sarah Tuneberg: Alum?
Christophe Jospe: Alum. I think alumna is right. It’s also amazing because when I heard her speak, I’m like, man, we’ve been wanting to do this topic for a really long time. And everything that she’s saying resonates with a lot of Nori’s worldview. So... As you know, listener, we only like to bring on people who agree with us.
Ross Kenyon: Actually, I think that’s one of our strengths is that we’ve had controversial guests sometimes or people that we do want to challenge, don’t see eye to eye with. We do get some nasty letters sometimes and sometimes they’re deserved if we’re not nearly as hard on them as we should be. But please send us a letter.
Christophe Jospe: If you have something to say or you’d like to hear a new perspective or you have an idea of a really good perspective, you can always email us at hello at nori.com.
Ross Kenyon: If your comment is mean in nature, you can go right to christoph at nori.com. It’s better for me.
Christophe Jospe: Okay, enough of that. We should introduce our guest. Sitting across from us, we have Sarah Tuneberg. She is CEO and co-founder of GeoSpisa. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Tuneberg: Hello. Thanks for having me.
Christophe Jospe: Sarah, we like to start off with people’s stories, not just like, who are you, but really, how did you get to where you are today, which is sitting on the Reversing Climate Change podcast?
Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah, absolutely. So the root of how I get here starts in emergency management. The start of where I get here really starts with watching a crazy movie when I was 10.
Ross Kenyon: Which one?
Sarah Tuneberg: The Killing Fields.
Ross Kenyon: You’re like, Pol Pot, that’s a funny name. I think I’ll stick around for this. Sure.
Sarah Tuneberg: There was small children that I resonated with and then I was on the journey with them and that led me to a career Always sort of searching for how I get involved in international development was sort of the start of that. So I thought I’d be a journalist. I thought I’d be a doctor. And then I ended up an emergency manager. I did international work and then was living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina happened. And that was the big shift that really leads me here today, which is I had done all of this work internationally and seen all of this pretty large Miserable conditions.
And then Katrina happened and it was happening literally in my neighborhood and to people I knew. And our government apparatus that was meant to help wasn’t and wasn’t doing so really equitably. And it was difficult. And that I literally thought, whoa, all of this work I’ve done abroad, like we can do it here. And then that was 15 years ago, I think, if my math is right. And so I’ve been working in domestic emergency management since. And given that climate change largely affects the natural hazard environment and the adverse consequences we see are related to increasing natural hazards, it’s a really natural sort of lead in to this space.
This space being climate change is coming to get us.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. So then you were already working in emergency management and then there’s like a 15 year lacuna though between where you ended and where we are now.
Sarah Tuneberg: Sure.
Ross Kenyon: So then you just started applying those lessons to how people are adapting or failing to adapt, what kind of natural disasters are happening right now.
Sarah Tuneberg: Sure.
Ross Kenyon: With regard to climate change.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: And Geospiza enters the scene.
Sarah Tuneberg: Relevant. It’s so incremental as compared to the others. Yeah. So I worked in government and consulting and helping communities prepare for a disaster. Had a consulting company. We developed some technology. That technology was really successful. And then we thought, wow, we might have a product here. And that product was A multi-source data integration tool where you take sort of a universe of data and models that’s hard for people on limited budgets and with limited technical capacity to access and understand and make it accessible in a subscription.
Ross Kenyon: Tableau started this, right? It’s like a subscription-based data viz.
Sarah Tuneberg: Correct.
Ross Kenyon: And then you’re sort of like, this created a new industry and Geospeza sort of applied this to climate change and risks around it.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah, and at first we weren’t focused on climate change specifically. We really were looking at the natural hazards that state and local governments in the United States were facing. They have a lot of reporting requirements, a lot of risk assessment they have to do to get funded. And it’s a pile of papers and a pile of PDFs and reports that just go on a shelf and never get actionable. And that was where we started. And interestingly, we were very conservative about our use of the words climate change. There was a lot of euphemisms, a lot of holding back.
Which was an indication that we might have been in the wrong business. Because if your heart is about something very specific and your work every day is about it and you’re masking it and covering it up in conversations with your customers, you’re already off to sort of a rough start in the trusting relationship. So we’ve since moved on a little bit from serving state and local government in the United States to And now Geospisa’s focus is much broader. So we take all of that data integration, all of that data decision support, and help large enterprises visualize, understand, and take action on their climate risk.
Christophe Jospe: That’s helpful. And you allude to this pivot where you moved a bit away from working with state and local governments. And one of the great things about Techstars is we have this founder story every week and a different founder comes in and Sarah was giving her founder story and you gave this really amazing anecdote, which is like, People in the government don’t necessarily want to do something more efficient if it saves their department money because they’re worried that they’re going to get a budget cut, even though using software in an intelligent way can automate and just improve that whole delivery of services.
