Neil Padukone

Neil Padukone, Director NY Climate Exchange

Director of Green Economic Transformation, New York Climate Exchange

1) What was your inspiration to work in climate?

It’s twofold. The first thing is, no matter what people believe, changes are happening: wildfires aren't just striking California deserts, but reaching parks in Brooklyn; the Manhattan skyline turns orange not from the sun but from the smoke blocks it out more and more rainstorms bring the city to a standstill. That’s not even mentioning the harm to those around the city and world facing daily air quality issues and food and water insecurity, and how those challenges aggregate up to civic and even international conflict.

The second opportunity: beyond carbon reduction, there are important reasons to improve air quality and public health, such as how we generate energy, produce and distribute goods, our resiliency, and build resilience against disruption. These changes can mean employment, business development, growth, and innovation.

Though climate change has always been in the ether throughout my lifetime, it came to the fore of my career while working on industrial strategy in NYC. In a city of skyscrapers, folks may not realize that 500,000 people work in manufacturing, transportation, construction, and infrastructure services, working behind the scenes to keep things running. But these industries keep things functioning daily and are the brass tacks of any climate response: greener products, cleaner logistics, efficient building, and renewable energy that don’t interrupt daily life. Helping these businesses and workforces transition their operations effectively means helping to transition the whole economy to a cleaner space. That promise was a big part of what excites me in this work.

2) What is your proudest accomplishment?

Not a personal accomplishment per se, but ironically, a powerful moment in my career came during COVID-19. The foundations of our health, economic, and social systems had been upended, but leadership was failing, flailing, and driving us apart. Not only were people ill and dying, but others were also out of work and unable to pay for food, and supply chains had fallen out, presaging even scarier changes.

Amidst all this, many of my colleagues across the NYC government came together to respond to food security challenges in what came to be called the "Food Czar Taskforce" under Kathryn Garcia. We set up a whole national information and alert system within days, developed working relationships across multiple sectors that traversed the city and country, plugged gaps in the food system, got people fed, got people protected with new PPE sources, kept people working, and even enhanced their work, helped keep businesses and farms afloat, and learned a ton that informed the City’s food planning efforts going forward.

In addition to the outcomes, how it happened was super inspiring. Even though our standing, our salaries, and our promotions probably would not be affected by the work we did, everyone stepped up to leverage whatever connections and resources we had, relied on one another, and ignored titles, rank, and organizational divisions to get the job done; did everything without fanfare or even, in some cases, a new budget line, all while continuing our everyday work and undoubtedly carrying other burdens that the pandemic brought.

It was an example of how work should happen, not just government work.

3) How did you get your first opportunity in your field?

Before working in New York City, I was researching at a think tank in New Delhi, researching for a book I'd written called "Beyond South Asia" on Indian geopolitics. I learned a lot about how the climate change-induced melting of the Himalayan glaciers has already affected water resources and conflict in the region.

But while there, I realized that many of the solutions to these challenges happen locally: transportation, land use, energy, and air quality. So, I returned to grad school to pivot into urban transport and economic development. Out of grad school, I got a job working in the NYC government, specifically an agency called the Economic Development Corporation (EDC). Its portfolio covers everything from freight to real estate to infrastructure, education, industry innovation, and economic analysis, a great way to learn quickly and build a professional network.

I’d recommend that folks looking for interesting things to do and places to learn not overlook local government, wherever they may be. Waste management, water distribution, electricity generation, and goods movement are fundamentals of modern life and are hard to deliver without government coordination or management. However, the way all these basics are provided is foundational to addressing challenges like climate change. Are we burning coal or moving solar-powered electrons to power homes? Are we shipping on electric trains or diesel trucks? So much of that work happens and is guided by the public sector. Young (or less young!) people interested in making an impact and learning a lot should consider that.

4) Who has been your most significant influence? (e.g., mentors, books, leaders)

I've been so blessed with many mentors and supporters before realizing they were supporters. There are too many to try to mention. But my grandmother just passed away at 98, so she's on my mind and has many stories worth telling. One is that when she was 16, she was taken out of school and married off. She agreed to care for her husband (my grandfather) but refused to be financially dependent. So, in the 1940s, India, against her family's wishes, commuted daily to the Bombay municipal building, held her head high even though she was one of the few women there, and returned home with her paycheck. Having that agency paved the way for her feisty independence in all walks of her life. The importance of the train in facilitating her mobility---physical but later financial and emotional---inspired much of how I thought about how good cities ought to be built. (To boot, transit is why New Yorkers emit just a 1/3 of the per capita carbon of the average American). So her story and so much more about her legacy are at my foundation, both personally and professionally.

On the more prosaic side, a couple of books that have been meaningful to me were:

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by Mitchell Waldrop blew my mind in college. It shared stories of scientists across disciplines who were challenging the dominant approaches of the late 20th century, moving from static control systems to complex systems: dynamic, evolving networks that gain strength from interconnection. From a tactical perspective, it brought about the neural networks that came to influence AI (for better or worse).

Producing Prosperity by Willy Shih and Gary Pisano is technical, but it's an essential overview of how innovation happens. It’s a critical overview of how innovation happens—it’s not some genius coming up with an idea in a eureka moment and then brutes who produce it at scale. Still, innovations---it's not some genius coming up with an idea in a eureka moment and then brutes who produce it at scale; but innovation also comes from the iteration that comes from collaboration and from many attempts to create different things in different ways at different scales---and from attempts to improve how we make them. The focus is the physical manufacture of products, but it has implications for how we prioritize things in society, including by elevating "innovators" while neglecting "producers" or "maintainers."

Relatedly, Marianna Mazzucatto's The Entrepreneurial State detailed how, though so many people deride government as uncreative, slow, and stodgy, all the things we delight in today didn't initially come from Apple, Tesla, or Google alone---but from innovations sourced and catalyzed by NASA, Dept of Energy, ARPA, NIH, and other parts of the public sector.

The Many Lives of Pauli Murray - As both history and inspiration, I'd recommend this article about a truly unsung hero in American history. Pauli Murray wrote the legal foundations of the civil rights movement, co-founded the National Organization for Women, advancing the feminist movement, was the first Black woman vested as an Episcopal priest, and if the terminology had been around, might have identified as trans today, building the power of that community too. She is a fantastic person with a story that should be better known. She is also powerful evidence that you don’t have to be bombastic, have the greatest awareness, or even be at the center of everything to change the world many times.

5) What would you be if you could change one thing about the world?

This is a big question! For now, I'll say this: I wish people (a) realized how awesome they are and (b) realized how awesome everyone is.

Everyone has power, wisdom, intelligence, creativity, energy, and other gifts to share. But because people don't realize how fundamentally excellent they are, we have people who are either self-loathing and are afraid to tap into and perform at their full potential (they're scared to give the world the gift of themselves) or are insecure and self-centered, and compensate with arrogance, bringing other people down (smothering the world with too much of themselves). Neither allows people to access the amazing gifts that are and come from themselves and others.

The musician Herbie Hancock put it more eloquently than I: "believe that all people...already have the potential of being awakened to their infinite potential...their greatness...and recognize the greatness of others as human beings."

If more people lived with confident humility rather than arrogant timidity, the world could be a more beautiful, kinder, and productive place.