Climate Change In Boston: Reasons For A Pulitzer Winner's Warning

This interview has been transcribed using AI technology. While efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, the transcription may contain errors.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Futurist Society podcast, where as always we're talking in the present but talking about the future. I have really special guests today. We have the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and professor at Boston University, David Abel.

Thanks so much for joining us, David. 

My pleasure. Nice to be with you.

Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you because a lot of your focus is on environment, environmental technology, all the progress that's happening specifically in Massachusetts. Tell us from your perspective, what does the future look like from an environmental perspective in Massachusetts? What is it that you're worried about?

What is it that you're optimistic about? What is it that you're concerned about? Anything that we want to keep an eye on?

Well, let me just be clear. I'm not an environmental technologist and I'm not someone who necessarily has a sanguine view of where we are headed. On the contrary, unfortunately, I think our politics have made it so that we are increasing the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere.

That is a significant problem that is going to lead to a warmer world. We saw last year that we had the hottest year on record. That followed 2023, which was the hottest year on record.

We are seeing record amounts of carbon in the atmosphere in many, many, many years. All of that portends a future of greater conflict between different countries over dwindling resources and water. It portends a future of people not being able to inhabit certain parts of the planet because it's too hot or humid to live in.

It portends rising sea levels, increased and more intense wildfires, crop failures, and many other concerns unless we change the direction that we're heading in.

Yeah. I see that happening from a passive observer in the news. How are you seeing it happening on the ground level?

Because I know a lot of your recent articles are about forever chemicals that are being put into the waterways here, a lot of the different initiatives that are happening. What are some things that people who live here in Boston may experience from that? Because I know that not only are you focused on it, but the city of Boston is also focused on it.

They're working on addressing some of these issues, correct?

Yes. Forever chemicals is more of a federal and statewide issue than maybe a local Boston issue. Forever chemicals is a separate concern.

We have over the last 100 years or so produced all of these new chemical compounds that have proven to be extraordinarily toxic to human health. We now unfortunately find these chemicals in our water supply and in our food, in our fertilizer, and we're just beginning to get a sense of the dangers of all of these compounds. That's just one set, one family of toxic chemicals.

Yeah. I know it's a separate issue. I guess when I'm thinking about the environment, I'm certainly thinking about climate change.

I'm thinking about pollution. I'm thinking, how does this affect me as just a normal Boston city resident? Anything that you're seeing maybe on the ground level?

You live here in Boston also. I know we were talking earlier. Anything that you're particularly interested in from being a Boston resident?

Well, we live in a city that is taking climate change seriously, more so now in the Wu administration than maybe in our previous administrations. We talk a good game, but don't necessarily live up to the ideals that we might espouse. An example of that is a film that I just recently made.

It's called Inundation District. It's all about this city's decision to spend billions of dollars building an entirely new urban district at sea level on landfill and hard on the coast, despite having more climate scientists per capita than probably any other city on the planet. Our mayoral predecessor, who came up with this idea of a so-called innovation district, came up with this idea because we had just spent billions of dollars cleaning up what was at one point the dirtiest harbor in North America.

Nobody wanted to live in this neighborhood, which was essentially abandoned warehouses and parking lots.

You're talking about the seaport, right?

I'm talking about Boston Seaport, dubbed by the former mayor, Thomas Emanino, the innovation district. The idea was that we would have this new, gleaming urban district on the harbor that would be home to all kinds of Fortune 500 companies. That vision came to fruition.

We now have, or we did GE and Vertex and PricewaterhouseCoopers and MassMutual and other major companies that now have their homes in this urban district. But we built this urban district despite repeated warnings about where it was being built and the dangers of building that at sea level, on landfill, and again, hard on the coast. The city ignored those warnings.

Now we have billions of dollars of new real estate. It raises all kinds of environmental justice questions about who should pay the cost to defend all of this new real estate, and then who should eventually cover the costs when the inevitable flooding comes.

Maybe for people who are not as focused on the environment, when they're looking at all of these problems, that's going to manifest itself as just flooding on a regular basis. What is it that they're going to be affected on the ground level?

Well, we are already seeing. I hope you get a chance to see the film. It's called Inundation District.