So I’m curious, sort of what were some of the forces that made you realize that and how did the pivot play out in that sense?
Sarah Tuneberg: Sure. Lots of where we... Got to is just through tonnes of conversations. We made a target for six months where we had 40 new conversations with potential customers a month. And we believed and I believed from my 15 years of experience that we really had something that was going to drive change. It was a solution that me and my colleagues really deeply desired. And then we take it out and talk to folks and they would say, You know what? I spend two-thirds of my time doing the reporting that you think you can save me 50% of my time.
I’m like, what am I going to do? No. And you could see in their face, and I really underestimated the challenge of feeling like you were going to become obsolete or at risk as an individual. And I think the efficiency we were proposing and the data-driven challenge Solutions and decisions we were showing them they could have made people individually feel vulnerable. And then decision makers and budget crafters, I think there’s this weird sort of perverse incentive in government where you have to fight and scratch out for every bit of budget you get.
And the way that budgets are done prospectively, so you know what your budget is for the year coming up, Means that if you spend less, they might take it away from you. I find that we value in government human resources, so people doing work over capacity building. And it’s, I think, one of the places we see that is that there’s a lot of Discussion right now in emergency management and public safety in the United States about is it ethical, is it appropriate for businesses to charge government entities to consolidate and make available a lot of open free data if they do it in a way that makes it more efficient, more effective.
They say, you know, it’s free anyway. How can you charge a city for something that’s free? And this was something we came up against a lot. We ingest more than 1,200 different data sets and we make them available really simply and easily in a way that’s hard for people who don’t have a lot of technical capacity. And some of our customers were like, well, I can just get that myself. Yeah, sure.
Ross Kenyon: You want to look at those PDFs?
Sarah Tuneberg: You look at those PDFs or do you want to build a whole bunch of APIs that are constantly moving?
Christophe Jospe: Application Programming Interface.
Unknown speaker: Ooh, thank you.
Sarah Tuneberg: Also, when things like the federal government shuts down and the census becomes available and huge amounts of your grant funding are generated based on census estimates and you can’t find that data, it’s helpful to have a vendor who can help you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Argument seems a bit specious. You’re not really doing anything. This is all public, right? The packaging actually matters quite a lot or how you’re using this information. Just having a raw binary is not really that useful for me. I would prefer someone to create something that turned that into something that was visual.
Sarah Tuneberg: Sure. We’re in the era of dashboards. It’s not to be underestimated. We joke like, oh, another dashboard, oh, another dashboard. But it’s for a reason that if you craft them well in especially a disaster scenario or an austere environment like we face in disasters, we can make faster, better decisions. And that’s relevant.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. We just read this book called Play Bigger and a lot of like the history of this sort of industry with data and like the end of software with like Salesforce, right? Being like, you don’t no longer buy like a CD-ROM with a program and it costs thousands of dollars if you’re an enterprise level. It’s a And oftentimes quite a bargain. Can you imagine if we had to just like pay for software that we bought rather than subscription for everything? I feel like it would be so hard for startups to even do this.
Sarah Tuneberg: I think it drives innovation. I think there’s really good research and really good writing about how the software as a subscription or software as a service movement has made it so we can afford so much and companies can innovate so much more quickly. So they get successful and also unsuccessful and go away quickly. We can test, we can validate, we can experiment so much faster.
Ross Kenyon: So what I’m trying to say is I don’t believe you’re a fraudster.
Sarah Tuneberg: Thanks.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s a valuable way to offer a service. Thank you. I’m surprised that people still give you grief about stuff like that.
Sarah Tuneberg: The New York Times just wrote an article about this very thing.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. What’s it called? We’ll link it in the show notes.
Sarah Tuneberg: Well, so this is an interesting story. One of the other public safety technology innovators is called One Concern. And they have done some really interesting things and they’re working in a hard market just like we were. And the New York Times article was pretty heavy handed about that aspect of their business, repackaging open and free data and charging for it. So yeah, I don’t know what it’s called. It’s about One Concern.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, okay. It’s not about us. Because I’ve seen this about AccuWeather and NOAA. Have you seen that whole thing?
Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah, well, so that’s another interesting thing is every single weather enterprise in the United States makes all of its money by repackaging data that’s made free and available from the U. S. federal government. That’s the way that works.
Ross Kenyon: How do you feel about that taxpayer? I don’t know. I think that one doesn’t bother me so much. But then there’s stuff like Michael Lewis’s second latest book dealt with it. Did you end up reading that?
Christophe Jospe: Which one?
