In this episode of the Sustainability Skill Set podcast, host Louis DeMaso sits down with Michael Jung, the Executive Director of the ICF Climate Center. During the conversation, Michael provides valuable insights into the groundbreaking work of the ICF Climate Center, including their recent report on “super” solutions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. He emphasizes the importance of these solutions, combined with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), in helping the country reach its net-zero goals by 2050.
Some key takeaways from this episode are:
- In order to achieve the U.S. net-zero goals by 2050, several key strategies need to be implemented. These include increasing the adoption of electric vehicles, focusing on energy-efficient buildings, transitioning power generation to cleaner energy sources, and exploring the utilization of “green molecules” like hydrogen and renewable natural gas.
- Asking good questions is a powerful tool for driving progress and sparking innovation. By leveraging the potential of questioning, individuals and organizations can challenge the status quo, foster transparency, and promote sustainability throughout supply chains.
- “Showing up” with curiosity, a willingness to volunteer, and a focus on building genuine relationships are crucial elements in accelerating one’s career in the sustainability field. Actively seeking opportunities, embracing learning in unexpected places, and nurturing authentic connections can lead to personal growth, support, and new opportunities.
Tune in to this episode to gain actionable insights and inspiring stories that can further your career and make a positive impact in the field of sustainability.
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Read the Transcript
[00:00:00] Introduction
[00:00:00] Louis DeMaso: Hello and welcome to the Sustainability Skill Set podcast, a show where we explore careers in sustainability and the skills to help you succeed. I’m glad you’re here. If you are passionate about sustainability and hungry to learn, you’re in the right place.
I’m your host, Louis DeMaso, a sustainability consultant and young sustainability professional learning right along with you.
In this episode, I had the privilege of speaking with Michael Jung, the executive director of the ICF Climate Center. Their research Institute models climate solutions and publishes impactful work that helps us understand the path to net zero.
Michael and I discussed their recent report on the three critical solutions to climate change, including increasing electric vehicle adoption, improving the energy efficiency of buildings, and transitioning our electricity supply to renewable sources.
He described the inspiring work of the ICF Climate Center and dove into his role leading it. He shared some great career tips around, showing up with curiosity and a willingness to learn, building genuine relationships and the best way to approach mentorships.
I found a story he shared about boarding a past employers private jets, just to get FaceTime with their executives, particularly entertaining. It demonstrates how his entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to put himself out there has led to success.
Finally, he highlighted that we will need people in all industries, with all skill sets, to achieve the major overhauls to our economy needed for reaching our net zero goals. This is great news if you’re interested in a sustainability career. We need you and your expertise, whatever that may be.
If you are wondering where your current skills might transfer to a sustainability career, look for where climate change will intersect with and impact your industry.
I hope you enjoy this episode and get something useful from it. If you do, I would love to hear from you.
[00:01:38] Michael Jung: Louis, it’s nice to sit down or, uh, I guess we are both sitting down. Nice to, uh, to see each other face to face over a camera.
[00:01:44] Louis DeMaso: Yes, it’s super nice to, uh, to sit down with you and I’m really excited about our discussion
[00:01:50] Michael Jung: You know, it sounds nice to say sit down together, but probably more accurate to say like we’re sitting down simultaneously. Uh,
[00:01:57] Louis DeMaso: While looking at each other over zoom. It’s a, it’s, it’s always a pleasure to have these kinds of video calls. So, um, thanks so much for your time and we’re excited to dive in.
[00:02:07] The Origin Story of ICF Climate Center
[00:02:07] Louis DeMaso: So I was curious to hear a bit more about the ICF climate center that you are a founder and executive director of, and the kind of work that they’re doing.
[00:02:16] Michael Jung: Yeah. Um, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a funny story, uh, which I, uh, I hope you don’t mind me sharing, which is that. Um, ICF, uh, is, um, actually one of the first, uh, opportunities, first job offers I ever got was gonna be to work with ICF, uh, to help, you know, get Energy Star up and running, uh, back in like the mid 1990s, late 1990s.
And, um, And I’ve been thinking about ICF ever since. Um, for those of you who don’t know, ICF, uh, ICF, um, is a consultancy. Uh, we’ve got about 9, 000 people across 80 offices or so around the world. Um, and, uh, I think that the, the, the beginning of ICF is very much relevant to understanding who ICF is and more importantly, why ICF exists.
Um, ICF was born in the late 1960s. Um, a couple of Defense Department analysts factoring like the whiz kid days of Robert McNamara and the JFK. Um, they got together. Um, and asked, you know, what is the biggest problem that we can do something about right now? And when they looked around them, uh, they saw inner city, Washington, D.C. really struggling. It was urban renewal. Mom and pop businesses were really kind of, you know, uh, swimming upstream and it was just a hard time. And so they said, you know what? Like, let’s, let’s do what we can to help these small businesses get through this. And led by, uh, their friend who was a world for World War Two, Ace Air Force pilot, one of the Tuskegee Airmen, a guy named Lucky Lester, uh, the “Tuskegee Airmen” was this all black Air Force squadron that, uh, Lucky Lester like 90 missions and never got shot down. That’s why he was called Lucky.
He was the first CEO of what they called the inner city fund. Today, we would call it social venture capital or social impact investing, but they started this fund to help small businesses in inner city D.C. get through it. And, um, and it turned out that capital really wasn’t the constraint.
It was the consulting that they did that, you know, delivered the bigger benefit. And, uh, it made an impact. Um, and They happen to be at the right time at the right place, just as the, uh, then what what became the Department of Energy, um, and, uh, and what became the Environmental Protection Agency. We’re both getting, uh, put together and so ICF was, you know, at that intersection of environment and energy from the very beginning of those agencies, and we’ve been doing that work ever since.
So, that’s kind of the origin of story for ICF. It’s kind of what drew me to ICF in the first place as like an opportunity. I had to turn it down because I would have had to move from Ohio, where my girlfriend was getting ready to start medical school, and move to D. C. to join, you know, the EPA and this ICF team that was going to start ENERGY STAR.
Um, and I knew that, uh, as soon as she figured out how much better she could do, uh, the jig would be up. So, uh, I made the hard call. I stuck around. It was the right call. Uh, she’s the mother of our three children, my wife. Um, but, uh, but I’ve been thinking about ICF ever since. And so it’s a real, you know, nice boomerang to become, uh, the executive director at this ICF Climate Center.
[00:05:26] The Role of ICF Climate Center
[00:05:26] Louis DeMaso: I know you were a policy director in Ohio for a while, but you were originally offered ICF and then only got around to leading ICF much later in your career.
