Brendan Scott: Engineering Change with Empathy and Innovation

• Brendan’s upbringing instilled empathy, humility, and a lifelong commitment to serving others.
• His journey from dropping out of high school to becoming a Navy engineer sparked his passion for renewable energy.
• Brendan highlighted systemic policy changes as essential for meaningful environmental and societal impact.
• He embraces failures as growth opportunities, emphasizing on collaboration and a commitment to long-term mission success.
• Brendan balances work, family, and creativity, leading a fulfilling life centered on impact and sustainability.

1. Please tell us about your background, childhood, and how your family shaped who you are today.

I had a good and easy childhood with loving parents, and I’m very close with my family. When I was young, my mother did me a great service in explaining to me that I was never going to be exceptional and that I was never going to be Superman or the president or Michael Jackson or any of that, but that I had been born basically as one of the most fortunate beings on this earth—-born a white boy in the United States to loving parents, with all of my fingers attached, it just doesn’t get any better. She explained to me that I shouldn’t expect to be anything special, but that I owed this world a great debt for the amount of fortune that I’d been born with. That I had a lot of work to do and owed this world a life of service.

My parents raised my brother and me Buddhist, and we were told that any sense of wisdom would beget compassion. As you live your life, you will learn, and your heart will break, and you will become more and more empathetic. So you better have some skillful means so that you can do something with that besides just feeling the suffering of others so that you can be useful to them.

2. Tell us more about your professional journey. What made you choose chemical and biological engineering as two distinct fields?

I was a particularly angsty teenager, and I really clashed hard with any sort of system that I’d get put in. I dropped out of high school when I was young and hadn’t been a stellar student up until that point either. I was very disinterested in being integrated into society, being programmed, and accepting dogma. I really kind of wanted to run wild, and I did that for a bunch of years till I ended up in the United States Navy.

I was working in the engineering department of the USS Enterprise, which had eight nuclear reactors. We had the power of the sun floating around on the ocean, and at the same time, we were involved in a thinly veiled resource grab. It became apparent that energy was one of the unit currencies of our society. It made me believe that if energy were free and abundant, we would have less reason for war. It would be easier to treat water, grow crops, and do all the basic things that can make society more just while allowing room for poetry, art, and music as opposed to a dark age.

So, I became interested in finding a way to not only work with renewable energy but also a way of transmogrifying waste and pollution into an asset because it seemed like that was the most abundant resource on earth. I thought that I would be a mechanical engineer, just because I had never taken a biology or chemistry class. My chemistry professor, Sasha Uniton, explained that biology was the most efficient machine on this earth. If I could understand it I could use biomimicry and natural processes to try and achieve my aims as opposed to creating yet another elaborate resource-intensive machine.

Biology became the thing that made it so that I wasn’t on academic probation because I was a terrible engineering student and math student. But I excelled in biology just enough to make it stay in school and get through.

3. What were the challenges or hurdles you faced in your career and life, and how did you overcome those? What are some pivotal moments that shaped your career path?

I’ve had many challenges and a lot of failures. Starting with school, I realized that I was not as smart as I thought I was, which was a useful and humbling experience. But in the process, I failed calculus two or three times and had to get special permission to even be allowed to continue to try and be an engineer.

As soon as I entered the real world of engineering, I proceeded to fail frequently there too. I think it was like failure, failure, failure, failure, groundbreaking patent. Maybe the lesson that’s been useful and that I’ll carry on is to be focused on the mission but not emotionally attached to the outcome of any one project, experiment, or effort because there’s going to be a lot of intermittent failures. On the way, and in the iterative process of improving things, getting discouraged about those cumulative failures can ruin really good scientists and engineers. I have seen it happen because we care and we’re invested in the outcome of these things. So it’s key to focus on the big picture, as opposed to the outcome of any one project.

4. How do you balance your work and personal life? What are some things that you enjoy doing in your free time?

I don’t even try to balance my work and personal life–I prioritize my personal life. I’ve had years of my life where I’ve dedicated myself to labor to the point where my blood pressure was crazy, I had ulcers, and I missed the growth spurts of my son. I don’t do that anymore. I work remotely so sometimes I even cook at home. When I’m in meetings, I make sure that I schedule my time to prioritize my son’s schedule to make sure that he can get to school, I can get him home, and I can do his homework with him.

I can get my work done at crazy hours and in that free time, I’ve tried to take on other jobs or hobbies that keep me happy and kind of balance out the very much in-my-head bureaucratic role that I play at the DOE. So, in the summer, I work in the morning with a hot air balloon crew where we launch a bunch of hot air balloons and chase them around every day before sunrise. I’ve got artwork in local galleries and coffee shops that I’ve been selling—that keeps me happy. I also work with community colleges on curriculum development and teaching biotech classes. I just try to say yes to opportunities that seem positive or interesting and that are different from the work that I’m doing.

