Building Consensus in the Midst of Crisis

Imagine waking in the middle of the night to discover your house is on fire—and as you yell for your family to evacuate, you find them clustered in the hallway, arguing about the best way to escape. Even more perplexing, several in your household seem to doubt that the fire is happening at all.

The work of climate scientists, clean-energy advocates, and environmentally focused policy makers can feel much like that metaphor—and among the aforementioned crowd, Julie Cerqueira ’02 stands at the front of the pack. But despite the challenges inherent to her work, and that of thousands like her, she is arguably the perfect person for the job.

Armed with a portfolio of undeniable data, Cerqueira reports daily to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), where she is tasked with bringing the nations of the world—and sometimes her own—to the table in the development of clean energy. Following years of climate change policy work in both nonprofits and the U.S. Department of State, she joined the Biden administration in September 2021 as principal deputy assistant secretary in the DOE’s Office of International Affairs. For a lifelong environmentalist, she seems to have landed her dream job. More than ever before, she is able to advance clean-energy initiatives on a global scale. And though the fruits of her labor may not be realized until long after she has left her post, she radiates optimism in helping the United States lead the way in clean energy.

What brought this biotechnology major from the labs of WPI to Washington’s halls of power? That story begins with a winged rodent that most people could do without.

With a Brazilian-born mother and a Portuguese father, Cerqueira knew she wanted to give back to the country that had given her family the gifts of education and a new start. Following her graduation from WPI, she joined the Peace Corps and traveled to the Philippines as part of a conservation project for endangered bats. Filled with idealism and ambition, she moved in with a family of Filipino farmers who complicated how she understood her mission and fundamentally altered her worldview.

Her experience in the Philippines provided a lesson she’s carried into her career. “I realized in that project just how deep social inequity can go, and to protect environmentally sensitive areas, we often need to help families find employment, education, and the opportunity to stay together,” she says. “These are hyper-local issues. We can’t just parachute in with our solutions.”

When she returned to the States after her stint in the Peace Corps, she experienced a renewed passion for place-based and inclusive action on ecologically important issues. Environmental policy wasn’t entirely new to Cerqueira—as an undergrad at WPI, she had pursued the subject as one half of a double major. But her experience in the Philippines had shown her the way forward professionally, and she soon enrolled in a graduate program at Fordham University focused on international policy. The next time she was called upon to save a habitat or endangered species, she’d be ready to support the people, too.

Her career path traced through a host of nonprofit organizations before she landed a position within the U.S. Department of State focused on climate change. Though her new position dramatically widened the scope of her work, she kept the lessons learned in the Peace Corps top of mind. She recalls meetings with well-intentioned colleagues who would proffer solutions for black carbon emissions she knew would be unsuccessful at the local level.

“You can’t tell people not to burn their trash when they don’t have trash collection,” she explains. “Or not to use a dirty cooking stove when the alternative [propane] costs more than they make in a month. Many of these communities have significant constraints, so if we’re coming in with policy solutions, but don’t actually know what it’s like on the ground, it’s hard to predict if any of our ideas are going to work.” In short, she had learned that one solution does not fit all, and that policy interventions that don’t include input from the communities affected are often doomed to fail. Cerqueira notes that these lessons are as true in domestic communities as they are abroad.

“[State government] can turn around policy so quickly. We would propose a regulation or policy initiative, and within a year, multiple states would be adopting it or something similar,” she says. “This was at a time when the federal government had essentially abdicated leadership on climate—and we had all these governors, mayors, the private sector, and young people working together to maintain momentum in the United States. That work gave me a lot of room for optimism.”

Cerqueira didn’t know at the time, but her skills for building consensus would soon experience their greatest challenge yet.

As any advocate for clean-air policy or climate-change initiatives will tell you, abiding passion is required to stay the course. However, working toward these same goals within government requires another “p” word: pragmatism. “Everything is compromise,” Cerqueira admits from her office in the Department of Energy. Although she maintains the environmental ideals she held as a student at WPI, years of making the proverbial sausage has also taught her the realities of policy work. “You’re never going to get to the perfect solution, because that’s not how the world works.” And knowing how the world works is practically in her job description.

