For Adam Met, bassist and founding member of multi-platinum indie pop band AJR, building a movement is not unlike building a following as an artist—it comes down to bringing people together. An estimated 250,000 people attended the summer leg of the band’s recent Maybe Man tour promoting their fifth studio album. Alongside hits like “Sober Up” and “World’s Smallest Violin,” concert-goers in arenas across the U.S. came away having heard clear calls to action. At each show, the band directed thousands of fans to participate in civic advocacy initiatives tailored to each location, including signing petitions, contacting elected officials, and registering to vote.
This marriage of advocacy and artistry comes naturally to Met. “Being on stage and playing the songs has become my Batman, my night job. During the day, I’m doing climate work, and I use one to impact the other,” he says.
Met, who holds a Ph.D. in human rights and sustainable development from the University of Birmingham, wears many hats. Beyond his music career, he serves as the executive director of Planet Reimagined, a climate justice nonprofit he founded alongside the United Nations Development Program’s former director of communications and advocacy, Mila Rosenthal. He’s also an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he lectures students on climate, policy, and movement building.
TIME spoke with Met to learn more about the inspiration for his work on climate change, how he balances music and advocacy, and the state of environmental activism.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
There are many social issues you could have chosen to focus on as an activist, like ending factory farming or alleviating poverty. Why did you choose climate change advocacy?
I didn’t choose climate, I chose human rights—that was my path into climate.
When I was 17, I went on a class trip to see Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland who was then the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and she laid out this argument for the relationship between human rights and climate that really stuck with me. As I continued my education, climate became this weaving connector between all these different areas: I saw how human rights played a role in everything from agriculture to waste to energy to production to transportation.
My Ph.D. was at this nexus of human rights law and sustainable development, looking at large-scale energy projects around the world and how we can integrate a human rights-based approach to the energy transition. Climate has become a passion because it intersects with pretty much everything we do in all parts of our lives.
Tell me more about the work you’re doing at your nonprofit Planet Reimagined—what are you most proud of?
Two things.
One is the idea behind the model. So much incredible research is done in academia that can help to move climate advocacy forward, and yet it’s rarely done with an eye towards implementation. That’s the idea behind Planet Reimagined: we do deep research with an eye towards real-world implementation, whether that’s on policy, technological solutions, or building the movement itself. That is not something that happens often in the climate movement, where either you’re living on the research side of things or the “let’s go out and get stuff done” side. That bridge is where Planet Reimagined lives, and that’s one of the things that I’m most proud of.
Another is this large-scale energy project called Common Grounds, where we did a massive amount of listening in Congress. We met with many Republicans and Democrats in the House and the Senate, working with the White House, the EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior to find areas of bipartisan overlap.
Specifically, we looked at oil and gas leases in the U.S. and found opportunities to site solar and wind on top of them. We found about 18 million acres across the west in both Republican and Democrat districts, and we got both groups on a letter to the Department of the Interior, who responded this past March, saying we will start approving new renewables on oil and gas land.
Now our focus is on helping these small leaseholders transition the primary driver of school funding and hospital funding in their communities from fossil fuels to renewables. This provides these communities a new lease on life. It provides jobs, boosts the economy, and works with the oil and gas companies themselves, proving to them through this market-based solution that renewable energy is the right move.
By our rough calculation, if we can site either wind or solar on the identified land, it could generate around 2000 new gigawatts of renewable energy that has never been considered in any prior study. It’ll also cut the environmental review process down by years, as all the relevant data has already been collected on this land, so we won’t need to start from scratch.
We also have a handful of other projects. We did a massive study with Ticketmaster and Live Nation to understand how to do better advocacy at concerts, and that was so wildly successful this past summer that we’re now expanding it to a bunch of other artists and genres, including sports and comedy. Over the last handful of years, there’s been a transition of what fans expect from artists. Fans want artists to speak up about issues they care about, but only if the artists are actually taking action themselves. They don’t want hypocrites.