5. Throughout your career, is there any habit that has helped you achieve the goals in your mind and do better?

I think that things that have actually been useful to me in my career have not actually been the work that I’ve done. Each of those efforts, while it might be meritorious or not, eventually just becomes some forgotten legacy. The interactions that I’ve had with the people while I’m doing it have actually been what matters in my career. The reason why I’ve been able to stay employed is because I’ve met a lot of very decent, hard-working people, and we’ve been good to each other.

I came to engineering largely because I thought this was going to be a role where I could do good work completely independent of my personality. I thought that because I’d be working on numbers, units, and data, I could just be a cog or a wheel in a big machine and that all of my neuroses and all of the things that make me would be dissolved in that. That was naive thinking. It turns out that what’s been really important in my work is how I’ve treated my co-workers and the small culture that’s built within a working unit. The only good habit I’ve got is just being half-decent to the people I work with, even when things are stressful and hard.

6. Is there any leadership quality that a human being should focus on to build a better life?

What makes me happy is when I see other happy people, one of the common themes that I see is service to others. If you focus your efforts and your time on something virtuous, like trying to make other people’s lives easier and better, the odds of you being happy, feeling fulfilled, and sleeping well at night seem higher. Most folks are not born rich, and we have to choose some sort of vocation to fill our days with, and not all of those have tremendous or the same meaning.

But finding that mission and purpose where you feel like you are doing something good for a greater collective or for others is how we can help get through our days without feeling overwhelmingly nihilistic about our insignificance in the world.

7. Is there any advice or a unique habit that you follow in terms of clean energy or living a more sustainable life?

I am actually of the opinion that individuals have limited capacity to affect substantial change in this regard. I’m composting, eating organic, and very seldom touching anything that’s made of meat. My family shares one small vehicle, and we’re mostly on foot, so we do what we can. But I also think that that’s like spitting in the ocean.

If we want to see real change, it’s not going to come from individual consumer choices. It’s going to come from things like plastic bans because a lot of the economic incentives for the creation of our most harmful products are tilted so that no amount of consumer activity, even unified, can change that. Some of these products have a negative value. They are waste products being reconfigured as a value add that individuals can’t change.

Individual choices about their electric bills are not going to profoundly affect utilities at the pace and scale that we need. So the way that individuals can affect society, sadly, is through voting and political organization and becoming active in community groups that can channel and nucleate influence to the point where we can work on real policy. I think writing is probably more effective than engineering. We have the technology that we need to avert the worst of the disasters that we foresee, given steps are taken in the right direction.

8. How do you approach balancing the economic viability and environmental responsibility in your projects?

For the projects that I’m currently working on with the federal government, the assumption is that for any project to be technically viable and to make some sort of impact in the world, it has to be economically viable. The US government is propping up carbon capture and renewable energy projects with taxes and subsidies, and trying to find ways to openly manipulate the economics to generate the capitalist drive to do the right thing. I think that in that balance, we lose a lot. There are certain things that should be done not for profit but because they are absolutely necessary.

Even though the US, in the last few years, has made significant contributions to mitigating climate change in the world, I am still looking long-term to India and China to be the leaders in this because, as the necessity is well beyond the economics, it is going to always drive us to consumption, greed, and ruin it at some level. Instead of trying to turn the US socialist, I hold hope that India and China have a longer-term vision. Some of the infrastructure development that we talk about is not necessarily going to be loved by all and is not going to be politically easy to swallow, but I believe that the necessity and drive are so great in India and China that it may happen. Maybe the most hopeful I have been about the balance between economics and necessity was working in India with Reliance. The work that they were doing to try and generate sustainable fuels on the Indian subcontinent as opposed to coming from the Middle East was the only earnest commercial effort I have ever seen in that space.

9. How do you see the role of bioenergy evolving in the next decade, especially with the net zero goals set?

I see the role of bioenergy as a limited one. I think that there are certain applications where we can take waste or things that are not useful for agriculture, forestry, or carbon mitigation, and we can use that as aviation fuel. Aviation will be a difficult transportation sector to electrify. So, making sustainable aviation fuels through biological pathways is doable. The economics aren’t great right now, but that is where we can, with current technology, transmogrify waste into a useful product. Otherwise, we should mostly use our biological resources to support soil and agriculture or trade calories for kilojoules of energy, and we should be very, very careful about that.

That is ultimately the risk of working with bioenergy, and we should very carefully focus on what feedstocks we are going to use: municipal solid waste, human waste, stuff that is hard to use for other applications and is a hazard. We should be cautious about what targets we focus on generating, and I think sustainable aviation is the only virtuous one we have right now while electrifying everything else.

Brendan Scott’s journey reflects a life dedicated to learning, service, and sustainable innovation, driven by empathy, resilience, and a commitment to meaningful impact on society and the environment. His ability to overcome failures and collaborate with others fuels his passion and success. Through his work, he aims to create a better, more compassionate world. Brendan’s unwavering belief in the power of collective action continues to inspire positive change.