Since September 2021, she has worked with the DOE’s Office of International Affairs to nudge the world’s governments closer toward a transition to clean energy. In so doing, she and her team are in constant search of common ground among a broad coalition of countries interested in advancing clean-energy technologies and policies around the globe. A core part of her work involves collaborating with other countries, scientists, and industry to accelerate technological innovation—for example, as the new chair of Mission Innovation—or conducting energy diplomacy to enhance national security.

Her department also serves as the “right hand” to U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, advising her on international energy policy and supporting her engagement on the world’s stage. And if she has learned anything from more than a decade spent in rooms of power, it’s the need to check your stubbornness at the door.

“I’ve seen a lot of fights lost because people don’t understand why compromise is necessary,” she says, recalling a project she worked on with the U.S. Climate Alliance in which advocates in one state were unwilling to accept a climate target proposed by their governor. As a result, negotiations broke down and everyone was left empty-handed until the next legislative cycle.

While she believes in a readiness for compromise, she also stresses the need for loud-and-proud advocates in tackling climate change. “You do need advocates who are pushing for the most progressive ideas, because they bring everyone else with them,” she explains. “And then you need your NGO partners who are a bit more centered and can say, ‘Let’s all acknowledge this is where we want to get to—but this is what we can actually do today.’ Having those partners around the country and around the world points you toward solutions that are both ambitious and pragmatic.”

After an unprecedented summer of natural disasters and record heat waves, one has to wonder how Cerqueira assesses our collective progress on climate change. First, the bad news: “We’ve made a lot of progress recently, but we are still far from meeting our climate goals, and the impacts we’re seeing across the world are disastrous,” she says, adding that a denial of climate science is making progress ever more difficult. “There’s a saying, ‘Just because you don’t believe in the devil, doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in you.’ That’s what keeps me up at night; how do you awaken people to the severity of this crisis? What else is it going to take?”

To be sure, the numbers on climate change are in. According to a recent report in The New York Times, the planet has already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius, marking the hottest global temperatures in civilization’s history. Continuing this trajectory, experts anticipate rolling droughts, the extinction of swaths of plant and animal life, and a mass migration of people to more moderate climates—a move sure to amplify socioeconomic inequality.

Despite these sobering projections, Cerqueira finds room for optimism. For starters, she cites tremendous economic incentives to be found in the implementation of clean-energy technologies. “We’re looking at a $23 trillion market by 2030 to deploy clean-energy solutions,” she says. “That’s a huge opportunity for folks to develop new skill sets and get good-paying jobs, boost the economy, bring down energy prices, and make our communities healthier.”

She also cites the negotiations surrounding the 2015 Paris Agreement as a model for introducing new, often marginalized voices into policy discussions. The agreement, brokered by 193 countries and the European Union, ultimately called for a 1.5-degree goal for global warming—but that’s not where they started. According to Cerqueira, this goal was established not by the world’s most powerful countries, but by an often-overlooked grouping of developing countries and island states. “We had small island developing states, indigenous groups, young people whose voices were finally being heard, and they helped compel governments around the world to aim for 1.5 degrees, not the two degree marker we thought we were working toward,” she explains. “And that half a degree makes a big difference.”

She notes another group who will be critical in solving the world’s climate crisis: the next generation of scientists and engineers. “Clean energy companies around the world are already facing skills shortages that will be exacerbated in the years ahead as we accelerate clean energy deployment,” she says, adding that the skills required by the future clean-energy workforce will most certainly be found in science and engineering. “Finding solutions to this crisis requires that we rapidly innovate lynchpin technologies and build clean energy infrastructure, bringing down costs so that clean technologies are affordable. These are all skills you learn in the sciences,” she says.

In fact, although Cerqueira’s career track has taken her far from her coursework as a biotechnology major, she has no academic regrets—and no hesitation in recommending a STEM education for the next generation of climate-change advocates. “The foundation you get in STEM gives you the ability to process complex information and coordinate across very diverse teams,” she says, noting that the mindset inherent to the sciences is a must-have in processing the evolving nature of climate science. “The answer we have today may not be the answer we get in 10 years,” she says. “That’s not to say that the science is invalidated—just that we’re constantly refining our understanding of how climate science works. A science degree gives you the ability to think through these shifts critically.”