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Putting It All on the Line with Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. and Jacqueline Patterson

BenTestani — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 22:48:32 +0000

Putting It All on the Line with Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. and Jacqueline Patterson

11/10/2023

Climate affects everyone, but not equally. Those affected first and worst are often the same communities that suffer from housing and income inequality, and climate and societal injustice. Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. has made striving for social, economic and climate justice his lifelong pursuit.

Yearwood says his organization, Hip Hop Caucus, was especially galvanized after Hurricane Katrina. One of his friends stayed behind to help and ended up catching her elderly neighbors as they floated down the street in the floodwaters, getting them to safety partly by first tying them to a tree in her front yard.

“And that, for me, is why we do this work. Because no one, and I mean no one, should have to catch their neighbors floating down the street,” he says. “Since that time, [Hip Hop Caucus has] been working to stop, literally, anywhere, black or white, Republican or Democrat, neighbors from floating down the street.”

A charismatic leader, Rev. Yearwood embraces his role as a unifying force, working with front-line climate activists and billionaire politicians alike.

“We realize no cash, no cause. You need resources to make this happen,” he says of his work with Michael Bloomberg. “David needs some stones. Cause we definitely fighting some Goliaths. So if Mr. Bloomberg can provide the resources for a few folks on the frontline and fenceline communities have a few stones in their slingshot, then we're all for that.”

Jacqueline Patterson is former Senior Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program. She’s also the founder and executive director of The Chisholm Legacy Project, a group that supports Black frontline climate leaders. Like Rev. Yearwood, she’s seen too many friends and relations die from exposure to industrial pollution. That’s one reason why she says a just transition needs to be driven by those on the ground.

“I think that getting behind community leadership is important. Whether it's Bloomberg Philanthropies itself, or it is the big green organizations, the places [with] the best enduring success was where communities were in the lead. The investment needs to be, and the power needs to be, with the frontline communities,” Patterson says.

Rev. Yearwood finds solace and comfort in his deep religious faith, which helps him stay motivated and compassionate amidst so much difficult work. And while he acknowledges the personal risks of putting himself on the line for climate and other kinds of justice, he says it’s worth it.

“I am more than willing to give my life to this cause because there's a righteous cause,” he says. “And I know that without clean air and clean water, the next humans don't succeed.”

"I have to have the courage to stand up to those who know that it's time to stop polluting our communities, polluting our world. We don't have much time and we must end the climate crisis now."

Guests

Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr.

CEO, Hip Hop Caucus

Jacqueline Patterson

Executive Director, Chisholm Legacy Project

Hip Hop Caucus (hiphopcaucus.org)

Ain't Your Mama's Heatwave (think100climate.com)

The Coolest Show (think100climate.com)

The Chisholm Legacy Project (thechisholmlegacyproject.org)

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Greg Dalton: I’m Greg Dalton.

Ariana Brocious: I’m Ariana Brocious.

Greg Dalton: And this is Climate One. Our show is all about having empowering conversations, and today we have a really good one.

Ariana Brocious: We don't usually think of climate and culture together, right?

Greg Dalton: We think about economics, science, curves, and outer space, maybe engineering, steel and concrete, maybe cows and hamburgers.

Ariana Brocious: But there's a group using the tools of arts and culture to do some pretty amazing things. It's called Hip Hop Caucus. They organize people around civil rights, environmental justice and democracy. And they do that by making films, a great podcast… They even host comedy shows, like one called Ain't Your Mama's Heat Wave. Here’s comedian Mamoudou N’Diaye.

Mamoudou N’Diaye: I want to tell you, just a report from these White climate crisis rooms, what they worry about: straws, sea turtles… and Black people. It’s not a good order.

Greg Dalton: The leader of Hip Hop Caucus is Reverend Lennox Yearwood, and I've been excited to talk with him for a long time. He grew up in Louisiana. He's the son of academics and activists, went to a historically Black university in Washington, D. C. He has a really compelling way of rallying people from different walks of life. He's a unifier. He hangs out with billionaires and front line climate activists.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, so after following his career and work for a while, what was it like to meet him?

Greg Dalton: I was really captured by his calm presence. Clearly, he's a man of deep faith. He's a Christian, and I also got some Buddhist vibes from him. You know, I wrestle with acceptance and resignation around climate. Am I doing enough? A lot of people in climate are worrying, am I doing enough? I think he really has a very calm way of accepting the limits of his power and what he can control while he's confronting deep, systemic, powerful people and institutions.

Ariana Brocious: So without further ado, let's hear Reverend Lennox Yearwood.

Greg Dalton: How did Hurricane Katrina impact you personally and shape your activism?

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: Hurricane Katrina impacted me personally because I had a lot of friends in New Orleans and seeing them, well I think anybody, seeing anybody drown and suffer, I don't care if you knew them or not, it's going to impact you, but for me personally knowing those communities, knowing folks in the 7th Ward and the 9th Ward and then seeing the pictures and seeing where the water was, clearly, you realize that if the water was that high, that you, people could not survive that. And so for me, I was in Washington, D.C. when Hurricane Katrina hit, but it was really the aftermath. It was really just sitting there waiting, like many people, watching, waiting. And then you just realize that, wow, there are just so many people who are literally dying before our eyes on TV. And something must be done about this. And that was when I guess we sprang into action at Hip Hop Caucus. We immediately had our networks together from the past election cycle, and people were being bused all around the country. So because of those networks, people were able to then connect with people. And then we just went right to work, and we haven't stopped since.

Greg Dalton: And before that you had been instrumental in P. Diddy's Vote or Die campaign leading up to the ‘04 election. and you've been involved in the Hip Hop Summit Action around that time. It sounds like your activism was focused in other areas and Katrina really kind of brought you into fossil fuels and climate. Is that fair?

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: Somewhat. I mean, Dr. Ben Chavis was working with me at the Hip Hop Summit Action Network, and he coined the phrase environmental racism. And so he would add that to all our literature when we were doing our voting work in 2003 and 2004. So I wasn't as, you know, up to speed as I am now. But it was clear that he was passionate and he would talk about what had happened in Warren County, in North Carolina, which is the birthplace of the environmental justice movement. And he would talk about how people would put toxins in certain communities. And so, you know, we always thought that was, it was important, but it was someone else's issue. We had other issues at that time, from the Rockefeller drug laws to police brutality to poverty, you know, we were like, okay, well, this is important.

But when Katrina hit, it crystallized, I think, for our generation how important that was. And for me, personally, I mean, I had a good friend who lived on Derjewan Street, Mama D. An amazing, beautiful, Black woman with these long, gray dreadlocks, and she lived on Derjewan Street.

Pretty middle class community, but a community that was built on the backs of Black people fighting for, just dignity. And why I bring her up now is because when she stayed home, she didn't leave like many people could have, she could have left, but she stayed home and her neighbors, mostly older Black citizens who had to ride on the back of the bus and drink from the segregated water fountains. She stayed around, you know, she was in her own sixties and seventies at the time. And as her neighbors, grandmothers and grandfathers begin to float down the street, she would go out there and catch them and tie them to the tree in front of her house.

Greg Dalton: Hmm.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: And that, for me, is why we do this work. Because no one, and I mean no one, should have to catch their neighbors floating down the street and tie them to a tree. And so for me, since that time, we, Hip Hop Caucus, created the Gulf Coast Renewal Campaign and have been working to stop, literally, anywhere, black or white, Republican or Democrat, neighbors from floating down the street.

Greg Dalton: And we see great outpourings of care and kindness. And I hear the injustice that you're talking about there. And I think of the Cajun Navy, which springs into action and, you know, carrying grandmas off, people they don't know, on their shoulders into the boat. You know, that stays with me all the time. And we seem to have this great, care for our neighbors at those times. And then we go back to... normal times, and we don't seem to care for our neighbors as much.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: Well, I'm not sure we don't. I think politicians don't. I mean, we, I think, I think, let's be clear. I think that, I think we still care for our neighbors. And I've seen that recently in East Palestine, Ohio. And I've seen this, those folks coming together. I've seen it all around in different places before and after tragedy. So I think politicians have a short memory, which is part of our work too, that we have to get them to understand that we need policy to create long lasting change because either you shape policy or policy shapes you. For too long, these politicians have these short memories about the impacts of these disasters.

Greg Dalton: You say that most people of color are forced into white progressive platforms. You came from hip hop into the environmental movement, which is known as being coastal, elite, white. What's been your experience in that regard?

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: Well, for me, I think that I've become kind of like a little bit of a Moses a little bit, right? I think that I didn't come up, even though when I after our work with Katrina and our continued work around different issues from Stopping the KXL pipeline and stopping the Atlantic Coast pipeline, to stopping the Byhalia pipeline in Memphis, we've been fighting pipelines all across and winning, we'd be very clear we've been winning as well, um, across the country for the past now, 15, 16 years. I think for me, the reason for that, though, I didn't come up. And no, no shade, as we were say in hip hop, I didn't come up in the traditional white,progressive climate movement. And I think that's a benefit because I think that I always saw this issue as an issue that impacted my community. And I think other folks do too, but they have to then work through institutions that may not be aligned to their community, where for me, it's hip hop caucus and other organizations like the Deep South Center and We Act For Justice and Uprose. And I can go on and on and on black millennials for Flint. These organizations are steeped and understanding what it means to be accountable and measurable to your community. And that's where I sit. And then also I think that the progressive climate movement is also a siloed progressive climate movement. People say that's kind of an oxymoron there, Rev. But that's exactly what we have, unfortunately, is that we have a movement that puts people into buckets. They say, okay, if you're environmental justice, okay, well then go over here. That's where the Black, brown, and Indigenous people go. If you're a young person, then go over here with Greta Thunberg and other groups like that, and y'all stand over here. If you're from Appalachia over here, you're from the Arctic over there, and that is ridiculous because the entity that we're trying to stop and curtail the fossil fuel industry is not in buckets. They are not siloed. And so I'm not sure why we ever thought a siloed, segregated climate movement would be successful, but it's not. And so I think that for me, I am in essence, a silo breaker. And so I, I work to break those silos to bring us together so we can be successful.

Greg Dalton: Right. And one way that you're doing that you're working with Michael Bloomberg,

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: That's a silo breaker.

Greg Dalton: Right. In a way, you know, Bloomberg has had a certain orientation towards markets. He's a white male billionaire, I think he's evolved. You know, I'm interested in how you came together and what you're doing together with Mike Bloomberg.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: Yeah. Well, they were a funder of the hip hop caucus, Bloomberg, Philanthropies. And we were doing work around connecting the dots between culture and climate, which the caucus does really well. And, we were working together. And then Anthea Williams, who we both actually serve on a board together, and I would show up to a number of things and, and over time, one good thing about the Mayor Mike Bloomberg is that he looks for the best people. That's kind of his trademark. And the other thing that he looked for is that his biggest joy, I think, from being mayor was that the life expectancy of people who were living before and then afterward he left mayor was longer. And we shared that passion because we both believe that anybody on this planet should have a long life. And, and so I think that brought us together. We're very different. And there's maybe kind of like an odd couple. It’s gonna be kind of an old reference. People may not know that younger folks. So it's kind of an odd couple and we both share passion. And I want to say that's very important. Do we have the same ideas and visions? No, without a doubt. We are very different. He's from Boston. I am from Louisiana. He is from one world. I am from another world. But we share that we are from the same world. And in that same world, we want to make humanity better. And so, yeah, he brought me in. and I kind of brought him in too. And we both worked together. to our best ability to make this world better. And I think we're doing it. I think that, you know, he's making tremendous investments, to curtail, particularly things around petrochemicals and oil and gas. He's working with mayors and there's so many different things. And so, and that also helps me because I think that there's worlds that I probably wouldn't have been around. And, and I think that helps me also to broaden, to bring that back to my community as well.

Greg Dalton: Because a lot of people who are involved in climate, particularly in the climate justice and environmental justice communities are skeptical of white male billionaires, a white savior complex that Mike Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Bill Gates are going to come somehow save us and they're creatures of this kind of turbocharged capitalism and, you know, symbols of the concentration of wealth. And some people look to those guys and say, well, they're not part of the solution.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: And that's where I think maybe where we differ because from my community, we realize no cash, no cause. You need resources to make this happen. So we don't, we don't have as many billionaires fighting the good fight, you know, and so we, I guess me from where we come from, the more that we can find a billionaire, white, black, polka dot. We will take ‘em and use those resources. We said we, you know, David needs some, some stones. Cause we definitely fighting some Goliath. So if, Mr. Bloomberg can provide the resources for a few folks on the frontline and fenceline communities have a few stones in their slingshot, then we're all for that. I understand though, I'm going to be very clear. I understand what white supremacy is. I'm very clear on white privilege is, but I'm also very clear that we are in a crisis and we're in a crisis that can literally have extinction level type events. And because of that, that means that we have to work together.

Greg Dalton: You're a pragmatist because of the situation, we don't have time to, to be too pure. You talk about going up against Goliath, David needs stones. You're wearing a hat right now as we record this that says end fossil fuels now. You're taking on very powerful interests, who have a lot to defend, a lot to lose. Do you ever worry about personal safety or, or taking on such power?

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: You have to, but you also have to keep moving. One of the reasons I said that Mama D story and catching your neighbors is because I realized that I need to do all I can with this life force that I have to create a better place for the next generation of humans. And I'm going to do that. And I would love like anybody to live for a long time and I have children and I have a family and I have friends and so no doubt about it. I would love to be here in old age. but if someone feels that I am in the way they need to harm me, my goal is just that the next one will pick up the baton and run very far with it so that we can have clean air and clean water. That's, that's, that's the calling sometimes that you have as an activist. You have to make that. And that's where faith comes in, for me. You know, you have to have a strong faith. To believe that it's just not you. That it's something bigger than you. And that's something that will carry on this fight. And that one day, and at this time, my goodness, with all that's going on and so much pain and so much trauma and so much hurt, you just got to believe that one day, the more that we keep fighting for justice, one day as humans, we will come together and we will make this planet a good place.

Greg Dalton: Are you saying you're willing to give your life to this cause?

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: I am more than willing to give my life to this cause because there's a righteous cause and there's a cause we're fighting for. And I know that without clean air and clean water, the next humans don't succeed. And so at some point in time, this is a temporal state regardless. And you know, I'm not going to be here forever.

So because of that, I'm okay with that. To know that the next generation, the same way, the exact same way that there were those who were on the plantations. There were those who were on the slave boats, there were those who were on the underground railroad, and they gave their lives so that a little black boy from Louisiana can work with a former Jewish mayor from New York to make the world better. Listen, I'm not doing underground railroad. I don't have that, but I have to have the courage to stand up to those to know that it's time to stop polluting our communities, polluting our world. We don't have much time and we must end the climate crisis now.

Ariana Brocious: That’s Reverend Yearwood of Hip Hop Caucus. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend.

Greg Dalton: Coming up, how approaching climate as culture can get more people involved:

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: I think the movement doesn't understand that. I think they just want to create the deep end of the pool, but you need to create the shallow end so folks can come in and learn. And I think that's what the Hip Hop Caucus is doing.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Ariana Brocious: This is Climate One. I’m Ariana Brocious and today on the show: climate as culture. My co-host Greg Dalton talked with the leader of Hip Hop Caucus, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, whose faith is foundational to his work.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: Yeah, my faith is very important. My faith actually keeps me because this, this work can be lonely, actually. It actually, you know, can be very lonely. So your faith helps you in that regard. And I tell young people all the time, you know, they, they sometimes may not go to some of the more traditional institutions that we've had, but they have a very strong faith. And I tell them all the time, regardless of where they come from, you have to do this work. You have to believe in something outside of yourself, because if not... You're going to pull on yourself, you're going to think that you have to be the solution and you have to make things right and you have to make sure that, you know, we, we win. And when you get to that level, it becomes consuming and

Greg Dalton: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: And you can't, you can't work that way because then you're not open anymore. Love is what conquers all. And so that's the thing for me. Simply is that you have to have faith. And so for me, faith is critical. this something that you believe is beauty and, and, and, and something you adore, whatever that is, but you have that something outside yourself that you pull on so that you don't consume yourself. Because if you don't, then the rage, the anger, the bitterness will actually consume you.

Greg Dalton: We live in a culture that has been shaped by capitalism that trains and conditions us as consumers that we're out for ourselves. It's what I buy, what I do, how I look, how and then climate, how I act, my personal climate footprints, you know, and that can be. totally consuming. I have virtue fatigue thinking about every little decision I make. What do I eat? What do I buy? And you're right. It can really be consuming. So earlier, you mentioned the hip hop caucus addressing climate and culture. I'm interested in your thoughts about climate as a cultural issue.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: Yeah, climate is a culture issue, and we have to be better storytellers. I think that's the next, the next frontier in this movement. I think that production is the next form of demonstration. I have nothing against marching in the street. I think it's important. I do it all the time. I have nothing against civil disobedience.

Definitely when it’s peaceful. I think that's important. to bring awareness. But I do think that at this moment, as folks are connected to their phones and radio and TVs, I do think that storytelling is everything. And I do think we need to do better at that. I think we must use our cultural expression. To shape our political experience. And so I think that using culture to do that is, is, is important. So Hip Hop Caucus is, is leading now on the way to other groups like Good Energy and others who are working with folks in Hollywood. But Hip Hop Caucus is leading on that front, creating stories from short films and music, the home album called Heal Our Mother Earth with Common and Neo and Antonique Smith, I mean, there's so much good stuff as well as comedies, I think, and using comedy, Ain't Your Mama's Heat Wave, I mean, just doing so much to really broaden the movement. I think the other thing here is that there's a need that the other side, so to speak, wants to keep it just to one group of people who are preaching to the choir. And so the way that you, you break that is that you have to get. everybody engaged and everyone involved and to broaden your camp, so to speak. And so storytelling helps that because then people can listen at their own accord, their own time and be involved. And so I think that's what we're doing at Hip Hop Caucus. We're trying to be the best storytellers possible. Cause another thing too, no offense to my science friends, I love dearly, I love my scientist friends, but my goodness, they, they can, they can help you gloss over, man. I mean, it can be tough going. I mean, I mean, I love to read an IPCC report. No, like, no, like no other, but man, and it's like, whoo. So we need a little help on that. And we need those who have that gift of storytelling and I think the folks in the Hip Hop Caucus do that really well. And I'm actually very happy that more people are getting behind that and are understanding how important it is to literally just tell the story correctly.

Greg Dalton: Right and that story so often has been what can I buy? Do I eat meat or not? Do I buy an EV or not? Do I buy solar? It's then again, back to that consumer identity, which leaves a lot of people out. It's a very, very narrow pathway for participation versus who am I you know, music, I guess you're saying culture, et cetera, what are the ways in to care about–

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: How fast those EV, how fast those EV goes. I mean, I mean, there's different ways of telling the same story. I mean, if one person is saying that, Hey, you can plug in and save the planet. And that's a great story. And we need that story. Other story could be like, man, this EV is super dope and it goes really fast and it's a lot of fun to drive that may turn different people on. Sometimes, you know, you gotta make things a little sexy, right? I mean, that's what's important also. I think that, I think people need to see this differently. And that's why I think culture is so important, food and fashion. And how we view things. And also, I think the movement had a tendency to only create the deep end. And that's, this is one of my things where everybody has to go to the highest diving board and leap off into the pool, into, you know, 15 foot water. The pool, though, should have two ends. It should have the deep end, which is important, but it should also have this shallow end where the babies can get in and in their little diapers and they can play around in the water. And that's the same pool, the same water, but it allows for everybody, the babies on one side, but also those who want to dive off the deep board on the other side to be all in the same pool. I think the movement doesn't understand that. I think they just want to create the deep end of the pool, but you need to create the shallow end so folks can come in and learn. And I think that's what the Hip Hop Caucus is doing. They're creating a pool, the same water, same pool, same thing, but it allows for different people at different levels to feel comfortable and be in the pool at the same time.

Greg Dalton: Right. Sometimes I'll be out at a dinner with friends and, and they're conscious about what they order in front of me because they think I'm going to judge them. Greg's here, so I'm not going to eat fish because, you know, he's one of those climate guys. He's going to think I'm a bad person if I do this, and there's so much judgment that prevents people from getting involved in the climate conversation, climate activity, because they think they have to be pure to enter the temple and be, you know, vegan, da da da, all these sorts of things, and it keeps people out. And so it seems you have a real gift for bringing people in because it doesn't sound like you judge them. You welcome all to your temple.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: Most definitely. I mean, I think that's the key. I think we have to have that. To do this, we're going to need industry. We can't fight all the time. We're gonna just batter each other. So the hope is that they realize that now, particularly with the bipartisan infrastructure law and the inflation reduction act, that there's real opportunity because they want to make money. I get it. What you want to do. There's real opportunity for you to make money. And so, and so for you to shift from one to the next, and so I am actually hopeful that they take up that task, and they realize that, you know, creating Cancer Alley, which is in my backyard in Louisiana, or creating, Sacrifice Zones, which may be from Flint to Jackson to Houston, that's not right.Their business plan can't be a death sentence for other people's communities. And so I'm hopeful, even for industry, that they understand that, that we all have to do this thing together, that we are in a crisis and we have to come together, but that's the thing. I don't know if they understand that. Well, unfortunately they're so, some of them are so wedded to greed, that we will need to force some to stop what they're doing. That is just the reality that some of them are not going to stop. And they're not, and they have shown that, they've shown that they will lie. Like, you know, there's a whole thing with Exxon, Exxon Knew and Exxon Lied and Chevron and BP, and now they're being sued by attorney generals all over the country because of these lies that caused so much pain and harm. But there's still hope because we still, to get over the finish line, we're going to need them to come around.

