I Did Not Believe in Climate Change

I grew up in a small agricultural town in the high desert of Colorado. The kind of place where kids rode dirt bikes after school and families went target shooting on weekends. Deeply conservative. The sort of town where climate change was something that happened to other people, if it happened at all.
I never expected to work on climate change. Growing up where I did, I wasn’t even sure I believed in it. I had a skeptical attitude just for the sake of skepticism. When you’re surrounded by people who roll their eyes at Al Gore and think the whole thing is overblown, that becomes your default position. You don’t examine it. You just absorb it.
So when I tell people that I now write national carbon accounting standards for a living, they sometimes look at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. Climate skeptic from Trump country who now writes the national carbon standards. That’s the trajectory, and I understand why it sounds strange.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t change my mind because someone showed me a chart. I didn’t have a come-to-Jesus moment watching a documentary about polar bears. The shift happened because of people, not data. And I think that matters for how we talk about climate change in this country.
## Where I Came From
Let me paint the picture more clearly. My hometown sat at about 5,000 feet elevation, dry and scrubby, with the Rockies visible on a clear day. Agriculture meant cattle, mostly. Some hay. People worked hard and distrusted anyone who seemed to be telling them how to live their lives.
The cultural DNA of a place like that runs deep. Independence. Self-reliance. A wariness of outsiders who think they know better. When environmentalists showed up talking about carbon footprints and renewable mandates, it felt like an attack. Not on the climate, but on a way of life.
I absorbed all of this without really thinking about it. Climate change was for coastal elites. For people who drove Priuses and shopped at Whole Foods. It wasn’t for us. And honestly, even if it was real, what were we supposed to do about it? Stop raising cattle? Shut down the local economy? The solutions always seemed designed by people who had never set foot in a town like mine.
So I carried that skepticism with me, through college and into my early career. Not aggressive skepticism, just a quiet dismissal. A shrug. Whatever.
## The Word That Changed Everything
I ended up working in energy policy, which sounds like an obvious path to climate work but wasn’t, at least not for me. I was interested in how buildings used energy because it was technical and practical. You could measure things. Fix problems. Save money. None of it required believing in climate change.
Then I attended a conference where someone from NRDC was speaking. The Natural Resources Defense Council. At that point in my life, I probably would have described them as tree-huggers. I wasn’t expecting to hear anything that would stick.
But the speaker said something I couldn’t shake. She said energy efficiency was the fourth most effective strategy to arrest climate change.
Arrest.
That word hit different. It didn’t mean slowing down. It didn’t mean mitigating, that squishy policy term that could mean anything. Arrest meant stopping. Like you would stop a criminal. Like there was something wrong happening and we could actually intervene.
I don’t know why that particular word broke through my defenses. Maybe because it was concrete. Maybe because it implied agency. Arrest meant we weren’t just along for the ride. We could do something.
For the first time, I started paying attention.
## Not Data. People.
Here’s what’s interesting, though: I still didn’t become a climate convert because of the science. I started reading more, sure. I looked at the data. But data wasn’t what got me.
People got me.
I think about Sally Duncan a lot. She was my professor in grad school, one of those academics who could have coasted on tenure and prestige but instead showed up to every office hour like it was the most important meeting of her day. I remember sitting in her cramped office, surrounded by stacks of papers and half-drunk cups of coffee, convinced that my research question was too small to matter. She listened to me fumble through my doubts, then leaned forward and said something I’ve never forgotten: “The work isn’t small just because no one’s watching. It matters because you decide it matters.”
At the time, I thought she was just being encouraging in that generic way professors sometimes are. But I watched her over the next two years. How she treated every student’s half-formed idea like it deserved real engagement. How she stayed late to help first-generation students navigate systems that came easy to everyone else. How she pushed back against department politics that would have made her life easier to accept. She wasn’t performing passion. She had simply decided that this work, teaching, mentoring, building something lasting in her students, was worthy of her full attention.
Sally changed how I think about meaningful work. Not because she gave inspiring speeches about purpose, but because she lived it in the ordinary moments no one was grading her on.
As I went deeper into energy policy, that lesson stuck with me. I started noticing the invisible workforce, the people who keep buildings running. The ones who manage HVAC systems, track energy use, fix problems nobody ever sees. People who showed up every day to do work that directly affected whether buildings wasted energy or used it well. And almost nobody was fighting for them. Nobody was telling their story. Nobody was making sure they had the training and tools and recognition they deserved.
That’s when I stopped being a researcher studying an industry and started being someone fighting for its people.
Climate change stopped being an abstract debate about parts per million and started being about Sally’s lesson applied to a whole workforce. About the millions of people who work in buildings and could be part of the solution if anyone bothered to include them.
