Using Data for a Livable Planet

Growing up in central Maine, Caitlin Swalec ’16 developed an early love for the water, spending her summers at her family’s cabin on a lake. “I used to wake up, put on a swimsuit and spend all day outside, swimming and kayaking and trying to catch snapping turtles,” she says. 

When she got older, she kayaked a mile across the lake to work as a lifeguard at a beach club. “One day, I realized that I could actually swim with the kayak tied around my waist, so sometimes I would swim to work and kayak home instead,” she recalls. When summer was over, however, she was disappointed when she realized she couldn’t swim in the river that ran behind her house. “It had all this industrial pollution from the pulp and paper industry, and I was upset about that,” she says. “That was an early connection to environmentalism for me.”

Now, a mile is the minimum she swims every day in the open ocean near her home in Santa Barbara, Calif., maintaining her connection to the natural world as she works to fight pollution worldwide. Swalec is program director for heavy industry at Global Energy Monitor (GEM), a nonprofit that produces open-source data on climate and energy issues. Swalec’s team is focused on decarbonizing companies in the steel, chemicals, and concrete industries. “The steel industry alone is responsible for 7–9% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and 11% of CO2,” she says.

“Our data is now the go-to source used by the International Energy Agency to build their decarbonization roadmaps, as well as being cited by the World Steel Association, the largest association in the industry,” she says. “So, I feel pretty confident in saying that we have the gold-standard, best-quality data in the sector.” Especially with the rise of disinformation online and sometimes bogus information produced by artificial intelligence, she says, “it feels so important to be a source that can be trusted.”

Engineering runs in Swalec’s family, as does WPI. Her father, John Swalec ’77, is a chemical engineer; so is her mother, Cora; her older sister, Lauren Swalec ’11; and her brother, Jack Swalec ’14. “I actually didn’t want to be a chemical engineer,” admits Swalec, who had wide interests including journalism and medicine. Nevertheless, she followed her family members in enrolling in WPI as a way to keep options open. “My parents always said if you study engineering, you can do anything,” she says.

At WPI, she gravitated toward environmental engineering courses. Ironically, however, her classes in chemical engineering are what hooked her after all. “I really liked doing hard math and problem-solving,” she says. A class on air quality management especially inspired her because it took a chemical engineering approach to reducing air pollution. “It drove home the fact that once you emit things into the atmosphere, it’s very hard to take them out,” she says. “So, the key is going to the source and stopping emissions there.”

WPI also gave her early exposure to the importance of data collection. She participated in an internship to develop a sustainability report for the university, working with the Facilities Office to examine options from insulated windows to compostable silverware. As part of the report, she documented contamination in recycling streams and worked to design better signage to show students what was recyclable. “It showed me something that is important in my career, which is that sustainability and decarbonization aren’t about one big solution—they’re about a million different pieces at different scales done by different people, and that adds up to big impacts.” 

While at WPI, she continued to follow her love of swimming, working as a lifeguard and swim instructor at the YMCA, which gave her a release from the stress of studying. “It let my brain relax from the pressure and intensity of the WPI curriculum,” she says. “I really loved teaching adults—people who had spent their lives scared of the water and getting them to float for the first time. I felt like I gave people access to a whole other part of the environment.”

After graduation, Swalec worked at DSG Solutions, an air quality consulting firm cofounded by chemical engineer Sean Gregory ’98, helping power-site operators come into compliance with environmental regulations. Wanting to have more impact on the regulations themselves, she went to graduate school at the University of California, Santa Barbara, earning her master’s at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management in 2019.

In keeping with her wide-ranging interests, she took classes in all areas of environmental management and was particularly excited about learning how to generate and analyze data on sustainability issues. “I liked being able to assess data and do the creative thinking to figure out what policies or narratives would help convince people to make certain decisions,” she says, especially as a way to fill gaps between environmentalists and conservatives who might be less supportive of regulation.

“Growing up in Maine, I thought about the hunters, fishers, and snowmobilers who maybe weren’t aligned with climate change initiatives but care so much about the environment because that’s where they go to play. There’s a missing link there in terms of how to engage people who are not your traditional environmentalists,” Swalec says.

Remembering her early frustrations with her backyard river, she completed her thesis on timber harvest policies, considering forestry conservation and planning work. When she saw a posting for a climate and energy research analyst at Global Energy Monitor, however, she immediately knew she’d found the right job for her—one that involved intense analysis of data, work on a range of issues, and bridge-building between advocates and industry. Though the organization had roots dating back to 2008, it had only been an independent nonprofit since 2017 and still had a strong startup culture. With only a dozen employees, Swalec was able to do a little bit of everything—data analysis, report writing, quality control, and convening of experts in the field.

Even more enticingly, company culture allowed her to swap her lunch breaks for swim breaks. She started the job in February 2020, and a month later, area pools closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So she took to the ocean instead, meeting other swimmers for a daily open-water workout at a local beach in Santa Barbara. She was immediately hooked. “It was amazing to go out there every day and explore this thing that from afar looks like an abyss—you have no idea what’s under the surface,” she says. “But then you get up close and put your head underwater and there are all of these kelp beds, fish and seals, even dolphins.”