If you go to the seaport on a day when we have a so-called king tide, you will already see flooding in various parts of the city. When we have a storm with significant storm surge and at a high tide, you see quite a bit of flooding in places like Fan Pier, which is the boardwalk right along the coast of the seaport. We are already seeing flooding.

A few years ago, in 2018, we had two back-to-back major storms. A lot of the seaport and parts of downtown Boston were underwater. If we, as an example, were hit by Hurricane Sandy maybe an hour or two earlier, I think, or later, we would have seen the kind of devastation that coastal New Jersey and lower Manhattan saw.

We narrowly escaped that because of the timing of the storm, but it will only take the wrong time storm to hit for us to see epic damage.

Is the city of Boston working to prevent some of those downstream effects?

Well, I don't know the answer to that question. They are studying the issue, but there are significant, expensive, and politically challenging issues that need to be surmounted for us to be able to really address those issues in a comprehensive and real way that would defend the city.

I see it happening myself. I moved here about six years ago, and I had a friend that we had gone over to their house in East Boston, which at that time was this place that they were trying to gentrify and make new development. Then you go over there now, and the levels are significantly different.

I don't know if that's something that every neighborhood is experiencing, but you certainly see it. Us being so close to the water, I can see why it's a concern. I had some of the people from the city administration here, the Office of Emerging Technology, and they were saying that there are three goals.

One of them was an environmental goal, but it was mainly to focus on air quality and things like that. I feel like there's other lower hanging fruit. Specifically, the rising sea levels are one of them, but also pollution is one thing that we had talked about.

What would you say, if you had a magic wand, would be things that you would focus on?

Well, the first thing is I'm a journalist, and so I'm not here to tell officials what to do, but we can clearly diagnose some of the problems and cast light on a range of issues. Air pollution is, of course, a significant concern. One of the ways that we can reduce air pollution is to expedite the transition from fossil fuel-powered vehicles to electric vehicles.

The more of us who are driving electric vehicles, the less tailpipe pollution that we have and that will do a significant amount to clear up the air and reduce this thing called particulate pollution, which is incredibly dangerous and separate from climate change. When we breathe, when we live in a city, especially right here in Cambridge where you live, you live next to a major highway, and all of that particulate matter floats in the air. You can't see it, but you're ingesting it.

It lodges in your arteries, it lodges in your lungs, and it is just not good for you. We see thousands of people die every year, particularly the young and the elderly, as a result of this particulate pollution. The more we can get rid of that stuff, the better.

Let's talk a little bit about other types of pollution. I know we had mentioned forever chemicals. Also, the city of Boston still has lead pipes, which to me is just something that I didn't even know was happening until I started doing some research on some articles that you had written about.

I have young kids. I'm looking at eventually moving into the city. I want to live in the city.

That's a significant concern for me. Are we making enough progress on this kind of stuff? Is that something that the city is tackling also?

It's an interesting question. The city, if you recall from a story I wrote last year with some of my students at Boston University, the city has made efforts. Using money from the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed during the Biden administration, there were subsidies that they were offering to essentially enable anyone in the city of Boston to have their lead service lines replaced with other non-toxic conduits of water.

They were having a hard time getting people to actually sign up for it because there's some invasive amount of work that has to happen. There's digging. You have to muck with all the pipes inside people's homes.

But I don't think anyone wants to live in a home that has lead pipes, especially if they have kids, which are especially vulnerable to lead. But everyone is vulnerable to lead. They had made a concerted effort and they still are.

Unfortunately, the new administration, the Trump administration, is axing all of these programs and trying to claw back the money that hasn't been spent on trying to replace and accelerate the replacement of lead pipes all over the country. We saw what happened in Flint, Michigan, when the water source switched to pipes that had lead that were corroded. It was a major public health crisis.

Yeah. I know that this is not a prescriptive conversation because you're a journalist, you're diagnosing stuff, but certainly you must be in your research doing some actions in your own life. For example, for me, when I hear a story like that, I'm thinking, if I want to buy a house, where do I go to see if there's lead?

What are some other things that maybe you're doing in your own life that because of your research and your focus on the environment that you might be incorporating into your own life? Do you drive an electric car? Are you doing anything in particular with your own kids if you have any?