## What I Do Now
Fast forward to today. I write national carbon accounting standards. The work sounds dry, and sometimes it is. I spend hours arguing about measurement protocols and baseline methodologies and verification requirements. I sit on committees with acronyms like ICC and RESNET. I help develop standards like ICC 1580-2025 that will shape how buildings across America measure and report their carbon footprints.
It’s not glamorous. But it matters.
Standards are the invisible architecture of progress. They’re the boring documents that determine whether good intentions translate into real action. Without rigorous standards, companies can claim to be carbon neutral while doing almost nothing. With good standards, we have accountability. We have a shared language. We have a way to tell the difference between greenwashing and genuine progress.
I think about Sally when I’m deep in the weeds of some technical document. I think about building operators across the country who are going to be affected by these decisions. Are we making their jobs easier or harder? Are we recognizing the work they already do? Are we creating pathways for them to grow and contribute?
The climate fight needs standards that work for real people in real buildings, not just for consultants and compliance officers.
## How I Talk to Skeptics
People sometimes ask how I talk to climate skeptics, given where I come from. They expect me to have some secret formula. I don’t. But I do have a different approach than a lot of climate advocates.
When I talk to skeptics, I don’t mention extreme weather events. I don’t talk about man-made causes. I don’t bring up polar bears or rising sea levels or any of the things that trigger immediate defensiveness.
I talk about not wasting the fuels we already burn.
Think about it. Nobody, conservative or liberal, wants to waste money. Nobody wants to pay more for energy than they have to. Nobody thinks it’s a good idea to burn fuel and have all that energy leak out through crappy insulation or inefficient equipment.
Energy efficiency is common ground. It’s not about climate ideology. It’s about basic practicality. If you’re going to burn natural gas to heat your building, you should get all the heat you paid for. If you’re running air conditioning, you shouldn’t be cooling the outdoors through leaky windows.
That’s a conversation I can have with anyone. My uncle who thinks climate change is a hoax? He still doesn’t want to waste money. My cousins who vote straight Republican? They still understand the value of efficiency. Start there, and sometimes the other conversations become possible.
Common ground exists if you look for it.
## What I’ve Learned
Looking back at my journey, from skeptic to standard-writer, a few things stand out.
First: people change people. Charts and graphs and dire predictions might convince some folks, but they tend to harden others. What actually moves people is connection. Hearing someone’s story. Meeting a Sally Duncan who makes the abstract feel personal. If you want to bring skeptics along, you need to start with humanity, not data.
Second: practical beats ideological. The climate movement has sometimes been its own worst enemy by leading with big, sweeping claims that feel like attacks on entire ways of life. When you tell a rancher in Colorado that their existence is part of the problem, you’ve lost them forever. When you ask them how they can run their operation more efficiently and save money, you might have a conversation.
Third: the boring work matters. Writing standards isn’t exciting. Sitting in committee meetings isn’t exciting. But this is where change actually happens. The big speeches and protests get attention, but the technical documents shape what’s possible. Someone has to do that work. I decided it might as well be me.
Fourth: your past is an asset, not a liability. I used to feel embarrassed about where I came from. Like I needed to hide my skeptical roots and pretend I’d always been a true believer. Now I see it differently. My background gives me credibility with people who dismiss most climate advocates out of hand. I understand the skeptic mindset because I lived it. That’s not something to apologize for. It’s something to use.
## Where I’m Going
I don’t know if I’ve changed anyone’s mind about climate change. Maybe I have. Maybe some of the skeptics I’ve talked to over the years have softened their positions a little, opened up to new possibilities.
But I know this: I’m not the same person who grew up dismissing the whole thing as overblown. I’ve seen too much. Met too many people like Sally who are doing real work with real consequences. Spent too many hours understanding how buildings actually use energy and where all the waste goes.
I still live in a world where plenty of people think climate change is a hoax. Some of them are family. Some are friends. I haven’t written any of them off, and I hope they haven’t written me off either.
The work continues. There are more standards to write. More technical committees to sit on. More arguments about measurement protocols that will never make headlines but will quietly shape how millions of buildings operate.
And somewhere out there, someone who sounds a lot like my younger self is encountering this issue for the first time. Maybe they’re skeptical. Maybe they think it’s all overblown. Maybe they need to hear about Sally Duncan, or about the word “arrest,” or about how common ground exists if you look for it.
Maybe they need to hear that you can change your mind and it doesn’t make you weak. It makes you someone who’s still paying attention.
I didn’t believe in climate change. Now I write the standards that will help measure whether we’re actually making progress.
Stranger things have happened.