Greg Dalton: And that's, but they're playing by the rules of the game, right? I mean, the rules of the game are that corporations serve shareholders, maximize profit, and they can get sued if they don't do that. So the individuals, now, maybe they created the rules of that game, but the individuals are playing in a system that prioritizes profit over people.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: Well, and that's why other ways of mechanisms that people are doing in the movement is important. They are doing shareholder strategies. You know, we've seen that with Exxon, folks are creating that. There are folks who are now going right to the banks. You know, me and my dear friend, Bill McKibben, have been talking to many banks, from Citibank to Chase Bank and telling them to stop funding these folks, because that's, you know, basically cutting the money pipeline. We've been going to some of the insurers, and also talking to folks like BlackRock. So we've been working it. I mean, we've been working it from all sides. We would say working it from the streets and the suites, and, and, and trying our best to make the impact. And there's been success and there's also been failures. But I think ultimately, if you make it hard enough, they will themselves realize it's too hard to keep doing this. It is unpopular. We are losing our social license. And so we must transition. And then when that happens, I actually think that we can save our world.

Greg Dalton: You're a man of faith. Forgiveness is a big part of faith. Are you able to forgive polluters and find empathy for even the worker, frontline workers?

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: Well, definitely frontline workers. I mean, I think, you know, we say down South there's, there's, you can forgive, but you can't forget, right? That's what, that's one of the things that they would, they'll say they'll, they'll twist it around a little bit. But your question to me is, can I forgive? It's, it's hard to… for them not to understand how much has been done to hurt because I can't bring people back, right? I can't bring back those folks, that mama who found that lump in her breasts. Or that father who found that lump in his groin. And they eventually died because of cancer or we know that, 68 percent of black people live within, you know, 30 miles of a coal fired power plant causing asthma and emphysema. So I can't bring those children who had asthma attacks in Baltimore back, right? I can't, I can't literally, the suffering that that child went through choking to death in their living room and over there in Cherry Hill in Baltimore because of the pollution. I can't bring that child back so that they need to understand that there has been some tremendous harm and hurt that has come particularly to vulnerable communities and they literally picked on in a bully type fashion, putting their plants on former plantation sites and putting it within Black and brown and Indigenous communities, next to reservations. They literally picked on those who sometimes didn't have the ability to fight back. So it's hard. But with that being said, if their intentions are true at this time to save our planet from global destruction, I can forgive. I can forgive because it is more important for us to save our planet for the next generation than to harbor hate for the past, and that's hard. So hard. But it is something that I, I, and I hope other activists and other communities can do.

Greg Dalton: You've worked with activists like Sharon Lavigne, who won the Goldman Environmental Award for her work in the dreadfully named Cancer Alley that you've mentioned near where you grew up. How did you come to work with Sharon, and what effect did her story have on you?

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: Sharon Lavigne is an amazing activist overseeing St. James parish, who now runs Rise St. James, an organization built on faith. Sharon was a school, a special education school teacher and literally was there with Formosa a corporation that's based in Korea and decided that they were going to just join the onslaught of corporations and industry–

Greg Dalton: Formosa, I'll just clarify, Formosa Plastics is a company that's building a petrochemical plant there.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: That’s exactly right. And she decided that she was going to work to stop that with some of her neighbors. Um, the group that she was working with was infiltrated, which was what they would do. Um, and she actually recognized that, which was probably one of the most amazing things about her story is that she recognized that they were infiltrated. You know, she's an amazing activist. It breaks my heart because I know that she faces threats all the time. That happens all the time to activists. So it was one of the things that we're seeing more and more as the industry gets more and more desperate. That they are threatening and harming and hurting activists who they feel are getting in the way.

Greg Dalton: And Sharon Lavigne doesn't want to be doing this work. You say that she, she –

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: No, that's actually very important. She would rather be retired. That's very important. She would rather not be doing this work. And she talks all the time about how hard this is. But she gets up every single day to ensure that the next generation has clean air and clean water. She remembers a time because she's old enough to remember a time when her community could go to the lake and find everything from crawfish, a Louisiana thing, to other things in the water to, you know, to play outside. So now she knows a time when everyone in her community is getting sick. And so for her and her neighbors and her community, they're fighting back.

Ariana Brocious: You're listening to a Climate One conversation with Reverend Yearwood. Coming up, relating climate action to other social movements.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: People need to understand that climate change and particularly, having clean air and clean water, is a civil rights issue. We have a right to clean air, we have a right to clean water. And so, because it's a civil rights issue, it needs to be on that same platform.

Ariana Brocious: That’s up next. We’ll be right back.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Later in the hour, we’ll return to my conversation with Reverend Yearwood. But I want to take a moment to bring in another leader who’s bridging the environmental rights and civil rights movements, that historically have some mistrust.

Ariana Brocious: Jacqui Patterson is former Senior Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program. She’s also the founder and executive director of The Chisholm Legacy Project – it’s a group that supports Black frontline climate leaders.

Greg Dalton: Like Rev. Yearwood, she’s seen too many friends and relations die from exposure to industrial pollution.

Ariana Brocious: Jaqui Patterson grew up near coal-fired power plants on the south side of Chicago, but says the impact of that didn’t hit her until later in life.

Jacqueline Patterson: Growing up, it was kind of not as conscious, like, you know, so I knew that there were kids in my class who had asthma. I didn't. I knew that there were folks in our church who, you know, had kind of like the respirator, you know, those mobile respirators. But I didn't necessarily tie it to the coal fired power plant or the near roadway air pollution until I grew up and then knew that those things were there. So it's only in retrospect that I think about, you know, the kids who, you know, weren't in school sometimes because of their asthma, you know, poor air quality days, or the kids who were in school and you'd see them put their respirators up during recess or whatever.

Ariana Brocious: So, once you kind of connected the dots a bit later in life, how did that shape the work that you do now?

Jacqueline Patterson: Yeah. It definitely made it a bit more personal. You know, my father passed from pulmonary fibrosis, which is usually something that people get when they smoke, but he never smoked a day in his life. And so I wonder, you know, if that was potentially linked. My mom passed away from colon cancer. She was 73 and she was otherwise…she walked, and, you know, she was quite healthy, and so, so I wondered, but definitely, probably more so with my dad, I just wondered what the toxic exposure might have done. My brother just passed little bit over a year ago of bile duct cancer. And, again, he was 56 years old. And so I just wondered what in our, growing up on the South side of Chicago might have contributed to any of those illnesses and passing. And then it just also made me think about other folks who I know from the community who, who passed prematurely childhood friends who passed earlier and so forth.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, I'm so sorry to hear about that. It is difficult to separate, but we know there's evidence that, living near these types of facilities has a lot of negative health impacts and multiple reports have shown that race is the number one indicator of whether someone lives near toxic facilities that cause this kind of pollution. What do you think is the best path to changing that?

Jacqueline Patterson: Yeah. I mean, I think that the best path is to eliminate, you know, the, I'm part of this group called the Cancer Free Economy Network. And to recognize that it is possible to have a society that doesn't have these types of things at all. So it's not just who gets more exposed to it or not, but it's that they're not necessary. These toxins that are in it, you know, it's possible for us to, to have what we need in abundance without having these toxic shortcuts that, that often corporations and industries make. it's not just about making things less bad or or just kind of mitigating or doing kind of midway reforms. It's about eliminating these toxins because it's very possible. It's very doable. And that's what we need to set our sights on.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, But there's a lot of industry resistance, and you spearheaded a report titled Fossil Fueled Foolery. Say that three times fast. During your time at the NAACP, focused on the main tactics used by the fossil fuel industry to promote their agendas, and in many cases, further climate injustices. Tell me a bit about that report, what it found, and what it recommends in terms of action.

Jacqueline Patterson: Yeah, So it did find these manipulation tactics, like whether it is financing campaigns of people that will not push, push forward the types of regulations that we need or the types of legislation that we need. So that's certainly one thing, manipulating the media, to some extent, whether it's buying ads that put forward false narratives, you know, we've seen the reports like Exxon Knew and other types of reports that have talked about how scientists, even science, and gotten people to put forward completely false, untrue analysis and, and research that says that, you know, “these things aren't tied to climate change.” And then the ways that they will take advantage of communities and “befriend” communities by establishing a financial relationship that will then have communities thinking that people have their best interest at heart.

Ariana Brocious: And this is things... I just want to jump in and give an example. Something like investing in sporting events, right? Or festivals or things where there's a lot of advertising and branding for that company to show that they're engaged, right?

Jacqueline Patterson: Exactly. Yes. So doing those kinds of things and then when communities when I remember when I was at the NAACP one community came to us and they said, Oh, this company wants to come in and build a landfill and they they just they want us to support them and they're willing to give us a $100,000 over the next 10 years. And so they sent us the plans and there was building this landfill on top of the water aquifer. And so we said, well, that's not good. And they said, well, they want to help the children. And I'm like, well, they're also going to simultaneously be poisoning the children. And so the, but the level of kind of economic disenfranchisement, they really capitalize on that. They see that vulnerability and they, they bring something that the community wants and needs and then, yes, obscures the actual harm that they're, that they're buying with these contributions.

Ariana Brocious: So you mentioned that there can be really negative consequences to money from fossil fuel industry or petrochemical industry coming into a community, trying to kind of sway them to back the industry. In contrast, in the conversation with Reverend Yearwood, we talked about the role of Michael Bloomberg's philanthropy. He's a billionaire, made his money through capitalist society, but he's investing some of that money to these causes that are, as Reverend Yearwood would put it, you know, giving David stones against Goliath. So what role do you think billionaires should have in this fight for environmental justice?

Jacqueline Patterson: I think that getting behind community leadership is important. Whether it's Bloomberg Philanthropies itself, or it is the big green organizations that the places where there was the, the best enduring success was where communities were in the lead. The investment needs to be in the power needs to be with the frontline communities.

Ariana Brocious: Well, to that point of creating strong communities and empowered communities, you're founder of the Chisholm Legacy Project, named after Shirley Chisholm, who was, of course, the first African American woman to be elected to Congress and the first to run for president. So this project aims to be a resource hub for Black frontline climate leaders. What need did you see for creating more leaders in these communities?

Jacqueline Patterson: Yeah. So it's not so much creating leaders. It's supporting the leadership that we see, you know, so, and that's what I saw. I saw that there were leaders that were out there trying their best to do this work and successfully doing the work and knowing that if those same leaders had connections to other resources, that the work wouldn't happen at their expense, that they would actually be able to do the work in a way that it, that didn't ravage them in the way that it often does when leaders are trying to work with so little in the way of, of resources. And so I saw communities like Randolph, Arizona, where there was a freedman settlement that was fighting against the local company that wanted to expand their natural gas plant. And they were just there with this pro bono lawyer. And the community had multiple health problems and so forth. And they were just trying their best to do this fight without any outside resources or anything, except for the pro bono lawyer who was in there. And so that's an example of where with just a little bit more in the way of resources, whether it's like connecting them with the legal clinic or providing resources to the pro bono lawyer or providing stipends to the local organizers or whatever it is that they might want or need, connecting them with someone who can help them with research that can strengthen their arguments when they're talking to the public utilities commission. So just like a little bit of infusion of resources can help to strengthen. So it's not such a tough slog for folks. I mean, they were victorious without the infusion of much in the way of resources at all, but it shouldn't have to be that way. It shouldn't be that hard to advance justice.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah. A just transition is critical as society pivots away, moves away entirely, hopefully, from fossil fuels. We often hear how workers need to be retrained, but there seems to be somewhat less attention paid to communities, like the ones we've been talking about, that have already suffered from the production, manufacture, burning of fossil fuels. So with that community lens in mind, what should a just transition look like?

Jacqueline Patterson: So again, you'll hear the theme, the just transition should look like whatever the community says it should look like. It needs to be led and it needs to be defined by, by community. It could be different for each community, but the bottom line is that the Just Transition means that in the end, There is self determination, that life isn't something that happens to communities, but that communities are actually more so in the driver's seat than is often the case now. It people have access to the basics and quality and affordability around the basics. clean air, clean water to drink, access to affordable energy and that we do it on our own terms.

Ariana Brocious: Jackie Patterson is founder and executive director at the Chisholm Legacy Project. Thank you so much for joining us on Climate One.

Jacqueline Patterson: It was my pleasure. Thank you.

Greg Dalton: In recent years, climate has entered the mainstream conversation as a concern for American voters of all stripes. Two thirds of Americans say they want to prioritize renewable energy. And people are also talking more about how climate is connected to gender, race, economics, and equity. Reverend Lennox Yearwood is leading a lot of those conversations – he spoke at both the 50th and 60th anniversaries of the March on Washington. But he says people are still not talking about energy and climate enough.

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: During the 50th anniversary, which was 10 years ago, I think president Obama spoke at that one. Myself and Cory Booker, Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey were the only two who, whose main thesis, so to speak, was around climate. And so then 10 years later, the crisis has gotten worse. Every year has gotten hotter. We've had droughts and wildfires, more hurricanes. Unfortunately, this year, uh, at the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, I was the only speaker who spoke on climate. So it's not a good trend, right? Not a good trend, and I'm glad that some reporters and others caught that. But the thing here is this, is that people need to understand that climate change and particularly, having clean air and clean water is a civil rights issue. We have a right to clean air, we have a right to clean water.

And so, because it's a civil rights issue, it needs to be on that same platform, but I think that this goes back to what we were saying earlier, that this means we need to break the silos that are in our communities. And I think this is something that I've now been working on and working with some of the big green organizations so that they can reach across the aisle to the civil rights communities, to folks in the NAACP and the Urban League and the King Center and on and on and on, that we can come together. And I think that my hope is that can happen now. I've told my dear friends at the Congressional Black Caucus that they need to stop taking fossil fuel money. I went to the Congressional Black Caucus this past year. And again, some of the sponsors there are still from the fossil fuel industry. And so they think they're getting away. They're like, okay, well, we're not really, this is, other folks issues. So we can take this money. They, also need to stop taking, it is dirty money. All money ain't good money. They say in my community. And so they need to stop taking the fossil fuel money. So on one side, we need, we do need the big green and the environmental movement and the conservation movement to reach across, to build support for the civil rights movement. On the other side, we need the civil rights movement to also stop taking money from the fossil fuel industry, we need to stop taking because that money is what is killing our communities and our Black and brown and Indigenous communities. And so that's what our job is now. Hopefully by the next 65th anniversary, we will have a much better representation of climate during the March on Washington.

Greg Dalton: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have put climate justice at the center of a lot of their climate efforts. How do you rate the Biden Harris administration now on climate justice?

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: They have a full report card. It isn't just one grade. Um, and so on creating policies to create change from the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, the, the BIF, all those things, putting people in positions throughout the agency, putting forth a Justice 40 process, they get an A for that. But at the same time as they are opening up supply demands for LNG, they are still sponsoring things that can be destructive from the Arctic to the Gulf Coast. In essence, they are still doing renewables on Monday and doing fossil fuels on Tuesday. That is not what makes a climate champion. So for that, they get a D. And so there's a mixed grade there, right? You have an A on one side, you have a D on the other. That puts you right between like a C ish type of grade. But they need to be not a C on a grading scale. They need to be a C for climate champions. I will tell them as one of the folks who was named a climate champion, that they need to be climate champions. They need to be serious and they need to begin to help us to transition because the world is watching.

Greg Dalton: As we wrap up, you talked about your willingness to give your life to this cause, and I'm curious about whether a lot of activists are attached to outcomes. We're really got to drive, you know, achieve this campaign, you know, reach this number, et cetera, et cetera. You know, are you also similarly attached to outcomes?

Rev. Yearwood Jr.: No, that's a great question. I actually am kind of outcome independent a little bit, this is where our faith comes in at. I have to do the best that I can do. I have to do it with integrity. I have to do it with the spirit of righteousness. And I had to do it with love, and if I do it with those things, I have to believe that we will, that the outcome that we will get should happen. But I also know... In these battles that you sometimes don't see it, you're not always gifted to see what the outcome is or what it will be. And because of that, you have to be okay knowing that you may not see the outcome, but you have to know that you're putting us on the right path. And I think that we've seen that, right, with the Civil Rights Movement, and we've seen that with the Women's Rights Movement, and the Queer Rights Movement. We've seen it before, when people didn't see the outcome, they unfortunately never knew how it turned out. They never knew that one day they would be a Black president. They never knew that there would be marriage equality. They never knew that women, well... Would have rights and unfortunately rights, some of those rights are being taken away, but they, they never knew they would see that and never saw it. I have to be the same way. I think others have to be the same. We don't know, honestly, if we're truthful, if this world survives the climate crisis, we can do all we can do. And we have to put this world, the prayer is, and you can't work if you have to see it. But you have to believe, and you have to be prayerful, that you are putting this world and this cause on a pathway so that those human beings after us, they can come and say thank you. You will never hear the thank you. You will never hear them say that we now have clean air, clean water because of those folks who lived back in 2023 and 2024. We now in, you know, 2074 and 2075, we have clean air, clean water. We, you may not be around for that. But you have to believe that there will be humanity after us, and because there will be humanity after us, it is our job, it is our destiny, it is our goal to make their lives better.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking with Rev. Lennox Yearwood, CEO of Hip Hop Caucus. If you want to learn more about their work, check out their pod called “The Coolest Show” wherever you listen.

Ariana Brocious: Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe wherever you get your pods.

Greg Dalton: Talking about climate can be hard… and exciting and difficult -- AND it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Greg Dalton: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Ariana Brocious is co-host, editor and producer. Austin Colón is producer and editor. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Wency Shaida is our development manager, Ben Testani is our communications manager. Our theme music was composed by George Young. Gloria Duffy and Philip Yun are co-CEOs of The Commonwealth Club World Affairs, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates.

2:10 Galvanizing power of Hurricane Katrina for climate activism
9:00 Breaking down silos to bring people together
10:00 Working with billionaire Michael Bloomberg
15:00 What he’s personally willing to give to the cause
17:45 Role of faith in his work
19:30 Climate as culture and power of storytelling
27:30 Forgiveness for fossil fuel companies and workers
34:00 Jacqui Patterson on childhood pollution exposure
38:00 Manipulation tactics of fossil fuel industry
44:00 Just transition needs to be defined and led by local community
48:30 Rating the Biden/Harris administration on climate justice

Play

Cow Poop and Compost: Digesting the Methane Menace

Otto Pilot — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 08:01:00 +0000

Cow Poop and Compost: Digesting the Methane Menace

02/25/2022

Carbon dioxide isn’t only greenhouse gas being emitted into the atmosphere that’s damaging the climate. In a 20-year time frame, methane is actually 80 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. These emissions present a significant problem for policy makers and people alike. Over 100 countries, including the US, have signed the Global Methane Pledge. The goal is to reduce methane emissions 30% by 2030.

Nationally, 37% of methane emissions come from cows. “Enteric fermentation” - a polite way of saying burps and farts - accounts for 27% of a cow’s methane emissions. 10% is from manure. The second big emitter is food waste rotting in landfills, which accounts for 17% of national methane emissions.

California is trying to be a leader in methane reduction. This past January, a new law (SB 1383) went into effect directly addressing the state’s methane emissions from organic waste in landfills. In a show of ambition, the state’s target is a 40% reduction in methane emissions.

Communities in California are now required to collect organics and divert them to be made into compost that goes back into the soil or made into fuel. The law also regulates dairy farms, requiring them to limit emissions. For dairy farms, the primary tools for achieving those reductions are anaerobic digesters. These digesters are essentially tanks or enclosed lagoons where microbes break down manure to produce and capture methane that would otherwise go into the atmosphere.

Not everyone approves of using anaerobic digesters to reduce methane. J Jordan, Policy Coordinator at the Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability:

“There are other types of agro-ecological practices, management decisions, pasture-based dairy. There are other forms of animal agriculture that do not have such a devastating impact on the environment, on people.”

Allen Williams, a 6th generation family farmer and founding partner of Understanding Ag, has experience with alternatives to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs.

“If you’re gonna have a CAFO system, you know you're going to produce more methane that's gonna be released into the atmosphere. So yes, you better be feeding something to reduce that methane or either using and even using methane digesters. But if you're out on a pasture system using adaptive grazing none of that is needed. It goes by the wayside because you no longer have those same issues existing.”

Michael Boccadoro, Executive Director of Dairy Cares, has a different take on the scalability of pasture based dairy farms:

“Let's not lose sight of the fact that those farms are gonna be much less efficient in terms of producing milk, which means we’re going to need a lot more cows in California to produce the same amount of milk. And that's going to overall lead to higher greenhouse gas emissions, not lower.”

Proper composting can also drastically reduce methane emissions and regenerate topsoil. Monique Figueiredo, CEO, Founder, and Co-Owner of Compostable LA is the driving force behind a company attempting to make composting more convenient.

“Composting is so impactful for the climate because of two things. One: it takes organics out of a landfill, and organics in a landfill become methane. They kind of slowly mummify while rotting, because the conditions in a landfill are so tightly packed that they create these anaerobic conditions, these conditions without oxygen. And when that happens food scraps can’t decompose properly, and so they release methane, which is way worse than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years of its life. So if we’re talking about reversing climate impacts before 2050, like a lot of the scientists are saying, we have to get methane under control.”

Guests

Michael Boccadoro

Executive Director, Dairy Cares

J Jordan

Policy Coordinator, Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability

Neil Edgar

Executive Director, California Compost Coalition

Monique Figueirado

Founder, Compostable LA

Allen Williams

Founder, Understanding Ag

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Over a 20 year period, methane is even more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. Food scraps create a significant chunk of the methane released into the atmosphere, as they rot in landfills.

Monique Figueiredo: They kind of slowly mummify while rotting, because the conditions in a landfill are so tightly packed that they create these anaerobic conditions, these conditions without oxygen. And when that happens food scraps can’t decompose properly, and so they release methane. So if we’re talking about reversing climate impacts, we have to get methane under control.

Greg Dalton: Proper composting can drastically reduce methane emissions and regenerate topsoil.

Allen Williams: In the US alone we waste approximately 40% of our food that’s produced annually. Why not take that waste and turn it into something that’s gonna be very beneficial to us?

Greg Dalton: Digesting the Methane Menace. Up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton. Today Ariana Brocious and I are digging into compost – and cow poop.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, manure REALLY matters because nationally 37% of methane emissions come from cows – a lot of that is actually cow burps, but a big chunk is cow poop.

Greg Dalton: Right. And not just manure – landfills release a lot of methane too. In fact, 17% of all US methane emissions come from landfills. And most of that is from food waste.