Ross Kenyon: It was about the politics of who gets appointed to NOAA and who gets access to this data and do they have a monopoly on it? Are other people allowed to use this public data and present it? And it gets kind of slimy in there, it seems.
Sarah Tuneberg: I think it’s an interesting thing we’re facing here, which is federal appointees are I would argue we’re at a sort of peak corruption currently, and that is a really good example of it. But I think there are other ones. We just saw yesterday that the assistant administrator at FEMA, who was responsible for hurricane recovery in Puerto Rico, was arrested on Embezzlement and fraud charges. So sort of this idea that through political appointees, those who are especially wealthy are becoming increasingly so or helping their friends do so at the cost of those who are most vulnerable, like the people in Puerto Rico.
Christophe Jospe: Okay, so before we give our listeners reasons to grab a pitchfork and show up and be angry somewhere, you went on this pivot, which is to say GovTech is maybe not the place to start, but there are entities that are willing to better understand their climate risk. And actually, those entities might be multinational corporations who have an interest in protecting certain assets and maybe getting ahead of the curve. And a fancy software product with many different dashboards is useful to them.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: That’s who you’re working with now, companies who are trying to mitigate their risks or figure out what to do.
Sarah Tuneberg: Correct. And we, through our really deep process of working in government, came to the conclusion that governments across the world lack the cohesion and organization to make the change we really need to see to drive meaningful change on climate. That we are so far down the road and we have so kicked the can and we are so fractured politically that really change lies in the hands of large multinational corporations who are highly exposed to losing their business, losing their customers, losing all of it. And we need to empower those people to have the incentive to make the changes.
And those changes look like CO2 emissions changes. Obviously, we need to be taking every step we can to stop putting more carbon and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But it also looks like taking better steps to adapt to and mitigate against the natural hazard consequences we are seeing right now.
Christophe Jospe: I have a hard ball for you. I mean, natural disasters have been happening since the beginning of Mm-hmm. Well, I’m interested in your answer. Let me not put words in your mouth. How you assess climate risk based on some of these things which have already been happening. And maybe hurricanes, harder one. But like, let’s talk about 100 year floods that happened multiple times. Like, where do you draw the parameters on this? How do you think about it?
Sarah Tuneberg: So I think that there’s... To some degree, that is a conversation and an argument that isn’t especially productive. So I think the evidence is very clear that things like unpredictability and natural hazards is being seen. We are seeing flooding. That is greater and lasting longer in areas we’ve never seen it before. We are seeing similarly drought last longer, be hotter than we’ve ever seen before. This was a year where we saw record temperatures all over the world. The average highs were the highest we’ve ever seen. So we’re accumulating the evidence that additional carbon in the atmosphere is warming seas, warming air, and causing unpredictable things.
Whether or not you can attribute a specific hurricane, a specific flood, a specific wildland fire to climate change is somewhat irrelevant. We are seeing nonlinear, unpredictable changes that don’t reflect anything of the data we’ve ever seen. To me, I don’t care what the cause is. I’m super grateful that there are folks like you and other companies in the world that are working on the CO2 problem. What I’m working on is that we’re seeing these terrible events happen. They are truly catastrophic like we’ve never seen and happening more and more frequently and we need to be dealing with that.
Cause, cool, whatever. You want to quibble with it? Fine. I don’t want to debate you on that. Mostly we can agree with That the stats are clear. Weird things are happening. We should do something about it.
Christophe Jospe: And better understand those weird things.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Could you give me an example of something, either an actual client or a customer or a hypothetical one of how they might use your services and change their behavior?
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes, absolutely. So one of the things that we work very hard on is helping people. Map decisions, policy strategies, other investment approaches that large corporations can take in the face of that very deep uncertainty we were just talking about. So we are working with a customer that transports all of their product, touches the Rhine River twice. And the Rhine is the major river of barge transport in Western Europe. It terminates at the port of Rotterdam. And their product comes in on the Rhine as commodity, as grain, and leaves as a food and beverage product.
And what we’re seeing on the Rhine is as a result of climate change, we’re seeing rapid ice melts and unpredictable flows in the Rhine. So drought and high flows. And that is causing all sorts of disruption to their supply chain because it’s not anything they’ve seen before. And so they are working on investments that allow them to continue getting their product out to their customers, then generating revenue and being a party to the economy. And working in a time-based way is inefficient saying – and it’s ineffective saying, you know, we’re going to invest in – Additional storage capacity in two years.
Well, we don’t know what the RINE is going to be doing in two years. So having decisions organized around time is not relevant. So instead, our software enables companies, organizations, enterprises to make decisions associated with particular metrics and data. So in this case, the end state that needs to be achieved is we need to get our product made and delivered using the RINE or alternate transit method We need to get the product out. Well, the real thing that’s preventing that, one of the primary things is what the level of the River Rhine is.