[00:05:35] Michael Jung: Not leaving ICF. The climate center is like a think tank within the consultancy. Um, and so ICF as a consultancy. All of our work is client facing, um, clients come to us with questions that they don’t know how to answer themselves. We help them. We run the models. We build the tools through the analysis. Um, but the climate center as a think tank within the consultancy is designed to ask the questions that our clients aren’t yet asking us.
And to, um, rather than give a client a deliverable that’s, you know, their intellectual property under NDA, um, the climate center is public facing, not client facing. And so we turn around and give our thought leadership away for free. Um, I think of it in terms of the law of the river. I grew up in Kentucky and every summer my Boy Scout troop would go whitewater rafting in West Virginia.
Uh, and the law of the river says that if someone falls out of your raft, Your job is to bring them back into your raft, keep them safe. But the law of the river says if you see anyone swimming downstream, uh, you pull them into your raft, even if they weren’t in your raft. You pull them in, make sure they’re safe, and then figure it out.
And, uh, that’s kind of what the Climate Center is about. You know, we know that if our clients at ICF are the only ones who figure out how to do the energy transition and address the climate crisis, that’s not enough. We need to help everyone that we see swimming through the drink.
[00:06:49] Louis DeMaso: I love that mission. And you have so many great resources published online.
[00:06:53] How will the U.S. reach its net-zero goals by 2050? A recent ICF Climate Center report.
[00:06:53] Louis DeMaso: I was recently reading a report from the ICF Climate Center that was on super solutions for reducing our economy’s greenhouse gas emissions. And it was saying that those solutions in combination with the bipartisan infrastructure law And the Inflation Reduction Act could put the U. S. on a path towards reaching its net zero goals by 2050. Could you provide any additional context for this report and describe its importance?
[00:07:13] Michael Jung: Yeah. So, um, since, you know, for decades now, ICF has been doing a lot of the modeling that goes into, um, the energy policy that has guided the EPA and the DOE, um, uh, on under planning, um, you know, we run something called the integrated, you know, IPM integrated, uh, planning model, um, and several other models that are sort of the bread and butter, the anchor, uh, models for, you know, how we understand the energy, uh, that’s driving our economy.
Um, we wanted to understand because our clients, you know, they’ll ask us, like, how is this affecting me? Um, but we wanted to ask the question, how are these policies, how far down the road are these policies going to get us towards, um, the climate goals that our country has? Um, bigger question.
And so, uh, so we ran the numbers. We, you know, uh, aimed our models at this question and found that we were coming, we’re gonna come roughly halfway. Uh, we’re gonna come up, you know, and that’s a big, you know, big step forward, but it’s certainly not all the way across the line. And so we then modeled out, um, you know, what would it take?
What are the longest levers we can pull to get us to where we have set ourselves accountable to being ? And, um, and, um, you know, it’s not a surprise, but I think, um, directly, we understood this collectively, but we were the, you know, the first to really kind of quantify it, uh, with the level of detail that we did to say that, you know, it’s electric vehicles.
We know that’s a big part of the inflation Reduction Act. And, uh, you know, we know that’s what we need to do. Um, but we now know because of our modeling that we’re going to have to double down. We’re going to need, you know, 100 times more electric vehicles than are on the road today. We’re going to need that amount by 2050.
Uh, we 240 million of these, uh, by 2050. Um, and that’s a substantial increase. That’s 2. 5 times more what we model would have happened just under the BIL and IRA.
We also know that, you know, uh, building decarbonization. We’re going to have to deploy, you know, lots of heat pumps, lots of, uh, you know, rooftop, solar, et cetera.
Energy efficiency. Um, what we call measures. And, uh, we calculated it’s going to be over a billion measures that we’re going to have to deploy by 2050. It sounds insurmountable, perhaps, but we also model out that it’s going to be something in the order of 962 million measures will have taken place because of the BIL and IRA.
And so it’s a 15 percent increase, not, you know, a billion sounds like too much until you realize that you’re starting from 967 million.
[00:09:45] Louis DeMaso: Right. And the report gets into some actionable steps that can be taken to try to close that gap, right?
[00:09:51] Michael Jung: Yeah, so between EVs doubling down, um, uh, building decarbonization, uh, you know, kind of, you know, uh, keeping, keeping our eye on that ball. Um, and the last is clean energy where we know we have to essentially decarbonize the grid. Uh, that’s not a surprise. Um, but we, you know, model out pathways, um, within that ecosystem to get there.
And, we also calculate that, um, we’re going to have to start using more, uh, what we call green molecules. Uh, so this is like green hydrogen and renewable natural gas. We’re going to have to use more green molecules than, uh, fossil fuel molecules by 2050. Um, and that’s a big leap. That’s a huge change from, you know, what is sort of projected to happen under our models as business as usual under BIL and IRA.
So, clean energy has to overtake fossil energy. Uh, you know, that’s kind of the third leg of the stool.
[00:10:39] Louis DeMaso: Absolutely. Were there any particular solutions or aspects of those three prongs that you found interesting?
[00:10:47] Michael Jung: Yeah, you know, electric vehicles, um, you know, that’s something that’s very visible. So let’s talk about that for a second. Um, you know, there’s, as we all know, there’s lots of rebates and incentives out there that are put forth in the current legislation. But, uh, it’s not enough. Um, we’re going to have to make sure that the infrastructure behind it is there too.
You know, it doesn’t help anyone if there’s a charging station that gets built out, but there’s not the grid behind it that’s capable of supporting it. Um, it doesn’t help, you know, if you build the infrastructure. You know what? The field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. The grid doesn’t exactly work that way. You’ve got a plan.
And so we know we need battery and manufacturing capability. We need to act, you know, have access to the raw materials behind, you know, these kinds of, you know, uh, rare earth minerals. Um, we need processing capabilities. Um, you know, we’re gonna have to build this out. This is going to be kind of like a wartime level effort.
Um, in terms of EVs, in terms of building decarbonization, in terms of clean energy, both electrons and molecules, um, this is mobilization on a scale that I’ve not seen in my lifetime, um, I don’t know if many, hardly any people alive today, um, will have seen the kind of national scale mobilization of resources of tension, uh, of commitment that we’re gonna need to get there?
[00:12:03] Louis DeMaso: Well, it’s so exciting to be a part of, and your ICF Climate Center’s contribution to helping us get there seems significant, so I appreciate all the work you do and, um, and the interesting information that you guys put out into the world.
[00:12:17] Michael Jung: Well, you know, it’s one thing to know which direction to go in. It’s another thing to know how fast do we need to go? How far will we need to go? Uh, what’s the pace that’s gonna be necessary? We are a technical company, you know, in our DNA, you know, we are, uh, uh, uh, we are, we like to quantify things. Uh, we like to have, you know, a keen understanding of the details.