Ariana Brocious: In a 20-year time frame, methane has 80 times more warming power to the climate than carbon dioxide.

Greg Dalton: California has a new law that aims to tackle methane from these two main sources - cows and landfills. We’re spending today’s show talking about it because California has a track record of setting national policy, or at least, leading by example.

Ariana Brocious: Last year at COP26 in Glasgow, more than 100 countries - including the US - signed The Methane Pledge, promising to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030. The California law targets a 40% reduction in the same time frame. So, it’s ambitious.

Greg Dalton: It is. The more I learn about this law (known as SB 1383) the more interesting - and complicated - it gets. The law was backed by a rancher I’ve known for years, John Wick, who wanted to increase the supply of compost to spread on grasslands. He says studies show that causes more grass to grow and perform photosynthesis that pulls carbon from the atmosphere and stores some of it in soil. Soil people are some of the biggest optimists in the climate conversation. As the idea worked through the California legislature, the dairy and agriculture industries opposed it. At one point near the end of the legislative session, dairy walked out of the negotiations. Then the law was changed to include a lot of voluntary rules and subsidies. That brought big ag back on board. Some environmentalists say that watered down the law.

Ariana Brocious: Still, the law you’re talking about went into effect in January. And it directly addresses the state’s methane emissions from food waste in landfills. Communities are now required to collect organics (meaning food and yard waste - the definition here is that anything that was once alive is organic) and divert them to be made into compost that goes back into the soil or made into fuel. It’s a big change in the way waste is handled for 40 million people. And it’s also a big deal for California’s seven-and-a-half billion dollar dairy industry.

Greg Dalton: Right. And they have to cut their methane emissions by 40% as well. That’s a big ask for the top dairy-producing state in the country.

Ariana Brocious: For dairies, the primary tools for achieving those reductions are anaerobic digesters. These are essentially tanks or enclosed lagoons where microbes break down manure to produce and capture methane that would otherwise go into the atmosphere. That gas can then be sold as a fuel.

Greg Dalton: Proponents say turning waste into energy is a good step for addressing climate disruption. But as I said, it gets complicated. So stick with us as we uh, wade through it.

Greg Dalton: Because investment and ownership structures are complex and varied, it’s hard to make blanket statements about who profits – and by how much – from the sale of the gas captured by dairy digesters. According to Aaron Smith, an economist at UC Davis, credits from California's low carbon fuel standard could earn a dairy 50% more money than just selling the cows’ milk. He’s not saying that the manure is more valuable than the milk, but dairies could profit selling both. I asked Michael Boccadoro, Executive Director of Dairy Cares, if this creates an incentive to add cows that will poop more money.

Michael Boccadoro: Absolutely not. … The reality is the dairy farmer is seeing somewhere between in most cases, $100-$200 per cow per year… they're being paid to provide manure feedstock for the digester. The rest of that operation and revenues are handled by the developer and you know there's a lot of costs associated with these projects. They cost about $3000 per cow to install so they can easily be upwards of 6, 8, $10 million per project that’s just on the dairy. And then there's huge costs associated with what we call the hub where the gas is cleaned, conditioned and compressed into a natural gas pipeline. Those facilities can easily run between 15 and $20 million additional. So, huge costs associated with all of this. Most of that money is not flowing to the dairymen and as a result of that, the dairyman has little incentive to add cows. Cows are added on a dairy based on milk economics not on biogas economics. It's just that simple.

Greg Dalton: But according to J Jordan, Policy Coordinator at the Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability, the added financial incentives to generate biogas lead to more concentrated dairies, worsening environmental impacts on nearby communities of color.

J Jordan: The way that the bill has played out has actually been incentivizing the status quo, right, incentivizing the way that we produce dairy in this state which relies on manure lagoons, these large pits in the ground where they put the liquefied manure and that's kind of where we see you know some of the issues is from that management style. …Incentivizing large-scale factory farms and incentivizing the additional water and air quality pollution or air pollution incentivizing larger herd sizes larger dairies by giving funding for things like dairy digesters to produce factory farm gas from those manure lagoons.

Greg Dalton: Michael Boccadoro agrees that scale makes it easier for dairy producers to take advantage of state incentives for implementing digesters, but he takes issue with the idea that this leads to more cows overall.

Michael Boccadoro: The data directs us in an entirely different conclusion and that conclusion is cow numbers in California are declining, not increasing. They’ve declined for the past 14 years since 2008 in the state and all expectations are the number of dairy cows in the state are going to continue to decline somewhere between a half of a percent per year and 2% per year. Lots of reasons for that but labor costs, water scarcity, other issues are driving farming in California to downsize, not just the dairy farms. We’re expected to lose about 1 million acres of productive farmland in California over the next decade because just from water scarcity concerns and groundwater regulation on the state. That doesn't mean a few dairies won't get a little bit larger. We’re always looking for opportunities any business to grow its business a little bit to offset rising costs. And I think we all know we’re seeing rising costs right now with inflation. So, always some incentive to increase but it all has to be done with proper environmental permitting too. And I think that's often lost on folks, the level of regulation that these dairies face in California. And so, each of these projects is regulated for air quality for water quality for local land use. And in addition to that, if we get a grant for one of these projects, we have to do outreach to the local communities, including the disadvantaged communities in the state. So, there's tremendous amount of effort built into the process to give local communities the opportunity to raise concerns and then the projects can seek to mitigate those concerns.

Greg Dalton: Yet according to J Jordan and others I’ve spoken with, the environmental justice community got left out of the final shaping of the law. Not only that, but in exchange for accepting methane limits, the dairy industry got a temporary pass on complying with new environmental regulations.

J Jordan: Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability and our partners environmental justice groups, climate justice groups we really weren't a big part of the conversation; we weren't really consulted and brought into that negotiation of area effectively during the development of SB 1383. So, you know, there were some changes and things that were included in the bill in the legislation that you know didn't necessarily fit with the types of priorities that we have. So, one of those things is that the bill really looks at trying to reduce methane emissions from dairies by 40% by 2030. So, really trying to you know decrease our greenhouse gas emissions as a state knowing that methane from livestock is a really big producer of methane and which is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. And so, from our perspective, I think you know we were really looking at well, maybe we should be thinking about regulating dairies like we do so many other industries in the state of California in order to deal with the climate change issue, this crisis that we’re all facing today. And regulations are really important because it’s much more of a direct way of reducing emissions rather than sort of spending years and years and years trying to put money into various incentives to reduce that methane. So, one of the things that was included in the bill at the last minute was that the state could actually not regulate dairies any time before January 1 of 2024. And that's been a really big sticking point for us because what we’d like to see is those regulations actually start now before we kind of continue to dig ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole.

Greg Dalton: Michael Boccadoro:

Michael Boccadoro: I struggle with the concept that this was in any way a pass. The idea that reducing methane by 40%,... it's extremely, extremely ambitious. And yes, there are incentives in this law and in all of California's climate programs for the regulated entities. The cap and trade program is another great example that regulates many of the industries you talked about that's designed around a market-based incentive program. The money that's raised from the cap and trade program goes into a program we call the climate investments portfolio and that money is then spent on projects like digesters to reduce greenhouse gasses. And in fact, the dairy digester program is the most effective program that is currently being implemented in California across the board. It's providing about 30% of the reductions from all the programs combined and it’s receiving about 2% of the funding. So, it's a tremendously effective program. But I think that the big point here is we did make sure that the incentives would be there and we also made sure that policies going forward would not in any way simply displace the dairy industry in California, what we call leakage and simply have that pop up in another state or another country. Because that's a big concern. We’re very efficient here and we shouldn't lose sight of what efficiency can provide. But if our cows are simply put on U-Haul trucks and shipped to another state, emissions are likely going to be higher; they’re not going to be regulated. And as a result, global climate change gets worse, period. That's not success; that's failure. So the program in California was designed to ensure success and incentives are the best way to ensure success and incentives have been shown is the best way to keep costs down for consumers.

Greg Dalton: One problem here - as with other climate policies - is that even if there’s a net reduction in statewide climate-disrupting emissions, there may still be negative local impacts.

J Jordan: In all the work that we do, we’re looking out for ways that the state's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change, which is obviously so critical. How are they also prioritizing social equity, public health, air and water quality and all of those things that are important to local communities? And we know that it’s mostly lower income communities of color who bear the weight of that localized industrial pollution and also the impacts of climate change.

Greg Dalton: So how do we bridge this divide? Many environmentalists believe the problem isn’t just with cow poop; it’s with the whole cow, and that completely eliminating cows from the food system is the single greatest climate-saving action we can take. But J Jordan doesn’t fall into that camp.

J Jordan: I have nothing against cows. This is definitely not their fault. No, we’re not here to talk about the elimination of cows in the state of California. We are here to talk about the trends that have led to people's drinking water being contaminated, not being able to take showers in their own homes, having particulate matter having you know various types of air pollution, having odors and flies around their homes as they watch these dairies expand. So, you know, this isn’t about trying to attack an industry, it's not about wanting an industry to go down. This is really about trying to protect the health and well-being of people and of the environment while also acknowledging the future for farmers. I think the reality is that the dairy industry is struggling and there is a lot to be gained, I think you know, from all sides of this issue if we rethink how we’re doing animal agriculture in the state. So, I do think that there are multiple benefits to transition to another type of agriculture that does not necessarily you know that is actually good for people that's good for the planet and that's good for farmers.

Greg Dalton: In other words, both sides agree on the importance of reducing methane emissions. But for J Jordan, this should be achieved through the level of regulation that other industries face, rather than incentivizing entrenched industrial agriculture.

J Jordan: We would argue that we shouldn't be relying on manure lagoons in the first place. And so much of the conversation at the state is about you know having these manure lagoons and accepting them as the baseline and what we want to push back on is that idea that you know this is some naturally occurring way of producing dairy that this is somehow the only way we could possibly ever produce milk in the state. And in reality, there are other ways. There are other types of agro-ecological practices, management decisions, pasture-based dairy. There are other forms of animal agriculture that do not have such a devastating impact on the environment, on people. And so, to sort of start with this baseline of well, the lagoons are there and they’re always gonna be there, I think really does a disservice to the communities that are being deeply impacted by that.

Greg Dalton: But how realistic is the idea that we could meet rising global demand with a pasture-based system? Later in this episode, Ariana Brocious speaks with Allen Williams, a sixth-generation farmer who argues not only that it can be done, but that if we raised only grass-fed cows, we wouldn’t need the digesters at all - that microbes in the soil of properly managed grasslands would absorb the methane as they did when the continent was covered with other ruminants like bison and elk. Michael Boccadoro of Dairy Cares has a different take:

Michael Boccadoro: With all food production, including dairy, efficiency is our friend. We produce more food with fewer resources. That's a huge benefit for these consumers and for the state from an environmental standpoint, it's phenomenal. And we've been doing that in California producing more milk with fewer cows and it benefits the environment across the board. According to the University of California, that did some research a few years ago, 89% less land, 88% less water. 45% less greenhouse gasses, less fossil fuel, less fertilizer, less pesticide. So, across-the-board environmental benefits. So, big or efficient is not necessarily bad, in fact, I'd argue that we can't do it without it. There's no way to feed a growing national and world population without efficient farming practices. And let's talk about pasture-based operations; they are certainly an important part of California. They provide a very important niche product mostly providing organic milk but all farms cannot be pasture-based in California. The water supply in the San Joaquin Valley is not there to support your irrigated pasture that would be necessary to do that. And let's not lose sight of the fact that those farms are gonna be much less efficient in terms of producing milk, which means we’re going to need a lot more cows in California to produce the same amount of milk. And that's going to overall lead to higher greenhouse gas emissions, not lower.

Greg Dalton: For J Jordan, the issue is far more complicated. And it stems from California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which offers subsidies to produce so-called “renewable” methane.

J Jordan: We’re seeing programs at the state level that are using huge amounts of money to both justify expansion of dairies and the production of biogas and also you know, creating additional pollution and creating in the case of the low carbon fuel standard there’s actually the ability for the production of this gas coming from dairies to essentially offset the production of oil from oil refineries.

Greg Dalton: In other words, under California’s climate laws, an oil refinery can essentially pay for the production of dairy methane as a way to excuse their production of other fossil fuels.

J Jordan: So, this is a lot bigger than just the dairy industry as well. There is an energy economy that's also kind of tied in with this issue.

Greg Dalton: And while it’s arguably better that dairy methane gets used productively, rather than being released directly into the atmosphere, J Jordan argues that it’s not actually a clean fuel.

J Jordan: The same pollutants are present in factory farm gas that are in natural gas and there are still air pollution and emissions associated with that gas being burned. In addition to that we’re not talking about you know many of the upstream emissions associated with the production of the gas, the raising of the cows, the feed, the silage the enteric emissions which are just from basically cows burps and farts and you know that kind of thing. So, there are other emissions that are not kind of being considered anywhere in the lifecycle of that fuel. And so, what's happening is that we’re seeing if that methane is getting claimed from the gas from the digester, then a bunch of methane can then be produced and emitted from, for example, an oil refinery. So, it may seem as though there is you know a reduction because there’s diesel being displaced, but there's actually you know a whole bunch of accounting happening at the state level a lot of throwing numbers around that really in reality we’re not seeing that reduction. We’re not seeing the evidence in a true evaluation and a true accounting of that reduction, okay. So, that's kind of the issue here is that there's so many different ways that the state is claiming that there are reductions in the transportation sector in the agriculture sector, but it really doesn't all add up.

Greg Dalton:You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about how to deal with methane from cow manure and food waste. Our podcasts typically contain extra content beyond what’s heard on the radio. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods. Coming up, functionally and financially, how will composting work on a state-wide scale?

Neil Edgar: Primarily it's about farmers being able to buy most of this material. They buy about two thirds of what's currently being produced and what's currently being produced will be doubled essentially in volume if SB 1383 is successful in meeting the 75% mandate of diverting organics.

Greg Dalton:: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Before the break, Ariana and I were talking about the dairy side of California’s new methane law. Ariana, after I spoke with Michael Boccadoro and J Jordan, I also talked with Brent Newell, Senior Attorney with Public Justice, who is concerned that California’s web of climate policies, overseen by different agencies including the Air Board, Department of Food and Agriculture, may be unintentionally double-counting emission reductions. The system is so complex with trading and credits that it's difficult to determine what’s really going on, even for people in the system.

Ariana: Yeah, it sounds complex even hearing you explain all the agencies involved. So even though converting waste to energy sounds like a good thing, we’re not really sure if we’ll be meeting goals of reducing methane emissions by 40%?

Greg: Ever since Arnold Schwarzenegger started California down this path 15 years ago, there’s been debate whether the claimed reductions are the actual, realized reductions.

Ariana: Well, we know that displacing diesel is a good thing for people breathing in deadly particulates, but converting methane from cow manure into electricity sounds a little dubious because that energy could come from cleaner sources like wind and solar.

Greg: Absolutely. Natural gas is not really clean energy. And of course, there’s the perennial trade-off between global benefits and local harms– when projects like these negatively impact local communities. This is a continuing narrative in environmental justice. Big picture problems get solved, but local communities of color still get stuck with dirty air and water.

Ariana: So we talked about the dairy side, now let’s turn to organic waste - and here we’re talking about food waste - the kind you may be putting in the garbage or down the disposal every night. California residents are now supposed to divert that waste into a new green waste bin. Instead of being compacted in a landfill where it will rot and off-gas methane, the idea is that it will be converted into compost, which can then store carbon in the soil.

Greg: Exactly. Let's say we put a banana peel in the compost bin instead of a trash can. I asked Neil Edgar, Executive Director of the California Compost Coalition, to walk us through the path of that banana peel.

Neil Edgar: The banana peel would first leave your house and go to a transfer station most likely be conglomerated into a larger load in a larger truck and hauled out to a composting facility where be process through their system. It would run through the system and be composted in a few weeks and be ready to use for as a soil amendment within roughly a 10-week timeframe.

Greg Dalton: So, within 10 weeks of leaving someone's house that banana peel is now compost, ready to be sold. What kind of price are we talking about here? Is this a viable product that is really sought after?

Neil Edgar: And it is most of the composters have been very successful in building markets over time. So, when these programs started up, they had to hire marketing people. And so, compost facilities, whether it was a recology team or other composters in the Bay Area they hire marketing people to go out and meet with farming groups and meet with landscapers and work on developing specifications for erosion control which are employed with Caltrans right now. And we helped work on a lot of that early measures to try to help build markets, but primarily it's about farmers being able to buy most of this material. They buy about two thirds of what's currently being produced and what's currently being produced will be doubled essentially in volume if SB 1383 is successful in meeting the 75% mandate of diverting organics. So, the pricing varies based upon quality based upon location; in some areas the suppliers are distant from the composter, the producer and so the transportation cost can be a large portion of the total cost of getting the materials delivered and then they are spreading costs in moving the material around their farms. So, it varies and then there are bag products that you see at your big box retailers, Home Depot, Lowe’s and other outlets are selling compost by the bag which is probably the highest price you’ll see.

Greg Dalton: Soil advocates for years have been saying that spreading compost on California's grasslands will fertilize more grass which causes more photosynthesis takes carbon dioxide out of the air, puts it into the soil where some of it stays. That's pretty basic science, but there’s been a problem with scaling it. So, what will this do now, this new supply of compost do for grasslands and ranges, free range cow areas in California?

Neil Edgar: We’re hoping in some areas that the mandate for procurement from local governments as part of this 1383 implementation will enable them or encourage them to fund some of these rangeland applications across the state and in an effort to provide the climate benefits that can be developed by doing so. Most jurisdictions are not going to actually be able to consume or use all of the compost that are targeted for their procurement programs and mandated under the regulations. A number of them are gonna have to come up with some maybe out-of-the-box solutions like rangeland applications or providing compost to local disadvantaged farmers who are trying to build soil health on their farms, supporting community gardens and community composting organizations to develop urban infrastructure. It’s amazing that in many of the large cities in the Central Valley and throughout California you have food deserts where there are no fresh fruits and vegetables readily available. So, supporting urban farming and community gardens as a way to have those procurement requirements go back into the community to help develop a better approach to food insecurity than we have currently.

Greg Dalton: Neil Edgar is Executive Director of the California Compost Coalition. Neil, thanks for coming on Climate One today.

Neil Edgar: You're welcome, Greg.

Greg Dalton: So far in this episode we’ve been talking about waste conversion and composting at scale. But there are other players in the market too. Compostable LA is a small-scale composting service based on a membership model. People can sign up for weekly service, where a full bucket of food scraps is exchanged for a clean one. Compostable LA works with a network of urban farmers to compost food scraps and then uses that compost on farms – AND redistributes it to members and the wider community. Let’s hear from the company’s driving force.

Monique Figueiredo: My name is Monique Figueiredo, and I am the founder, co-owner and CEO of Compostable LA. Compostable LA is a food scrap service, and our mission is to make composting as accessible to people as possible because I truly believe that composting is one of the most impactful things you can do for climate change. Composting is so impactful for the climate because of two things. One: it takes organics out of a landfill, and organics in a landfill become methane. They kind of slowly mummify while rotting, because the conditions in a landfill are so tightly packed that they create these anaerobic conditions, these conditions without oxygen. And when that happens food scraps can’t decompose property, and so they release methane, which is way worse than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years of its life. So if we’re talking about reversing climate impacts before 2050, like a lot of the scientists are saying, we have to get methane under control. And then the other part of composting which I really think is the powerful part is the soil creation aspect. Because when you create healthy soil and when healthy soil has a relationship with plants, you get these entire other sphere of benefits. Stormwater filtration, it’s holding water to help with flooding and drought, it’s creating more nutrient dense food, because there’s more nutrients in the soil itself from the compost. So it’s healthy humans, it’s healthy air. Because it’s pulling carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it in the ground where it’s good for plants. So it gets deeper and deeper the further you start digging into the world of composting.

Growing our own food is one of our core human rights, it’s something humans have been doing since the beginning of time, but soil can be prohibitively expensive. Growing your own food shouldn’t be a privilege. Not only that, when you talk about community-based systems, like community composters, we are the anti-NIMBYism. We’re saying, we want this material in our backyard. We don’t want to ship it to large anaerobic digesters or incinerators out on different disenfranchised communities. We want to keep it here, it’s a resource, we want to distribute it to the community so they can grow their own food. So from a food sovereignty aspect and from an environmental justice aspect, community composting is this antidote.

So as SB1383 goes into effect, which is the new California law for organics, our hope is that the networks that community composters are trying to create is not lost in the spirit of efficiency and compliance. I think SB1383 is incredibly validating for composters who have been saying that there needs to be drastic movement around soil creation and methane reduction. But we want to make sure that as this regulation gets implemented, we don’t lose the beautiful vibrant picture of diversity that could be present in order to accomplish the regulations. So yes, major haulers can do the most efficient means of moving your food scraps from point A to point B, but there might be environmental justice concerns in regards to rapid, large scale scaling. Who are the communities impacted by that? Where are the anaerobic digesters being put, and is waste-to-energy really the way we want to be using this resource? Because it kind of breaks the recycling aspect of organic management because it’s just turning into energy and you burn that and then it’s gone versus if you compost it, it’s soil, it grows food, it gets composted, it’s soil, it grows food and it’s this whole cyclical nature. So what I would really love to see is this ecosystem. Large scale haulers, community composters, people doing it in their backyards, neighbors sharing systems, just this whole thing of people working together. Because that diversity and redundancy in ecosystems is what creates stability. It’s what creates justice. One solution doesn’t fit all.

The reason I started composting is because I wanted to be in service to my community. Composting is the venue with which I create and show love for the people I live near. I think collective action can be really a powerful antidote to climate anxiety and hopelessness and feeling overwhelmed. And I wanted to create this space where people felt like they were doing their part. And that doesn’t let big corporations off the hook but it does say, I’m not just standing here paralyzed. So it’s really a place for empowerment for Los Angeles, it’s a place to come together and show what individual action can do, and the way we do that is composting.