So they need to know at any given time, are we predicting that we’re entering a drought phase or we might need to get our Commodity and product off the river and into a different method? Or are they predicting that it’s going to be really high level and we might need to move otherwise? Or is it an okay year and we can go? And what are the investment strategies? What are the costs and benefits? How do we do that?
Ross Kenyon: That sounds useful to me. I could see where you would fit into that. Are you not happy with your contribution?
Sarah Tuneberg: No, I’m really happy with the contribution. That example was not my most simple one. Sometimes I think as a founder, it’s interesting that you get really excited about conversations and then you share that story maybe before it’s ready. Sort of like half-baked, like, oh, I’m so excited. This is such an interesting one. Maybe it’s not the most simple, but that’s okay. We’re going to go with it.
Ross Kenyon: I thought that was good. Do you want to give your simple one too?
Sarah Tuneberg: No.
Ross Kenyon: No?
Sarah Tuneberg: No.
Christophe Jospe: I thought it was good. Well, you also give another one on TEDx presentation, which we should certainly link in the show notes. And everyone should watch that. Get your numbers up there.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes, please.
Christophe Jospe: I think you’re talking about Houston.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes.
Christophe Jospe: And the development in Houston in flood prone areas. And it’s like, man, this was a short term decision to make a quick buck for the developers. But if you really crunch the numbers, you’re like, you’re gonna get flooded sometime.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes. You are going to be flooded many times, likely. And it’s interesting in the United States and in lots of parts of the world, flood risk is subsidized heavily by the taxpayer. So we think lots of times, oh, it’s their fault. Oh, it’s their responsibility. But the insurer of last resort is always the people. And so we enable a really fundamental inequity in the way we do things around natural hazards in the U. S. , which is We allow developers to develop property in really risky areas. And we say, it’s okay.
It’s for economic development. It’ll probably be okay. And then we allow people to move in. And then when they lose everything, we end up having to pay, whether it’s through – which we can talk about in another conversation if we should or shouldn’t, but I think we should help people – But maybe we should also help them make better choices, not the individuals, help the developers make better choices about where we build.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s a super important point and one that people often don’t see. It’s sort of invisible. A book that I would recommend that I really liked, and we’d like to have them on the podcast too by Dr. Matthew Kahn at USC.com. I read a book called Climatopolis and it’s basically applying microeconomic theory and how prices communicate very important information. But if you limit how prices can move, that information is not being communicated. So if you artificially communicate. Recap the amount of premiums in flood-prone areas. More people will live there than otherwise because it’s cheaper.
And then you have to pick up the pieces later. But it probably wouldn’t have been as big of a problem if you just said, sure, you can live here. The government is not going to underwrite your insurance policy because it’s just too risky. And really, no one should be living here.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes, absolutely. And that’s such a fraught conversation to have partially because we have historic inequities that made those places worse. Quote, unquote, habitable to begin with, like redlining and building affordable housing in high risk areas because the land was cheap. But it’s just challenging.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’d like to because normally when people think about risky areas and maybe this is a rhetorical approach that people take rather than the full story. And I’d like to hear more about what you just said. I think about rich people in beach communities because they definitely get a lot of the benefit to having these nice homes right on the beach out in the Hamptons or wherever people are.
Sarah Tuneberg: In North Carolina is where we see, coastal North Carolina is where we have some of the highest value repeat loss flooded properties. There’s, I think, somebody should quote me on this, not quote me, should come back with the data about this, which is, I think there’s a pier in somewhere in the Outer Banks of North Carolina that has been destroyed like 8 of 10 hurricane seasons and federal taxpayer funds rebuild it every time.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, it’s time to not have that pier probably destroyed. Okay. So then we’re associating flood risk and hurricane risk in these coastal communities with wealth, but you’re saying that there have been other policies that have encouraged higher risk communities or marginalized communities to also live in these areas too?
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: How’s that work? It’s new to me.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah, absolutely. So you see areas, again, lots of times in coastal communities. So New Orleans is a really great example of this. The Lower Ninth Ward was unknown flood hazard. We, the government, we Knew the way that the levees and the dams and the dykes were constructed in and around lower New Orleans, that area was highly vulnerable to flooding. And we saw that happened. And we see that all across the United States, that the areas where... So another great example is the Far Rockaways in New York City. Out in Queens, in the middle of the century, we started building affordable housing, also some Aged housing and I think some in the 80s after we changed the way we help people with mental health issues, some other sort of structured housing, but nobody, it was sort of a not in my backyard approach.
And so the place where government and developers developing sort of low income and also less desirable housing, the only place they could get land was way, way out of town, In a highly vulnerable natural hazard area. So on a marshland.