Starting from a cove on the east side of the beach, she and other swimmers swam west out to a point where they would check in and talk. Sometimes, they’d talk about their work, bouncing ideas off each other in an impromptu social circle. “Having a daily group of people to check in with definitely made remote work easier,” she says. Oftentimes, she and others would continue swimming from there, about two miles in the summer and maybe a mile or mile and a half in the winter, when water temperatures dip into the 50s. Accustomed to cold-temperature swimming in Maine, Swalec never wears a wetsuit. “I’d rather take the extra time swimming than taking on and off a suit,” she says.

As Swalec became project manager for heavy industry in 2021 and program director in 2023, she found the data analysis to be similar to swimming in the ocean in one crucial way: “There’s so much beneath the surface. You never know what you are going to find until you start to peel back the layers.” While she sometimes starts with an existing dataset, often projects require intense legwork—locating the biggest companies in the sector, going through their sustainability reports, and figuring out where their plants are and what they produce. “It’s a little like being a private investigator,” she says. 

Decarbonizing industry has to be done in two ways, she says—changing the power sources companies rely on for their plants to more renewable sources and changing the processes companies use to create their materials. For steel plants, for example, there are two types of furnaces that can be used: traditional blast furnaces, which typically burn coal to smelt iron into steel and produce a lot of emissions in the process, or electric arc furnaces, which can use renewable sources to produce steel from recycled steel scraps, making them much more environmentally friendly. Electric arc furnaces can also use something called “direct reduced iron,” purifying iron with hydrogen rather than coal to make iron from raw materials through green processes. “That effectively makes the whole process zero emissions,” says Swalec.

The problem is that currently two-thirds of steel plants use the polluting blast furnaces. With data Swalec’s team produces, environmental advocates can assess the state of steel-producing technology around the world, approaching companies at a crucial time in the equipment life cycle, when furnaces must be relined or replaced, and encouraging them to switch to greener technology. “The main way our data are used is by groups building these decarbonization road maps, so they can assess what percentage of the industry currently uses a particular technology and what percent they can move over to another technology by what year in order to achieve the emissions savings we need,” she explains.

Beyond those basic calculations, every geography has different considerations in terms of the cost and availability of technology and renewable energy sources. “China’s industry looks very different from India’s, which looks very different from the U.S.’s,” she says. “A global assessment means drilling down into local geographies and asking whether it’s realistic to ask a country with very few renewable energy sources to produce this clean hydrogen.”

Among the accomplishments Swalec is proudest of is starting a group called the Steel Data Network, which brings together different experts in the decarbonization field quarterly to strategize about how to meet sustainability goals. In keeping with her desire to build bridges, she regularly attends industry conferences to present GEM’s data and collaborate on solutions. At the same time, groups can check GEM’s data against corporate social responsibility commitments companies have made to see if they are living up to environmental goals and better hold them accountable.

Keeping up a regular routine of swimming helps Swalec work through the difficulties of all these complicated problems. “It sets a nice cadence to the day, where I spend a few hours in the morning doing intense work, until I’m usually stressed enough and panicked to believe everything is going downhill—and then I spend 30 minutes to an hour in the ocean and it really changes my perspective on where I am in the universe,” she says. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten into the water with a problem that seems so big, and then after that decompression time, the solution just comes to me.”

As COVID lockdowns were lifted, a die-hard contingent of her original group—anywhere from three to 12 people a day—have kept up their daily swimming routine. At the same time, Swalec has intensified her commitment to open-water swimming by enduring longer and longer distances. Her first longer swim, fittingly, was at the lake where she grew up spending summers in Maine; instead of swimming across it, she swam around the perimeter, 11.5 miles in all. Since then, she’s competed in several open-water races ranging from 2 to 6 miles in California and Colorado.

The entire swim took her 7 hours and 12 minutes, in water ranging from 58 to 62 degrees Fahrenheit. “Sometimes I look out on the island and back to the mainland and think, ‘That was insane—I don’t know what made me want to do it!’” she says. “But I just love swimming.” There’s a more profound motivation to her commitment to ocean swimming, however: keeping a tangible connection to the natural world. The channel swim was full of natural beauty, including encounters with dolphins, seals, several spouting whales, and hundreds of diving pelicans.

“This mission-driven climate work can be really disheartening sometimes,” she says. “So having something to ground you is really important to connect you to your environment and make you realize what you are fighting for.” Long-distance swimming also accentuates the lesson she learned back in her days at WPI, that fighting to save the planet isn’t going to succeed with a quick fix, but is going to require a steady and prolonged commitment that counts its wins slowly, but repeatedly, over time.

“People always ask me, ‘How do you swim for that long?’ and my answer is, ‘You do it one stroke at a time, over and over,’” she says. “It’s the same with sustainability, where there isn’t going to be one big solution. It’s about reducing the problem down to millions of little bite-sized pieces and doing it over and over again.”