Greg Dalton: That was Monique Figueiredo, founder, co-owner and CEO of Compostable LA.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about composting, cows and addressing the methane menace. Coming up, how adaptive grazing can reduce the methane cows generate compared to a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO.

Allen Williams: So, if you’re gonna have a CAFO system, you know you're going to produce more methane that's gonna be released into the atmosphere, you better be feeding something to reduce that methane and even using methane digesters. But if you're out on a pasture system using adaptive grazing none of that is needed.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Ariana Brocious: This is Climate One. I’m Ariana Brocious. It takes about 3000 years for nature to produce 6 inches of topsoil. But every 28 years, an inch of topsoil is lost as a result of current farming practices. A report last year estimated the most fertile topsoil is entirely gone from a third of all the farming land in the upper Midwest. The implications of this are drastic for land and the climate. Allen Williams is a 6th generation family farmer and founding partner of Understanding Ag. He says when we lose topsoil, we also lose water filtration and soil fertility, not to mention putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Allen Williams: As we lose more and more topsoil then what we are seeing is we are seeing a definite heating up of the planet. And that's because we have a lot more exposed soil surface. We have measured soil temperatures repeatedly in virtually every region of North America and in many other countries and what we find is that when soils are protected when they have plants and living roots growing on those soils and the soil shaded from those plants. Then, even in the heat of the summer, say our temperature is 90°F, the soil temperature can still be in the 70s or low 80s. But where we have soil that’s exposed then at an air temperature of 85 or 90° we can often see soil temperatures soaring to 140 to 150° or higher. And when you consider hundreds of millions of acres in North America that can be bare and exposed in any given point in time, then that creates a tremendous heating of the atmosphere.

Ariana Brocious: So, is what's good for the soil inherently good for both farmers and ranchers bottom line in the climate or are there trade-offs that have to be made there

Allen Williams: Fortunately, this is a true win-win. When we implement regenerative principles and practices the farmers when in terms of soil health soil function, profitability is enhanced significantly which is very important today because way too many of our farmers are carrying a significant debt burden, and they need to be able to get out from under that debt burden, so this is one of the ways to do that. But the other portion of the win here is that the ecosystem, the climate and human health all are victories here. We see significantly better nutrient density and foods that are grown this way because they’re grown in a healthier soil therefore our own human health improves significantly and obviously ecosystem health and climate health improves along with that.

Ariana Brocious: So, you argue that the world has supported grazing animals on every continent for millions of years and ruminants have always produced methane. But lately it's become a problem in part because of the soil degradation we’ve been talking about and that soil degradation leading to the fact that soil does not have as many methane digesting microbes as it used to. Is that right?

Allen Williams: It's actually a combination of factors to be quite honest with you. number one, as almost all of the research looking at methane emissions from ruminant animals like cattle and things like that were done in animals in a CAFO or confined situation or in situations where they were in conventional grazing systems. And so, that data is reflective of the way those animals were managed and we always have to understand that. So, it's not something inherent in the animal itself; it’s inherent in the way that we as humans manage those animals. So, what we found are two primary things. One is that in degraded soils we have destroyed a lot of the microbes that actually capture and digest utilized methane. This is always been a natural process with any wild ruminant burps methane just like a cow does and they always have. But we had the microbial population in soil that was functioning to be able to capture that methane and turn it into other things. And so, we know now that as we rebuild the soil microbial population that we can jumpstart that process all over again. But the other thing that we know is that is we increase the diversity of the plant species that are growing out there and therefore increase the phytonutrient richness and diversity in the diet of the animals that they actually produce less methane in their own digestion by eating a more diverse diet.

Ariana Brocious: You mentioned CAFOs, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, which is how a lot of the meat and dairy is produced, especially in the US. How can different grazing techniques rejuvenate the soil health as you're talking about to sequester more carbon and enhance those methane eating microbes.

Allen Williams: So, first of all, if animals are in a CAFO system they’re not grazing at all. So, we have a complete lack of any graze impact whatsoever and we have to understand that, but secondly if you are grazing and that's exactly what we should be doing with our ruminant animals they were designed by nature to be out there grazing, not to be in a CAFO situation. And that’s where they perform by far the very best and the healthiest as well. But if we are grazing, we need to graze adaptively. And when I say that I'm talking about a system of grazing that mimics the way that the wild ruminants grazed and moved across the landscape. Wild ruminants had a vast array of plant species they were eating every day and they were constantly moving across the landscape; they weren’t just confined to one pasture or little area for an extended period of time. And so, by using biomimicry and ecomimicry in the way that we graze our domesticated animals we can use them as a proxy for the wild ruminants. And we can graze them in a manner by moving them every day using temporary fencing or even herding techniques we simulate what the wild ruminants did and therefore get the positive results that the wild ruminants did.

Ariana Brocious: So, part of the reason that animals are raised in CAFOs now is because it makes the meat more affordable essentially. It’s easier way you can argue to produce a lot at scale and the kind of practices you're describing sounds more labor-intensive on the part of the rancher and then, though grass fed beef can often command a higher price point I’m curious how you see those types of operations scaling. Are we gonna be able to produce the same volume of meat that Americans, you know, expect with these types of practices as opposed to the confined animal operations?

Allen Williams: We’ve actually run the numbers on that and actually we can produce more total animal protein if we go back to pasture production than in CAFO production. And that includes we can actually produce not only more of these but more milk, more cheese, more eggs, more pork so on and so forth, more poultry, more broilers, that type of thing. Pastured production does not mean that we’re gonna produce far less protein. As a matter of fact, it’s really quite the opposite if we do it correctly. And so, what we find here is that, first of all, it is not more labor-intensive farmers and ranchers just think it is, okay. But once you actually start implementing these principles and practices you find that all you're doing is trading labor for labor. Some of the other things that you had to do every day because of the confinement you no longer have to do that and instead we’re replacing that labor with just simply moving the last stock on a daily basis. It actually takes very little time to do that once they’re well trained to that daily movement. The other thing is that in doing an analysis of the amount of grassland that we have available and that’s significantly underutilized in the US. Right now, for instance, in the US we’re producing about 30 to 32 million head of grain fed cattle annually. Cattle fed in feedlots. But we have enough grassland right now in the US without harming anything else at all, any wildlife anything else to be able to produce more than 50 million head annually of grass fed individually. So, we could actually 100% replace the grain fed with the grass fed in a very short order if we so desired. And if we look at cost it’s actually not more costly to produce a grass-fed animal on the production side. Many times, it can be lower cost than the grains and the transport of those grains for the feedlot production. The cost issues come in on the process inside. For pastured protein production we need more processing capacity. The big guys you know the Cargills, the Tysons, JBSs of the world, have these massive processing plants that allow them to have a significant capture of economies of scale. And in the grass-fed sector we don't have those size plants. So, we need more processing capacity and we can keep pastured protein production in line with the calls for conventional protein production.

Ariana Brocious: According to the EPA about 37% of methane emissions nationally come from cows and a chunk of that comes from cow burps essentially. So, to reduce that there's been a lot of research into feed additives things like seaweed, possibly oregano other things that would be added to what cows eat and actually reduce the amount of gas they produced. And I’m curious what you think about that and how it fits in or does with the regenerative agriculture you're discussing.

Allen Williams: So again, the vast majority that research was not done utilizing grass-fed cattle grazing. And I’m a scientist and so as a research scientist myself you have to take your results only within the context of the research. We can’t extrapolate those results beyond the context of the research. So, the research was done again on cattle, predominantly in CAFO systems and not actively grazing. Therefore, the conclusion that if we feed, you know, kelp, seaweed, all of these other things, cattle, you know, oregano whatever to reduce methane emissions through the burping again that's done through feeding in CAFO systems. So, if you’re gonna have a CAFO system, you know you're going to produce more methane that's gonna be released into the atmosphere. So yes, you better be feeding something to reduce that methane or either using and even using methane digesters. But if you're out on a pasture system using adaptive grazing none of that is needed. It goes by the wayside because you no longer have those same issues.

Ariana Brocious: In California, a law known as SB 1383 recently went into effect. And one of the ideas is to divert food waste from landfills, turn it into compost and make it available to ranchers and farmers. I'm curious what you think of this idea and if you think if this were available to the farmers that you work with if they would use it?

Allen Williams: Well, certainly we’ve got a problem. In the US alone we waste approximately 40% of all food that’s produced annually, which is just very, very disturbing. But globally we waste several trillion pounds of food every year. So, obviously we've got to do something about that and being able to use that waste in the production of compost is absolutely something that I would heavily encourage. Why not take that waste and turn it into something that’s gonna be very beneficial to us? Again, as you said at the opening today you know we've had significant loss of topsoil and soil organic matter and carbon. So, let's take this waste and make it useful to start restoring organic matter and carbon and building new topsoil. And yes, there are many farmers and ranchers that would use it. Now the biggest impediment is the fact because compost has bulk, you know, if you ship it too far then the cost of that compost becomes prohibitive just because of shipping. So, we've got to be able to produce compost near the farms and the ranches so that they can access it on a cost-effective basis to apply.

Ariana Brocious: So, you've consulted with more than 4000 farmers across the western hemisphere. What ideas or practices are they most resistant to and why?

Allen Williams: Well, what I would have to say is just regenerative practices in general, you know, which include adaptive grazing, moving to no-till, using complex cover crop mixes minimizing disturbance leaving roots to the ground year-round so on and so forth, and introducing more diversity. Those are the basic tenets of regenerative agriculture, but there's really three big reasons that they resist and we identify the same three reasons over and over. Number one is peer pressure. I grew up in a farming and ranching family. I'm sixth generation. And so, I’ve been in agriculture my entire life and I understand the peer pressure. As a former rancher we are very conventional we’re very traditional. And when you as an individual farmer start to do something different than your neighbors then they start to talk about you and often times not in a very good way. So, the peer pressure can come from your neighbors, your friends, even your own family members. It comes from everybody that sells you something. It comes from your lender, it comes from unfortunately, oftentimes, even from our universities our extension service in places like that. So, they get peer pressure from all of these different sectors that are telling them, no, just keep doing things like you’re doing why in the world would you change what you're doing. And so, they began to doubt themselves. The next biggest barrier is their lack of education. You cannot implement what you do not know. And most farmers and ranchers do not inherently know how to farm or ranch regeneratively. That's not part of their equation or knowledge base. So, they have to take time to educate themselves. That's why we started the soil health academy to be able to offer that practical hands-on education. And then the third barrier is their debt load. Way too many farmers are so heavily in debt that they're frightened to make any changes. Now, the same practices that you are implementing got you in debt, and this is what’s so ironic about it. They’re afraid to change what they're doing now, even though what they’re doing now got them into that debt situation because they're afraid that if they change anything, then it's going to cost them the farm because they are operating on such razor thin margins right now.

Ariana Brocious: Allen Williams is a sixth-generation family farmer and founding partner of Grass Fed Insights Understanding Ag and the Soil Health Academy. Allen, thanks for joining us on Climate One.

Allen Williams: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about compost, manure and methane. Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe to our podcast on Apple or wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- but it’s critical to address the climate emergency. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation. Brad Marshland is our senior producer; our producers and audio editors are Ariana Brocious and Austin Colón. Our audio engineer is Arnav Gupta. Our team also includes Steve Fox and Tyler Reed. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

REWIND: Erin Brockovich / Inconspicuous Consumption

Otto Pilot — Sun, 03 Jan 2021 12:33:00 +0000

REWIND: Erin Brockovich / Inconspicuous Consumption

01/03/2021

On today’s program, we revisit three Climate One conversations from the past year that empower us to make a difference – both individually and collectively.

Twenty years ago, Julia Roberts won an Oscar for her portrayal of maverick environmental activist Erin Brockovich in the biopic of the same name. The film depicted Brockovich’s successful crusade against corporate behemoth Pacific Gas & Electric, which had been pumping contaminated wastewater into the water supply of the town of Hinckley, California.

The real Erin Brockovich hasn’t slowed down since then - in fact, she’s out there writing the sequel, taking on corporate polluters and government enablers from upstate New York to Flint, Michigan to Beverly Hills, California. Much of her work centers on empowering underserved and overlooked communities to collectively advocate for themselves. And that can start with just one person. These days, in addition to her work on water safety and toxins in communities, Brockovich has taken on the climate emergency. The connection, she says, is fundamental.

“Climate change is about too much water, not enough water, no water, drought, flooding,” she says. “I think it's becoming real because it's tangible, it's touchable. You're running from it, you’re breathing it. You're swimming in it. You could be drowning in it. I just think it's here.”

“Climate change will be about our response, our preparedness, our defending ourselves,” Brockovich continues. “And not just thinking that because you can’t see it, it’s not going to happen.”

Everyday choices – like what to eat, wear or binge-watch – may impact the planet more than you think. But how far can individual choices take us?

Tatiana Schlossberg is the author of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have, in which she argues that everyday consumer choices may not change the carbon economy, but they’re an important part of being the kind of person who acts in more collective and impactful ways.

“I don't think we should feel individually guilty necessarily for our consumption,” Schlossberg says, “but we should feel collectively responsible for fixing the systems and building a better world.”

Among the choices we make where our carbon footprint may be hidden in plain sight is in what we wear. Rebecca Burgess, Founder and Director of Fibershed, a nonprofit that helps develop regional and regenerative fiber systems for clothing producers, believes that our clothing choices can be as significant as our food choices.

“If I eat local, can I wear local? If I eat organic, am I wearing organic?” she asks. “If I’m interested in climate smart agriculture, how am I wearing those values and the fibers that I'm wearing each day?”

Burgess believes we need to re-think our relationship to our wardrobes. “Think about the timelessness of the piece,” she advocates, “think about wearing a garment or purchasing a garment that's gonna be with you for the long haul. Love it. Really be a custodian not a consumer.”

Guests

Erin Brockovich

Author, Superman's Not Coming

Tatiana Schlossberg

Author, Inconspicuous Consumption

Rebecca Burgess

Executive Director, Fibershed

Amina Razvi

CEO, Sustainable Apparel Coalition

Play

Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have

Otto Pilot — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 23:28:50 +0000

Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have

01/10/2020

Everyday choices – like which shirt to buy or where to binge-watch shows – may impact the planet more than you think. But how far can individual choices take us, and when is it up to companies and producers to take the lead?

“You can drive yourself crazy trying to make the most ethical choice,” says former New York Times science reporter Tatiana Schlossberg. “It's almost impossible to make an impact free choice in our current system.”

Schlossberg is the author of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have, in which she argues that everyday consumer choices may not change the carbon economy, but they’re an important part of being the kind of person who acts in more collective and impactful ways.

Among the choices we make where our carbon footprint may be hidden in plain sight is in what we wear. Rebecca Burgess, founder and director of Fibershed, a nonprofit that helps develop regional and regenerative fiber systems for clothing producers, believes that our clothing choices can be as significant as our food choices.

Guests

Tatiana Schlossberg

Author, Inconspicuous Consumption

Amina Razvi

CEO, Sustainable Apparel Coalition

Rebecca Burgess

Executive Director, Fibershed

Miranda Ballentine

CEO, Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA)

Gary Cook

Senior Corporate Campaigner, Greenpeace International

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, the economy, and the environment. [pause] Everyday choices – like deciding what to buy or binge-watch tonight – may impact the planet more than you think.

Tatiana Schlossberg: It's almost impossible to make an impact free choice in our current system.

Greg Dalton: But how far can individual choices take us – and when is it up to companies and producers to take the lead?

Amina Razvi: If you are a business and you want to remain in business, I think it's imperative that you're looking at not only all of the risks but the opportunities as well that sustainability can present.

Greg Dalton: Does focusing on individual action distract us from changing the economics that encourage us to accumulate more stuff?

Tatiana Schlossberg: I don't think we should feel individually guilty necessarily for our consumption. But we should feel collectively responsible for fixing the systems and building a better world.

Greg Dalton: Inconspicuous Consumption. Up next on Climate One.

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Greg Dalton: How much can individual consumer choices change the carbon economy? Climate One conversations feature oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats, the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge. I’m Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: The small choices we make everyday can have a big collective impact on climate. But experts say individual actions can only get us about 30 or 40 percent of the way to safety. The rest falls on governments and companies.

Miranda Ballentine: Is every company ready to make their individual brand heard on particular policy measures? No, they’re not.

Greg Dalton: Miranda Ballantine is CEO of the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, a coalition of companies across the U.S. When a major corporation chooses to operate on clean energy, it sends a strong signal about what kind of economic actor that business wants to be. The same is true for individual identity.

Rebecca Burgess: If I eat local, can I wear local. If I eat organic, am I wearing organic?

Greg Dalton: Rebecca Burgess is Founder and Director of Fibershed, a nonprofit that helps develop regional and regenerative fiber systems for clothing producers. We’ll hear from her, Miranda, and others later in the show. Buying an organic or locally-sourced shirt has an impact that is puny compared to pumping cleaner energy into a large company’s data center. But Tatiania Schlossberg, says it’s an important part of being the kind of person who acts in more collective and impactful ways. Tatiana is a former New York Times reporter and author of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have. We began our discussion about the climate impacts of our everyday choices by walking through a typical morning.

Tatiana Schlossberg: So I wake up and I look at my phone, probably. So that’s the first thing. And you know, our phones and all of our devices have, you know, are produced using lots of metals and rare-earth materials and they travel many, many thousands of miles before they reach us. So there’s that carbon impact and then using the Internet itself, uses electricity so, you know, within the first few seconds I've made a dent. And then I have I guess I have my breakfast. I do love yogurt so that has a big carbon footprint in terms of livestock production is 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. I have some tea with milk, so already I’m not doing great.

Greg Dalton: 15 or 50 depend on who --

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah, exactly yeah.

Greg Dalton: Debatable number there that’s the whole debate.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Well, I guess then I get dressed. So depending on what I'm wearing pair of jeans, it’s a lot of water if it's I’m going exercise its synthetic fibers made from oil. And then well I live in New York so I usually walk somewhere. But let's say I got into an Uber then I would be adding miles to the road and, you know, burning gasoline to get wherever I'm going. So within like the first hour you can really kind of go around the world and back.

Greg Dalton: You write pretty early on that “we focus on the little things in the hope that they matter. So we can feel like we at least did something when the apocalypse comes. In the aggregate, these little things can matter.” So tell us how, are we really making a difference or we just addressing our conscience when we make these little changes?

Tatiana Schlossberg: Well, I think all these things are connected and, you know, I stress in the book in the beginning and throughout that this problem is too big to be solved by individual behavioral changes. Because it's hard to get 7 billion people to do anything without some kind of government regulation, or international agreement or corporate action. That being said, you know, I think it's important for me and for people who care about this issue to try to live in line with our values because, you know, I want to be the kind of person who if I learn more information about the harmful things that I'm doing that I act on them. Not because I think that that's enough to solve the problem but because, you know, maybe these things do add up and maybe they matter but also kind of the consciousness around it will remind me hopefully to act in the more collective and impactful ways that I can. Like voting or, you know, if I put pressure on a company should do better and to talk about climate change as well.

Greg Dalton: So you do it to be the kind of person that you feel you should be not because of its impact in the big picture?

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah. I think, I mean obviously, you know, there are things that have that contribute more than other things. You know, like eating red meat or taking an airplane flight I mean those things contribute significantly. But I think me taking, eating one fewer burger a week doesn't do that much because the system is so big and the incentives are so off. That really to fix that and to, you know, reduce the emissions associated with beef production and to prevent things like rural drinking water pollution or a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The system needs to be changed as well. And I don't know that that happens just from, you know, people who care about this eating a little less red meat.

Greg Dalton: I think that's you know, what I try to work on is that bridging that the personal and the systemic.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah.

Greg Dalton: It so hard. Because people are part of systems and yet, we don't know how to change systems.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Right.

Greg Dalton: Thinking system is for you know, PhD brainiacs it was like way beyond my ability. So how do you bridge and you write that the size of the problem and the narrative of personal responsibility is destructive.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah.

Greg Dalton: Unpack that.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Well, I think you know, the narrative around personal responsibility the idea that if you know, we had all just brought our own reusable grocery bags to the store 20 years ago, we wouldn't be in the situation. It makes us I think makes me anyway feel kind of guilty and turn inward and turn away from the problem and to really look at myself as opposed to, you know, what are the systems what are the incentives that exist to make, you know, how does the system work in a way that encourages more consumption and more waste and more emissions that is sort of disconnected from my role as an individual. And I also think that focusing so much on the individual distracts us from who is actually responsible for this problem. And the people who are mainly responsible are fossil fuel companies and lobbyists, and people who take money from them. And, you know, those who have been not only kind of standing in the way of progress but also making our chances of fighting it so much worse. And so, you know, I don't think we should feel individually guilty necessarily for our consumption. But we should feel collectively responsible for fixing the systems and building a better world.

Greg Dalton: I do feel guilty sometimes, I mean --

Tatiana Schlossberg: It’s hard not to feel guilty.

Greg Dalton: As a white man, I have a lot of privilege in this world.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah.

Greg Dalton: I grew up in -- I live in San Francisco one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest country. So you tell me it's okay if I don't feel guilty.

Tatiana Schlossberg: No. I mean, I think, you know, there's a healthy amount of guilt and shame. I just think that I don't know that it's necessarily a powerful motivator in trying to fix anything. Like maybe for some people it is but I think for other people it makes them resentful of the messaging that told them to feel guilty when they didn't know that they were necessarily doing something bad. And so that's what I've tried to address in my book is, you know, one of the things I write about for instance is like denim production. And producing jeans can use many, many thousands of gallons of water just to make one pair of jeans. But if I'm standing in the store trying to figure out which pair of jeans to buy, it’s going to be impossible for me to figure out which of those jeans was produced using the least amount of water. And so I don't know that it's necessarily -- it should be the company's responsibility to have more control over their supply chain and see where the waste is occurring and then try to reform those practices. And so I think you know, in that way I don't know that me feeling personally guilty about owning a pair of jeans fixes that problem.

Greg Dalton: You come down pretty strongly on the side of producer responsibility versus consumer responsibility. Most people think it’s somewhere shared. Because if people think that they have no responsibility for what they buy then that’s not right either. So it’s some shared responsibility. Is that fair?