Ross Kenyon: This is Brooklyn, not Queens, right? No. Far Rockaway?
Sarah Tuneberg: Far Rockaways is in Queens.
Ross Kenyon: Isn’t it like down by JK? Queens does this weird like wraparound. Okay. Okay. So, okay. I’m mistaken.
Sarah Tuneberg: So you have this area out on the Far Rockaways. So really detached from community, further isolating people who need resources. And they were the people that when Hurricane Sandy came just absolutely got hammered. Not that other places didn’t, but they really did.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So that community is right on the coast, right? It’s like that narrow little piece of land.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Which seemed like it would be desirable were it not so risky. So this is land that would not have been developed by the wealthy. This is like a bedroom community potentially. For people commuting into Manhattan, but it’s just too risky to build it. But the government isn’t subject to those same sort of mechanisms for allocating risk and determining because they’re just insuring themselves. It’s not like a private developer. So they said this is high risk, but we don’t really mind.
Sarah Tuneberg: And it was at the time very low cost because there was no transit. So it’s very disconnected, very isolated. And it also lacked a lot of resources. I also think there’s a whole book about this. I also think it was formerly a dump. Also potentially contaminated land.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. What’s the book? I’m curious about this.
Sarah Tuneberg: I don’t remember. Just tell us later.
Ross Kenyon: We’ll put it in the show notes if you’re curious about this because this is part of the story I don’t know as much about. Well, you kind of already answered some of those questions that I lined up for you and you said it before we even primed you, which is how does government sometimes limit prices in a way that distorts information and causes bad decision making? And it sounds like this is at least partially your bread and butter.
Sarah Tuneberg: Absolutely. And I think one of the places we do it most often is through flood insurance. Flood insurance is the strangest of insurance products in the United States. So it’s only available through the federal government. You are required to buy it in certain limited circumstances. If you live within a particular flood zone, you have to buy it. But there aren’t any real incentives to encourage people not to live in those areas. And once people live in them, flood insurance can be ratcheted up to the point where it’s unaffordable, but there’s no incentive to help people leave, so then they’re uninsured and then they flood.
And then FEMA comes in and gives them aid. But FEMA is the administrator of the flood insurance policy.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like a welfare trap for insurance. Yeah. This is funny to me, too, because it’s bipartisan or transpartisan. I’ve heard conservatives and libertarians complaining about flood insurance forever. Yeah. I don’t really hear progressives talk about it as much, but I also hear people both left and right also support it because there’s sort of this natural empathic, we have to help people who are already in this situation. And you’re like, well, yes, you don’t want to just abandon people, but also like we don’t want to artificially encourage more of this behavior to continue.
So you have to break the cycle and help people. I don’t know what you do with it because I can see reasons for it to be supported and rejected from both sides for both of those issues.
Sarah Tuneberg: I think it’s an interesting one and I wish we would – I wish this would have been discussed in the climate roundtables and I wish we had a climate debate in the presidential election. But I think in a similar way we talk about health insurance and having to make real deep sort of investments in change to ensure people have the coverage they need to be healthy. And live in our world. We have to have similar sort of really hard risk-based conversations. We have to use the evidence. We have to use the data.
And sometimes it’s going to be really tough. I think One of the things we see in this back to this idea of government not taking real action on climate is that people are going to make their own choices. And what we’re going to see, I anticipate, is that at some point we’ll have a threshold where people can’t handle the losses themselves. They can’t get insurance. It’s not going to be affordable. And then they’re going to have to make other choices. And I think one of the places that we see this and it’s really interesting is hail coverage.
Boring, hazard, we all sort of – it’s like a nuisance hazard, it’s no big deal. But it turns out that this is one of the most sort of early and aggressive problems we’re having as it’s related from climate change to natural hazards. Unprecedented numbers of hailstorms and they are far more severe than anything we’ve ever seen before. So a couple of years ago in Colorado, we had I think a $3 billion loss single event hailstorm. And then we had another one and another one. And we’re seeing this all across the world.
And I was hail in places that literally it’s never hailed before. Hail is incredibly destructive. It usually doesn’t kill anybody, luckily. But it destroys people’s things that are insured and then insurers have to replace them. And we’re seeing in particular neighborhoods in Colorado that people are paying 10x hail premiums. And I was in a conversation recently, a closed-door insurance conversation, where very straightforwardly insurance executives were saying hail coverage for homes and automobiles is likely to become unavailable Within 24 to 36 months.
Ross Kenyon: They were like, oh, hell no.
Sarah Tuneberg: Exactly.
Ross Kenyon: I was going to make a joke about the pharaoh and the plagues, but yours is better.
