How to escape your silo (spoiler: friendship helps)

Eve Driver and Tom Osborn agreed that the world urgently needed to ditch fossil fuels. But the Harvard College classmates, both engaged with campus conversations on climate change, saw very different ways of getting there.

Driver viewed the push for carbon-free energy sources as a historical analog to the Civil Rights Movement.

“But Tom was like, ‘No, this is much more akin to when we switched from horses and buggies to cars,’” Driver recalled.

Each slowly came to see the wisdom in the other’s perspective, with direct, and often difficult, conversations, proving the building blocks of a lasting bond. Driver and Osborn went on to publish “What We Can’t Burn: Friendship and Friction in the Fight for Our Energy Future” (2024). In a recent appearance at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, they read from the book and traded insights on fostering connections like the one they forged as Class of ’20 undergrads. 

“When I discovered this book, I found it so moving that it entered my own research on friendship and politics,” offered Ethics Center Director Eric Beerbohm, the Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor of Government and senior adviser of the FAS Civil Discourse initiative. “I told them, ‘You’ve almost created a genre here.’”

Osborn, who studied psychology, had been the teenage founder of a clean cooking fuel company in his home in Kenya. He was in high school when his mother was diagnosed with a respiratory tract infection, caused by inhaling smoke while cooking with charcoal, the local standard.

“I grew up in a setting where government doesn’t really work,” Osborn said. “I thought, if someone’s going to solve this clean cooking problem for my mom, it’s not going to be the government. It was going to take an entrepreneur to do it.”

Driver, who grew up in suburban Boston loving Ralph Waldo Emerson, remembered being skeptical of Osborn based, in part, on the name he chose for his company: GreenChar.

“I was very skeptical about greenwashing,” said Driver, now a Brooklyn-based writer and strategist focused on the clean energy transition. “There’s a lot of companies I was learning about that advertised themselves as green but were really not very green.”

“What We Can’t Burn” alternates between the voices of Driver and Osborn during their junior year at Harvard, a memoir-like format that captures how sparring partners can evolve into trusted pals who expand each other’s thinking. “The climate crisis demands radical and uncomfortable forms of cooperation between people with all kinds of reasons not to trust or talk to each other,” they write in the introduction.

The Feb. 27 conversation touched on an event, explored at length in the book, that nearly broke their relationship: Driver’s involvement in a fossil fuel divestment protest that halted a 2019 Kennedy School event featuring then-Harvard President Larry Bacow.

“I felt like that tactic was to some extent alienating,” said Osborn, now the co-founder and CEO of the Shamiri Institute, a public benefit organization delivering mental healthcare to young people across Africa. “I was just like, ‘If you’re going to be going around campus shutting down people, I don’t want to be friends with you.’”

Event moderator Ari Kohn ’26, a social studies concentrator and undergraduate fellow at the Ethics Center, asked about the particularities of maintaining their connection on campus. “My experience at Harvard has been that people have really self-segregated among people who have very similar beliefs as them,” said Kohn, who also co-chairs the Intellectual Vitality student advisory board.

Osborn attributed these divisions to the siloed nature of academia, with experts from different fields working separately: “The consequence of that is we don’t have a lot of modeling for what it takes to engage in these conversations outside of combative debates.”

Debating Driver on the best way to decarbonize helped open his entrepreneurial mind to the role policymaking can play in bringing renewables to market, he said.

“I was guilty of the siloing that I was accusing people in academia of,” he confessed, citing the “heavily subsidized” SolarCity, acquired by Tesla in 2016, as just one example of a clean energy venture to get a boost from government partnerships.

“We both had a lot of authentic questions that we couldn’t really answer within our circles,” Driver said. “I was so inspired by so many of the academics and activists and writers I was reading. But at the same time, I knew there was a limit, just from a disciplinary perspective. None of them have ever built an energy company.”