Rafe Pomerance, who died on May 21, 2026 at age 79, spent nearly five decades trying to make the world take climate change seriously before it was too late. I last spoke with him at the Arctic Repair conference in Cambridge in summer 2025, where he told me his message was “absolutely the same” as it had been in 2018: the fate of Miami is tied to the fate of Greenland.
A Career That Started With a Coal Report
Pomerance’s climate awakening began almost by accident. In the late 1970s, while lobbying for clean air at Friends of the Earth, he came across a government report on coal liquefaction warning that carbon dioxide emissions could cause a “significant and damaging” rise in Earth’s temperature. From that point he devoted himself almost entirely to climate change, pushing Congress toward hearings and testifying himself in 1984 that the consequences, once clear, would be irreversible. He helped organize the landmark 1986 Senate hearings on the greenhouse effect, a genuine turning point in public awareness. From 1986 to 1993 he worked at the World Resources Institute, and under President Clinton he became Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment, leading the U.S. negotiating team that helped produce the Kyoto Protocol.
The Cover That Made Him Famous
In August 2018, the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue — “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change” — to the story of how climate action nearly happened in the 1980s, with Pomerance at its center. The piece, later expanded into a book of the same name, cemented his reputation as one of the movement’s earliest and most persistent voices, sometimes dubbed the “Paul Revere of climate change.”
Still Pushing, Even at the End
In our Cambridge interview, Pomerance was focused on his final project: the Upper Limit Project, which sought to establish a global cap on sea-level rise as a companion metric to the 1.5°C temperature target. He argued that temperature alone had failed to sufficiently drive policy, but that sea-level rise — visceral, universal, and tied to the collapsing Greenland ice sheet’s 24 feet of locked-up sea-level potential — could finally galvanize leaders from Miami to Tuvalu. He was candid about America’s retreat from climate leadership under President Trump, calling the dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act “a real tragedy,” though he found some relief in China’s growing role in clean energy technology.
An Optimist to the Last
Despite the political headwinds, Pomerance remained resolutely hopeful. “It’s just not acceptable to lose the homes of hundreds of millions of people over time,” he told me, “and that’s not an outcome that the world can accept.” He leaves behind a policy legacy stretching from the Clean Air Coalition to Kyoto to the Arctic Repair movement, and generations of scientists and advocates he personally inspired.
Rafe Pomerance Interview Transcript
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
Rafe, it’s great to see you. Last time I saw you here in Cambridge, I think it was about eight years ago in around 2018, 2017, 2018, you said that the fate of Miami is tied to the fate of Greenland. That was eight years ago, 2025.
What’s your message now?
[Rafe Pomerance]
Absolutely the same, except that Greenland is in the global news, thanks to our president. And it’s possible to tie this connection now much more strongly so that the collapse of the Greenland, the important issue in Greenland is the fate of the ice sheet. It’s 24 feet of sea level rise, ultimately.
So the world has to tackle the ice sheets and control them. And so we’re actually in a better place now to talk about Greenland than we were then. At that time, Trump made a proposal to buy Greenland.
We jumped on that because it’s the obvious point to be made. But now it’s even more apparent. And so we’re trying to bring that forward again.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
But in that time as well, we’re starting to see impacts much more viscerally.
[Rafe Pomerance]
Yes.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
And how does that, from your perspective, as someone who lives on the East Coast of America, how does that impact actual the way people think about climate science?
[Rafe Pomerance]
I think that there’s a much greater awareness of the impacts, as you say, that we’re seeing impacts, particularly sea level rise, among others. Coral bleaching is another. There are many.
But sea level rise is sort of universal in its effect and it can drive policy. So what we’re trying to do is to turn the sea level rise issue into a driver of national and global policy.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
And how much traction have you had with that so far? We’re early.
[Rafe Pomerance]
I think we’re getting there in terms of being able to convince leaders to take this on. In other words, I can see a scenario in which 10 U.S. senators and governors simultaneously step out on the beaches of their states and call for this global upper limit to sea level rise. I mean, it’s an opportunity for global leadership.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
And you’re talking about the U.S. and obviously the federal level is kind of going backwards on policy, but you’ve got a lot of momentum at state level. And these impacts are global. We heard from a lady from Tuvalu earlier today.
And when you use that plural, leaders, are you actually thinking across a more global?
[Rafe Pomerance]
Absolutely. Absolutely. Global leadership.
There’s an opportunity here for leaders from the island states, from coastal nations, from across the globe to step out on this. And we have been in the situation where the only metric to global, to the global solution is the temperature metric, which has been insufficient at driving and motivating policy. And our thought is that the sea level rise metric as a second supplementary metric can drive policy and solutions.