Yeah. One of the challenges of lead pipes is that there is no disclosure requirements. When you go to sell a house or buy a house, you can find out all kinds of things about that property, but there is no requirement to alert prospective buyers that you have a home that has lead service lines, which seems to me to be crazy, but a lot of people actually don't even know what their lead service lines are, which is also a nutty situation.

Last year with my students at BU, found that one of the properties that had lead service lines that the city had known about and had reached out to the property owner about was Boston College. Boston College had a dorm that had lead service lines and the city had alerted the college about this more than 10 years before. The college didn't do anything about it despite repeated efforts by the city and the city's offers to actually ultimately replace them. They only replaced them when my students started asking questions about it.

It's a great thing about journalism, right?

Yeah. It was a great example of journalists getting action and I was very proud of the students.

You might not have the ability to say this is how it should be done, but a lot of the questions you're asking can spur the change that goes into the right direction, similar to the example that you had talked about. That is, I think, much more of a public policy type of situation, but is there anything that, like I said, you're doing in your own life? Do you have kids at all? I do.

Yeah.

I have a three-year-old and just a few week old. 

Congratulations. 

Thank you. It’s a lot of coffee. But the fact of the matter is, I want to buy a house and I'm looking at Charlestown, I'm looking at Jamaica Plain because I want them to have a yard and all this stuff. But because Boston is such an old city, I'm so worried about pollution.

I'm so worried about the climate, all this other stuff. Some of the things that I didn't think about, because I didn't grow up in a city. I know that you did.

Some of the things that I just didn't think about, now I have to think about. Are you considering these things when you're a parent or even in just your own life? Are you making conscious decisions based on the research that you have done?

I mean, I do try. I'm not always successful. We live in a world in which there are so many variables that are hard to control.

And you try the best that you can. I would just say that on a macro sense, we all should be trying to reduce our carbon footprint as much as possible. We should be trying to reduce harm as much as possible to others and to our families.

To answer the question you asked earlier, I drove a hybrid car for years. I now drive an electric vehicle. And I say that not because it makes me holier than thou or something.

It's, first of all, so much better of a vehicle than any other vehicle I've ever had. The torque is amazing. It's more fun to drive.

I write a lot and make films about climate change, and it always felt really awful to me and hypocritical that I would just give a talk essentially about climate change. And then I would have to get my hybrid car, my Prius, but go to a gas station. And that just somehow felt somehow hypocritical.

But now, it's nice to not actually have to go to a gas station. But it's still complicated because when you charge your car, mainly you're charging with natural gas, which is the predominant source of power. Hopefully, the electrical grid in New England continues to convert to non-fossil fuel options, and that is increasingly changing.

So ultimately, it is more of a comprehensive solution if you have solar and offshore wind and onshore wind, and maybe even nuclear power, feeding the electrons rather than natural gas, but still most of the grid is powered by natural gas. So it's kind of a complicated thing, but at least you don't have a tailpipe on an electric car, and so you're not pumping out the particulate matter that causes pollution, especially in a dense neighborhood, whether it's Cambridge or Jamaica Plain. Jamaica Plain is, I think, the leafiest neighborhood in Boston.

So maybe not this time of year, but in a couple weeks, we'll see the leaves come out.

Do you check the air quality index? Are you one of those?

I'm not. No, I do not check the air quality index, but it is.

The only reason I do is because I have a digital scale. I weigh myself every day, and it tells me that. And it's like, oh, it's consistently terrible.

And I've only started looking at it because now we have all of these things. I never would have known about it if it wasn't for this digital scale.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you could probably drive yourself nuts with that. And I don't know.

I can't live by sensors. But there are reasonable questions. I mean, when you live in a city, you are subjecting yourself and your family to more pollution. And I do think about that. And it is a concern.

Have you ever, because I know you grew up in New York City.

Outside of New York.

Outside of New York City. My wife grew up in New York City. And so there's this allure to cities. Do you ever consider leaving because of these environmental concerns?

