How to take action

Adam Met is a popstar with his band “AJR.”

He’s also trying to save the planet.

Met is the executive director of Planet Reimagined, alongside activist Mila Rosenthal. It's a nonprofit dedicated to finding solutions for the growing issue of climate change and advocating for climate justice.

Met, who holds a Ph.D, has worked with the United Nations, the White House and Congress on climate strategies. He assisted with the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the largest pieces of climate legislation in history.

When he’s not making music or teaching at Columbia, Met travels around the nation speaking about Planet Reimagined, and hoping to encourage people to work towards a greener planet.

“I like framing this conversation around individual action and collective action, but there's kind of a thing in the middle that we're missing, and that's this idea of individual leadership,” he said.

He spoke about a fan who he met after an AJR concert. She was inspired to create a petition in order to ban single-use plastic at her school cafeteria, and ended up getting over 1,000 signatures.

“She figured out a way to galvanize the community around an issue that she saw in her community every single day, and then turned it into something that could actually make a difference,” Met said.

He thinks both Republicans and Democrats need to be an equal part of the conversation.

"Every single thing I do is either bipartisan or nonpartisan,” he said about his work with Planet Reimagined. “So as I'm developing a strategy, I will go in and work with Republicans and work with Democrats in order to come up with an effective strategy to move policy forward, legislation forward, campaigns forward.”

Met spoke at Denison University in April, and had things to say about plastic as well as larger environmental issues. Here are some excerpts from his talk.

[editor's note: these excerpts have been edited for clarity and conciseness.]

Thoughts on the plastic crisis.

One of the things that concerns me in the plastic crisis is how easy it is to attain plastic, to use plastic. There is a real disconnect between how individuals feel like they can have an impact and what systems-based change looks like. For example, this young woman came up to us and said, 'Okay, we're going to end single use plastic in the cafeteria. This is how we're going to do it.' She got 1,000 people to sign a petition. Great, she had success. That's a really good story to tell, inspiring for a lot of young people to kind of get engaged around this idea of plastics. We should think about others ways people can get involved in collective action.

Adam Met, speaking on the campus of Denison University. Photo by Doug Swift.

Adam Met, speaking on the campus of Denison University. Photo by Doug Swift.

How are younger people getting their news?

I think that new media approaches, multimedia approaches, things like podcasting, blogging, social media, communication becomes even more prescient in an age where news isn't always accessible, or scientific journals are behind paywalls, even the New York Times Online.

Should journalism advocate for an action or position?

People want to be able to make decisions for themselves. Giving them all the information and the tools to do that is a tightrope walk, right? You can give people actions that they can take without saying you have to take these actions. You can give them the opportunity. It doesn't have to be dictatorial, right? You don't need to say 'this is what you have to do.'

"You can give people actions that they can take without saying, 'you have to take these actions.'" Adam Met. Photo by Doug Swift.

Is individual action enough to improve the planet?

The only real change that's going to happen around plastic is going to be at the policy level. And the policy level is, there's a UN Convention on plastic. It's never going to happen at that level. Sorry for all the people who are actually working on that. I spend a lot of time at the UN and they spend a lot of time talking, and most of what they do is bullshit.

The places where it's going to happen is community by community, at these community board meetings, where they are approving and not approving new projects. And the number of people it takes going to a community board meeting and standing up and saying, 'We don't want this new petrochemical plant here,' or 'We want this petrochemical plant shut down,' or 'We want this plastic production facility to be shut down.' It is such a small number of people.

There are seats in places like Texas where they won by four votes, literally four votes. The amount of power that you have as an individual, as a voter in the presidential election might not be huge, but when you're voting for community board members, it's enormous. When you think about how dollars trickle down and decision-making trickles down, there is so much power at that local level. And my first call to action always, whenever I'm talking to people, is that they need to vote at the local level, and they need to do the research on who the people who are running for everything from treasurer to deciding zoning laws, people who are deciding all of these kinds of small decisions, that's where we're going to have the most impact.

More on the need for local action.

The number of climate policies that have been passed at the state and local level over the last four years and are currently in negotiation is more than we've ever seen in history, to the extent that if even three-quarters of these end up passing, it will be more impactful than the Inflation Reduction Act. I'll give you two examples. There's policy in San Antonio that was just implemented. Texas, red state, it just implemented this policy. It is a circular economy policy. And what that means is that for construction, anytime a building is being demoed, they need to catalog all of the materials in the building. The materials are kept in different warehouses around the city based on the type of material. And anybody who's building new construction has to go to these warehouses first to reuse materials. It's an incredible policy that can easily be implemented in Miami, in Cleveland and in Boise, based on a bunch of research that we've done.

Second example: Are you familiar with neighborhood decarbonization? Neighborhood decarbonization is the idea that you're taking a neighborhood at a time and decarbonizing it by working with the utilities, as opposed to everybody individually, putting solar panels or switching to renewable electricity, things like that. That's a neighborhood-wide policy that can happen. This really just takes the neighborhood association saying, we want to do this. There's changes in taxes, there's changes in where the tax money is being funneled. There's a couple of small changes that has to happen, that have to happen, but this is happening all over the United States. The wins at the federal level are great. The real wins happen at the state and local level because it shows examples of what can happen, and then we can apply them in hundreds of other places across the country.