And uh, that’s the contribution that we try to bring.
[00:12:38] The importance of leading through persuasion and integrating sustainability directly into all functions of a business.
[00:12:38] Louis DeMaso: So what’s it like leading the ICF climate center?
[00:12:41] Michael Jung: Oh, gosh, Louis. Um, you know, my father used to tell me, you know, Mike, if you’re the smartest guy in the room, you’re in the wrong room. Um, working at ICF, um, I’m definitely in the right room. Uh, there are 9,000 people, all of whom are smarter than me. Um, deep, deep subject matter expertise. Um, but that’s not even the best part.
Uh, the best part of it is, is that ICF, which is a publicly traded for profit company, um, has all of the rigor, the discipline and the urgency that, you know, uh, a for profit entity has. But the people who work at ICF have all of the purpose and the passion and the mission that you might associate with like a non-profit.
Um, and so we’re kind of like the best of both worlds. These are, you know, I’m a Boy Scout as I mentioned earlier. Um, you have to leave the ground, the, the campsite cleaner than it was when you got there. Um, you know, the people working at ICF. You know, it’s, it’s just like I, you know, I shared the origin story.
We’re all asking, like, what is the biggest problem we can do something about right now? And a lot of us, not all of us, you know, ICF works, not just on energy and climate. We also do work in the realms of healthcare, refugee resettlement, criminal justice, um, you know, we’re just a bunch of do gooders, a bunch of boy scouts, proverbially, uh, all trying to make our difference.
[00:13:55] Louis DeMaso: Sounds like an exciting team to be a part of.
[00:13:57] Michael Jung: Oh, it’s great.
[00:13:58] Louis DeMaso: What, um, what, what does your job involve in the day to day?
[00:14:04] Michael Jung: The day to day. Um, so the climate center is. Um, we’re not the line of business. Um, we’re not really sort of like a, an entity within ICF. It’s more of an initiative. So a lot of the resources that I call upon are, you know, they’re all dotted lines. I don’t have, you know, command and control. I don’t have anyone who, you know, I can boss around because, uh, you know, they’re accountable to me.
I lead through persuasion. Um, I did outward bound when I was a kid. And, uh, the model that we used there was, you know, don’t lead from in front. Uh, don’t drag, you know, drag us down from behind, uh, be in the middle, lead from within. And, uh, and that’s the model that I use at ICF, um, you know, to inspire, uh, to engage, um, but I don’t have command and control.
That’s not what really gets the work done. I find.
[00:14:49] Louis DeMaso: That seems congruent with a lot of sustainability roles in big companies where, you know, there’s a sustainability department and potentially sustainability goals, but it might not be directly embedded with the operations departments that they’re tasked with influencing and trying to steer. So leading from a place of persuasion and communicating the value to each individual business unit becomes really important in that case.
Could you speak a little bit about to how you do that and any, any tips you might have for approaching that challenge?
[00:15:22] Michael Jung: Um, it’s a good question. I will clarify, Louis, that, um. You know, my role in the in the leading the climate center is one of generating thought leadership. Um, and, uh, and being public facing, you know, sort of the face of energy and climate work. Um, but I am, you know, there are other people besides me who lead our sustainability work.
You know, I see if we were the first, uh, sort of, uh, professional services firm in that category to become carbon neutral in 2006. Uh, so we’ve been doing it, you know, for far longer than most people have been thinking about it. Um, you know, we’ve been walking that walk. Uh, and so I would say, you know, the function that we have, uh, for, you know, doing, uh, the right thing, um, is embedded, uh, as opposed to, uh, you know, it is part of who we are and why we are.
Um, it is not this sort of off to the side thing. Um, I’ve been, you know, I began my career in the electric utility sector. Um, so I’ve been in a lot of entities, uh, since then that, you know, there’s like the sustainability office and it’s off to the side and then there’s everyone else who like keeps the lights on, keeps the machine running.
Um, that’s a tough model to, to, to affect change from within. Um, it requires the right personality, uh, the right charisma, um, you know, the right sort of relationships and those are not given. Uh, in fact, those are more of the exception than the rule I have found. Um, whereas, um, I think today what we are seeing in industry is, and I think part of it is owed to policy, um, is, um, uh, an internalization of these priorities into the business operations themselves, as opposed to a, um, you know, an ancillary sort of function, which I think, you know, you get, you can only get so far if it’s off to the side.
[00:17:01] Louis DeMaso: That’s so important is, is integrating those sustainability considerations into every aspect of the business, right?
[00:17:07] Michael Jung: You know, I tend to think of this as, you know, when we stop asking ourselves, like, how would we make this sustainable? If it becomes part of just how do we do anything? Um, then, you know, it’s built into the math. Uh, and that’s when it really gets done.
[00:17:23] Information is the most valuable currency. Asking good questions drives progress.
[00:17:23] Louis DeMaso: How do we do that?
[00:17:25] Michael Jung: I think we’re, I think we’re making steps. The, you know, an example that I’ll give is that, um, disclosure.
Uh, disclosure is what makes financial markets work. It’s a, you know, information is the, the, the currency, really, of financial markets. And so, as, um, information about the sustainability, um, you know, this, this, this pivotal moment in my career, I’ll give you as an example, was, um, I was working at American Electric Power and, uh, and AEP back in the day started receiving these shareholder resolutions.
Where, um, uh, some groups have figured out that they could use their rights as shareholders to ask questions, um, of, uh, of corporations. And at the time, AEP was the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the Western Hemisphere. We were the largest consumer of coal in the Americas. Um, and, uh, and, and some folks figured out if we own a few shares, you didn’t have to own a lot.
You can ask questions at these shareholder meetings. And the company has fiduciary responsibilities. And so, um, the first couple of questions were a little clumsy. Uh, you know, they didn’t go very far, but eventually they figured it out. And we’ve worked with these shareholders to say, yeah, that’s a good question.
What is the financial risks posed by AEP’s exposure to carbon policy and pricing? And you know, we formed a board subcommittee. They sat down with, you know, experts from across the country in so many different disciplines. I was fortunate to be staffed on that board subcommittee. So I was the fly on the wall, setting up these meetings and just taking notes, but I saw it happen in real time where these members of the boards of directors of this, you know, mega company, uh, these light bulbs started going off in their head.
They said, Whoa, this is a big deal. This is a risk. We have a fiduciary obligation as board members. To make sure that the company manages these risks in a way that is good for the shareholders. And so, you know, AP went from then being, you know, sort of the bad guy, if you will, uh, to committing to, you know, not building new coal plants, uh, to starting putting money into, you know, carbon capture research.
