Climate Solutions Workshop
You are invited to participate in the Climate Solutions Workshop!
For most people, Climate Change is a scary mish-mash of ideas and headlines. This Workshop will help you sort it out, and hopefully take some of the scariness out of it. Plus we’ll offer ideas on how you can help.
En-ROADS
The heart of the Workshop is a comprehensive climate simulation computer program that originated at MIT. The program is called En-ROADS, for Energy Rapid Overview and Decision Support. The user interface is clean and simple, but under the hood is a powerful mathematical model of the earth’s climate system, including especially how it works with our energy consumption. The user interface looks like this:
For the bulk of the Workshop, we’ll test your ideas about how we can address climate change, and see what effect your favorite solutions have on the earth’s temperature by the end of the century.
I’ve done this dozens of times, and the participants always get very involved and excited…”try this”…”try that.” The participants typically come away from the Workshop much better informed and more hopeful, but also realistic.
The Workshop
The Workshop takes about 1 ½ hours. It works best live, face-to-face, but it also works ok on Zoom. It’s designed for 3-20 participants, although we can stretch that either way.
The Workshop has two main parts:
- The computer simulation, where you as participant suggest a range of climate change solutions, and we see what the impact is on the end-of-century temperature rise. Then we compare that result with the latest science, and with the commitments made by 196 countries at the International Climate Solutions Meetings in Paris (2015) and Glasgow (2021).
- Ideas for how you might make a difference. There’s no arm-twisting, just helping you think through what works for you. The ideas will range:
- Just talk about it with family and friends;
- Do things in your own life to reduce your family’s CO2 emissions;
- Get involved politically, help shape policy.
Spoiler alert: as the Workshop progresses, it gradually becomes apparent that
- There are no simple solutions, no “silver bullets”
- The way out of our crisis involves implementing many solutions
- The timing is becoming urgent, but…
- There is still plenty of reason for hope!
- Maybe best of all, the solutions not only eliminate Global Warming, they also improve our overall health and equity, and build the kind of world we actually want.
There is no charge for the Workshop.
En-ROADS: The Bigger Picture
En-ROADS was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It followed decades of ground-breaking work on large system modeling. It has been used extensively by policy-formation leaders: 36 US Senators and 86 US Representatives have participated, as have over 100,000 people in 71 countries. The program is updated monthly to include the latest science and the latest climate change data.
An organization called Climate Interactive has taken on the promotion of En-ROADS. I am one of about 400 volunteers trained by Climate Interactive worldwide. As of this writing, I have presented the Workshop 18 times in living rooms, high school classrooms, service clubs, and on Zoom.
If you’re interested, you can take an advanced peek at En-ROADS:
https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=22.7.0/
And here’s the link to Climate Interactive:
Who Am I?
I am John Lamy, and my wife Gail and I have lived in Jacksonville, Oregon, since 2005. Before that I was an engineering manager in Research and Development for a large Silicon Valley company. Since moving to Oregon, I’ve been a management consultant, helping small and mid-sized companies manage their operations.
I have an electrical engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Cornell University. Gail and I have a grown son living in Austin, Texas, and a strapping young grandson in high school.
We’ve been concerned about the Climate for decades now, and we’re doing what we can to help. I’ve discovered that I’m good at giving clear, simple explanations, and I’m very comfortable with the simulation software because I used it in my consulting practice.
Benefits of Participating
Why would you set aside 1½ hours of your valuable time for a Climate Solutions Workshop? Here are a few of the benefits:
- Clarity. We are so bombarded with scary factoids that it’s hard to keep straight what’s really going on. This Workshop will give you a framework to sort it all out and absorb new realities as they emerge.
- Hope. As I said above, this Workshop is indeed realistic. We need to do more, and quickly. BUT: there’s still time, and there’s a very credible pathway to turning it around. Once you see that it’s possible, you’ll feel a spark of hope. And, despite all the bad news out there, there’s also a ton of GOOD NEWS…we’ll share a few snippets.
- Action. If you’re inclined to help, we’ll talk about how to divide up your contributory time so it suits your lifestyle and still maximizes the effectiveness of what you’re doing.
From Here
If you think you might like to participate in the Workshop, give me a call or shoot me an email. We can work out a time and place, or plan to do it on Zoom. I truly hope you’ll give it a try!
541-778-2252
Thank you!