La’Shaye Cobley is a staff air pollution specialist at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) where she was introduced during her stint as a California Council on Science and Technology Fellow. Cobley found her calling to science policy shortly after receiving her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Utah. Since joining CARB, Cobley has co-led projects such as the drayage component of the Advanced Clean Fleets rule, and Community Engagement Model. Cobley reflects on how her upbringing has informed her path to science policy and how she pursued a career outside academia. Cobley’s ideas are her own and are not a reflection of CARB.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
MS: What inspired you to move into air quality and urban policy?
LC: I grew up Rastafarian, which has a culture of stewardship. My mom very much instilled in me a respect for nature, so when I got to undergrad, I studied plants. In my PhD, I studied urban ecology, and the trees that I was studying told me stories about air pollution. I was really curious about where trees in cities get their nutrients from. Where do they get their nitrogen? I thought it would be the story of fertilizer use, but it was a story about vehicle emissions and pollution. It turns out that where I did my research, there's more air pollution in lower-income areas than in higher-income areas. After finding this, I wanted to have a more direct line with making an impact, and that led me into policy through the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) fellowship.
MS: Do you find policymaking to be a cycle where policy informs the environment, which informs policy again?
LC: It's all connected, especially at the California Air Resources Board (CARB). If we're doing a rulemaking, it has to be data-driven. One of the rules that I worked on, the Advanced Clean Fleets rule, said that trucks in California have to have zero emissions by 2050. I had to talk to engineers, manufacturers, and residents who live next door to warehouses. In addition to these conversations, we were looking at air quality metrics and scientific data. Once we had collected all of this information, we wove it all together to tell a cohesive story about the rule. The benefit of the role that I do is that I get to zoom in and out of the weeds and think about the policy and how it impacts people.
MS: What common challenges do you face?
LC: The thing that is hard is that you don't want to disappoint anybody. As a public servant, you want to be helping everyone, all the time, but it's not always clear what the action should be. When I was working on the Advanced Clean Fleets rule, truck drivers said they wanted clean air, but the zero emission technology was really expensive and was going to put them out of business. Those types of conversations are hard to navigate. The thing that is hard in policy, but that's also true for academia, is that things just take a really long time.
MS: Why does it take a very long time?
LC: California is very developed, and in any rulemaking, you have to prove your numbers to the Department of Finance. There's a cost associated with each rule. You don't want all businesses to just die because that's people's livelihood, so you have to do research on alternatives and perform technology assessments. Once you've done all of this research about the technology and the cost, you need to go and workshop that to the public. Workshopping takes a lot of time because you have to figure out how you are going to meet people in their communities. Are you just going to have one meeting? One meeting for 40 million people? Trying to get a compromise that works for the majority of people just takes time.
MS: How do you get the public to participate?
LC: It depends on the rulemaking and the topic. Despite CARB’s long history of community engagement, the public has said we’re not doing it well. To help address this, one of the things that I work on is CARB’s Community Engagement Model. We are writing a textbook for staff on how to better engage communities. It's already been a multi-year process because of writing the document. We’ve gone to communities in different ways and contracted community experts to identify the best practices and strategies for community engagement. Once the model is finalized, we'll train staff, which will take time as well. All of this to say that outreach is hard. There are some people who want to be very engaged and there are some people who are like, I don't care how you do it, just get my air clean. And so you have to work with all of the above. We encourage people to come to our board meetings, but also encourage them to be a part of the process before the board meeting.
MS: What are your long-term hopes?
LC: At the end of the day, I take it very seriously that I'm a public servant. The highest honor is that I know my work is impacting people, and I want to make sure that, at the bare minimum, I do no harm. To go beyond that, I want to make sure that as we clean the air and move towards reducing greenhouse gases, we do it as equitably as possible. A lot of times, communities of color and low-income communities bear the weight disproportionately of cleaning up and transitioning. I just want to make sure that no community is left behind and that we are leading with them in mind as we make these transitions.
MS: What advice would you give students interested in science policy?
LC: When I was in grad school, it was very hard for me to imagine what my career would look like after I decided that I didn't want to be a professor. I had no training to do anything else. I want students to know that we are valuable; we have skills that can be utilized. You can think about things deeply and complexly and that desire and that skill is transferable.
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