Joe Romm, a physicist by training who became one of the most influential voices in the debate over climate change and how to stop it, using his blog to provide deep-dive insights and sharp-elbowed critiques, died on Sept. 14 at his home in Washington. He was 66.
His former wife, Patricia Sinicropi, said that he had struggled with mental health issues for several years and had died by suicide.
Armed with a doctorate from M.I.T., Mr. Romm bounded into the environmental policy fights of the mid-2000s. He became a prolific writer of white papers, books, opinion pieces and a blog, Climate Progress, which he operated under the auspices of the Center for American Progress, the left-leaning think tank where he was a fellow.
Politicians in government and experts in the field quickly took notice of Mr. Romm’s clear, detailed policy takes — and takedowns.
“They trusted him to get enough into the details to get it right, but also to be able to translate it into terms that they could understand,” Michael Mann, the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview.
Mr. Romm argued for an aggressive, all-in approach to dealing with climate change, using whatever practical solutions were available rather than investing in future technologies — a strategy that many credited with shaping climate policy during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr.
He received similar credit for his long-running advocacy of electric cars. He argued that they were a more practical alternative to the internal combustion engine than hydrogen cells, a once-hyped technology that Mr. Romm considered unrealistic. He led the charge against President George W. Bush’s hydrogen-powered-car initiative, which the White House announced with great fanfare in 2003 but which failed to deliver even a fraction of its promised outcomes.
Mr. Romm’s 2004 book, “The Hype About Hydrogen: False Promises and Real Solutions in the Race to Save the Climate,” he claimed that such initiatives were often disguised benefits for special interest groups, which used the promise of silver-bullet technologies as an excuse not to take painful but necessary steps sooner.
He took on climate deniers and the fossil-fuel industry, but also ostensible allies when he felt that they had failed to recognize the urgency of the moment.
“He was a hyperactive, very aggressive critic,” Andrew Revkin, a journalist who covered climate for The New York Times from 1995 to 2016, said in an interview. “If anything I did struck him as being too nuanced or wrong, he would pounce on it. I’d write 500 words, and he’d write 2,000 words.”
A compelling speaker, Mr. Romm also wrote extensively about how to communicate the details of climate change to general audiences, even skeptical ones. In 2015, he wrote “Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know,” which quickly became the standard primer for would-be climate-policy debaters.
Last year, he and his daughter, Toni, a student at the University of Chicago, released a podcast called “Decoding Taylor Swift: A Storytelling Revolution,” in which they argued that the pop singer’s lyrics offer a master class in how to “make the words you speak more persuasive, memorable and viral.”
Joseph Jacob Romm was born on June 27, 1960, in Middletown, N.Y., where his father, Al Romm, was the managing editor of the local newspaper and his mother, Ethel (Grodzins) Romm, was the chief executive of an environmental technology company.
He received his bachelor’s degree in physics in 1982 and his doctorate in 1987, both from M.I.T.
In addition to Ms. Sinicropi and their daughter, he is survived by a brother, Dan.
As a graduate student and in his early career as a fellow at the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation, Mr. Romm focused on the threat of nuclear war; his first book, “The Once and Future Superpower” (1992), was about American security policy.
But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he shifted his attention to energy, and from there to climate change, which was emerging as an issue of national importance.
Mr. Romm worked at the Department of Energy from 1993 to 1998, including a stint as an acting assistant secretary. He served as the director of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a think tank, from 1998 to 2006, when he joined the Center for American Progress.
His blog offered more than just his own perspective: With a team of reporters and regular contributors, it became a one-stop shop for progressives, delivering a mix of news and in-depth reports.
In 2019, Mr. Romm helped found Front Page Live, a progressive news aggregator for which he served as editor in chief, and in 2023 Mr. Mann hired him as a senior research fellow at the Penn Center.
“There’s nobody else like Joe Romm,” Mr. Mann said. “There’s nobody else who brought all of these interlocking talents and proclivities together in the way that he did. That gave him such a unique voice, and it’s a voice that we sorely could use today.”
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