Um, we bought the first. Logging rights, uh, for, um, we bought up and retired logging rights in Bolivian rainforest as one of the early, uh, clean development mechanism projects, CDM projects under the Kyoto Protocol. Um, we joined a group of other utilities around the world and we started putting up wind turbines in the Galapagos Islands and hydropower in the kingdom of Bhutan.
Like, it went from like being, you know, sort of like, uh, uh, the Dark Knights to becoming the Boy Scouts. And, uh, and, and that was really fascinating to watch unfold.
[00:20:01] Louis DeMaso: That sounds amazing. And the, the act of asking questions sounds like it really drives interest in those topics, right?
[00:20:10] Michael Jung: Harnessing mechanisms like shareholder resolutions to ask different questions that have been asked before, um, you know, it was a novel application of an existing tool. Um, and we’re doing more and more of that today, um, you know, in different, different ways. Um, you know, the, the, the system is what it is, but we can use it for different ends by kind of reorienting its tools.
[00:20:30] Louis DeMaso: Yeah, it’s interesting how just highlighting and asking those questions can really drive interest in, um, in things that, that hadn’t been really considered before we’re
[00:20:39] Michael Jung: If you don’t ask, you don’t, you know, you don’t get the answer, if you don’t ask the question, right?
[00:20:42] Louis DeMaso: That’s right. Exactly. Yeah. It seems like in a lot of consumer packaged goods and food and agriculture supply chains, which is what I primarily interact with, a lot of sustainability work throughout the supply chain is being driven by the questions that are being asked by retailers and products.
[00:20:59] Michael Jung: Yeah, ultimately, hopefully, consumers even too.
[00:21:02] Louis DeMaso: Exactly! Driven by consumers, yeah. The consumers drive the retailers, the big box retailers to be considering this stuff and then needing information from their supply chain. And so they ask their supply chain. And even if the information is not available, which in many cases, you know, we’re still trying to get to that point of having that information available, just the, just the asks, just the questions that are passing down show that those, uh, those big customers are interested in this and it’s, it’s really noticeable and it drives sustainability progress.
[00:21:32] Michael Jung: I’ve got three kids, Louis, and I’ve enjoyed this kind of fun phase. I’m sure there’s like a module in their curriculum that you know that when they hit it, this is what it triggers when they come home and for like the first time ever, they go into the pantry actually read the nutrition labels on the food that we’re making for them.
And, uh, and, and, you know, they’re asking questions that they’d never thought about before. And then they’re like, wait a second. Why is there so much of this? Or are we getting enough of that? Um, you know, where does this recommended daily allowance come from? Wait, we’re only getting 15%. What else are we eating that gives us the other 85 percent of that?
And, there’s just like this light bulb that goes off in their heads in the same way that these light bulbs went off in these, you know, boards of directors member heads when I was staffing the subcommittee at AEP. Um, yeah, like you see these light bulbs go off and once you are aware of something, it’s really, you know, you never become unaware of that.
Like, once you, once you know what’s in your food or once you know what’s coming out of your, you know, smokestacks, um, you can’t not know about it.
[00:22:30] Louis DeMaso: Absolutely. And once those questions are asked, then it becomes a matter of how do we find answers, right? And the data there is, can be a big challenge. And I know…
[00:22:41] Michael Jung: And that’s where companies like ICF jump in, you know, we run them under, if we build the models, we help with the data.
[00:22:46] Louis DeMaso: That’s right. Have you, have you found that the, um, well, does the information that you collect then support companies in taking action on sustainability?
[00:22:57] Michael Jung: You know, we work with a lot of companies, um, but, uh, ICF is probably best known as being a government contractor. Uh, we help agencies, uh, federal agencies primarily, but we also have a Europe and Asia division that works with European governments and Asian governments, um, helping governments, uh, uh, to, to, to design policies, to implement policies, um, and, uh, and.
You know, going downstream from there, then, you know, private sector entities often have to comply with those policies or, you know, do what they’re, you know, they’re apart to meet those policies in their deployment. So, um, you know, when it comes to like, you know, program design implementation, um, you know, ICF is well known in government.
You know, contracting circles as being, you know, the folks who who get it right. Um, you know, we were in the room when energy star was created and and energy start today is probably the most visible and successful sort of, you know, efficiency program that folks are using every day. Um, you know, once you see an energy star label, uh, You notice when it’s not there, um, and you start to make choices.
You realize that, wait a second, you know, the upfront cost of a device is only part of the total cost of these devices. And, um, you know, that’s, that’s a labeling thing. That’s an information thing. That’s asking questions that hadn’t been asked before. And that’s, you know, ICF largely behind the scenes, uh, has been, you know, uh, sort of supporting that program since its inception.
[00:24:18] ALL skills and industries will be critical for decarbonizing our economy.
[00:24:18] Louis DeMaso: So, if somebody is wanting to work at or contribute to an organization like the ICF Climate Center, um, what kinds of skills are necessary for that and what kinds of work would they be doing?
[00:24:28] Michael Jung: Gosh, Louis there’s, you know, it’s almost like it’s more of a challenge to figure out, like, what is the skill that is NOT needed, um, to work in the energy transition and address the climate crisis?
[00:24:39] Louis DeMaso: And that’s good news for somebody who wants to transition in, right? Because that means that they probably have some kind of transferable skill, yeah?
[00:24:46] Michael Jung: I mean, like I said before, this is like a wartime level of mobilization that’s going to be necessary. Um, you know, this is like victory gardens and like all hands on deck, like, you know, buy a bond, wartime bonds, like everyone has to do their part. Rosie the Riveter, think of it, you know, at that level. Um, you know.
The obvious direction is, oh, I should be a climate scientist or I should be like an energy engineer or something like that. And those are predictable and certainly needed, you know, we’re going to have massive shortages in terms of electricians and HVAC installers and, you know, people who just kind of like, you know, put things together on the infrastructure side of things.
Um, but we’re also going to need storytellers and, um, and, and, and, and writers, um, and, and, and, you know, creative, uh, you know, uh, all manner of, of, of talent is going to be necessary. You know, climate affects healthcare, um, you know, uh, health systems are going to have to adapt, um, you know, education, um, you know, there’s, I can’t think of many fields where climate is not going to be on the, become a factor if it isn’t already.
[00:25:50] Louis DeMaso: What does somebody do with that though? What is, if, if they’re working in health, for instance, and they want to make climate a greater part of their career, do you have any thoughts for how they might go about doing that in a practical way?