I mean, for a lot of reasons, you know, during the pandemic, we spent a good amount of time at a cousin's place on the Cape. And yeah, the air, it was something rejuvenating about living by the water and breathing salt air. And yeah, not having- It was a scary time to be in a city.

Well, it was a scary time to be in the city, but also, you know, not having, not ingesting the daily barrage of pollution was, you know, a breath of fresh air in a real way. But yeah, no, I mean, I, you know, there's in her family, you know, politics involved in the question, in that question. And my wife would prefer to stay in the city.

And I'm, you know, it's much more convenient to live in the city. And there are lots of things I like about living in the city. But, you know, there are lots of, there are a lot of permutations to answering that question.

One of the things that I think that I just want to double click on is this idea of changing the energy mix, because I think that's something we can get optimistic about. Just a few blocks away, they're building a fusion reactor. And I know that that's something that you had written about.

Are you optimistic about that? Because I know that that's something that, you know, is getting real traction. You know, I look at it as a passive observer.

And there's always every few weeks or so some sort of breakthrough that's happening.

Yeah. When people ask me the question, which is an inevitable question, when you talk about climate change, which you've already asked me a little bit about, which is what gives you hope, the one thing I do point to is this, at least, concept that we are an ingenious species. And when our backs are against the wall, we have found solutions that seemed improbable or impossible.

And we did that during the pandemic when we, in record time, used a new technology, mRNA, to create these vaccines that we were able to distribute to billions of people around the world in, you know, incredibly rapid ways, despite the complexities of transporting these vaccines, and saved millions of people's lives as a result. And we're facing a similarly dire predicament with climate change, as we continue to burn all these fossil fuels and pump all of these emissions into the atmosphere, which is causing the planet to be on target to warm to some three degrees Celsius, which is very scary. It might not sound like a big number.

But you saw what happened in Los Angeles a few months ago, and we're now not even at 1.5, or we're close to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial times. And if we double that, the kind of fires that you saw in LA will be more routine and probably worse.

Are we at risk for that here in New England?

Yeah, well, to some extent, yes. And we last year just had a record wildfire season in New England. We certainly can have forest fires.

And, you know, we saw it just last year, where this month has been helpful in terms of the amount of rain we've had, but we've been in a drought. And droughts are a common problem from climate change. And we sort of go back and forth between droughts and deluges, like these heavy bursts of rain.

But if we are likely to have more droughts in New England, we're likely to see greater amounts of wildfire. And that echoes around the world. But going back to your question on fusion, just to say that so fundamentally, as concerning as the trajectory that we are on is about the amount of emissions that we are pumping into the atmosphere, and the challenges of living in that world and extracting that kind of extract the challenges of extracting emissions from the atmosphere are at the moment, seemingly insurmountable, because of the amount of amount of emissions that are in the atmosphere, and also the cost of actually removing them. The one thing that gives me a significant feeling of hope is this idea that maybe we can hopefully somehow engineer our way out of this problem.

And the advances that we've seen in nuclear fusion, excuse me, are significant. And we, you know, we have the just a few blocks from here, a plasma fusion center that has been really amazing. And, and we just saw a few years ago, this for the first time a reaction where we generated more electricity, more energy output, more energy. Yeah, that maybe not electricity, but right. Energy that, you know, yielded, then it took to start the fusion reaction, more or less, it's kind of complicated but, but that gives me great hope.

If I just want to zoom out for a second, because I know you had a wide body of work, you know, you're covering wars, you're covering, you know, the Boston bombing, you're covering environment now, what made you focus on the environment? Like, what was the impetus to kind of hone your skills to only be devoted to this now?

Yeah, I mean, I've covered a lot of things over the years. And some more than a decade ago, a colleague who had covered the environment, went on leave, and I'd been writing a bit about how our oceans were changing in our region. And the first story that really jumped out to me, that made me sort of think that there is a bigger story here, that needs to be told on all kinds of different levels was how the iconic species that gave, that brought a lot of wealth to Boston and put New England on the map was cod.

And cod is this fishery that brought settlers from Europe and brought a lot of great wealth to New England. And this whole region in the Boston area. And in 2014, we saw the collapse of, before 2014, in the years leading up to 2014, we saw this catastrophic collapse of the cod population, despite years of overfishing, the cod population always seemed to bounce back.