Sarah Tuneberg: I like the pharaohs when it’s coming. The first plague of climate. Hide your first born. We’re not there yet. Blood. I don’t know. We got a lot. Darkness.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. The river’s turning red. Blood.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That one doesn’t seem like a natural climate risk. I mean, one thing that we think a lot about because...
Sarah Tuneberg: I don’t know. Sorry. Red tie is a thing and it’s disgusting and it’s happening.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. That’s what the Bible’s talking about.
Sarah Tuneberg: Maybe. I think maybe we should start... This sounds like a great podcast, which is the plagues of climate change and what their analogs are.
Christophe Jospe: Theologians get at us. Yeah. We’re coming for you, theologians.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve been We’ve been trying to do more religious podcasts, too. And I think the time has come. We like doing them. We would like to do more. But yeah, that’s a great hook, though. I’ll steal it. I’m going to take credit for it. Let’s do it.
Sarah Tuneberg: Do it. I want to talk about the darkness one. If you have this, this is a fascinating theological argument about what darkness meant and why it was so bad. We have totally gone off track.
Ross Kenyon: But anyway, I’m kind of curious.
Sarah Tuneberg: Jonathan Safran Foer wrote an incredible piece. He wrote his own Haggadah, which is the document that we read, the holy documents that we read at Passover, Jewish people, me being one of them, and the plague of darkness. He spends a lot of time talking about what it actually means. So if you’re interested in it, read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Haggadah. It’s exceptional.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, my next Seder. That’s what I’m going to be doing.
Sarah Tuneberg: Do it. It’s worth it.
Ross Kenyon: Climate Change Seder. I’m thoroughly a Gentile, but I’ve been to a couple of Seders.
Sarah Tuneberg: Because they’re magical. They’re wonderful.
Ross Kenyon: I really enjoy them, actually. Great food. Good story. Hide the Kofa or whatever. The kids go run off.
Christophe Jospe: Afikomen. Afikomen. There you go. I mean, we were talking to a farmer last month and he lost his entire crop from hail. And so this is something that is very serious and very real and is only going to get worse. And you started talking a little bit about it, of how climate risk is changing the insurance industry, where they’re just like, we’re not going to cover this. But what other sort of forces or trends are you seeing shifting in the insurance industry as a result of climate change?
Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah. So it’s really interesting. I didn’t know a whole lot about insurance. I’ve had a rapid, deep immersion in learning a lot about the market and the business. And one of the things I think we don’t all think about is we think insurance, their business is The policy premium they charge us and theoretically they make enough money to cover it and pay it back. But what it really is they’re large investment companies and they have huge amounts of money invested in the markets and it’s the return on that money that allows them to cover things.
And one of the risks insurance companies face along with every pension manager, every 401k manager, every financial fund Is the risk of stranded assets. And I would imagine you’ve talked about stranded assets here, but this is this idea of primarily fossil fuel oriented companies count what is currently in the ground as something that they will capitalize on and it will contribute to our economy. As we decarbonize and as we see things change. Those assets will not be taken out of the ground, hopefully. And there is huge risk to that because we are counting on that future earnings.
And insurance companies are similarly counting on that. And their revenue projections and their models about how they handle things are dependent on that revenue recognized. But we’re never going to do it. Interestingly, I was at a meeting. There was a Climate Action Week in London earlier this year. And it was an incredible experience because in an environment in the United States where I previously never used the words climate change because I was afraid it would hurt my business – Climate change was such a foregone conclusion. It was such like, yeah, it’s happening.
It’s here. It’s not even negotiable. What are we going to do about it and what are the risks? And we have very clear data about it, what the risks are. And one of the things somebody gave a presentation on from the Bank of England was about this idea of a global policy tipping point that eventually things will become so severe in the environment, natural hazards will be so severe that governments will take action and very, very quickly they could Just create legislation and requirements that mean that we never extract any more CO2 generating products from the earth, whether that’s oil or gas.
Cool. And that the cost to the economy in what could be as little as 24 months is many trillions of dollars of losses. And it was essentially like we’ll all just lose everything overnight if we don’t do something quickly. And the insurance companies are motivated not just to protect their losses as it relates to hail and wildfire and flooding, but also to avoid losing everything in the financial markets.
Ross Kenyon: Cataclysmic. That is not good. That’s bad. Insightful commentary from yours truly. One of the memes I saw recently was if someone mispronounces a word, don’t make fun of them because they learned it through reading. So force majeure.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes, force majeure.
Ross Kenyon: Force majeure. It’s like act of God, right? And so when you write a contract, you’ll say this contract can be breached without fault by either party. If there’s sort of like an act of God, just unpredictable chaos that reigns and disrupts the... Is that going to change with climate change? Will this take on a greater significance? Will there be litigation in contract law? How might that work?