[00:26:04] Michael Jung: Um, you know, the most immediate thought that comes to mind, Louis is, um, recognizing that, you know, this past summer, uh, is the first summer that many Americans came to understand that, uh, the climate crisis manifests itself as public health threats, uh, wildfire smoke, extreme heat. Um, those are public health emergencies, but they are climate crisis manifestations.
Um, and so if if you’re in public health, uh, you’re going to start to see, you know, cities and counties and governments start creating, you know, chief heat officer, uh, public health systems are going to need people who understand how to translate climate data. Into planning for public health systems. Um, you know, these are intersections that are we’re gonna, you know, cross more and more.
Um, unfortunately, but, you know, it means that there’s opportunity for good work to be done by people who can sort of speak multiple languages when it comes to the climate and health or climate and whatever.
[00:27:03] Louis DeMaso: So it sounds like in the search for where the opportunity is to, to integrate sustainability into your career, you might find it where climate change would impact your industry.
[00:27:16] Michael Jung: Yeah, climate adaptation and resilience. That’s going to be, you know, I mean, we crossed that line. Our world today is already, um, you know, uh, we’re having to change the way it is. Things work the way we live the way we work the way we get around because of climate change. Um, you know, America, you know, is going to rebuild itself essentially, you know, over the next couple of decades, all our infrastructure is going to have to be rebuilt.
Um, partly because it was, you know, just kind of reached its expiration date already in many cases, but also because the time when most of it was built, was not a time where climate change was showing up. It’s been said that, you know, the generations alive today are the first to experience the impacts of climate change and maybe the last to have an opportunity to really.
Effect how bad it gets. Um, our infrastructure is, you know, the first infrastructure to experience, you know, these impacts, but it’s also, um, whatever replaces it is going to be, you know, need to be built in a way that is resilient to the impacts that we know we’re coming down the road.
[00:28:19] Louis DeMaso: It’s a good time to update everything when everything coming, coming due for updating, right?
[00:28:24] Michael Jung: Well, I mean, you know, the sad thing is, is that are the folks who do modeling, not just at ICF, but everywhere around the world. A lot of it was right, right? You know, we kind of saw extreme heat. We kind of saw polar vortexes, you know, we saw these things coming. And, uh, and, and so, you know, by and large, we’ve kind of run the models and now have empirical data to say, yes, we pretty much The good news is, is that those guesses now empirical observations can guide how we build the next round of infrastructure and we can see around the corner better than we ever could before.
[00:29:05] Louis DeMaso: Well, the, the work that ICF Climate Center is doing to highlight some of those areas, um, will certainly be helpful in trying to design the future of infrastructure, right?
[00:29:15] Michael Jung: We do so much resilience planning for communities. Um, you know. Building their roads. What kind of materials? What sort of, you know, uh, designs, um, you know, building bridges, building, uh, you know, buildings, um, you know, heating and cooling systems. Uh, you know, you name it public health systems, even to, um, there’s so much climate resilience work that is underway.
Um, you know, even by taking place in places where people don’t necessarily agree on the causes of the climate, uh, they are in agreement that yes. Things are different now than they were before. I live in Portland, Oregon, and we had a heat dome a couple of years ago that got so hot that we had to, you know, curtail service on our light rail lines that serve, you know, the public transit kind of, you know, get people from A to B because the metal in the rails was not specked to operate at that temperature and was, it was, it was too soft.
It was bending out of shape. Um, you know, like no one ever imagined that Portland would have multiple days of 120 degree heat. It just wasn’t foreseeable, you know, a couple of decades ago when these things were built. Uh, but now we know what’s coming down the road because we’ve seen glimpses of it already.
[00:30:22] Michael Jung’s journey into climate work.
[00:30:22] Louis DeMaso: So, I would love to get into your story arc a little bit and hear about how you got to where you are today because it’s a, um, incredibly interesting position to be in and, um, I would love to hear about, kind of, what drove you to get into climate work in the first place and, and how you built up the skills and credibility to participate in something like the ICF Climate Center.
[00:30:43] Michael Jung: Well, I was born on planet Krypton and as it was exploding, my, um, I was born in Korea. Uh, and, uh, and I immigrated to the States when I was three. Um, as I mentioned before, Lewis, I’m a Boy Scout. Um, you know, growing up in Kentucky, uh, you know, you have access to a lot of fun mountains and gorges and valleys and caves.
So, uh, I’ve always loved the outdoors. And, um, uh, one day I was reading the newspaper in high school, I’m kind of a nerd that way. Um, and I noticed that the article in the top left hand corner of the front page of the paper that, that day. began with a sentence. One fifth of humanity was disappointed today when the International Olympic Committee, yeah, when the International Olympic Committee awarded the year 2000 games to Sydney instead of Beijing. And I was like, wow, one fifth of humanity. Like, I feel like I’m supposed to do something good in this world. I have no idea how to do it, but maybe if I do like a small thing for one fifth of humanity, that’ll add up and it’ll be, you know, a meaningful contribution. So I figured I should learn about China, uh, and so, uh, so I started taking Chinese language classes, you know, to, uh, you know, learn about history, uh, uh, you know, society, et cetera. I ended up majoring in East Asian Studies in college. Um, and, um, and I came, you know, I kind of I live by this 80 20 rule, which is, you know, right? Halloween’s right in the corner, right? So in my household, like 80 percent of the candy is eaten by 20 percent of my household, um, by five people.
[00:32:11] Louis DeMaso: That’s the 80 20 rule. Yeah.
[00:32:12] Michael Jung: You can guess who that 20 percent is… but, uh, but, you know, let’s look at China’s problems. Like what? What’s you know, what’s what’s the biggest problem that that China’s is wrestling with? And at the time, China was losing like seven to 9 percent of their GDP. Every year to environmental degradation, far and away, you know, the largest source of bleeding of capital in the country.
And I was like, wow, that seems like a problem. Maybe I can learn more about that. What’s causing that? And, you know, when you look at it through a couple different lenses, they all kind of start pointing back to energy, the extraction, the utilization, the externalities, energy. Energy causes a lot of environmental impacts.
It turns out not just in China, but everywhere. And so I thought, okay, let’s study Chinese energy. And if you look at energy, the biggest pieces of the pie, uh, you know, the 80, 80, 20 roll again, you know, 80 percent of it is. Transportation and power. And so I studied transportation in the People’s Republic of China.
I looked at five year plans for multiple decades. Um, and, uh, you know, spent an entire summer at Lawrence Berkeley lab pouring through Chinese state statistics books and came up with this production that China was going to become a net oil importer. And at the time that sounded ridiculous because China was a huge exporter at that time. but I looked at, you know, all the five year plans, all the road construction that they were, uh, putting together the provincial level, um, and started adding it all up and drawing out the lines and, you know, the lines crossed. And I was like, wow, they’re going to be an oil importer in decades. I was a little wrong.