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah, I think I’m not saying that, you know, we can all like fly with abandon and eat as much red meat or wear as much cashmere as we want. Because once you learn this stuff you have to act on it because otherwise what's the point of knowing it. And if you limit the options of what's available I think like a good example is with light bulbs. Like if you got rid of incandescents and you only had LEDs or compact fluorescents then you wouldn't have the problem of having this wide variety of efficiency in light bulbs. So I think kind of limiting it at the market level or at the regulatory level is the most effective way to do it.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, there’s been a lot of pushback on that front. You write about going around to friends’ houses and plugging in power meters, etc. What goes on with your friends in terms of kind of judging and watching sort of the virtue police of, you know, people watch you or you watching your friends about, is that ice cream? I know you like ice cream, so, right.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah. I do like ice cream. It’s complicated. I think I've become maybe a less popular dinner party guest because people will ask me like, you know, how bad is this thing and then I'll tell them, and then they'll be mad and --

Greg Dalton: They’ll feel guilty being around you.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Exactly. The next time I see them like well I bought this at Zara, but don’t tell Tatiana. But, you know, I think the level of curiosity from among my friends has made me feel that this topic and this approach is really valuable. I think sometimes as I've been doing my book tour I've gotten some questions like, well, what’s the carbon footprint of your book and what's the like your dress made of. Which, you know, it's not invalid but I think that there has been a long tradition of those who don't want to fight climate change or make progress in this area to try to point out the hypocrisy of those who are trying to deliver a message about it. And I think it's almost impossible to make an impact free choice in our current system. And so I think that that is really a distraction from the message as a whole. Like what Tatiana Schlossberg is doing, you know, I don’t really think that that is -- that's not an important way to have this conversation.

Greg Dalton: And if being a carbon saint is required to be involved that means --

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah, we’re all excluded.

Greg Dalton: We’re all carbon sinners.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah. Exactly, yeah.

Greg Dalton: Do you ever get fatigue --

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Like I think about it I sit on the couch I'm worried about the fire retardants on the couch, I’m looking at the TV. I learned in your book that the TV even if it's not used for a whole year, you use an average carbon, emits average carbon --

Tatiana Schlossberg: Same electricity consumption as per cap or I think --

Greg Dalton: Kenya and Haiti --

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Dalton: And so, and then I’m thinking about all the things around me that are bad and my wife is like okay shut it off, turn it off. I mean do you ever get fatigued with sort of this climate awareness that kind of just run away with you?

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah, I mean part of kind of doing all this research makes it paralyzing to go to the grocery store. But, you know, I do feel that I'm glad to have written the book because and maybe you feel this way too now, I don’t have to be alone with this information.

Greg Dalton: It's a burden and a responsibility to be climate conscious.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah.

Greg Dalton: And it can be a little bit lonely.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely, you know, loneliness to it and it does really feel really overwhelming at times. Because even if you hear some good news often there's the other side of the coin. So, yeah it's really hard and I think that's also one of the things I wanted to achieve in the book is to explain why this is such a big and complicated problem and difficult to solve. Because I think sometimes we hear things like, well we know that solar and wind energy exist like why can't we just get all of it from that. But really that requires developments in either battery technology or pump hydro storage or in the transformation of the electricity grid. And those things are really difficult to achieve. And so I think it's important to fully understand the problem because otherwise you probably won't be able to do what's necessary to solve it.

Greg Dalton: Right. You write about the five stages of environmental grief, denial, anger, this was a new one. This was clearly riffing off Elisabeth Kubler Ross but I don’t think trying to use less plastic, that’s a new one. Denial, anger, depression and determination. Tell me about you going through those phases, you know, as you are writing this book and learning about the gravity of climate.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yeah. Well, I think, before I became a climate environmental journalist I didn't want to read about it that much. Because it did make me feel so anxious and sort of upset and powerless as I think it makes many people feel that way. So there's denial there. You learn more about it that's anger, you get angry. Depression, you know, it feels overwhelming, like we were just saying trying to use less plastic always. And then determination to be I think you know, for me understanding this issue, you know, doesn't make me feel less scared or less alarmed and it makes me feel slightly less anxious because I do feel that I understand the problem and I understand, you know, I can evaluate for myself what politicians are proposing or what companies are saying and whether it's enough or whether it's green washing. And that makes me feel, you know, like I guess a determination to keep doing that and to keep asking those questions and figuring out what's necessary. And so, I hope that my book kind of helps people kind of go along that journey as well and come out the other end feeling motivated.

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Greg Dalton: This is a Climate One conversation about Inconspicuous Consumption. Coming up, more with author Tatiana Schlossberg, plus fashion experts on ways to reduce the carbon impact of our clothing.

Rebecca Burgess: Think about timelessness and the piece. Think about wearing a garment or purchasing a garment that's gonna be with you for the long haul. Love it. Really be a custodian not a consumer.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about our hidden carbon footprints with Tatiana Schlossberg, author of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have. One of the more surprising things Tatiana writes about is the relationship between the surge in home delivery, and the demand for cardboard.

Tatiana Schlossberg: I wanted to write about e-commerce because I wanted to see for myself if sort of all the handwringing about cardboard and the carbon pollution and people feeling guilty about things being delivered to their house, is that really kind of bore out in terms of whether that was, you know, worse for the environment or not. And it was really interesting to learn that, you know, over the last 10 years or so I think e-commerce has quadrupled in size in terms of value, but the cardboard production in the U.S. stayed relatively the same. But we’re at a lot worse, like it used to all go the retailers and they’re really good at recycling it and we’re much worse at recycling it. So that's kind of a problem. And then when we drive to the store we’re much less efficient at planning our routes than the big logistics company like FedEx or UPS. So that actually might be more efficient but we kind of screw that all up when we do next day or two-day delivery. And so I think part of the problem sometimes the systems are the problem, sometimes the problem is the way that we use the systems.

Greg Dalton: Well, after I read that I ordered some shaving cream online. And I saw, oh okay, so rather than going down to the store. You also write about opposition to GMOs you kind of take a swipe at, you know, liberals who are opposed to GMOs you say that that is kind of scientifically blissfully ignorant.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Well, I think people have kind of talked about it as if it’s a health risk to us which it's not. And you know, GMOs here and maybe something that’s preventing pesticide additional pesticide use or things like that. But in other parts of the world it means Vitamin A enriched rice that can prevent a lot of people from going blind. And so I think it's kind of a misunderstanding of what GMOs are and what value they actually can provide. And also a misunderstanding what the risks are. The risks are you know, this power concentration in putting farmers out of business and maybe affecting, I mean there's some biodiversity concerns I think. But in terms of kind of the health risks to humans that's really not an issue.

Greg Dalton: It's about power and monoculture and those things. It’s not about the things that people like to scare about GMOs.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Right. I think that it’s important to understand why we're opposed to certain things, as opposed to just because again that's a sort of problem where you need to address the system as opposed to kind of thinking about it in terms of how it affects you as an individual.

Greg Dalton: So individual choices are insufficient they’re important for identity and for values. What are some of your top tips for example, don't use a gaming console the stream videos that's a bad one. What are your other top tips?

Tatiana Schlossberg: Well, I think you know, some of the things we’ve mentioned you know, eating less kind of red meat and beef products and other meat. You know, flying less or not at all. I think buying secondhand is a really good option. Renting clothes is a good option. And then sort of --

Greg Dalton: Renting clothes.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Yes. Like rent the runways. I don't know if the same things exist for men. I mean again, you can drive yourself crazy trying to make the most ethical choice. And that's why I think I stress in the book that the most important things to do are to vote and to you know, not support companies that aren’t at the very least transparent. And also to talk about climate change because you know, only about a third of Americans talk about climate change with their friends and family. But if they do talk about it, they're more likely to consider it a risk and to support policies to mitigate it. And so, I think that that is a really important thing that anybody can do.

Greg Dalton: So you're saying persuasion should happen, right? To convert people into, I hate this metaphor, but the choir, right. To get people on the bus or in the choir.

Tatiana Schlossberg: Well I think, yeah and you know, these conversations don't have to exclusively be about climate science to be talking about climate change. And there are lots of different ways that these issues manifest themselves. And so, I think another theme in the book or something I’m trying to draw out is the issue of environmental justice. And, you know, so many of us are especially non-white communities, low-income communities and rural communities are disproportionately impacted by the direct effects of burning fossil fuels for energy. And there are lots of different people who are affected by that no matter what state they live in or you know, if it's red or blue or whatever. So I think you don't have to necessarily even make the conversation about what greenhouse gas emissions are doing to the planet to show people that a fossil fuel intensive economy is not good for most people. And that, you know, a lower carbon or a zero carbon future would actually be better for all of us for our health and kind of for the different opportunities for solutions.

Greg Dalton: It’s all though within the frame of consumption. It's all about, you know, and so some people would say consumption is the problem. Do you think that voluntary virtuous restraint is viable and achievable cause we all struggle with?

Tatiana Schlossberg: Right. Yeah, you know, I don't think we can shop our way out of the problem. So, that's one thing. And I don't know that telling everybody to buy less is effective. But that's why I think my focus is not on sort of telling people what to do or what to buy and what not to buy. But really understanding how these systems work and how the incentives are off, you know, in terms of both kind of their economic impact for most of us, but also the wider impacts in terms of, you know, health and environmental costs. And you know, we risk applying pressure in the wrong places if we don't understand how all the systems work and how they work together. And so that was more of my goal rather than sort of trying to tell anybody what to do. And I was often pressed by my editor like can you provide more solutions. But, you know, I didn't want to be dishonest in that way because I do think that you know, these problems are big and require systemic and structural change as opposed to sort of you know, all of us just or those of us who care really taking this on. Because there are generally speaking aren't enough of us to really make that matter.

Greg Dalton: So where do you end up, oftentimes people talk about they’re hopeful. I think sometimes people feign hope they're not quite as hopeful as they say they are because they think they’re supposed to say they're hopeful. So after writing this book where are you on the hope spectrum?

Tatiana Schlossberg: Well, I do think that a lot of the problems are incredibly big and complicated and it's hard to see how they’re fixed. But I am incredibly inspired by all the other young people who are really, I mean kids who went on the climate strike and how much pressure the Sunrise Movement and others put on like the DNC even though the DNC didn't have the climate debate. And, you know, things like the Green New Deal and that is that we’re kind of having a national conversation that includes that sort of radical action. To me that's a big change from even a few years ago. And I am also personally inspired by, you know, our more slightly more distant history of the 1970s and the environmental movement there. Because without that action on the first Earth Day and also the organizing around the 1970 midterm elections you know. If they hadn't defeated kind of seven of these 12 members of Congress at the worst environmental voting records we probably wouldn't have the expansion of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. And so many of these other regulations that really have changed what it's like to live in America. And so, I think that's an incredibly to me powerful and poignant example of what is possible.

Greg Dalton: Tatiana Schlossberg, author of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have. You’re listening to Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Another place where our carbon footprint is often hidden in plain sight is in what we put directly on our bodies every day.

Amina Razvi: Yoga pants, bicycling shorts, you know, denim jeans. What does that material look like, you know, where is it coming from what’s the environmental impact of it.

Greg Dalton: Amina Razvi is Executive Director of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, a business alliance that measures environmental, social and labor impacts across the clothing, footwear, and textile industries. She joined me to talk about the energy embedded in our clothing along with Rebecca Burgess, Founder and Director of Fibershed, a nonprofit that helps develop regional and regenerative fiber systems for clothing producers. Rebecca explains how our clothing choices can be as significant as our food choices.

Rebecca Burgess: Well, we like to wake people up to the idea that the value system that they place when putting food in their refrigerator or stacking the shelves in their kitchen is a similar value proposition as what you would fill your wardrobe with. Where was this fiber coming from that populated these sweaters and pants and socks and underwear where did it come from? And, you know, did it come from near my home, did it come through a complex supply chain. If I eat local, can I wear local. If I eat organic, am I wearing organic? If I’m interested in climate smart agriculture, how am I wearing those values and the fibers that I'm wearing each day? And, so right now the hidden cost they say by, and this is an Ellen MacArthur Foundation stat that if we continue business as usual with our textile production consumption patterns, that the industry will basically equate to about 26% of the overall carbon budget that humanity has to keep the planet under 2° C. So, you know, almost a third of the global emissions budget by 2050 under business as usual scenario is significant. So, we have a lot to change which are not only fiber choices, but behaviors and how we wear clothing.

Greg Dalton: That’s a bigger proportion that I think I realized. Amina Razvi. Tell us about do the companies recognize how big a problem they are in terms of the global carbon budget and what’s being done about it?

Amina Razvi: I do think that companies are increasingly becoming much more aware not just of how complex the problem is, but of the role that they play. And I think that's because they're hearing about it at multiple levels. They're hearing about it from consumers who I think are, you know, their core customers, and are asking more questions about the things that they purchase from these companies. They're hearing about it from global and local stakeholders, who I think are pressing companies to do more about these issues. And, so increasingly I think it's becoming a much more, I think strategic conversation at higher levels within multiple organizations than it has been in the past. And, I think that's great to see but I do think there's a lot more to be done.

Greg Dalton: Is that conversation driven by risk and fear? I know some people are concerned about the supply of cotton, right? Cotton, there’s a lot of water. And I’ve heard Rick Ridgeway, the sustainability lead at Patagonia say, organic cotton is terrible because organic doesn't address water use. So is this conversation driven by opportunity or desire to be a leader a brand leader in sustainability?

Amina Razvi: I think it's actually all of the above, right. If you are a business and you want to remain in business, I think it's imperative that you're looking at not only all of the risks but the opportunities as well that sustainability can present. And I think sustainability is increasingly becoming seen as a competitive advantage. So those companies who want to demonstrate leadership those companies who want to, I think further engage with their consumers and actually rethink how they do business are gonna be seen differently. And I think that they know that. And so a lot of them are moving in that direction.

Greg Dalton: So Rebecca Burgess, tell us how much oil is in my closet? If I look at, and you don’t know, you’ve never seen my closet, but a typical guy got jeans and shirts and some exercise clothes. Is there more oil in my closet than I realize?

Rebecca Burgess: For most human beings FAO U.N. stat is around 70% by weight of our wardrobes is actually fossil carbon drive lithosphere based carbon. So yeah nylon, polyester, acrylic. And you know, when I look at typical life-cycle assessments on those kinds of garments we’re not taking into account some of the emissions that are land-based around those extraction processes. I also do not see in the use phase those fossil carbon derived fibers being incorporated in their understanding of how we’re caring for them because it's in the use phase where we see currently in the San Francisco Estuary initiative I think it was 5 Gyres and San Francisco Estuary group just did a whole analysis of the San Francisco Bay on microplastics. And they started collecting microplastic. And 74% of the material they caught in their microplastics bucket was material from fibers.

Greg Dalton: So when we wash our, I like to cycle, when I wash my cycling shorts -- anyone washes their yoga pants or their bicycling shorts there are fibers that go from their washing machine into the nearby waterway. That's right? Is that what you’re saying?

Rebecca Burgess: Yes. They said 53% of that 74% was plastic fiber. And the plastic fibers are what they're concerned about is the kind of trophic cascades. So as zooplankton absorb that and then they’re eaten, how that absorbs through the food chain is what most scientists are most concerned about from health systems. Looking at human health for the food chain that we’re part of as we eat, part of the marine food web for our diets, but also within the marine food web just without the human consumer just how is that affecting cetaceans and other life forms as it accumulates up the food web. So yes, it's our yoga pants. If they’re acrylic or if they’re nylon or polyester that is a problem.

Greg Dalton: Which most yoga pants are. Amina Razvi. Athleisure is one of the fastest-growing segments, Athleta, Lululemon. These products are oil-based. Yoga pants and cycling shorts are bad for the environment. What's the alternative, can the garment industry move away from fossil fuels the way that the car industry is moving away from gasoline to electric?

Amina Razvi: I mean, I think in order to be able to make that move you kind of have to know where you're starting, right. And it's the fundamental basis of the SAC and the work that we’re doing around the Higgins, right. The Sustainable Apparel Coalition was really founded to help bring that data in a global standardized way to the companies who are using it. So if you are making yoga pants, bicycling shorts, you know, denim jeans. What is that material look like, you know, where is it coming from what’s the environmental impact of it. And if you know that then you actually have a really good baseline. You have an understanding of what the impacts are currently and what do you really need to do to shift away from those types of materials or those types of fibers towards ones that are potentially more environmentally friendly or sustainable.

Greg Dalton: So you’re helping companies understand their impact and get a baseline. In a lot of sectors we’re seeing cities companies pledge zero net emissions going for zero. Where are the bold leaders in apparel and textile saying we want to be out there and go to -- who’s the big hairy audacious goal?

Amina Razvi: You know, for us, I think many of our members are setting really big audacious goals. And that’s part of what I think the Sustainable Apparel Coalition brings to the overall industry is that you have leaders. You have folks like Levi’s setting goals around water. You have Patagonia talking about how they reduce their emissions, you know, and others. But I think it's really important for everyone to push each other to set really ambitious goals and to figure out how they do that collectively. Because at the end of the day, no single company is actually gonna be able to solve this problem.

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Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about the carbon energy hidden in our clothing. This is Climate One. Coming up, more with Rebecca Burgess and Amina Razvi, plus putting pressure on tech companies to clean up the power they run on.

Gary Cook: What we need to see more of is for companies to be using their influence using their ability to influence government and policy makers to change the rules and change what’s powering the grid because we’re running out of time.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking about sustainable clothing with Amina Razvi, Executive Director of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, and Rebecca Burgess, Founder and Director of Fibershed. She tells us about the impact of “fast fashion” – inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest fads.

Rebecca Burgess: Well, since 2001, 2002 around the time that H&M came into formation. We started to see a spike in the use of polyester as a blending agent to bring the price down of fast fashion items of clothing. And when we started to see polyester blended into cottons and blended into other natural fibers we created a system whereby it is become price prohibitive to separate those fibers back out. There's plenty of R&D and technologists trying to find ways to take the natural fiber out of a piece of clothing and recycle that and take the polyester out and separate it and recycle that. And there’s some people actually blending it all and making new yarns, but overall, we've created this huge spike of garments that are hard to recycle less than 1% are actually going back into the system as new clothing right now. And part of that is because of all these cheapening options to blend plastic which is subsidized through many things all the way back to war really. So my concern really is the fast fashion has perpetuated clothing is hard to recycle and that it has been promoting through its marketing not just seasonal purchases, but every two weeks every three weeks. There's this idea that the next best and greatest thing will be available to you. And I really like fashion researcher Kate Fletcher out of London who says, you know, fashion is like any organism it has filled out completely how much it can grow in the ecosystem in which you could call Earth's biome. It’s basically reached the max capacity of what it can do. And so right now the role is to really hit our climate goals. She would say we have to reduce volume and consumption by half. And so what we need to look at is a price per wear model, you know, how long am I gonna keep this item. How long can I keep this item, how durable is it? How many mending attempts can I put into it. How much can I refurbish it? And could I get this $300 climate beneficial wool coat to cost me $.30 per wear, if I keep it to the end of its full life which might be beyond my lifetime. So, this idea of inheriting clothing, keeping clothing and play inter-generationally modifying clothing over-dying it, hemming it, visible mending could become a trend which it is, Sashiko mending is starting to come back beautifully. I do think we have a role to play in paying the true cost and then analyzing cost per wear as an overall strategy to keep our budgets still within reality. But we have to keep the clothing longer to make this all work.

Greg Dalton: Amina Razvi, I’d like to get you on cost too because cost is such a big driver. Luxury brands, people can afford to pay some kind of premium for pasture raised wool, etc. etc. I don’t even know the labels to use here. I know the labels to use in the grocery store, you know, Forest Stewardship Council, Marine Stewardship Council, I don’t know the labels to use here. But how about the cost are they willing to absorb perhaps some of the cost of doing this of internalizing the carbon costs as Rebecca just said.

Amina Razvi: I think it's one of those things where every company is looking at it and tackling it slightly differently, you know. And, I think that for some of these companies it's also about innovation, right. It's not just purely what is this gonna cost, but how can we innovate to actually get to the ultimate goal of having more sustainable clothing. So, how can we look at different materials or where we’re getting them from, or how we’re sourcing them. Not just the materials, but, where something is actually produced physically that location, you know, what do transportation logistics and everything look like across the supply chain to figure out how a company can really innovate. How they can recognize those costs but ultimately also deliver and make better product.

Greg Dalton: But is local sourcing of fibers for clothes. We all hear about local food and food miles. I haven’t heard about local clothes as much. Are companies really looking about local sourcing because fossil fuel is cheap, shipping from China, labor is cheap in China in fact most of the pressure on the garment industry has been over labor practices over recent decades. So is local sourcing really a thing?

Amina Razvi: I mean it’s what Rebecca does and one of our member companies North Face has been working with Fibershed. And so I definitely think there are companies who were looking at that but I think it's actually about multiple options, right. You have to do things both locally, regionally, as well as think about globally, because that is the system that exist. And look at what those with the potential is to change things at multiple levels, because that change at multiple levels is really what's going to be effective in terms of getting to the reductions we ultimately need. And so I don't think it's either/or it's a yes/and. It’s all of those.

Greg Dalton: Rebecca Burgess, top tips for people who want to be climate conscious clothing consumers. What should a person do?