On the summer part of our tour, we had about 250,000 people attend. 35,000 people ended up taking some sort of civic or political action, like registering to vote, checking their voter registration, or calling their representatives on site [and] asking for them to vote a certain way on a certain climate issue. In Phoenix, for example, it was 109 degrees, and we had a petition for people to sign to get the city council to designate extreme heat as an emergency.
Our goal is to partner with organizations that have specific advocacy asks. We’re past the point of educating people that climate change is real: depending on the study, around 75% of people in the United States already believe this, and it’s a waste of time to focus on that last 25%. So organizations that are just focused on awareness or raising money are not traditionally the ones that we partner with. We prefer to work with the ones that focus on an advocacy touch point with a follow-up opportunity for fans to engage. When there isn’t something specific happening at the local level, we’ll work with a broader organization, such as Climate Changemakers, which provides localized approaches to advocacy.
Your proposal involves working with the market. There’s often an anti-capitalist flavor to environmental activism, so it seems notable that you’re making progress here by working with capitalism, rather than against it.
I think the climate movement in the last handful of years has moved anti-capitalist because fossil fuel companies, big financial institutions, and even some of the car companies, have made commitments around climate change that they have ultimately walked back. Corporations are the biggest polluters on the planet, and a large number of them have done a really good job of putting the blame on the individual. The whole idea of a carbon footprint is absolutely ridiculous in my mind.
So when I’m focusing on a capitalist approach, it’s from a policy perspective: if we can get companies to agree that this is a transition they should make, then we can hold them accountable to that, as opposed to relying on voluntary commitments. This is how I think we have the best chance of making the transition as fast as possible.
AJR fits into a long tradition of musicians using their platforms for political or social causes. Are there any particular artists that have inspired you?
Absolutely. There are two that are in conflict with each other: Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs.
Phil Ochs was an artist who created protest music in a way that was really prescriptive. He considered himself a singing journalist, so he would go around seeing these incredibly difficult social and political issues and write songs about them, primarily during the Vietnam War. He was very direct about what he wanted his fans to do. He and Dylan were friends, although Dylan took a different approach, telling these stories and letting people develop their own opinions of them. They actually fought with each other over what the right approach was in order to get people mobilized.
While AJR’s music is not prescriptive in that same way—we’re not saying “go out and do this”—we do have some activism-y songs. “Burn the House Down” wasn’t written for this, but the March For Our Lives anti-gun movement picked it up and ended up using it as their theme song. In our most recent album, we have a few references to climate, including a climate anxiety line in our song “Inertia”: “I was gonna save the planet, but today I’ve got plans.”
How are you balancing your time between being a touring musician and an advocate- researcher?
In my mind, they aren’t that different. Building a fan base for our music is similar to building the climate movement. We have people from different backgrounds and countries at our shows, from 8-year-olds to 80-year-olds, who all gather for the same thing: to listen to the music. Through our advocacy-on-site approach, these different people come together to take action on climate. Being on stage and playing the songs, that’s different, but that really has become my Batman: my night job. During the day, I’m doing climate work, and I use one to impact the other.
When I’m on the road, I’m pretty much in meetings every day, whether it’s with governors or mayors or local companies that are trying to help transition. I’m really thankful I have this platform, and I want to make sure that I use it for good as much as possible. I don’t think I would be able to do one without the other. My mind works in a very strange and scary way sometimes: I’ll be sitting down at the piano and playing something, and that will inspire me to imagine some creative solution around water policy in upstate New York. I think it’s been productive so far. I don’t sleep very much at night, but all this stuff is exciting and energizing for me.
This piece is published as a part of TIME’s Earth Awards initiative, which recognizes individuals influencing the future of the planet through their work on climate justice, awareness, and activism. Met will receive a TIME Earth Award at the Oct. 9 TIME100 Next gala convening emerging leaders.
