Narration on the Path to the Creation of CEIF
By Creator and Director of CEIF Andrew Johnson
Having spent many years in the civil construction industry, I find myself in a unique position to accelerate the adoption of GREEN environmental systems throughout the global economy. While my intention in graduate school was to follow my passion in economics and financial markets, fate lent a hand during the 2008 financial crisis and placed me back in my family's civil construction business, where I used financial leveraging to stave off collapse to eventually bring it back to life in a different form. So, while it was not my intention to gain decades of experience in civil construction, I have it, and want to direct it at moving our global economy toward limiting warming to the COP 2015 Paris accords goal of 1.5 degree Celsius.
Having civil construction skills alone is not unique, but having a Master Degree in Global Political Economy and Finance with a focus on Financial Engineering AND being able to grade a parking lot with a bulldozer does provide me insight into taking a large problem all the way from political policy to the top course of asphalt. Also, I found as project manager of civil construction projects and manager of a multi-tenant government sponsored manufacturing incubator that understanding and overseeing electrical projects is vital to functioning systems and cost controls. With GREEN technology moving heavily toward electricity as the principal form of power, I have dedicated more of my resources toward electrical projects to gain a better insight into its properties and construction parameters.
With this knowledge and experience, I wish to dedicate my time and treasure toward avoiding the worst scenarios of climate change. After three months of part-time study and having owned an Electric Vehicle (EV) for five months, I am finding the largest obstacle toward adoption of electric vehicles, solar power, and other GREEN solutions is fear of the unknown. Consumers are simply afraid to make the leap and with good reason. Take my EV Ford Mustang MachE, even though I am able to read complex technical documents involving the battery, oversee the upgrade to my entire house electrical service, and read travel maps with ease, I have found the experience challenging and risky even with a household of two healthy incomes.
We, and here I refer to the global community, are not going to avoid the worst effects of climate change until someone gets out there and helps consumers not only afford the switch, but also educates and assists each and every citizen to understand the new technologies, how to implement the technologies, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, answer the questions, "How much is this thing going to cost me?". My Center for Energy, Infrastructure, and Finance is being built for just that purpose. My goal is to research, identify, and eliminate barriers toward adoption using knowledge and understanding of civil construction, public policy, and finance. Our goals as a society need to move beyond the wealthy elite Tesla owners who can afford to buy a spare $60,000 car for fun and make technology adoption available on a greater scale to incomes at all levels.
As we saw at COP 27 in Sham el-Sheikh, the developing countries, along with our own low-income American's, are dealing with weather events that are devasting entire populations and are pleading with the wealthy countries and corporations that caused the green house gases for help. In my spare time for 30 years I have read economic, historic, diplomatic and literature books to enrich my life, and at this moment I find all that knowledge gives me a greater understanding that allowing climate change to happen will cause mass migration on a global scale, which in turn will create unending war. My three month old daughter will graduate in 2040, a once distant date many of us never considered we needed to worry about, but now I am making a college plan for that little girl with the hope that the world can be stable enough for her biggest worry to be who her college roommate will be.