But as the waters in the Gulf of Maine started to warm faster than any other body of water on the planet, all of a sudden, this species that was crucial to the economy, and that can only sort of thrive in narrow bands of temperature started dying off or moving to cooler waters. And as a result, we saw for the first time, the federal government imposed an unthinkable moratorium on commercial cod fishing in New England. And that moratorium remains in effect today.

And it's mainly because the waters have warmed to the point that this species can't really thrive in the way it did. And that led to a lot of fishermen and families who depended on that, that species and other businesses essentially going the way of the cod vanishing.

Yeah, I think that, you know, can I tell you my favorite documentary that you've done so far? It's the guy that gets swallowed by a whale. I mean, you know, I've, you closed your eyes a little bit when that happened, but it's such an amazing story, right?

Like it was all of like, for those of you guys who are not from the area, it was like all over the news and everything like that. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Sure. So, so a few years ago, after making a film called Lobster War, which was all about lobstermen and, and conflicts between lobstermen, and then making a film called Entangled, which was all about whales to say very little about it. All of a sudden, there was a collision between a lobsterman and a whale.

And naturally, I was interested in the subject. And the Boston Globe asked me to look into this, this story about this lobsterman, this guy who dives for lobster, the last remaining, I would learn last remaining commercial lobster diver as far as I could find in New England, who was who claimed to be swallowed by a humpback whale while diving underwater. And my colleagues at the Globe asked me to essentially debunk the story.

They thought it was, I don't know if I can say this on the podcast bullshit. And so, so I did what any reporter would do. I tried to talk to as many people as possible who knew the the lobster diver, I talked to his mom, talked to the guy who claimed to pull him out of the water, as well as another fisherman who was on the scene and helped as well.

I talked to his sisters, I talked to the lobsterman himself. And then I had the sorry task of having to go back to my editors to tell them that unfortunately, I thought the story was true. And the next day, the Globe had, we had a front page story that had probably the best headline to accompany any story I've ever written, which I can't take credit for, because reporters don't write the headlines.

But in short, it said, this fish story isn't hard to swallow. And then after, after writing this story, I talked to the protagonist, the guy who was swallowed, his name is Michael Packard, about how I moonlight as a filmmaker. Thank you very much.

I appreciate it. Very nice of you. And, and he invited me a few weeks later to come out on his boat, I wasn't sure if there was more to say.

Because this story about this lobster diver from Provincetown ricocheted all over, all over the world.

It's the most New England story I've ever heard. You know, lobster diver gets swallowed by a humpback whale. I mean, come on.

Yeah. It's on brand for New England. It was, yeah, it checked all the boxes for me.

And to make a long story short, after a day at sea with him, I, you know, thought that there was a much deeper story to tell about this man and what led to that moment. And what happened afterward. And I thought if I could spend enough time with him, maybe go through the seasons with him and get a sense of what happens to a human being who is thrust, a reclusive guy, like a, like a fisherman, a lobster diver, no less.

What happens to someone like that, who is thrust into the international spotlight? And then what happens when that spotlight fades? I thought maybe that would be an interesting story.

And so after a couple of years, we produced a film called In the Whale. And it's all about Michael Packard's experience. Yeah.

Won some awards too, right? 

It did. Yeah.

Is the fishing industry still viable? Like, is it going away from New England? Because I work on the North Shore and there's, you know, so many people that come to see me that are in this industry that are concerned, you know, and I don't know enough about it.

Maybe you had some insight.

I mean, we are seeing a dramatic change in oceans all over the world, particularly here in New England. We are seeing waters warm, we are seeing waters become more acidic. And we're seeing a whole range of fisheries change in population size and in their migratory patterns.

And that will have an impact on the lives of a lot of fishermen. But it doesn't mean that there won't be a fishery, there won't be fisheries, it just might mean that the fisheries are different. And lobsters is a great example.

We saw there used to be a thriving lobster fishery throughout New York and New England. And over the last decade or two, we have seen the complete collapse of the lobster fishery south of Cape Cod. I did a story for the Globe a few years ago about the last commercial lobsterman in Connecticut on Long Island Sound.