Now, will it happen? Not clear, but it’s an idea.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
Now, even if you got the traction that you’re hoping for, the Greenland ice sheet is in a state of decline that can’t be stopped, but it can be slowed, as I understand it from speaking to scientists. What do you think we should do if you got the attention you needed to do something?
[Rafe Pomerance]
Well, our goal, the way we define an upper limit to sea level rises is to achieve the lowest possible rate of increase. That means, in effect, zeroing emissions out globally. So that you will achieve that result.
And the same is true of Greenland. I mean, if you lower the temperature of the earth, you’ll slow the rate of loss. And that’s the point, initially.
Now, what’s being discussed here about Arctic repair, who knows how much more we can do in an innovation context about saving the ice sheets. We have to save Antarctica. These are catastrophic impacts.
And so the world of innovation is before us. There may be more things we can do. But for the moment, I think it is sufficiently accurate to say we ought to be slowing the rate of increase to the minimum.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
And you’re at a geoengineering, an Arctic-specific intervention conference. A lot of the stuff going on here. Do you advocate for, if the research went the right way, would you advocate for deployment to stop or slow the rate of losses?
[Rafe Pomerance]
Yes. Yeah, well, we’re going to hear about different technologies that have reached a state of ability to test them or what have you. We should be doing that.
We should be doing the research. We should be doing the testing, because we need to know if we have the options. We need to know that.
And I don’t think it’s clear yet that we know that sufficiently for the public to embrace it.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
You’ve been in government in the U.S. in the 90s. You’ve been at the top of international NGOs. You’ve got that perspective.
You also know everything that you’re saying, whether it’s reducing emissions or giving the go-ahead for interventions, is rife with political trauma in a way. And do you realistically see a way through that? I’m talking about a pathway to the future that we can believe in.
[Rafe Pomerance]
The particular initiative we’ve embraced is based on the theory that the impacts can drive policy. If we’re going to lose the coastal world around the globe, that’s redundant, but to say we’re going to lose the coastal world, that may be enough to drive this with political leadership out in front. Right now we’re in a period of time where political leadership is pretty weak on this, I would say.
But that can change. And the data that we’re seeing from the scientific community is really scary. So it has been for a long time, but maybe it’s sufficient now to drive policy.
And going back to the initial question, if the population of Florida comes to understand that the fate of Greenland is the fate of Florida, maybe this all gets put together at some point.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
The thing is, the fate of Miami is usually to build great big defences and accept tidal flows down high streets, whereas the Tuvalu population are facing existential risk, which they can’t really do anything about. How do we balance those in terms of maximising your message?
[Rafe Pomerance]
Well, I think leadership can come from all kinds of places that are facing massive sea rise. It can come from Tuvalu and it can come from Miami. They all have a similar interest in slowing this as much as possible.
And our point is to try to make it happen by providing a platform or an idea that allows it to happen.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
And if you were going to leave the audience and the people who’s listening to you now with one resounding message, the reason why you came here, what was your one?
[Rafe Pomerance]
Well, my resounding message is that embracing an upper limit to sea level rise can drive policy across the board. And that this second metric in the climate system can drive policy at all levels across the board now. And it has to happen.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
Okay. It’s an optimistic message at a kind of a pessimistic time. Okay.
[Rafe Pomerance]
Yeah. Well, you know, I, you know, I’ve been doing this for almost 50 years, so we’ve been through a lot of different moods on the subject. And we reached, you know, under President Biden, the United States embraced the largest programme to combat the emissions of greenhouse gases in history.
The so-called Inflation Reduction Act. It was massive. You know, and Trump is tearing it apart.
And the MAGA movement and all that. It’s a real tragedy. But there we were as a country doing as much as our imagination would have it, putting together one piece of legislation.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
Okay. One more question to add on then to follow on from that point. As America retreats from this sort of global leadership position, and it does look like China is coming in to fill that.
There’s talk of Xi Jinping coming to COP 30. Oh, really?
[Rafe Pomerance]
Yeah.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
Does that make you anxious? Or is it a relief that maybe America hasn’t achieved?
[Rafe Pomerance]
No, I think, well, in the climate context, it’s probably a relief because what you need are substitute technologies for the energy and for the carbon producing technologies that are omnipresent in the world. And the Chinese have developed options and produced them. So I don’t see the Chinese challenge as kind of a threat.
Maybe it’s going to help.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
So with the 50 years and very varied and in-depth experience you’ve had, how does it leave you feeling right now? You still see pathways out, not out of it, but around and through this.
[Rafe Pomerance]
Yes, I do. I always have. And well, we’ve developed this idea.
We’ll see. This is a pretty powerful idea. And we have to stay at it.
And, you know, it’s just not acceptable to lose the homes of hundreds of millions of people over time. And that’s not an outcome that the world can accept. So, yes, I think we can move it.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
That’s a great place to end. Thank you very much. Okay.
Thank you. Okay.