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes. Yes. 100% yes. I think one of the things that’s interesting back to an earlier question is, yes, natural hazards have been happening forever. Hurricane, it’s an act of God. But there are factors at play that whatever your faith tradition drive the consequences to human action. We know now that we might have hurricanes and we might have once considered them a force majeure. It might have been an act of God once, but now as we are populating coastal properties and coastal communities, we know better. We know there are going to be consequences.
So what do we do about that? And so things, as we have better data and as we accept things around how climate changes, It’s absolutely going to happen. I know there are initial test cases happening and it’s an interesting place to watch and an interesting place to see what’s going to happen.
Ross Kenyon: That would be a good future podcast episode too. Yes. You have to let us know if there’s someone that we got to have on to do this.
Sarah Tuneberg: I would say that there’s London teams who are really working on these. They’re leading the legislation. I will connect you with some of those people.
Christophe Jospe: Great. Thank you. I love those British podcasts. We always drink tea on them. Okay. Serious question. In your TEDx, you were talking about sort of risk mitigation in terms of getting venture capitalist returns because a little bit of investment will save you a whole lot of money. But if this is the case, why isn’t this happening a whole lot more?
Sarah Tuneberg: It’s not sexy, period. We have a human nature to respond in a fight or flight mechanism to exactly what’s in front of us. And thinking ahead and investing our money in the long-term upside is hard. It doesn’t come naturally. And the example I gave in my TEDx talk is really simple strategies like moving the electrical and HVAC systems, that’s heating and air conditioning systems, Out of the basements of commercial buildings and putting them higher is like a revolutionary idea. It seems so simple because when then it floods, they don’t get flooded out and the elevators still work and all of these things.
We almost never do it. And it’s because it doesn’t feel important or like the number one priority. I think it’s a really interesting commentary that – LEAD, which is the, I don’t know what it stands for, the leading evaluation and marker of having a sustainable building doesn’t take into account very many disaster, if any, disaster resilience strategies. You don’t get extra lead points by ensuring you’re flood resilient. And that’s bananas to me. And I think this idea of separating sustainability and being green From being disaster or hazard resilient is a huge flaw in the way we’re doing things.
And we need to put those together to have a holistic, sustainable future.
Christophe Jospe: That makes a lot of sense. And LEED is leadership in energy and environmental design.
Sarah Tuneberg: Right. So this is this idea of reducing carbon emissions, greenhouse gas emissions is huge and absolutely crucial to our future. But we also have to deal with being resilient to the consequences we’re already seeing. And separating those things is leading us down a dangerous path. To your question again, though, about why don’t we invest in mitigation, it’s September 11th today when we’re recording this. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last 48 hours about how we came together as a country and took action and how we spent money in response and why don’t we do that on climate change.
Why are we not gelling? And what could we do if we took that sort of deep sense of pride and community and action? And how amazing could it be if we had done some of, for good, what we did in the days after 9-11? It would be interesting. I’m reflecting deeply on it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s one of the potential benefits to the Green New Deal, which some of the things they suggest sound good. Some of them sound like a waste of money. Some of them are probably in between. But one thing I do like is that having a moral mission as a large national community may be a good thing.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah, absolutely.
Ross Kenyon: I think when we don’t have it and things are too good for a while, I think we end up just tearing each other apart. So like I might end up cutting this too, but I was in Sarajevo years ago and I was hanging out with these two master’s students who worked at the UN and they were like very well-heeled, educated people. And they missed the days of Tito when it was Yugoslavia and it was United. So like all of those Balkan countries were all together. And they miss it. They’re like, we need an external enemy.
If we don’t have one, we’re just going to kill each other instead. And so that was like the first time I heard someone earnestly yearn for a dictator. That was a first. But also I think that broader point is true.
Sarah Tuneberg: We joke at Geospiza and then also in my family that what we really need to solve climate change is aliens. That if we could just have aliens. Some more UFOs, hopefully harmless. Nothing would bring the globe together faster than an external enemy. If we could all feel like we were humans and they were someone else, we would probably take action on climate because we really dig our planet, especially when faced with somebody who wants to take it from us. This is not unlike the mitigation discussion, which is something ever present feeling really scary we’ll do something about, but 10 years from now, that might save me a million dollars.
I don’t know. I’ll maybe take the risk.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. The in-group, out-group dynamic is, I think for humans, it’s the most stimulating thing you can do. We do it naturally. There’s also, this is a little obscure of a reference too. There’s a South Park I saw years and years ago where in the future, the kids are complaining about religion at the beginning of the episode and they’re looking forward to a time when it’s only atheism, but all the atheists have divided up into camps of which types of atheists they are and they’re all killing each other over it. It’s just...
It’s our most fun activity. Humans love it.