And there used to be a robust fishery, that fishery has declined, last I checked, more than 95%. And when I went out with this fisherman, this lobsterman, I spent a day with him at sea, and he caught something like 15 or so lobster. That was it.

Pulled trap after trap with nothing. And the lobsters that he did pull out were mainly considered cull lobster, which means that they were in such bad shape, he couldn't sell them. Missing claws or deformed in some way or super skinny, something like that.

And so we're seeing that change in lots of places. We're seeing the steady migration. Last year, we saw a really, we saw, I think, a smaller lobster catch in Maine than we've seen in years.

And a lot of the lobster are moving to Canadian waters. And that creates geopolitical challenges.

Interesting. Yeah. So one of my favorite towns in New England is Gloucester.

First off, just the way that it's spelled is so New England. It's such a quintessential New England town. And now a lot of the fishing people are moving out and it's becoming gentrified, it's becoming like a pseudo tech hub.

It's just totally different. So I wonder if you feel like that is what you're mentioning when we're going to adapt, we're going to respond, things are going to be changing, but hopefully it should be for the better. I don't know if that's the thread of optimism that you're weaving throughout your environmental reporting.

But I think that there's something there, at least what I can see on the local level in a town like that.

Yeah. I mean, I don't put a spin on my work to say that, yeah, things are going to be for the better. I'm not in the business of necessarily giving hope, or even false hope, perhaps.

But I'm not also in the doomsday industry. And I'm not suggesting that everything, every change is for the worse. Things just evolve and change, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad.

Gloucester is an interesting example. Gloucester has had to adapt. The film that I made about the collapse of the cod fishery, Sacred Cod, which was my first environmental film, is very much about the devastation that Gloucester in particular experienced as a result of the moratorium on cod fishing and ground fishing, and the changes to Gloucester.

There's still a vibrant fishery in Gloucester. It's actually, I think, now a lot more lobster fishing at a Gloucester than ground fishing. But there's still a ground fishery for other kinds of fish.

And yet it's also adapting. It's becoming less of a working waterfront on some levels than it used to be. And it is gentrifying in other ways.

So last question before we get into the three general questions that I ask all of my guests, which is just about the penetration of some of the stories that you have. There's obviously stories that have produced change, like the one about the lead pipes in Boston University. There's some stories that I'm sure that you feel very passionate about.

But yet the one that I felt like was the most entertaining was the one where the guy got swallowed by a whale. And that's something that you had some success with your documentary. What do you feel like is just the most, that you like writing the most?

What are the ones that you feel like are your favorite ones out of all of the ones that you've written?

Oh, hard to describe a story as a favorite. I mean, the stories that you're highlighting are stories that have animated my life in some ways over the last couple of years, because they've taken the shape of films, not the lead pipes so much. When I talk about my work at Boston University, I teach a large class of mainly freshmen, introductory students.

And I talk about the work that I did during the marathon bombings, which had a profound impact on me because of my proximity to the bombs and the almost kinship that I felt with a lot of the victims and the bonds that we created through a lot of intense conversations and interviews and stories and even films. That's how I actually got involved and started making films was through the marathon bombings. But I would say that those might not necessarily be the favorite stories, but the stories that maybe stick with me in deep visceral ways.

The ones that you felt like a kinship with?

Yeah. Stories where I really got to spend a lot of time with people trying to make sense of senseless violence and come to terms with unbelievable amounts of pain, physical and emotional.

Interesting. Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

At the end of our session, we always ask three general questions to all the people who are on our show. One of them, I feel like we kind of already covered, which is where you get a lot of your inspiration from, which I feel like the perspective that you've given is the stories that you're really passionate about have been some sort of reaction that you have. And then that's something that is very inspiring.

And then you write this amazing article. But I did want to ask you, coming from that same vein, what are the questions that we should be asking? What are the questions that we should be...

You're a journalist. You want people to look at the world and gain the same kind of information that you're gaining. What questions are you asking that you think that everybody should be asking themselves when it comes to getting inspired?

When we're having inspiration, should we be looking for stuff that we identify with? Is it something that produces the most emotional response? What is it that you're thinking about when you're writing a story, the questions that you're asking to be inspired by the subject matter that you're covering?

