In Praise of Steve Schneider

Steve Schneider, one of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, died Monday from a heart attack while traveling from a scientific meeting in Stockholm. The San Jose Mercury News published an obituary detailing Steve’s many contributions to climate science and policy development. Steve was well known to many NRDC staff as a colleague, friend, and mentor. The following remembrance was written primarily by five of Steve’s students who are now or were recently at NRDC.

 IN PRAISE OF STEVE SCHNEIDER

By the Natural Resources Defense Council

More than twenty years ago, Steve Schneider wrote a book called Global Warming and dedicated it to his children, “in the hope that their generation will be more creative in adapting to the greenhouse century than mine has been in preventing it.”   Over the succeeding two decades, no one was more “creative in preventing it” than the author of that book.  NRDC mourns the passing of a friend, teacher and colleague.

Steve Schneider explained climate science and climate solutions with equal joy and skill in every corner of the world, to audiences that included heads of state, members of Congress, college undergraduates, energy company executives, state regulators, local church groups and Hollywood actors.   He loved the chance to help Arnold Schwarzenegger and Meg Ryan understand atmospheric chemistry, and he drew the same pleasure from a rapt audience of NRDC interns.  He felt equally at home in the wildernesses of Australia and the foothills of the San Francisco peninsula.  He preached the extraordinary potential for energy efficiency and exemplified it in his personal decisions.  To the consternation of his adversaries and the admiration of his friends, he found a way to be simultaneously a world-class scientist and social visionary without compromising either role.  Indeed, it is impossible to think of anyone else who has done this anywhere near as well.

Steve Schneider would be the first to point out that his work is not yet complete, including but not limited to the mandatory caps on greenhouse gas pollution that he eloquently urged Congress to enact over at least three decades of testimony.  For all who celebrate his life, there is now more for each of us to do, but he has left us his tools.

From Steve Schneider’s Students at NRDC

NRDC has an extended Stanford University family, which grew substantially after Steve Schneider joined the faculty in 1996.   Five of its members weigh in here:

CHRISTOPHER BENNETT [MAP Sustainable Energy Fellow]:  Dr. Schneider was both my undergraduate advisor and thesis advisor at Stanford. For me, he was both an unfailing source of knowledge and a dedicated mentor. My greatest impression of him will remain my time in Copenhagen, where Steve went out of his way to get his students personally involved in the historic climate negotiations. He has left us a legacy of scholarship and activism, and it is our challenge to continue his fight.

AUDREY CHANG [NRDC alumna and Executive Director, California Energy Efficiency Industry Council]:  Steve was my advisor at Stanford, and in the decade since, he was a close mentor and friend. His passing is a tremendous loss for humanity and the planet, and me personally – I have him to thank in large part for the career path I’m on today, and for convincing me to stay on that path and pushing me to be the best I can be.  Steve was effortlessly inspirational; he was the most brilliant person I've ever known, and also one of the most genuine and caring, who always - in spite of his insanely busy schedule that took him across the globe several times a month - made time for his students, in whom he invested like no other scholar because he saw them not just as pupils and researchers but as the future flagbearers of his decades-long quest to elevate the role of climate science in public discourse.  He was inimitable in his ability to communicate the complexity of climate science and the reasons for action on climate change in easily understandable and emotionally resonant metaphors. I vividly recall a conversation with Steve at a conference, in the throes of his eventually successful battle with leukemia; I implored him to take a rest from working to focus on his recovery, but I could say nothing in the face of his simple and starkly true response: “If I don’t do this, then who will?”  We needed you to keep doing it for much longer, Steve, but in your absence, we will carry on and try to make you proud. 

KRISTIN GRENFELL EBERHARD [Legal Director, Western Energy and Climate Program]:   As an advisor for my Honors Seminar on Environmental Science and Technology Policy at Stanford, Professor Schneider impressed upon my classmates and me the importance of translating scientific knowledge  into something that media and a lay audience can understand and act upon.  Years later, Professor Schneider guest lectured in my “California Climate Change Law and Policy” class at Stanford Law School, and he had clearly been practicing what he preached.  His presentation was full of colorful visuals and even more colorful metaphors, designed to explain to any audience in an hour or less what the scientific method is, what it can and can’t tell us, what it has told us about climate change, and what we should do about that.  It saddens me to know that Professor Schneider’s presentations have come to an end, but heartens me to think of the hundreds of students whose lives he touched who will carry on with his lessons.

SASHA ENGELMANN [MAP Sustainable Energy Fellow}:  Steve Schneider, more than any other professor I know, was as much a master of his field of climate science as he was of language and expression.  In a classroom setting, his effectiveness stemmed from his ability to weave a subtle but persuasive social context around complex economic and scientific ideas.  To a question I once posed regarding the carbon tax, Steve launched an explanation I will never forget involving the novels of Carl Sagan (with whom he has been compared).  Steve led a class at Stanford that ranged from learning basic principles of climate change to discussing these ideas at an extremely complex level with experts at United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen.  His unstoppable wit and energy was an inspiration to students who saw his influence in the company of the most respected scientists and heads of state in the world.  Always willing to try new angles from which to tackle the issue of climate change, Steve pioneered an unprecedented collaboration between the Earth Systems and Philosophy Departments at Stanford this last spring.  Working with Professor Deborah Sachs, Steve’s interdisciplinary class on the ethics of climate change was an attempt to analyze the science of climate change from a moral and philosophical perspective.  Even after hours of dynamic discussion, students would rush to his desk to ask him further questions after the end of the class, often missing their next courses.  Still, though it was his knowledge and brilliance that I admired as his student, it is his generosity, style, and love of ideas that I will remember with the greatest clarity.

NOAH LONG [Energy Program Attorney]:    Dr. Schneider's visits to Stanford Law School's environmental law clinic were informative and inspirational.  With humility and directness, he brought us the message that the struggle to confront a global climate disaster was no longer a scientific debate, but a moral and political imperative. He made us understand that as legal advocates we could, and must, be scientifically literate members of this struggle. We all owe a debt of gratitude to his great contributions to our planet and humanity.

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