It happened actually sooner than I projected. but I got, you know, a prize for that college thesis. and, uh, I felt like, okay, maybe I’m onto something.
[00:34:00] Louis DeMaso: Yeah.
[00:34:00] Michael Jung: Chinese state data is, like, super painful to work with. Um, you know, they just, you know, it’s just a lot of, like, manual labor, uh, crunching spreadsheets together.
It’s a painful process. And so I said, let’s learn about the other half of the equation, the power side. Um, but let’s not just do it in China, because power is pretty similar everywhere.
[00:34:22] Louis DeMaso: Mm
[00:34:23] Michael Jung: Basically, you boil water to make steam, and that steam runs a turbine. And, you know, every country, every place does it roughly the same way.
You can burn different things to make the turbine spin, or use different technologies to make the turbine spin. But that’s basically the same thing everywhere. So, uh, I got into the power sector. Uh, and, uh, and I spent a solid decade working in, uh, American Electric Power, uh, just kind of learning the ropes, cutting my teeth.
I’m not an engineer. I don’t even play one on TV, but I spent enough time with engineers to gain a really profound appreciation for what engineers do really well, as well as what are their blind spots as a discipline. And that led to an opportunity to go into public service. I worked for a gubernatorial campaign and administration in Ohio.
Um, got to write some policy that, uh, changed the landscape, took Ohio from sort of being a laggard to a leader when it came to state-level energy policy.
And, then I spent another decade in clean tech, where, uh, I was trying to disrupt from, you know, uh, another angle, uh, and that’s, uh, what I’ve been doing until I landed at ICF recently.
[00:35:29] Louis DeMaso: When you got into the energy industry, you described not being an engineer, what, um, what were you doing at that time that contributed to the energy, energy industry?
[00:35:40] Michael Jung: Um, I did a, I did, I spent a year in Korea, uh, um, after college, uh, to learn the language, to meet my relatives, uh, to deliver abroad. Um, and when I came back. Need the job. So I just sent out my resume everywhere. Um, my girlfriend, the one I mentioned before, um, was going to start medical school at Ohio State University.
She’s from Cleveland. And so I was like, okay, I should figure out how to be near her. Uh, and, um, I looked at, you know, what are the big employers in Columbus, Ohio, where the Ohio State University is, uh, is located. And, um, one of the big ones in the energy space. And, uh, American electric power happens to be headquartered there.
So I sent in a resume, uh, send a resume to all sorts of different companies, including ICF or EPA, as you know. And, um, I didn’t hear back for a long time, uh, from AEP. Um, in fact, as I, when I got this, uh, job offer from EPA, uh, uh, the one that would have me working with at ICF, um, I was like ready to accept it.
And then this letter kind of cryptic comes in from AEP. Saying, we’d like to invite you to come up to, uh, to our office, uh, to for an interview. And I thought, oh, well, you know, I should do that interview before I, you know, take this other job. But the funny thing is, is that, um, it had taken so long and, uh, and, and, and it didn’t really say anything about what the role would be, what the position would be.
I sent in this cold, you know, cold letter, and, and resume, like there was no position that I was applying for. It was just like, hi, can I work for you? And so, uh, so, um, I arrived, I was taking up this elevator. It was a long elevator ride. I remember, where I grew up in Kentucky, there aren’t many tall buildings.
And so, like, when you go to, like, the 20 something floor of a building, you notice, like, how long…
[00:37:27] Louis DeMaso: That’s an important building, right?
[00:37:29] Michael Jung: Yeah. And so, or a really slow elevator. Um, and so I get off the elevator, I’m led into, like, this gigantic office. Um, and there’s a fellow sitting behind a desk at, like, the far end of this office. So it’s, like, this really long walk to sit down in front of him.
And, uh, and he doesn’t like get it up to shake my hand or anything. There’s no warm welcome. He just kind of like sits there and watches me walk down, you know, towards his desk.
[00:37:54] Louis DeMaso: And you’re thinking, am I in the right place?
[00:37:55] Michael Jung: I felt like I was being sent to the principal’s office, Louis. I was like, am I in trouble? Like, you know, this doesn’t feel like I thought it would feel. And, uh, and he looks at me, he’s like, Michael John, he’s looking at my resume, but he looks at me, Michael, John, what are we going to do with you?
I’m like, Oh my God, I am in trouble. And he explains that. Um, apparently my resume had been bouncing around AEP. No one knew what to do with me. No one was ready to be the one that said no. And so I just kind of got like bounced from desk to desk to desk. And I finally ended up on this guy’s desk. Um, his name was Jim Markowski. Uh, he was the guy in charge, an executive vice president, uh, in charge of the fleet. All like 38, 000 megawatts of coal fired electricity at American Electric Power.
This massive generating fleet. And, uh, he said, Mike, no one knows what to do with you. You’re not like us. You’re not an engineer. You don’t have any particularly relevant skills, but, uh, no one wants to get rid of you. So that’s how it ended up on my desk.
[00:39:02] Louis DeMaso: Did they describe anything about what was the things that caught their eye that made them want to take a chance on you?
[00:39:10] Michael Jung: Well, the way Jim put it was, he’s like, Mike, I’m going to let you rotate through the departments in my control. I’m going to give you a year. If you have a job offer at the end of the year, welcome to AEP. If not, it’s been nice knowing you.
[00:39:27] Louis DeMaso: Sounds a bit like an internship.
[00:39:29] Michael Jung: It was like an internship, but like, um, also a bit of like, let’s throw this guy in the deep end and see if he can figure out how to swim. you know, it was intimidating. It really was.
[00:39:39] Career Tip: Take notes and don’t be afraid to ask questions! Be humble and learn.
[00:39:39] Michael Jung: I spent the first year, almost a year and a half, I think every single meeting I went into, I had this tiny little notepad and I would just jot down all the acronyms and initialisms and jargon that I did not know what.
I thought it was a foreign language. I’ve learned a lot of foreign languages. Learning utility was maybe the hardest foreign language I’ve ever had to learn. And, and it took like a year and a half before I would start consistently leaving meetings without having anything new written down.
[00:40:08] Louis DeMaso: I can completely relate to that. When I first joined the agriculture industry, it was the same. I actually carried a notebook with me. And was writing down all these things about tomatoes that I, like, had never thought about before, and it took me so long, but writing those things down and just documenting everything was so helpful, and I’m sure it was for you too.