Sarah Tuneberg: Terrible. Aliens would probably work is what I’m trying to say.
Unknown speaker: Climate change.
Christophe Jospe: But I mean, to go back to your 9-11 comment, 9-11 was very clearly the United States getting punched in the face and we felt it and we came together. Climate change, abstractly, we can see that we’re getting punched in the face, but actually like the impacts that we’re experiencing are the CO2 concentrations of 20 years ago. We don’t even know how bad 412 parts per million, which is where we’re sitting at today, really feels.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes.
Christophe Jospe: But the science is there that we know it’s going to be bad. So it’s kind of like, what’s that shock? Whether it’s aliens or some other force majeure, it’s almost like your thesis is we need a shock to come together.
Sarah Tuneberg: That is depressing. Yes. Oh, goodness. I want that not to be. I want the shock to be children’s climate protests. I want us to not need that, but maybe we will. And to me, the heartbreaking... The most heartbreaking part about that is that the shock and the punch to the face is going to come to the people who have the least resources to absorb it and come back from it. And I think we saw this in the cyclonic activity in Africa this year, that unprecedented tropical cyclone destroying the Communities in Africa or in the Bahamas just now with Hurricane Dorian.
These are communities that have the least resources to come back and they’re the ones who are going to bear the brunt. And they also realized the least amount of gains from the activity of putting all of this carbon in the atmosphere. They’re not the wealthy executives who are continuing to do it. And it’s breaking my heart.
Christophe Jospe: All right. Well, I have one more sort of depressing question. But on your TEDx, you said we shouldn’t call them natural disasters. We should call them human disasters.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yes.
Christophe Jospe: Why is that?
Sarah Tuneberg: Because it’s human decisions that make it so that they are truly a disaster. The hazard will happen. As you said at the top of this, hurricanes happen. Earthquakes happen. Rivers overtop their banks. It happens. The disaster comes when humans are injured, become killed. The disaster happens.
Ross Kenyon: Ultimate passive voice right there. Yeah, so weird.
Sarah Tuneberg: When humans die or animals die, when people lose everything, when people become displaced and have to move across huge places and change and disrupt their entire lives, that is the disaster. And that is not natural. We have made choices as human beings that And we continue to make choices that put people in the path of natural hazards. So we can talk about hazards all day long, but the disaster is the human part and we need to separate those and be clear about what we’re saying. I believe that calling them natural disasters and saying their acts of God and saying it’s force majeure and saying all of this removes our human responsibility.
It makes it feel like it’s totally out of our control. It’s totally not our responsibility, but it is our responsibility. We can and should and we know how to do things about it. It looks like taking steps to reduce CO2 emissions. Looks like not building in areas we know will flood. We know all of this. It means building earthquake resistant structures, which are so clear about how we do that. The evidence and the engineering research is remarkable. Same thing on wildland fire. We know how to build houses that survive wildfire.
If you’re going to live in an area that is dry and surrounded by trees, build a house that will survive. You can do it. We know how.
Christophe Jospe: I just had an image of like a bunker and with a swimming pool on top.
Unknown speaker: Yeah, I was also deep in thought. Stone? Stone home?
Sarah Tuneberg: No, really simple strategies. It involves landscaping decisions. So lots of making sure there’s not trees close to your house. Also, the vast majority of wildfires, the damage comes from sparks and embers that flow ahead of the flames. And so sealing off your So having impervious landscaping or hardscaping around your house and making it so that your house can’t catch on fire from the inside, that’s how you do it. And I am not going to quote this exactly, but I think – Building a wildfire resistant, highly wildfire resistant new construction only increases the cost something like between 8% and 11%, which is not nothing, but it is way less expensive than rebuilding that house again, which we do all the time.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, thanks so much for being here.
Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah, absolutely.
Ross Kenyon: That was fun.
Sarah Tuneberg: Thanks for tolerating a strange and winding conversation about plagues and No, that was fun. Acts of God and Force Majeure.
Christophe Jospe: I liked it. There’s more to do too. So if someone wanted to find out more about your work or climate risk in general, what should they do?
Sarah Tuneberg: They should go to geospiza.us. As a side note, geospiza are the species of bird that Darwin studied to develop his theory of evolution. And we think of ourselves as helping our customers adapt to a rapidly changing climate. So come to GeoSpisa. Reach out to me on Twitter. I’m at Sarah Toonberg. That will be listed below. I love talking about all of this. And I look forward to learning more from everybody in the audience.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Thank you. That was a very fun one. If you like the podcast, you like what we’re doing here, please rate and review us in iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher. Stitcher is the one that you should do. Tell your friends, help us make carbon removal and climate change more of what people are talking about. I think it’s really important and we hope you feel the same. So thank you so much.