Rebecca Burgess: Consider buying something, if you are needing something new. If you're at that point of your wardrobe needing and you need more warmth, you need more options, because you put tattered clothes to bed. Think about timelessness and the peace. Think about wearing a garment or purchasing a garment that's gonna be with you for the long haul. Love it. Really be a custodian not a consumer. And, so think about custodianship as a change in mindset, that's number one. Number two, simply how you care for your clothes, purchasing natural fibers that aren’t going to create these marine and terrestrial ecosystem problems with shedding compounds that we don't quite understand their impacts to even our hormone balance. So, natural fiber is key. And then I would say, how you wash your clothing. We can save 1,600 pounds of CO2e per year, just by washing on cold and line drying. And then I'm also gonna make sure that I wash on cold, I line dry where I can. And then the last thing would be mending, when it gets tattered. How can I keep this piece in play? Who are my partners in keeping this clothing alive and well? Is it my local dry cleaner who can help me fix this if I can’t fix it myself? You know, where's that haberdashery to fix and mend. I think those are the main things that I would say are important. And then when you do buy also, if you can find an organic item of clothing. If you can find something local those are very, very key. They help stimulate some of these pieces that we’re trying to put in play around carbon drawdown in ag lands which is so critical to the climate conversation. And so if you can find clothing that's coming from a landscape that has measurable drawdown occurring like the North Face’s Climate Beneficial Wool program that's measurable change to atmospheric tonnage moving down they can measure that. And that's a really important thing to look for if you can find it.

Greg Dalton: Rebecca Burgess, Founder and Director of Fibershed, along with Amina Razvi Executive Director of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. This is Climate One. Although media and tech companies may seem on the surface like sleek, low-carbon operations, it takes a lot to power the clouds of the digital economy. (TRACK IDs in reverse order also)

Miranda Ballantine: The cloud is just a word, it’s not actually in the sky as we know it’s actually in computers in buildings. And those computers use a lot of power and generate a lot of heat.

Greg Dalton: That’s Miranda Ballantine, CEO of the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, a coalition of companies across the U.S. seeking to procure renewable energy. I spoke to her along with Gary Cook, Senior Corporate Campaigner for Greenpeace, about which companies are getting clean, and which ones aren’t.

Gary Cook: I'd say broadly, you’ve seen a lot of leadership from tech companies in driving their growth or attaching their growth to renewable energy. And so we’ve seen I think probably in the tech sector alone probably over 10 GW of renewable energy deployed attached to actions by companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple and Facebook. Now these companies have led a transition from the sort of 1.0 approach providing renewable energy credits that have very little impact on the marketplace to really doing PPAs, Power Purchase Agreements and other forms of transactions that's driving renewables under the grid. What we really need to see is the transition from that to a 3.0 approach where we’re really looking at how are we getting dirty energy off the grid phasing out fossil fuels and getting a true 24/7 renewable supply that is what is needed to address climate change and transition us to a renewable energy future.

Greg Dalton: Gary, you mentioned the leaders. There’s some laggards in your most recent report of Click Clean 2017. Amazon was rated a C, Netflix and HBO Go and Spotify got a D. And Twitter got an F. Have they moved since then and why are those companies lagging so much?

Gary Cook: You’ve seen some movement some good, some bad across that spectrum. I think, you know, actually Spotify has done much better since then they’ve actually been much more transparent about their footprint. They've transitioned their operations to parts of I believe it’s mostly Google's cloud network that is has higher much higher percentage of renewable energy powering that part of their cloud platform. Amazon unfortunately has gone I’d say down overall. We’ve seen some recent movement this year which hopefully is a sign of renewed leadership. But from 2017 when that report was put out kind of went silent for quite some time had not bought renewable energy but yeah, we’re at the period during of rapid growth. And that's really the challenge I think we’re seeing is that companies need to, are growing so quickly and unless they’re really focused on solving for the renewable energy supply in a very aggressive way, then they start slipping and falling behind on matching their growth with renewable energy.

Greg Dalton: Miranda Ballentine, your response?

Miranda Ballentine: So the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance has a slightly different place in this ecosystem. Our members are not just the tech and entertainment companies. And interestingly, if you go back to 2013 when REBA was first created as an idea. One of the big problems that these large organizations identified was a transition in our economy towards a digitized economy. So it's not just the Googles and Facebooks and Amazons of the world but a whole range of other kinds of companies. So think about General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Walmart, Target, all of these organizations saw back in 2013 that their businesses were becoming digitized. And they were using cloud computing to manage their businesses and saw a tidal wave coming in front of us of energy demand to provide power to those data centers. So I would say that this is not just a tech challenge it’s a challenge for every large organization. It's a challenge for cities and it's a challenge for individuals. All of us are consumers of data and the cloud is just a word, it’s not actually in the sky as we know it’s actually in computers in buildings. And those computers use a lot of power and generate a lot of heat. And so it is a challenge that all major corporations are working to tackle together I would say.

Greg Dalton: And is this happening across the political divide. We live in such a politically divided country. Miranda Ballantine, is this a move toward green energy happening in red states?

Miranda Ballentine: Absolutely, no question about it. So the move towards green energy, yes, is driven by a desire and need to solve the climate crisis. I will tell you that is the number one driver for these large organizations that are directly procuring renewable energy, wind, solar.

Greg Dalton: It’s not just cheaper energy?

Miranda Ballentine: Absolutely not. I spent a little bit of time as assistant secretary of the Air Force and I spent a lot of time during that period of my life thinking about energy security and energy resilience. And one of the benefits of renewable energy in particular is it has no supply chain. So a determined adversary whether it's mother nature with a hurricane or an enemy of the country can take out all kinds of other kinds of energy but they can't make the sun stop shining and they can't make the wind stop blowing. So a lot of big organizations whether it’s cities data centers, retail stores are also seeing renewable energy not only as a clean low-cost form of energy but also a form of energy that can give them reliability and resilience in the face of these increased storms that we’re facing.

Greg Dalton: Gary Cook that brings to mind the recent wildfires in California which have 2 million people in Northern California without power for some time. There's a concern that some of the large companies will start to island themselves off from the grid so that they can because the grid is now unstable in California in a way that it never has been. So that's concerning for business continuity purposes. Are you concerned that some of these companies will island themselves off and they might be in a green island and that might have some consequences for the rest of the system?

Gary Cook: I think you see companies taking action to take control of their supply chain. I think when you’re looking at data centers it’s such a large power draw that they're creating when their building data centers that they can certainly do things that are local connected to the data center but they’re still gonna be grid dependent overall. And so I think what you see and what we need to see more of is sort of more collective responsibility for what's powering the grid. And for companies to be using their influence using their ability to influence government and policy makers to change the rules and change what’s powering the grid because we’re running out of time. You see it in California, you saw in Sydney this past week, you see climate change impacts every time you turn around. We need to move much faster key part of that is working together to change the system that is governing how our electricity is generated. Unfortunately, we see in tech sector growth and often being very concentrated in places where the utilities aren’t interested in transition. You look at Virginia where you have the largest concentrations of data centers in the world and you look at Dominion Energy who is the dominant utility. And they are not transitioning in 10 years’ time where we need to be basically have phased out coal dramatically reduced our natural gas use for powering that grid there are only gonna be 10% renewable. And you have more and more data centers going there every single month every single year. That's the kind of growth that we don't need is gonna take us in the wrong direction. So companies have been aggressive in many places and driving renewables but in many places their growth is aggressive and the places where the transition is not happening and it’s taken us in the wrong direction.

Greg Dalton: Miranda Ballentine, industry associations, trade associations are often they, you know, very cautious because they have a broad membership to be careful of. They don’t want it often alienate some potential collaborator of a member or customer as a member. Is Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance willing to really pressure coal and take on coal and get coal off the grid the way that Gary just mention?

Miranda Ballentine: So something that's completely unique about REBA as far as I can tell we are not an industry association based on any sector of the economy. We’re not based on any particular industry our members range across not only every sector of the business community, but also we have university members we’ve got city members. We are a community of organizations that have come together around a mission not around a sector and how to improve that sector.

Greg Dalton: So you’re not afraid to make enemies. Is that what you’re saying? You’re not afraid to ruffle some feathers?

Miranda Ballentine: Some feathers are already demonstrably ruffled. So, yeah, I think we’ll have to. Now, is every company ready to make their individual brand heard on particular policy measures? No, they’re not. You know, our organization has to allow the leaders to have their brands be seen while also allowing those that are newer in the journey and maybe just starting to learn how to do renewable energy projects. Not be engaged in public policy unlike most trade associations, public policy and regulatory intervention is only a small piece of what we do. We do an enormous amount of education and growing the market by just bringing more buyers into the skill set that they can do deals.

Greg Dalton: I wanna ask about peer pressure, Gary Cook, how important is peer pressure among these companies to be on the right side and even down to the individual or CEO level to get in here and be on the right side?

Gary Cook: Particularly in a tech sector these companies are very competitive. I think it's obvious on number levels they're all very keen to as a consumer get you into their ecosystem keep you there continue to rely on those services. They’re very competitive and this goes back to your question on employees for talent. And I think you see existing employees, future employees looking at these companies and like where am I gonna attach my talents to. And I think the concerns around leadership on climate change from a recruitment and retention perspective are huge. And so I think we can expect to see more pressure from employees demanding more from these companies that these companies will have to keep up with the race otherwise they run risking not only losing their customers but losing a lot of their talent.

Miranda Ballentine: And I would say there's another element of, it's not so much peer pressure as peer support. So for the next generation not the Fortune 100 and the Global 500 but the next generation of companies. They are actually looking for peer support and collaboration and the cover that well Google has done it, Facebook has done it Walmart has done it. If those companies can do it we can do it. So that kind of peer-to-peer what are you doing what are you doing can we all make a commitment to do something really makes a difference in that next group what I call the fast followers not necessarily the leaders.

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Greg Dalton: Miranda Ballentine, CEO of the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, along with Gary Cook, Senior Corporate Campaigner with Greenpeace, talking about the very big and often invisible environmental impact of the energy choices made by tech companies and other businesses.

Greg Dalton: To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review.

Greg Dalton: Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. Sara-Katherine Coxon is the strategy and content manager. The audio engineers are Mark Kirchner, Justin Norton, and Arnav Gupta. Devon Strolovitch edited the program. Dr. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, where our program originates. [pause] I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

Mark Kurlansky and Anna Lappé: Plate to Planet

Otto Pilot — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 22:00:00 +0000

Mark Kurlansky and Anna Lappé: Plate to Planet

05/17/2018

Mark Kurlansky and Anna Lappé are two of the country’s most prolific and influential authors writing about feeding a crowded planet with a destabilized climate. The connection between global warming and the dinner table isn’t always obvious when we go to the grocery store. But our choices about how we put food on our plates, and what we do with the waste, contribute to as much as one third of total greenhouse-gas emissions. How can we continue to feed the planet without destroying it in the process? A conversation about the climate costs of global food production – and some possible solutions.

Guests

Mark Kurlansky

Author, MILK! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas

Anna Lappé

Executive Director, Global Alliance for the Future of Food

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

On today’s program, we go from plate to planet. Food writer Anna Lappé remembers reading a United Nations report that made the connection between climate change and livestock production.

Anna Lappé: At the time it was about 18% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, which was more than every single train, plane and automobile. And I remember thinking, why isn’t everybody talking about this?

Producing the food we eat makes up a big part of our climate footprint. But Mark Kurlansky says we should be looking for solutions - not pointing fingers.

Announcer: Mark Kurlansky and Anna Lappé: Plate to planet. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: Is the solution to climate change at the end of your fork?

Welcome to Climate One, hosted by Greg Dalton.

The connection between global warming and the dinner table isn’t always obvious when we go to the grocery store. But our choices about how we put food on our plates, and what we do with the waste, contribute to as much as one third of total greenhouse-gas emissions. How can we continue to feed a crowded planet without destroying it in the process?

Today, Greg talks food with two of the country’s most influential writers on the topic. Anna Lappé examines the climate crisis within our food system in her book “Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It.” A generation ago, her mother Frances Moore Lappé published the revolutionary “Diet for a Small Planet.”

Mark Kurlansky has explored global food history in his best-selling books “Cod” and “Salt.” His latest is “Milk: A 10,0000 Year Food Fracas.”

Here’s their conversation.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé, in 2006, you read a famous report called Livestock's Long Shadow. How did that set you on the course that you've been writing about, you come from a food family but how did that – yeah.

Anna Lappé: I do. Yeah, so it’s not the most dramatic story to tell about how you get sparked about an idea. I was sitting in my Brooklyn brownstone apartment reading a study from the United Nations. But it was really striking to me. It was a report that for the first time experts really tried to piece together the full climate story of livestock and really try to determine if we look at the whole picture, not just the food they’re eating and not just the methane they’re emitting and not just the transport but all of it together, what do we get? And what they found is that livestock as a whole sector emitted about at the time it was about 18% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, which was more than every single train, plane and automobile at the time. And I remember thinking, why isn’t everybody talking about this? And then of course you start peeling the layers even more. We don't just eat meat and dairy, we consume a lot of other things and you look at the whole story of food related, food sector related emissions. And today that figure is about 30% so you heard in your intro you said 14% is agriculture, well that’s direct agricultural emissions. But put it all together all of the aspects of food production from seed to plate to landfill. And you’re talking about a third of the crisis. So I got really inspired to dig in and I ended up writing a book about it and to this day continue to explore these questions of how food connects to climate.

Greg Dalton: And we’ll talk about that at this hour. Mark Kurlansky, you write that milk is the most argued over food in human history and also the most regulated. So how is it the most argued over? That surprised me.

Mark Kurlansky: Well, it’s always been argued over for like 10,000 years. And it’s not surprising if you think about it. I mean what is milk; it’s this bodily fluid that we’re supposed to feed to our babies. And, you know, nobody knows when this moment was, I would have loved to have been there when, you know, either the mother couldn't produce enough milk or the mother had died and somebody said, oh, look at that goat over there. Maybe we can use that. So always tremendous arguments about mother's milk versus animal milk and many other things. The thing about milk arguments is that they don't go away because they don't get resolved. They just get more and more, we keep adding to them. So there's newer milk arguments and there’s really old arguments. I guess the oldest one is whether you should use animals and then after that, which animals you should use, which hasn't been resolved. The arguments about raw milk versus pasteurization which came about in the 19th century haven’t been resolved and, you know, we have newer ones about GMO crops for food, for feed and –

Greg Dalton: I’ve read about donkey milk and camel milk in your book. Those were new to me. I haven't heard those before and we had people here recently with pea milk where you can make bathroom jokes about that. But it’s like milk from peas so there's lots of milk substitutes out there.

Mark Kurlansky: Well, milk substitutes aren’t new. The Catholic Church, there was this belief in the Middle Ages that milk was blood. And so it was a kind of blood, a white blood. And the church did not allow the consumption of blood or red meat on holy days which were about half the days of the calendar.

So that meant that you couldn't use milk on holy days. So what they did is they use almond milk. They use lots of almond milk in the Middle Ages and if you look at medieval recipes they’ll say, you know, take a cup of milk or almond milk meaning, you know, depending on which day on the calendar it is.

Greg Dalton: We wanted to talk to an actual dairy farmer as we’re talking about milking cows and methane. So we talked with the CEO of Saint Benoit Creamery he’s talking about some of his company’s business decisions.

[Start Clip]

Eric Batum: I’m Eric Batum, I’m the CEO of Saint Benoit Creamery. We are a small creamery in Sonoma, California. And our milk is very little processed; it’s low pasteurized and it cannot travel much. We are completely non GMO and organic. So we know the animals are well-treated this is very important to us.

The second thing is that we get milk from Jersey cows and Jersey cows like to go on pasture. So they’re not cows that like to sit on the farm like Holsteins could be. They’re on pasture all year long. Of course one of the sacrifice is that when you go with this kind of breed the productivity or the amount of milk that’s produced by cow in a day is certainly less than it can be with a lazy Holstein. The costs or the price that we paid the farmer for the milk is much more, way more almost three times the price of a regular Holstein cow. So our products are not cheap, our products are I would say expensive in the markets, but it's also for a clientele that is caring about the environment, caring about the animals and caring about having good food for themselves or for their families.

[End Clip]

Greg Dalton: That’s the CEO of the Saint Benoit Creamery, Eric Batum. So Anna Lappé, there's a lot in there, a poke at Holstein cows, we’ll get Mark Kurlansky on that. But the idea that wholesomeness and economic value, environmental concern costs more, is that elitist, is that true?

Anna Lappé: Well, is it true and is it elitist are different questions I think. I would say that, you know, if you wanna talk about elitism I would think the entire way our current food system is structured is inherently elitist where the worst paid folks in our economy are in the food sector, you know, where you have an entire concentration of wealth where some of the best paid CEOs are in the food sector and at the same time you have farmworkers barely able to feed themselves. You know that to me is the elitist dynamic of our food system.

To the cost question, you know, does it cost more to say support, you know, I don’t know how many of you have had that product. I have, it’s quite delicious, and it is quite expensive. It can certainly cost more to say the individual consumer in the marketplace and part of that is because we are paying the true cost of our food when you’re paying more and you're actually giving more of your dollar to the farmer. But what is exciting to me when we start looking at these sustainability solutions is that actually I like to tell the story that ultimately they are going to cost us a whole lot less.

Because the kinds of practices that sustainable farmers are using on their land don't incur the cost that you and I all incur in our taxpayer dollars when we have to spend money to pay for the pollution that's caused by agriculture or pay for all the other externalities as economists like to call it about our current industrial system.

So to me the real story is this way of farming that's going to be more in concert with nature is ultimately going to save us a lot of money particularly when it comes to how we can harness sustainable food to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help fix the climate.

Greg Dalton: And a lot of people look for that grass fed, grass finished. Mark Kurlansky, grass-feeding is actually cheaper than grain. So why don’t more farmers do the ranchers did?

Mark Kurlansky: Well it’s like all of these things, you know, they come with a catch. It is cheap if you have the right kind of climate, you know, Ireland –

Greg Dalton: And enough grass.

Mark Kurlansky: Well, because you have the right climate, yeah. But on the other hand grass fed produces less. So there's always, you know, an economic, I find having talked to a lot of farmers all over the world. One thing I consistently find is that these farmers are looking for a formula that works. Rarely do you find somebody saying, well you can find people sometimes saying, you know, I want to be organic. I've talked to a lot of people said they wanted to be organic and they couldn’t make it work. But basically they're looking for a formula that works. If you don’t do anything if you just do all the things that you’re supposed to do, which evolving devise to try to make milk cheap. I mean like why do we use cows in the first place. I mean cows probably aren't the best milk but they’re the best milkers, you know, and Holsteins have been bred to be the best producing cow. It’s not necessary the best milk but the most productive. And not terrible milk necessarily, you know. But if you do all that stuff like you're supposed to do then you're kind of stuck with the milk price the U.S. government’s milk price in this country or, you know, in Australia it’s the supermarkets that determine the milk price there. Somebody is always setting a low milk price. And if you charge more than that price people won’t buy your milk because it's more expensive unless you do something special. So that's why farmers are always thinking well maybe if I’m organic, maybe if I’m GMO free.

Greg Dalton: So you say that farmers, ranchers do that because of the price premium not because of some environmental ethic it's really –

Mark Kurlansky: Well sometimes but often not, you know. I talked to this guy he produces this very popular milk in the Hudson Valley which is near New York City and he sells his stuff in the green markets in New York for a good price and it’s a really nice milk. And it’s GMO free and it says on the bottle GMO free and I said to him, I said, “So do you think that GMO feed is bad?” And he said, “No, I don’t think so but, you know, people really like it when you say GMO free.”

Greg Dalton: And they’ll pay more. Anna Lappé.

Anna Lappé: I would say that when I’ve talked to farmers around the country and around the world. One of the most interesting I think farmers to talk to are farmers who have shifted to organic and asking them why, why did they make the choice. And one of the things that I feel like I’ve heard more than any other answer to that question is that they made the shift because they had experienced either in their own families or in their own communities they’d experienced the health impacts of growing food or raising, you know, raising crops with pesticides.

And one of my favorite farmers of all time John Kinsman, a dairy farmer in Wisconsin. He said he’d been a conventional dairy farmer multiple generations in Wisconsin the moment that everything change for him is when he woke up in the hospital and he realized he was there because the chemicals he was using on his farm. And he totally shifted his production.

Mark Kurlansky: Organic is a complicated thing. I mean I've talked to farmers who wanted to be organic because, you know, they actually feed organic food to their families and they believe in organic and so they want to do it. And in some cases, you know, organic is no longer an ecological term or something it’s a bureaucratic term; the U.S. government defines organic. And it's very difficult to do. It’s very expensive and extremely difficult to do. And I've talked to many people who wanted to be organic and just couldn't get ahead doing it.

Greg Dalton: And some of them think that organic is inhumane, Mark Kurlansky, tell us about that.

Mark Kurlansky: Yes. Yes, I’ve talked to many farmers who didn't want to be organic because they thought it was cruel to cows to not to give them medicine when they’re sick. You can give them medicine but then you can’t use them in the organic herd which is one of the many examples of how organic favors large-scale farming. Because in large-scale farming you give them the medicine and then you move it to the other herd because they maintain an organic herd, and non-organic herd. But if your family farm with 100 or 200 cows you can't really do that.

And I’ve talked to many farmers who are just really bothered by this whole idea and didn't want to do it. And in fact, there is an organization that certifies farms as animal friendly and they won't certify organic farms.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about growing and eating the foods we love. Coming up, how farmers and environmentalists can work together.

Anna Lappé: This food sector is a place where we’re seeing real climate solutions and a lot of environmentalists are starting to realize that farmers who really are both on the front lines of the climate impacts but also they’re on the front lines of the climate solutions.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is exploring the climate consequences of food production, and possible solutions, with writers Anna Lappé and Mark Kurlansky. Lappé is the author of “Diet for a Hot Planet,” and Kurlansky’s newest book is “Milk: A 10,0000 Year Food Fracas.”

Let’s continue with their conversation.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé, one of the other critiques of organic is that it doesn't scale. Can't feed the world organically because it takes so much land, et cetera. Do you agree with that or do you challenge that?

Anna Lappé: Well, I definitely challenge that. I challenge that on lots of different counts. First of all, I challenge that on the fundamental frame of this question of how do we feed the world and fundamentally I think it's always important to remind ourselves that fundamentally the root causes of hunger currently today and has been for decades and decades. It's not because we aren’t producing enough food, it’s because of what food we’re producing, who has access to it, it has to do with the politics of food.