[00:40:25] Michael Jung: You know, I had to buy textbooks to like teach myself like, you know, power economics, but I also had like a lot of times I just had to find people and ask them very humbly, almost embarrassingly like. Uh, you know, I heard someone say like, you know, uh, um, something and I wrote down the letters of what I thought it sounded like, but I don’t know if I got the letters right.
Can you, you know, like, well, you know, can you tell me if I got the letters right? And so I can look it up. Um, that’s how bad it was. But, um, that’s how you learn, you know, um,
you everything is hard until it’s easy. Everything is mysterious until you understand it.
[00:40:58] Louis DeMaso: It’s, it’s an incredible story of just humility and not being afraid to ask questions and jumping in and, um, and taking that opportunity to learn rather than become overwhelmed and shut down.
[00:41:12] Treat mentorships as real human relationships to get the most out of them.
[00:41:12] Michael Jung: You know, I was also afforded, um, uh, the privilege of having some, some really, you know, amazing mentors. People who were really good at things that I wasn’t good at, people who had patience for me being on the learning curve for a long time, but also people who understood that I was good at things that they maybe weren’t good at yet and had abilities that they were going to need in the coming years.
And so, um, you know, yeah, you know, mentors, um, played a huge role in my career and, uh, and, and, and it’s something that I still think about a lot as I have transitioned into becoming more of a mentor than the mentee. Um, and, uh, and, and, you know, that’s, that’s, uh, I think maybe as much work as I’ve done over my career on energy and climate, um, I, I’m starting to feel like the work that I’m doing in mentorship, uh, may, you know, be, uh, right up there in terms of the impact that I leave.
[00:42:03] Louis DeMaso: As somebody who is a mentor to mentees, um, do you have any tips for somebody who is either looking for a mentor or somebody who has a mentor and helping them get the most out of that experience.
[00:42:19] Michael Jung: Um, that’s a good question. Um, you know, I, in my experience, the relationships that I’ve gotten the most out of as a mentee, someone who’s been mentored, um, are ones where it’s really grounded in sort of a relationship, a human relationship, um, you know, Um, you can talk about stuff. That’s not necessarily work related.
Um, you know, whether you share an interest in like food, one of my mentors, like, you know, we like to, to, to, to eat like, uh, at this, um, Vietnamese place that was right up from the office. Um, a lot of people at the EP were like, not on board with Vietnamese food yet. It wasn’t really a thing, you know, back in the late 1990s so much, uh, but he liked it spicy and, uh, and, and I was right there with him.
And so, uh, so that’s where we would go. And, you know, we just like, that was a default thing that we could share. Um, and over a lot of different Vietnamese meals, you know, we came to find a lot more in common as well, but start with the human because, you know, if you don’t understand who someone is, uh, it’s, it’s hard to get a lot of, you know, ground covered in terms of what you can learn from each other.
[00:43:24] Louis DeMaso: Sounds like building that relationship from a place of humanity and just getting to know the person rather than approaching it as like a knowledge extraction exercise sounds important.
[00:43:36] Michael Jung: You know, I think it matters more now than ever before, because, you know, um, and I think it’s, you know, there’s something to be gained in terms of efficiency, um, and, uh, and productivity. Um, but there’s also something lost in terms of sort of the intangibles. Um, and I think that really shows up in that mentor mentee relationship.
[00:43:55] “Show up” with curiosity and a willingness to volunteer to achieve your highest level of contribution.
[00:43:55] Louis DeMaso: So you described the, um, the way you got into your career and we have the arc of you getting into policy, which is something that we could probably spend much more time than we have diving into. what would you say has been one of the common themes or biggest strengths as you’ve navigated your career and gotten to where you are today? This is going to sound like almost Mark Twain like. Show up. It’s, it’s, it sounds trivial. Um, but it, it’s, it’s kind of profound. Um, I, I had a summer internship when I was a college kid, um, I grew up in Kentucky, happened to have an oil company, Axiom Petroleum, uh, which, uh, sounds like a weird place to have an oil company.
[00:44:38] Michael Jung: I guess back in the second world war, the government found, uh, German subs prowling our coasts, uh, and they realized, oh my God, all of our oil refineries are on the coast. And so they propped up a couple of oil companies, uh, to refine oil inland. And so one of these companies, Ashland Petroleum, was, uh, located on the Ohio River.
Uh, so submarine German subs couldn’t, you know, blow up refineries on the Ohio River, they figured. So, I, you know, like every kid, uh, in Ashland, Kentucky, at some point, you get an internship at, uh, at, at the oil company. I spent a summer there, and, um, I was just, like, looking through the corporate directory one day, like, trying to find a department for something or other.
And I noticed there was an aviation department. I was like, oh, do we make aviation fuels? What is that? And I was just curious. I showed up. I called over and I said, Hey, I’d like to learn about the aviation department. And he said, Oh, great. Where are you flying to? I was like, Oh, I guess we like we operate aircraft.
Um, and, uh, and I said, I’m not sure where, what are the options? And they said, well, you know, here, the planes, uh, here’s the link to like the schedule for where the planes are going this week. And I learned that AEP, or, uh, uh, Ashland Petroleum, uh, had a terrible accident a long time ago where the CEO and the COO and the CFO, I think, were all on the same corporate jet.
And it went down. And it almost took the company under. Um, and so they instituted this rule, like, you know, you’re never going to have, like, you know, more than two C suite officers on a plane together. Um. The result of that role is you had ended up having like seven aircraft for this like relatively modest size, you know, oil company, but you know, like this aviation department, a small fleet of aircraft.
And the rule was, um, if you were an employee, you could what they call deadhead on the, on the flights. So if one of the executives was chartering the flight to, you know, take them to a conference in New York city, you could ride along and all you had to do was pay what the equivalent, the taxes would be on an equivalent commercial airfare.
So it’d be like 20 bucks.
[00:46:36] Louis DeMaso: And you get to spend an entire flight sitting in the plane with somebody who’s incredibly influential and knowledgeable.
[00:46:42] Michael Jung: You show up. And so I did this a couple of times, um, in the summer and like the first time, like, you know, the executive just like very, very intensely reads the newspaper and actively ignores you. Cause why would they talk to this kid?
Um, but eventually they relent. And they’re like, you know, what’s your name kid. By the end of the summer, I had like three or four job offers. Um, because I had shown up, I had shown up in a place where they, I had, they had not expected to see me. Uh, I’d shown up with. A curiosity, um, and a willingness, um, and, uh, and, you know, that that’s kind of half the battle. Um, a lot of the times, um, when AEP did this, uh, shareholder committee, uh, I mean, this board of resolutions, board of directors, uh, subcommittee to address the shareholder resolutions.