So again, inspiration is not necessarily the milieu that I'm working in. It's the hard questions. It's the vital questions.

It's the questions about why things are the way they are, how they got that way, and how can we somehow repair a damaged world? Mm-hmm.

So you're mainly looking for facts to address a problem.

To expose, yeah. 

To expose a problem. 

Expose what it is that we are really confronting, whether it's climate change, whether it's pollution, whether it's senseless violence.

Interesting. So where do you see Boston in 10 years, if you were to have the most pie in the sky type of... What do you hope that Boston looks like? What do you hope that the environment looks like in 10 years?

If you, let's say, had the most optimistic outcome of all of the potential outcomes.

Well, 10 years is not a huge amount of time. I think the amount of change in 10 years, hopefully, we will have figured out a plan, at least, to address rising sea levels, which is a major concern to a lot of downtown and other parts of coastal Boston. And we will not just be talking about them, but we'll be figuring out how to build shoreside barriers or other kinds of ways to live with water.

Hopefully, we will not have suffered a cataclysmic sea level rise event or storm surge event. My hope is that we will live in a world in 10 years where commercial fusion power plants are viable and are starting to become part of the grid, and we'll be replacing the coal plants that Donald Trump talked about bringing back, and that we'll be living in a city, in a state, and in a country that takes democracy seriously and is a force for good in this world, not a force for division and toxicity.

Spoken like a true optimist. You got to throw in some negativity in there, huh? That's all right. No problem. 

So, last question. There's breakthroughs that are happening left and right. It's not only in the environment. It's not only in artificial intelligence. It's in biotechnology, robotics, all sorts of different things. Outside of your own field of interest, what is something that you just can't get enough of that you're, as a hobbyist, looking at on a YouTube video? What about you?

We are living in a world that is changing rapidly on so many different levels. It's hard to keep up. I'm just looking at the papers that my students are turning in, and you can see the influences of artificial intelligence.

And that is not a good sign. But I was just talking to a cousin who was just in China, and he was getting around by using Google Translate, which simultaneously translates to Chinese, and he was describing how seamless it felt.

Yeah. Universal translation is something that...

Yeah. And soon it will be built into your glasses, and it will become... And hopefully that bridges divides and makes it easier to communicate and understand each other and reduce division.

But I think the way generative AI evolves is both frightening and also exciting. The things that we thought we couldn't even think of that we thought were science fiction a few years ago are now reality.

I know.

I love it. We are seeing the emergence of another form of intelligence that is seemingly on par with human intelligence from a layman's point of view, just interacting with Claude or one of these chatbots.

Are you using it at all in your own life?

I use it in a lot of different ways, yeah. And it's more of just playing around with it to see what it will do and what it's capable of. I was using it to create...

I'm working on a new film project, and I was looking to create a title slide with a specific kind of font and a specific style. And I was going back and forth trying to use this New York City subway mosaic style font, and I had very specific directions. And it was interesting to just see how it evolves.

And it's something you'd have to pay a graphic artist to do before. And now you just tell it what you want it to do, and it can actually help achieve your vision.

Yeah. I use it a lot for very specific, atypical research questions. If I'm planning a vacation, and I say, I want a hotel on the beach with a sauna, and it'll find me that, as opposed to clicking through dozens of websites and stuff like that.

But I'm always interested to see how people are using it in their own lives, because we're still in the infancy stages right now. And especially, I wanted to know how a journalist is using, because I didn't know if you were using it for your research at all or for stuff like that.

Yeah, you got to tread lightly on how you use it. But there are all kinds of potential uses that are legitimate, but they're also questionable ways that it can be used. And unfortunately, I'm seeing that too often in the work that I'm getting back from students.

So I teach at Tufts, and I have the same issue. I have a lot of the hallucinations. Yeah. It'll produce an article, and you click on that article, and there's no article. 

But anyway, it was so nice talking to you. Thank you so much for giving us your insight. And thank you guys to all of you who have joined us today. As always, if you could hit the like and subscribe button, it would really make a difference to our channel. And for those of you guys who are tuning in on a regular basis, we will see you in the future.