You mentioned I come from a food family so my mother Frances Moore Lappé, some of you may know, she’s been drumming home this message for decades now, which is that the root cause of hunger is scarcity of democracy and not the scarcity of food. So in other words, we could today we’re producing 2,900 calories for every man, woman and child and yet a billion people are still going hungry. So I always think it's important that we're not just having this debate about what production method is going to be best but also how do we put that into a bigger context. With that said, what thrills me about the story of organic farming or as folks especially internationally call it agroecology, agroecological farming. That’s a word I think that doesn't go over so well in English language but the principles of it are fabulous.

And what we're finding is study after study showing that actually when you're applying these agroecological principles really bringing knowledge to farming, and what I would call knowledge intensive farming versus input intensive farming, that actually yields are often comparable with say the chemical counterpart without any of the cost, the health costs and frankly the cost to the farmer of having to spend money on these inputs. We’re seeing in many places around the world, a whole movement of farmers embracing these practices, finding their farms do better. Talk about good news for climate that these agro-ecological farms studies are showing they do much better during moments of climate extremes. They do much better during times of drought, they’re better at retaining water in the soil because they’re building healthy soil. All the things that we know we’re going to need in a climate unstable future, these farms are doing well for us, you know, compared to the chemical farms that are not.

Greg Dalton: So another term that I've heard related to that which is more memorable perhaps is climate smart agriculture and yet there's some big companies that are trying to perhaps support that you might say co-op that. But what’s wrong with climate smart ag?

Anna Lappé: So yeah, so when I was researching and writing this book Diet for a Hot Planet, I used the term climate smart and climate friendly and then the book came out and I noticed some of our biggest agribusiness companies starting to use the term. And what we're finding that in this decade that we've gone from food being totally off the radar in terms of the climate conversation to being part of the climate conversation is a lot of the companies the food companies that are now part of the climate conversation in a way they don't want to be where they realize actually we’re a key driver here. You're starting to see false solutions being presented by some of these companies saying well we can, you know, one example is there’s been a lot of conversation about how we need to use our soils to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and bring it back into the soils; what’s called carbon sequestration.

We’re starting to see a move by some of the biggest food companies and biggest investors in the world to do what some people are calling land grabs, basically buying up a huge swath of land to do these short-term big large-scale carbon sequestration projects that have dubious carbon sequestration benefits but are profiting some of the biggest companies in the world. So and I think it's important that we bring our critical mind to any kind of silver bullet solution that's coming from the very companies that have gotten us really into this mess.

Greg Dalton: Mark Kurlansky, is big always bad?

Mark Kurlansky: [Laughs]. I think big is not necessarily always bad. But, you know, small is usually good, you know.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Is small efficient, you know, one of the classic economics is big helps drive down the cost. I guess I’m thinking of –

Mark Kurlansky: One thing I learned in spending a lot of years in studying fisheries is that efficiency is not always a good thing. It's actually sometimes a thing you want to avoid.

Greg Dalton: We have a cult of efficiency sometimes, yeah. I’m thinking of a scene very memorable scene in Food, Inc. the documentary where the Walmart guys go to the farm at I’m not sure if Gary Hirschberg is there, and Walmart banned the growth hormone in milk that changed that market overnight. And probably think that's a good thing, I don't know but that's an example of a big company. When a big company makes a change it can have quite a profound impact.

Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. And I don't think you should ever have that attitude, you know. I think you should always have the attitude that you should try to work with people, you know. I do a lot of talk radio interviews and I get these people who call in environmental people and different causes that they're pushing and they talk about farmers like they’re the enemy. And I tell them, you know, you want to change things, the first thing you have to do is understand farmers and learn how to talk to them. Because the way you're talking, there isn’t gonna be any kind of communication.

Greg Dalton: Yeah. How about that Anna, we don’t, you know, talk to people who disagree with as much in this country anymore, and certainly a lot of people maybe if you go to farmers’ market you talk to people who produce food. But for a lot of environmentalists, ranchers and farmers are the villains. Anna Lappé.

Anna Lappé: Well I’m just gonna say I mean I think that story is changing too a little bit. And just to correct the historical record on the Walmart and banning that growth hormone. Really what pushed that movement away from this artificial growth hormone or VGH where as far as I know no dairy farmers are using it today, was dairy farmers and consumers together really putting a stand up against you know saying –

Mark Kurlansky: They didn’t like the results.

Anna Lappé: But on this question about, you know, these farmers and ranchers and environmentalists, you know, can we all be friends. What has been encouraging to me again over the past real decade of this conversation about climate and food is that we’re seeing I think new alliances and a deepening of understanding of how it’s certainly not helpful to pit ourselves as opponents if we have the shared goal of fixing the climate. And to me again, this food sector is a place where we’re seeing real climate solutions and a lot of environmentalists are starting to realize that farmers who really are both on the front lines of the climate impacts but also they’re on the front lines of the climate solutions. They are the ones who are really the stewards of our soils which again is one of the biggest carbon sinks on the planet.

And that when you bring this ecological practices to the farm, you're seeing a real power for biodiversity to go up, you’re seeing a huge push toward agroforestry bringing trees onto farms and that has incredible environmental benefits. So to me I think there is more of an understanding of how there's more ways we can work together.

Mark Kurlansky: Most farmers and most ranchers and most fishermen do not want to do harm. They do want to earn a living. And if their ways of earning a living are doing harm, you know, you have to convince them that there's a better way to do it. They really by and large are not evil people, you know. I've seen with fish farming, you know, salmon farming was started by Norwegians. And they never wanted to be the bad guys, you know, they didn't foresee that. So they have gotten concerned about how bad their image is and have recognized not all of them but some of them the Norwegians who started it actually that they’re creating problems and they're doing some things wrong and they're trying to find solutions and they will talk to people. You know, as a journalist I can sit down with them and they will say yes, X, Y and Z these things are really bad we’ve got to figure out some way to change it. That’s the kind of dialogues that have to happen.

Greg Dalton: And another thing Mark Kurlansky, you write about the shortage of workers in dairy. And there's robots coming, there’s already –

Mark Kurlansky: Yeah, there’s gonna be more and more because, you know, every farmer I talked to can't get, he can’t get help. I mean it’s a really hard job and there’s no money in it, you know, some young guy starting off usually doesn't want to do that unless, you know, the ones that do do it come from a five generation farming family or something.

Greg Dalton: The robots coming there too?

Mark Kurlansky: Robots are gonna be more and more in farming especially dairy.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé, are food miles overstated, exaggerated, you know, Michael Pollan educated a lot of people about food miles. Look where your food comes from. And yet some people think that food miles have been kind of overblown.

Anna Lappé: Yeah. That is one of the things I was really curious about. And actually if you look at the science around and what percentage of your, of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the transport of your food you know what percentage of your food that is, it’s actually a relatively small percentage. But what I would sort of caution folks to do though is not say, okay then we can, you know, get this food from halfway around the world and get this food from the other half way around the world. Local is often proxy actually for a whole suite of other benefits of your food. So, you know, when a Michael Pollan is talking about supporting and buying local food, I'm pretty sure Michael is not meaning, you know, if you live near a Twinkie factory go buy the Twinkie, right.

He really means support your regional food shed. He means, you know, go to the farmers that are promoting biodiversity that are keeping your land protected from sprawl that are, you know, tending to your watershed the kind of things –

Mark Kurlansky: You don’t think the local Twinkies are better.

Anna Lappé: I don’t know. I don’t live near a Twinkie factory as far as I know.

Mark Kurlansky: You know, I -- you'd mentioned this book I’ve done, Food of a Younger Land, which was food writing that was done for the WPA in the 1930s. And the food was all local and, you know, one of the results of that that you could see was that in most places people ate really badly in the wintertime. If you read this book, you're going to think twice about being a locavore.

Greg Dalton: Well it’s a luxury that certain people in Mediterranean climates have.

Anna Lappé: Right.

Mark Kurlansky: Yes.

Anna Lappé: And, you know, I think to me what is important to realize when you bring up this food miles question and start thinking about it. It really starts drilling you down into this question of well then what is the most important thing if you care about the environmental impact of your food, or you want to eat a more climate friendly diet. It's really a question of what are you eating, how was it grown, where was it grown and because most of the percentage of greenhouse gas emissions associated with your food come from that agricultural production slice it’s about 80% to 85%. So that brings us into, you know, what have the most impact.

Greg Dalton: What is food and Anna Lappé, you have a TEDx talk about empathy for both for workers. And so talk about the collective empathy of food.

Anna Lappé: Yeah. So I was talking in that speech this idea this way that food can actually listen our innate sense of empathy. I started thinking about it as I started reflecting on the farmers and farmworkers I'd met. And started realizing that, you know, when I make food choices for myself and my family, you know, I do really think about how does this food choice not just feed my two daughters the healthiest food for them but it really does create this sense of empathy in me where I think about was there a farmworker mother living in Salinas Valley who had to be exposed to chlorpyrifos a toxic insecticide to grow the lettuce that I'm giving my kids for dinner.

And realizing that for me for instance choosing food that isn't grown with toxic pesticides, is an empathetic choice that is both really about my care for myself and really my kids but really it’s about caring for people all across the food chain. And how I think food can be this act of expression of that collective empathy for the farmer you're never going to meet, the farmworker you’re never going to meet, the butterfly and bee you’re never gonna see buzz by but you know was saved because you didn't purchase the food that was grown with the neonicotinoids that killed those bees and butterflies. So I think there is a way that it can tap us into I think a really beautiful part of human nature, which is our capacity to feel empathy.

Mark Kurlansky: Can I just talk a minute about pesticides because it’s an interesting example. You know, DDT was developed during World War II because American troops in the Pacific were getting a lot of malaria. And before DDT came along basically what farmers did was what is called biological control. Which is you bring in the bug that eats the bug that you want to get rid of. And it's a very difficult and complicated things because you're talking about, you know, invasive species, bringing in things that weren’t supposed to be there and, you know, in nature, there's always -- biologists call it the law of unintended consequences.

But research on this science just sort of went away when DDT came along and all the research went into coming up with more and more kinds of chemicals to kill them. And it’s an example of how corporations took over science and really pointed it in a wrong direction.

Anna Lappé: Yeah. I mean the figure is about 1% maybe 2% of all research dollars is going to exploring these biological control methods and the rest of it is going to this chemical model of agriculture which we’re seeing creates these pesticide treadmills.

Mark Kurlansky: Was it Dow? Who was it better living with chemicals?

Anna Lappé: Du Pont maybe yeah. They’re now one company so.

Mark Kurlansky: Right.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about food and climate change at Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. My guests are Mark Kurlansky, best-selling author and Anna Lappé, a food advocate and also best-selling author.

We’re gonna go to our lightning round and ask some quick questions of our guests today. First section is association. I’ll mention a noun and you mention the first thing that –

Anna Lappé: Oh this is kind of scary.

Greg Dalton: So the first thing that comes to your mind Anna Lappé if I say chocolate.

Anna Lappé: Mmm, delicious.

Greg Dalton: Mark Kurlansky. Kale.

Mark Kurlansky: Green was the first thing that came to my mind.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé. Quinoa.

Anna Lappé: Questions.

Greg Dalton: True or false. Anna Lappé. You have met foodies who care more about the temperature of their goat cheese than the homeless people outside their grocery store?

Anna Lappé: Have I met them? I’m not sure so.

Greg Dalton: You heard about them?

Anna Lappé: I’ve heard about them, yes.

Greg Dalton: Okay. True or false. Mark Kurlansky. 60% of people in the world are lactose intolerant?

Mark Kurlansky: That is correct.

Greg Dalton: Last question in our lightning round. True or false for Anna Lappé. You secretly dream of watching Three’s Company and eating Cheetos?

Anna Lappé: [Laughs]. You’re quoting me so I guess sometimes – in this TEDx talk I confessed that as a child we had to keep our television locked in the closet it would only come out occasionally. And, you know, the closest thing I got to junk food in the kitchen was, you know, I think a rice cracker and maybe some honey on top of it. So I said, you know, secretly sometimes I would dream of eating Cheetos and watching Three’s Company.

Greg Dalton: Alright, let’s give them a round for getting through that gauntlet of lightning round here at Climate One.

[Applause]

Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about changing our diet to save the planet. This is Climate One. Coming up – making hard choices at the meat counter.

Mark Kurlansky: And the guy in this heavy New York accent said, “Make up your mind lady. You wanna be a locavore or you wanna be a grass fed?”

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking with authors Mark Kurlansky and Anna Lappé. They’ve both written books on global food production and its connection to climate change.

Let’s get back to their discussion. Here’s Greg.

Greg Dalton: So Anna Lappé, someone who wants to eat a climate friendly diet. What should they eat, what should they not do?

Anna Lappé: Well, yeah, that’s a good question. And kind of depends what your starting point is what you might need to shift off and on your plate. For the average American who is consuming about twice as much protein as their bodies can use and if you over consume protein you don't store it for later it's essentially wasted calories. I would say a really good place to start for the average American is removing some meat off that plate. We know that currently the way we’re producing our beef cattle in particular, have a really high climate footprint. And so in particular looking at shifting away from the beef you find in the supermarket. I have been digging into the evidence about, you know, is it possible that a 100% grass fed beef managed on pastures using, you know, really, really complex systems to make sure that the cattle are helping build up the soil carbon content. I think there's some really interesting science around that. Can the typical consumer find that in the supermarket, probably not. So I don’t think it’s a very helpful message.

But the good news around what does a climate friendly diet look like it's all the things that you’ve probably been hearing lots of other people talk about in terms of what’s good for your health and good for water, good for all kinds of things. It's eating more organically grown food, organic agriculture has a much lower carbon footprint uses much less energy. And again has all of those resiliency benefits. It means eating less packaged food. It means eating more in season. All these things that, you know, those are the lessons we’re learning about what a healthy diet looks like. So there's a good, a nice synergy between what’s good for the climate and good for you.

And then the final thing I would say is to not waste your food. We in the U.S. are wasting about 40% of all food that we could eat. Globally it ranges but that's about on par with the global figures. And so just food waste alone we could significantly reduce the climate impact over our food and feed more people if we weren't wasting so much food.

Greg Dalton: Mark Kurlansky, your next book is on salmon. You’re quite concerned about the fate of the oceans that's a big source of protein for people around the world. Tell us a glimpse on to your next book on salmon. How they’re doing?

Mark Kurlansky: Well, salmon which is a really remarkable animal. I mean an animal that can jump 10 feet in the air and just has this incredible life cycle and gives up its life to spawn. The problem with salmon is just about everything that we’re doing wrong. I mean it's really remarkable. Salmon are in trouble because of bad fishery management, because of bad farming practices, because of deforestation, because of irrigation because of climate change. I mean really I want people to save the salmon because all you have to do to save the salmon is save the earth.

Anna Lappé: Right.

Greg Dalton: We talked a little bit about aquaculture is that inevitable can aquaculture be done sustainably? A lot of times restaurants will say, oh this is sustainably farmed.

Mark Kurlansky: No, the problem with aquaculture is that it doesn't address the issue. And people embrace it as though it does. It addresses the issue of how can I get some fish but it doesn't, you know, these animals are dying out because of what we are doing to the planet. And the fact that we can create a few fake ones doesn't in any way address the problem we’re doing to the planet.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé, there’s some companies that are doing what's called clean meat which is, you know, meat or beef, burger without the cow, you know, tuna fish sandwich without the tuna. Is that perhaps a solution that doesn't have the environmental impacts to create meat in the laboratory?

Anna Lappé: Well, I would say there’s really two different categories that are getting lumped together by the industry gave themselves this nice sounding term, clean meat. You have really I think it’s important for us to understand there’s really two different paths of essentially alternatives to what we think of, you know, animal-based proteins. One path is these plant-based proteins that are actually based on plant. So its products that are trying to create alternative to dairy using say legumes grown in France to make product called Ripple that’s alternative to milk. On the other hand, you have these companies that are creating meat products in a lab and they are cultured they have starter cultures that tend to come from crops that are not so good for the environment like sugarcane, they require a lot of energy. I remember going to a clean meat conference and during the breakout session at lunch time there was an entire corner of the room piled with a pyramid of plastic Petri dishes and then in front was a little sample of a burger and they were saying, “Well we’re still trying to figure out how to scale this, but that’s how many Petri dishes we need to make this burger here.” There’s a ton of questions I and a lot of other folks that are more expert in this than I are asking about these companies and you have a lot of investor dollars are going in. I think for, you know, these reasons that we understand that, you know, when beef cattle uses 3/5 of the world's land but is only giving us 5% of our protein calories, we should be rethinking meat. I think doing it this way to me raises a lot more questions than our answered so far in what I've seen from what these companies are putting out about what they’re doing.

Mark Kurlansky: And the thing is that we’re kind of in our attempt to help people we’re making life really difficult for people because they’re just inundated with all of these choices. And, you know, I was recently at a Whole Foods at the meat counter and they had these New York steaks, not New York cut but, you know, from New York. And this woman said, “Well do you have anything that is grass fed?” And they said, “Yeah, these over here are grass fed.” And she said, “But that says Australia.” And he said, “Yeah, they’re from Australia.” And she said, “Can I get something local that’s grass fed?” And the guy in this heavy New York accent said, “Make up your mind lady. You wanna be a locavore or you wanna be a grass fed?”

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Which gets to the point of like how much time people spend at the grocery store. Anna Lappé, I have this image of you spending five hours in the grocery store because you’re like analyzing and looking on the Internet, you know, because it's complex.

Anna Lappé: Right.

Greg Dalton: You go to Marine Stewardship Council, all these different labels. Is it easier than that?

Anna Lappé: It’s really, I mean we’re lucky in that we have a grocery store that's locally owned and does a lot of my sort of thinking for me and having great products on the shelves. But actually, I really push back around the like “it’s too confusing” messaging because actually eating this sort of climate friendly diet if you want to call that you actually erase a lot of the questions that you have. I mean when I look in our kitchen we don't have that many brands, we don't have that much packaged food. So we don’t have to go in to, you know, what’s the latest labor atrocity of this company, is it okay to buy it, you know. Because we’re eating mostly whole foods not from the Whole Foods grocery store, but whole foods like real food that then we have to cook.

What I would say though, to this like it’s complicated is, and we haven’t really touch on this yet together is that to me then the story needs to wrap into what are the policy changes we need to make. So that we as individual consumers don't have to, it’s all on us, right. We don’t have to be constantly bombarded with, you know, is this label telling us the right thing, does this have some toxic pesticide? We should have a set of policies that raises the floor so that when you go into the grocery store, you don't have to worry does that can have a lining that might make your kids sick. Does that company produce palm oil in Indonesia that’s going to worsen climate change? We should be setting policies in place so that floor gets raised so we as individuals don't have to be doing that thinking.

Greg Dalton: Mark Kurlansky, some of the things that people are concerned about in the fish for example, there’s some myths about safety and there's one about people have probably all heard about salmon that's died with, you know, the same things that the Shirley Temple cherries are something like that. Is that true?

Mark Kurlansky: No. You know, when they first started farming salmon. When you farm salmon it doesn't have the kind of crustacean diet that it has at sea. And so the flesh doesn't turn that pink color, it’s white, which they were fine with but nobody bought it. And for a while they tried to market it as white salmon but nobody wanted it. So they got the stuff from the crustaceans to feed to the farmed salmon so that they would have that color. And a lot of people, you know, they think they're giving them red dye number 2 or something, it's not, they’re just sort of re-creating what would happen at sea. I mean there's a lot of issues with farmed salmon but that really isn’t one of them.

Greg Dalton: Before we go to audience questions I wanna ask each of you, you’ve done some interesting travels, Mark virtually and Anna actually with your mother. You visited five continents to write the book Hope’s Edge. So tell us about that journey and kind of, you know, five continents in one minute, you know.

Anna Lappé: Okay. So yes, my mother and I wrote a book together which when I tell that to people sometimes they’re shocked, you could write a book with your mother. But we looked at examples around the world where people were developing this really creative solutions to make food systems work for health and climate. And to me I think one of the most inspiring experiences was going to one of the largest cities in Brazil, a city called Belo Horizonte or beautiful horizon. And seeing what a city government could do if they started looking at food differently, not just as another commodity to be sold at the marketplace but as a basic human right. And if food becomes a human right then all of a sudden these elected officials in the city had a whole different frame of mind about policymaking about well then it's our responsibility as the elected officials here to ensure that everybody has a right to access good healthy food.

And what we saw was within a decade they had innovated all these incredible policies, which in one minute I won’t have time to go into. But they had decreased infant mortality by something like 73%, they had decreased hunger by some huge margin. They had helped all the regional farmers by connecting them to urban consumers and they had really I would not say solved hunger but as one of my friends put who wrote a whole book about this, they had begun to end hunger. And that was to see that on a scale you asked about the scale, to see that on a scale of a huge city really doing this incredible work through again really creative policies was really inspiring. And some of those policies that we witnessed there in Belo now I’ve seen spreading all around the world.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Oh thank you very good program. My name is Tom McCollum. There’s growing bipartisan interest in a tax or a fee with dividend on carbon in the energy sector. How will that play out on the carbon footprint in the food sector, make it better, make it worse, impact health or improve health?

Anna Lappé: I think how would I answer that actually to give an example of what we’re seeing here in the state of California that I think is really exciting and I think most people don't know about which is how can we look at the revenues from cap-and-trade policies like we have here in California. How can we ensure that some of those revenues are going into agricultural systems that will be good for the climate? So they’ll be benefiting farmers and also helping farmers develop the kinds of practices on their land that are going to reduce the emissions from the ag sector in California. And there is a network in California called The California Agriculture and Climate Action Network or CalCAN that actually developed this really creative policy and amazingly so got it passed and now there is revenue coming into California farmers to look at how can they bring these conservation practices to their farms. And so it is policies like this that can help farmers do what is complicated stuff on the farm, do it more, do it better and get some compensation for it.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our next question. Welcome.

Female Participant: Hi, my name is Hope Soranski and I work for an environmental nonprofit. And my question to you all is how do you believe we can pay the true cost of food while also taking into consideration equity, traditional cultures and socioeconomic status?

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé.

Anna Lappé: Yeah, that’s a great question. And it gets back to this both the human rights to food and also the right of people to – indigenous people to their land. And one of the facts that I heard recently is 75% of the world’s biodiversity is on the land held by indigenous peoples around the world.