Um, I showed up, I said, someone needs to staff that, you know, I raised my hand even before anyone asked, are there any volunteers? Um, you know, uh, just. Yeah, showing up. That’s that’s been a lot of what I give myself credit for, um, in terms of, you know, having earned some of the opportunities that I’ve gotten is just because, you know, I’ve gone out of my way to show up
[00:47:56] Louis DeMaso: It seems like a consistent theme, both in the macro scale of the big opportunities that you’ve pursued, and also the micro scale of carrying a notebook around and, you know, Asking a question when it would, might, wouldn’t, it might be easier to ignore the question or just glaze over it and, you know, not embarrass, potentially embarrass yourself by, you know, looking like you don’t know something, but just taking, taking that opportunity to try to get the most out of a situation that you can.
[00:48:21] Michael Jung: at every turn. And, you know, I tell people, um, you know, sometimes people ask, Well, you know, what if you’re not invited? How do you still show up? Um, you know, when I was in graduate school, um, uh, I went to the Kennedy school. And so when, you know, notable people come to speak at Harvard University, they often speak at the Kennedy schools kind of campus.
Um, and, uh, I’m not, I’m just a grad student. I’m not going to get any face time with these, you know, prime ministers and heads of state and, you know, Nobel laureates and whatnot, but anyone can walk up to the microphone and ask the first question. And I learned that that’s almost as good as being on stage with them, because you plant a seed, you start a discussion, you can go up to them afterwards.
And now you have something to talk about. Other people come up to you, they’re like, hey, that’s an interesting question. And now you’ve got something to talk about with them. Uh, and all it took was standing up and going first.
[00:49:12] Louis DeMaso: That, that seems to me almost like a analogy to social media networking and kind of our modern age of technology. Now, just. starting conversations and putting information out there into the world, putting yourself out there and how that gives you the opportunity to connect with people and, um, and be seen.
[00:49:32] Michael Jung: You know, I mean, that that’s kind of how our conversation got started, right Louis?
[00:49:35] The Importance of Energy Transition in Sustainability
[00:49:35] Louis DeMaso: Yeah. Exactly. Well, with just our last few minutes here, I’d like to pull back way back out to how we started here with kind of the, um, the work that ICF does, the, the American economy. Um, one of the things that I like to ask all my guests who are involved in those kinds of things is, um, what are some of the most important steps we can take in business and society to accelerate our transition to a more sustainable world? And what types of professionals do you think will be most important to guide us there?
[00:50:04] Michael Jung: Um, I guess, you know, 80 20 rule. Um, the biggest pieces that we need to put in place, um, you know, I think of it, the climate crisis is kind of the big thing. Um, what can we do about the climate crisis from a mitigation perspective? Um, you know, it’s the energy transition by and large. Um, there’s a lot of stuff we can do in agriculture and land use and forestry and whatnot, but I would say energy is kind of the 80 percent chunk.
Thank you. Of that of that part of the mitigation solution, and then you go into the energy side, and I would say, if you’re going to take big swings at it, let’s swing with EVs and heat pumps. You know, that’s kind of the ones we need to hit home runs with. Um, if you’re looking at the resilient side of it, um, it’s it’s all about, you know, I would say the most important piece of resilience we need to focus on is utility sector resilience because we’re electrifying so much of the economy. We need to make darn sure that the electric grid infrastructure that we are placing a lot of eggs into 1 basket. Let’s make sure that basket holds up. Because the storms are coming, the heat is here, the cold is arriving, um, that grid needs to be more robust than ever before, at a time when that grid is 40, 50, 60 years old already, um, so we’re gonna have to rebuild it once, just to like, replace it, we’re gonna have to build another grid on top of it, to meet population growth, economic growth, we’re gonna have to build a third grid on top of that, to meet electrification load, and maybe a fourth or fifth grade if we’re going to start like extracting, you know, carbon out of the atmosphere, even, uh, we’re asking a lot of the grid.
And so, let’s make sure that that infrastructure is resilient. And then, above and beyond that, it’s, you know, roads, bridges, the physical infrastructure that is, uh, you know, underneath it all.
[00:51:47] Louis DeMaso: And so anyone, uh, looking to get into a sustainability career, uh, would be well suited to get into energy, something related to energy, um, and like you described, it doesn’t have to be an energy engineer, it can be anyone who contributes to an organization that’s working on that…
[00:52:04] Michael Jung: we’re going to have to finance it. We’re going to need to do stakeholder engagement on it. We’re going to have to write copy all about it. We’re going to have to do sales and marketing for the new pieces that we’re going to have to deploy. Uh, we’re going to have to insure it. We’re going to have to, uh, you know, underwrite and like there’s everything needs to get done.
[00:52:22] Louis DeMaso: Well, it’s encouraging for people who are in careers right now that might not be super sustainability focused, but, um, you know, it sounds to me like the main message is that any career can be sustainability focused. You just got find the intersection.
[00:52:34] Michael Jung: Climate affects everything and everything affects climate.
[00:52:37] Louis DeMaso: Yep. I love it. Well, thank you so much, Michael, for taking the time today to share some stories from your career, some insights that you’ve gained from the work that the ICF Climate Center does and generally sharing your experiences with us listeners.
[00:52:53] Michael Jung: Louis, I appreciate the opportunity. You know, you’re doing such important work, engaging folks in these kinds of conversations and sharing their stories because, um, everyone needs to become a part of this because, uh, you know, it’s going to affect all of us.
[00:53:05] Louis DeMaso: Any last thoughts that you’d like to share?
[00:53:08] Closing Remarks and the #OpenDoorClimate Initiative
[00:53:08] Michael Jung: Um, you know, the last thing I’ll share is, um, there’s a thing #opendoorclimate, uh, that, uh, on LinkedIn, uh, is sort of a way to indicate that, you know, you’re open to having these conversations. Uh, I, I’m on it. Um, I love talking with people. I love helping people become part of this work. As I mentioned before, perhaps my best legacy is if I can help inspire those who are going to pick up where my generation leaves off.
[00:53:31] Louis DeMaso: Search #opendoorclimate on LinkedIn or any other social media platform that you’re on. there is a large community of sustainability professionals there who would be willing to chat and help you out.
[00:53:41] Michael Jung: I’m glad we’re both a part of it, Louis.
[00:53:43] Louis DeMaso: All right. Well, thank you so much, Michael. Hope you have a nice evening and I’ll talk to you soon.
[00:53:46] Michael Jung: Thanks. Bye.
[00:53:48] Louis DeMaso: And for those listening, I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you’ll join us next time on the sustainability skillset podcast.