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Tim Profeta M.E.M. '97, J.D. '97, director of Duke's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, arrives one April morning at the Capitol Hill office of a Republican senator from the Midwest. He's here to discuss one of the most difficult issues facing Congress this year: how to slow the devastating pace of global warming. President Obama wants lawmakers to pass cap-and-trade legislation, which would set limits on carbon emissions and allow industries to buy and sell pollution allowances. But Obama faces a fight from Republicans, along with Democrats from coal and industrial states, who say restricting emissions will increase energy costs and stifle economic growth.
Profeta, a thirty-nine-year-old former Senate staffer, is not in Washington to peddle cap-and-trade. His job, instead, is halfway between policy nerd and family counselor. On key environmental issues, including climate change, Profeta and his colleagues listen to all sides, identify the sticking points, and help design legislative fixes to address those concerns. They focus on the staff level, where the rhetoric is less likely to veer into polemics. They do much of their talking, and listening, behind closed doors.
"He won't quote you," Profeta tells the senator's energy-policy staffer, nodding toward a Duke Magazine reporter.
The aide is new, and his stiff body language gives him a nervous air. His boss views climate change as a moral issue: As a devout Christian, the lawmaker considers himself a steward of God's creation. But he is also concerned that cap-and-trade will drive up prices for his constituents: farmers purchasing fertilizer, manufacturers fueling their assembly lines, families operating their refrigerators and personal computers. During this recession, the senator worries, these financial burdens could outweigh the environmental benefits.
Profeta speaks softly but quickly, using the policy-dense patois common to the Hill. "I'm not an advocate. I don't lobby," he explains. "I live in the world of if-then statements. If you help me define the 'if' statements of where [the senator] is now, we can be useful." Profeta listens to the aide without interruption. Then, in neutral tones, he explains the modeling done by Brian C. Murray M.S. '87, Ph.D. '92, the Nicholas Institute's director for economic analysis. Murray's calculations show how specific policy decisions—particularly the creation of "offsets," which allow polluters to buy credits from others who reduce carbon by planting trees, capturing methane at landfills, or changing farming practices—could substantially drive down the cost of cap-and-trade. "This is important for your boss's interest," Profeta says, sketching out cost curves on a scrap of paper.
By the end of the meeting, the aide is visibly more relaxed. In the hallway, they run into the senator's chief of staff, who refers to Profeta as "my global warming hero."
"There are three types of people when it comes to climate change," the chief of staff says. "There are those who deny it exists. There are those who use it to pursue another agenda. And there are those, like Tim, who understand it and want to do something about it." He pauses before adding, "That's off the record."
In the fall of 2004, Profeta was already in the thick of the climate debate when he received a call from Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, asking whether he was interested in heading up an institute, still in formation, that would take a pioneering approach to environmental policy. The new institute, Profeta learned, would bring the rigor of university research to Capitol Hill, but with greater speed and relevancy than academic scientists usually muster.
Profeta, a New Jersey native, had developed a love of the outdoors early, traveling from the Grand Canyon to Glacier National Park with his parents and learning to canoe and climb rocks during an Outward Bound stint in New York's Adirondack Mountains. As a Yale University undergraduate, he took environmental-policy classes and discovered his calling. But he wasn't sure what an environmental career might look like.
Interning for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Profeta noticed that the lawyers he met mirrored his own professional temperament. "I was more of the pragmatic sort," he says. "That's my personality. It seemed to me that the lawyers were the ones who put the suit on and took it to court, or took it to Congress and tried to get something changed in the law." Even though he couldn't articulate it, Profeta says, he also understood that "the environment was an inherently interdisciplinary topic." Duke had a joint program offering a law degree and master's of environmental management; it seemed like a good match.
Profeta found the two degree programs "cross-fertilizing," he says. "When my law-school classmates' eyes were glazing over on the seventeenth acronym of environmental law, I was interested because I understood the economics and the science that underlay those laws." After he graduated in 1997, he practiced law and clerked for a judge before accepting a position as the environmental counsel to Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.
Profeta came to the Hill in 2000, just as Lieberman was accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president. The national campaign transformed Connecticut's junior senator into a major legislative player. The new staffer got pulled into the battles over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and reducing the regulatory burden of the Clean Air Act. But Profeta's "obsession," he says, became climate change. In 2003, Lieberman teamed up with Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona to sponsor the first significant legislation calling for an economy-wide cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse gases from U.S. polluters. Profeta became the principal architect of the Lieberman-McCain Climate Stewardship Act and helped build a political coalition and media campaign around it. The Senate defeated the bill 55-43, but the relatively close margin was viewed by supporters as a hopeful first step.
The Lieberman-McCain effort revealed Profeta's considerable political savvy. "Tim was able to identify for Lieberman the way to really, really grab the ring: to take advantage of his friendship with McCain and to make McCain a leader on this," says David McIntosh, associate administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. McIntosh, who worked in Lieberman's office after Profeta's departure, says Profeta also developed a skill that would serve him well at the Nicholas Institute: the ability to advance an idea without taking credit. "When you are a staffer to a powerful person, you want them to think it's their idea," McIntosh says. "You want them to own the idea in the end. And because you can't really ever say 'no' to them, you have to steer them gently."
When Duke first called Profeta, he was "happy as can be" in his Senate job, he says. "I had my hands on the tiller of what I thought was the most important legislation in the Congress." At the same time, he felt a "constant frustration" over what he calls "the absolute polarization of this debate."
"Fifty percent of the political world had confidence in one set of sources and 50 percent had confidence in another set, and those sources were giving them different facts," Profeta says. "And lawmaking is hard. It requires tradeoffs and compromises. But if you can't start with a common version of the facts, compromise is impossible. Progress is impossible."
Of course, good environmental research happens every day at universities. But that work rarely makes it into the legislative discourse. "Usually, it's neither well-timed nor well-packaged for consumption on the Hill, and it's frequently politically tone-deaf," McIntosh says. "Some professor will look at a debate in Congress and identify what is interesting to her about it, which might be completely irrelevant and unconstructive with respect to where the decision points really are."
This realpolitik was not lost on some higher-ups at Duke.
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