Communication is a Climate Solution: How Taylor Swift Can Level Up Your Storytelling

Joseph Romm holds a PhD in physics from MIT and has authored countless articles and 10 books in the areas of climate change, clean energy, and communications. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the UPenn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, where he has authored several research papers, most recently “Shrinkflation: Why new nuclear plants raise electricity rates, and smaller reactors (SMRs) would be worse, especially for AI.” In the 1990s, Romm spent 5 years working on climate solutions at the US Department of Energy, the first two helping the Deputy Secretary oversee all of DOE’s energy programs, including nuclear energy. Then he helped to run the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy ultimately serving as Acting Assistant Secretary, where he oversaw $1 billion in R&D and demonstration of low-carbon technologies. This included renewables, building efficiency, industrial decarbonization, energy storage, hydrogen, and electric cars.  In 2009, Rolling Stone named him one of 100 “people who are reinventing America,” and Time named him “Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.” Romm was Chief Science Advisor for the Emmy-winning docuseries “Years of Living Dangerously.” His Oxford University Press book was called “the best single-source primer on the state of climate change” by New York Magazine. His podcast, with his daughter Toni, “Decoding Taylor Swift: A Storytelling Revolution,” uses Swift’s lyrics to teach the secrets of viral storytelling.