And so we really want to be thinking about how do we protect that land. How do we protect those people and the rights to land and, you know, not to keep coming back to policy. But, you know, I think it does, it comes back to where, how are we regulating our agricultural system and how are we forcing those that are really the drivers of these costs, paying those costs.

So right now for instance, I was just looking at how much the factory farm industry in this country, how much antibiotics are used. You mentioned this is an issue in dairy. Well antibiotics are used rampantly in our industrial agricultural system about three quarters or more of all antibiotics used in this country it's not used in hospitals, but it's used in factory farms. And only a tiny, tiny bit of that is actually around animal health. The largest reason why we’re feeding animals antibiotics is actually to promote growth because it promotes growth really fast. And if you look at the cost, the healthcare costs, we’re experiencing of antibiotic resistance that’s a huge cost. Now is the pharmaceutical company that's providing those antibiotics to that factory farm paying any of that cost, is the producer that’s feeding the animal, you know, that product is paying any of it, no. So to me, it's a complicated question of how do we get some of these costs revealed and how do we get regulations and policies in place so that those that are really causing this impacts of carrying some of the burden, or regulation place that say in the case of antibiotics there's been work going on for decades to try to force companies to disallow companies to use subtherapeutic levels of antibiotics.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé is a food advocate and author. We’re talking about food and climate change at Climate One. Let’s go to our next question.

Male Participant: I’m Dan Warren, an old football coach. My question is this. Just over the last 200 years the increase in population. Does that affect climate change more than a lot of things and the multiple is keep on going? Thank you.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé, a lot of the environmentalists don’t like to talk about population. It's a messy social issue that they don't like to go there.

Anna Lappé: Yeah, well, you know, I see it as not so much a messy social issue as, actually a really important conversation about women's rights and also a conversation that totally connects to the food conversation. Because all around the world the majority of farmers are women and part of the reason why we have population growth is that women aren’t empowered to get an education. They aren’t empowered to they don’t have the resources to feed their families. And so when you start looking at how do you create a farming system that actually does help those small-scale farmers be able to stay in the land and thrive, does support women and girls education, you start changing the entire story of population growth.

One of the books that has come out recently about climate change I think is really important to read is Drawdown. You might have had Paul Hawken on your program. But one of the biggest areas for how we address climate change that he talks about on that book and many other folks have said is women’s rights, education for girls and actually that, you know, you hear demographers say we’re going to double the world’s population by whatever year they like to say. And those demographic changes are not set in stone. And actually they can when you invest in women's education and when you invest in supporting girls, that entire story changes.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking how the food we eat helps heat up our planet – and some possible solutions. His guests were Anna Lappé, author of “Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It.” And Mark Kurlansky, who has written the best-sellers “Cod” and “Salt.” His latest book is “Milk: A 10,0000 Year Food Fracas.”

To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more. If you like the program, please let us know by writing a review on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. And join us next time for another conversation about America’s energy, economy, and environment.

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Carlos Manuel and Tyler Reed are the producers. The audio engineer is Mark Kirschner. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch edit the show The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

Net Zero Living

Otto Pilot — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:01:00 +0000

Net Zero Living

01/04/2018

Conservation begins at home – literally. Designing and operating a home that generates as much power as it uses is rapidly becoming a reality. Meanwhile, cities around the country have made zero waste a goal for their landfills. Can it be done? What steps can we take to reduce the trash on our collective backs? And what is it really like to live trash-free?

Diana Dehm, Founder, Trash on Your Back
Kevin Drew, Zero Waste Coordinator, San Francisco Department of the Environment
Lauren Hennessy, Sustainability Outreach Manager, Stanford University
Samuel McMullen, Co-Founder, Live Zero Waste
Ann Edminster, Author, Energy Free: Homes for a Small Planet
Daniel Simons, Principal, David Baker Architects
Sven Thesen, Owner, Net Zero Home

This program was recorded at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, CA.

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

Conservation often begins at home – literally. Net Zero homes are designed from the ground up to produce as much energy as they use.

Sven Thesen: We wanted a reasonable home that was extremely comfortable, extremely functional and still had an extremely small carbon footprint. And then the joy is we won, we did most of the things right.

Announcer: Reducing our home energy use is one thing. But what about all the other waste we produce in our day-to-day lives?

Samuel McMullen: We call it trash goggles where once you've done it, you start seeing trash everywhere.

Announcer: Is it really possible to recycle and compost all the mountains of junk generated by our consumer lifestyles?

Diana Dehm: We’re really trying to help everyone understand that we can create a zero waste world.

Announcer: Net Zero Living. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: How little waste could you generate in your day-to-day life? Welcome to Climate One – changing the conversation about America’s energy, economy and environment. I’m Devon Strolovitch. Climate One conversations – with oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats – are recorded before a live audience, and hosted by Greg Dalton.

On today’s show, we learn about how we can reduce the trash on our backs – and in our backyards. Americans create an average of four and a half pounds of waste a day. But some cities are trying to to get their residents to cut that to zero by recycling, composting, and being more mindful about what they consume. More than dirty sidewalks are at stake. Landfills are a big source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that amplifies severe weather. In the first part of today’s show, Greg talks trash with three people at the forefront of slimming our consumer waste lines. Kevin Drew is the Residential Zero Waste Coordinator of the San Francisco Department of Environment. Lauren Hennessy is Outreach Manager at Sustainable Stanford. And Diana Dehm is a sustainability consultant and founder of the Trash on Your Back challenge.

Here’s our conversation about getting to zero waste.

Greg Dalton: Diana, let’s begin with you. You were doing an interview a few years ago and you came up with this idea spontaneously of walking around with trash on your back. What prompted such a moment of insanity?

Diana Dehm: It was a definite moment of insanity which turned into something pretty cool. I was interviewing MIT at that time, I do a radio show as well, and it’s all about solutions for the planet. And they were talking about this climate simulator tool. Anyway, one of the guys on the show was so excited, so I had to stop the show I go, “What is your passion? Why are you so excited?” His name is Drew Jones, he’s amazing, he’s a wonderful guy. He’s the executive director for MIT’s climate simulation. Anyway, so he came back, he goes, “Back in 1989, I was at Dartmouth College. And bunch of radical buddies and I decided to go out and see what our impact was.” So they walked around with their trash for a week. And I said, “You know, Drew that sounds like an idea that needs to be recycled.” And he’s like, “You’ll do it, Di?” and I’m like, “Yeah, let’s do it. What the heck.” So the next day I called about 17 really good friends. One is Matt Bogoshian who is pollution prevention guy for the US EPA. “Hey, Matt, will you carry your trash on your back for five days?” So he said, “Yes.” He was the first early adopter. And what ended up happening, we had 17 people in 16 States the first year and that was four years ago. We did it on Earth Day. And every year we have an annual Earth Day thing and we would just talk about the learnings. The first year we did have quite an amazing turn out. The second year, we had about 2500 people from around the world, 27 states and 6 countries. So when you see Israel and Australia, and you see all these little kids getting on board, we’re really trying to help everyone understand that we can create a zero waste world and we can do it. We were able to knock the 4.4 pounds of trash average per person down to 0.8 pounds per day, right, just by doing this. So it’s turned into a very interesting thing and kids are just grabbing onto this like in amazing ways. It’s a Math issue if you think about it, you know, weighing things and measuring things, and it’s also a Science issue. So STEM is playing a huge role on this.

Greg Dalton: Lauren Hennessy, you created a video that caught our attention sort of a parody of a Meghan Trainor video, “All About That Bass.” So tell us how you came up with that video and what you’re trying to do to inspire college kids to be more mindful about their waste at Stanford?

Lauren Hennessy: Well, also I’ll point out that it’s not just college kids. We have a significant population of staff and faculty on campus. So it really needs to pertain to a wide audience. So I really sought to kind of come up with something that would just catch and I really have to say --

Greg Dalton: But do professors know who Meghan Trainor is?

Lauren Hennessy: You would -- I’m not kidding. People are singing this song. But I have to be honest. It really started when a friend sent me a YouTube link of a bunch of frat boys lip-syncing to a Taylor Swift song. And this video had half a million hits on YouTube. And I was just sitting there thinking how -- they are not even doing anything, they’re just mouthing the words to the song, there must be a way to get people talking about environmental and sustainable actions in the same kind of fashion. So it kind of struck me that music is this grand communicator that a lot of people don’t really take advantage of. And I think it’s been a crucial point that’s missing in environmental communication.

Greg Dalton: So let’s queue up a little video at Stanford.

[Video Playing]

Thanks. So a video riffing on a pop tune, what impact did that have, Lauren Hennessy, at Stanford?

Lauren Hennessy: It -- well, I’m here today, aren’t I?

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Yeah, right. We found you on the internet because of this video. Yes.

Lauren Hennessy: So I’m -- the video today on YouTube had close to 5000 hits which is 100 times greater than any of the other videos that were entered into the competition. We far exceeded our waste minimization in the competition than in years past. And it was -- we doubled our participation in the competition than last year. So it really went far in as far as spreading awareness.

Greg Dalton: Make it fun. Kevin, let’s talk about the City of San Francisco which has a zero waste goal. Where in San Francisco is zero waste really possible?

Kevin Drew: Well, that’s a very interesting question, very difficult goal that we’ve set for ourselves, it’s very aspirational when we set it. Some of us who were in the business at the time said that’s a little bit aggressive, but you can’t get halfway there; you gotta just go for zero. And if we get to 99, that’s doing really well. But what your guest just talked about was exactly the kind of spreading that’s got to happen. It’s going to happen to people getting charged up about it and carrying their trash on their back, it’s going to happen to college kids and the kids -- the other folks on the campus to find a way to get to zero waste. It’s going to take a million little ways to get there. It’s like the same -- it’s like the organism that we are and the organism of the planet is. It takes lots of little pieces to really get everything done. You can see the big garbage truck driving by but the bacteria in your gut is doing just as much to keep your system going as that garbage truck and everything in between. So zero waste is really a beautiful kind of a biological construct that we still have to invent. We don’t know what it is yet. Everybody’s asking us, you know, how are you going to get there, do you have a precise plan? No, we’re making up as we go along, frankly. And for God’s sake, let’s get out there and do it. I mean, that’s what we’ve just seen here.

Greg Dalton: Specific question. I remember being in Starbucks a couple of years ago and seeing on a printed -- on a napkin, “We care about the environment, waste, et cetera.” And then I looked for a place to recycle that napkin in Starbucks and I couldn’t find one. So does the City of San Francisco require businesses to have receptacles for compost and recycling and that they’re actually in a place that a human can see?

Kevin Drew: Yes, we do. We require that. Is it perfectly implemented, no. But it’s -- we’re getting there. And actually Starbucks is one that we’ve worked a lot with, I think we need to get further with them because they are -- they have a lot of control, they have a lot of social ethic in a lot of their business so that they could be a tremendous leader. If they would make their lids and their stirrers compostable along with their cups and take some of the plastic out of the lining in their cup, pretty much everything in the store would be compostable.

Greg Dalton: Tell us where the stream of compost in San Francisco, someone puts something in a compost bin at home or at the office, where does it go? Tell us briefly the life of a compost.

Kevin Drew: It gets consolidated into bins in your house or your business and it gets picked up by a Recology truck and taken down to the transfer station down by Candlestick Park, where it’s consolidated it into a big 20-ton transfer trailer which goes about -- there are now 700 tons of organic material being collected every day in San Francisco. And most of this is transported either to Jepson Prairie Organics out near Dixon or to Grover Compost Facility out near Merced where it’s turned into compost. Of those 700 tons they end up with about 350 tons of finished compost. There’s a tremendous water reduction because most of our food, most of our compost, most of our organics is water. And then that’s primarily sold to vineyards, golf courses, organic farms. They like this compost, it’s a very rich compost because it has a lot of meat and bones and other things. Most composts tend to be agricultural in nature, like from leftover crops or leftover agricultural products. And you don’t have -- they’re sort of one dimensional. So this, we call it four-course compost because it has a little bit of every course in the meal in it. And it is a very rich product because of that.

Greg Dalton: Lauren Hennessy, composting at Stanford?

Lauren Hennessy: Composting in Stanford is it goes to a Newby Island Facility, so that’s actually across the bay. And this is an industrial facility. We actually have a pretty high ability to accept composting, but it is a voluntary composting program right now. So the buildings on campus actually have to elect, to participate at a building wide level. So unless you have that champion who’s willing to do it or there is an opportunity with the RecycleMania campaign, we actually give an individual the opportunity to become a compost captain for their floor. So it is on a voluntary basis right now, it’s not a mandatory composting program.

Greg Dalton: Diana Dehm, you’re from Orange County. How much composting is happening in Orange County?

Diana Dehm: Still getting -- it’s not there yet.

Greg Dalton: Yeah. Kevin Drew, why not -- why don’t -- is it cost?

Kevin Drew: It is a certain amount of -- it’s just really political will. I mean, when you think about garbage, you know, trash, the trucks are there, they drive around, they pick it up. I’d like to tell people, it’s just about driving it to a different location in the same truck. It weighs about the same. And there are some programs in Orange County that friends of ours have started, Stephanie Barger in Zero West Group down there and they focused on restaurants and grocery stores first because that’s what we did. It’s just where the concentration is. You don’t have to drive around and pick up a thimbleful. You can pick up a lot in a restaurant, in a produce store and then you can kind of expand from there. So there’s many good examples like that, and it’s happening. There’s more happening than you know because the industrial people don’t want to pay to throw it in the landfill, that’s very expensive. You can pay less and go to a compost facility and you avoid all those methane.

Greg Dalton: Diana Dehm, a lot of kids, certain generations, learned recycling from their parents. Maybe the current kids are learning composting the way you and I learned recycling. But tell us how kids are getting involved in your campaign?

Diana Dehm: You know, it’s interesting when you -- one of the things I love to say is love them, educate them and get the heck out of the way. Kids get it. What I’m always amazed at is K through 12 students, they are fearful. They know that there’s an issue, right? And it’s thanks to our teachers, it’s thanks to our parents, it’s thanks to the messaging that we’re getting out there. I think media is so important to get this message out there. We’ve had some kids come back with some amazing statements on what they’ve learned in just collecting their trash to understand what their own personal impact is. Then what happens which is really interesting, they go to their parents and they say, “You know what, Mommy, Daddy, we’re only going to buy compostable, biodegradable or recycled products.” That’s the power of the pocket book that these kids are getting. It’s pretty interesting.

Greg Dalton: Let’s talk about another institution that’s getting it. You say that the Super Bowl was really zero waste. Talk about professional sports briefly. You mentioned the Mariners earlier. One of your friends is doing a super green stadium for the Atlanta Falcons.

Diana Dehm: Yes.

Greg Dalton: So let’s talk about the professional sports which really has a big influence on pop culture.

Diana Dehm: Huge. And that’s like the music and the sports and the, you know, doing something crazy like carrying your trash on your back. But one of the things about when we first started, Scott Jenkins, he was the operations director for -- or VP or something for the Seattle Mariners. And if you think about a stadium, it’s a city in itself, right? City in itself. So he was able to start down the path, he also co-founded the Green Sports Alliance. He’s on my board which I’m so thankful to have him because he sees the fan engagement opportunity here through sports. But the Seattle Mariners became zero waste three years ago. No, I’m sorry, 98% zero waste. So they go back in their supply chain, they look at what they’re buying and then they’ll take that. And when you go on to the stadium whether it’s a hotdog, it’s going to be compostable, whether it’s a container. The supply chain now says, “Everything, nothing goes to Landfill. So major league sports is getting majorly involved, and they’re getting very competitive. Scott left and went to the Atlanta Falcons. And he’s designing and building getting back to what we talked --- what you guys talked about earlier was how do we make a Net Zero stadium and how do we make it 100% zero waste? So there’s a lot happening and when you go in there as a fan, you experience that feeling, plus they’re making money at it, right? This whole Trash on Your Back piece, you know, 4.4 pounds of trash per day, right? We knocked that down to 0.8 pounds per day. Just take 50%, that’s an 82% reduction. The U.S. spends $12 billion -- expected $12 billion a year in waste management, right? We take 50% in one week. We’re able to knock that down. And it’s a $6 billion -- you know, 50%, $6 billion opportunity for the nation. Wouldn’t we rather put that in schools, in compost facilities and, you know?

Kevin Drew: That’s what we’re doing. That’s what -- that’s the movement and it’s really gratifying to hear it moving into the sports area, in the kids’ schools and all of that because it’s kind of the hippie dream. But it’s, you know, it’s being normalized, it’s being really globalized, I think.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about getting to zero waste. Up next, we’ll hear more from our panel of waste-reduction experts, and Greg Dalton will talk to a University of Michigan student who’s walking the zero-waste walk.

Samuel McMullen: Living zero waste, you certainly still use things. You just don't use unnecessary things. You don’t ask for production.

Announcer: That’s coming up, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about getting to zero waste with Kevin Drew, Residential Zero Waste Coordinator of the San Francisco Department of Environment. Lauren Hennessy, Outreach Manager at Sustainable Stanford, and Diana Dehm, founder of the Trash on Your Back challenge.

Here’s your host, Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: We’re going to go to our lightning round. Diana Dehm, you are a closet-- this is yes or no. You are a closet hippie.

Diana Dehm: Yes.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: You have gone dumpster diving.

Diana Dehm: I have.

Greg Dalton: Okay. Lauren Hennessy, pizza leftover from frat parties makes good compost.

Lauren Hennessy: Yes.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Stanford students prefer weed grown with solar power.

[Laughter]

Lauren Hennessy: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Okay.

[Laughter]

Kevin Drew, as mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, started the city’s pioneering composting program. As lieutenant governor, he has a lot of time on his hands and could make a good compost cop.

Kevin Drew: Yes.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: A compostable cup or fork thrown into a landfill will biodegrade back into the soil. Yes or no.

Kevin Drew: No.

Greg Dalton: Okay. We got a list here. It’s okay to put the following items in the compost bin in San Francisco. Meat.

Kevin Drew: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Bones.

Kevin Drew: Yup.

Greg Dalton: Clam shells.

Kevin Drew: Yes. Clam shell, you mean, from clams or are you talking about --

Greg Dalton: Real clam. About the -- yeah, yeah.

Kevin Drew: Clam shells. Yes.

Greg Dalton: Pistachio shells.

Kevin Drew: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Paper salad containers.

Kevin Drew: Yup.

Greg Dalton: Dog poo.

Kevin Drew: No.

Greg Dalton: Okay. Alright. That ends our lightning round.

Lauren Hennessy: Can we talk about the difference between biodegradable and compostable?

Greg Dalton: Good point. Yeah. It’s --

Lauren Hennessy: Cause this is very frustrating for me and I must say I’ve been trying to purchase compostable balloons for an event that we’re having. And the amount of people who will say that they have something that is compostable and then when you say compostable or biodegradable, and they’re not quite sure, is astounding. But that’s an important distinction.

Greg Dalton: Confusing labels. Biodegradable like, I mean in 1000 years, sure --

Kevin Drew: Biodegradable doesn’t mean anything. Compostable is a very strict standard within the STM certification. And we’ve had to get legislation passed in California to require that word compostable mean what it means and that biodegradable doesn’t mean anything.

Announcer: That’s Kevin Drew, Residential Zero Waste Coordinator of the San Francisco Department of Environment, on getting to zero waste. How much would you have to change your lifestyle in order to cut the amount of trash you produce to zero? Samuel McMullen is a student at the University of Michigan who embarked on a one-year journey to do just that. Samuel is the co-founder of Live Zero Waste, an environmental nonprofit that helps people give the zero waste lifestyle a try. Greg Dalton spoke to him to find out what it’s really like to live a zero-waste life.

Greg Dalton: Tell me about the first zero waste meal that you try to have. How did that happen tell me about that first meal?

Samuel McMullen: Yeah, it was right after we gave a presentation to sort of launch the zero waste or the live zero waste idea and right after that we went down into the lobby of the NRDC in Beijing and went into the restaurant and had to sort of negotiate our first zero waste meal which was has been repeated many times since then in my life and in my sister's life. And it was just a matter of asking if we could have the silverware with no napkin wrapped around it at that particular place. But actually the dinner we had the next dinner we had the silverware came wrapped completely in plastic. Everything, the silverware, the plates, the bowls everything was shrink-wrapped in plastic because in Beijing I think foreigners are worried about germs. So they were sort of proving to people how clean they were. And so we had to ask them for serving if we can eat out of the serving dishes and I ran home, my apartment was not too far. I ran home and got chopsticks that were not wrapped in plastic. So that was an adventure right off the bat.

Greg Dalton: How do people react when you ask for no straw, no plastic wrapping. Do they roll their eyes at you and think, uh, what a pain this guy is?

Samuel McMullen: Yeah, it depends entirely on how you ask. And I've asked many different ways. The best reactions I get or when I preface it with listen, I’m doing the zero waste challenge and it's a little bit weird and gonna make your job hard but do you mind giving me a water without a straw or this burger without a paper wrapping or sandwich or whatever. But yes, sometimes if you just ask if you say, can I have a water with no straw or the silverware without a napkin around it and you get some eye rolls and muttered things as they leave.

Greg Dalton: And what’s the purpose of doing this is this to sort of live the zero waste life for your own identity and comfort, or is it to change other people's thinking and change something bigger than yourself?

Samuel McMullen: Yeah, I mean it’s components of both for sure. The impetus was certainly the first thing you said, which was that we’re trying to sort of live out our values and we’re working on environmental law paper at the time studying renewable energy policy. And so we were feeling great about ourselves as environmentalists, but start realizing that we weren't really doing much in our own lives to address the problems that we are writing about. So that was our reason for doing it. And then as we started encouraging other people to try it, it became much more about the idea that these kinds of changes measured on an individual level, don't make much sense. Like it doesn't really make sense to go zero waste if you're the only one doing it because you save a lot but you don’t save that much. Whereas if you measure your community metrics and you try to encourage other people to do it and encourage them to get their friends to do it and get everyone on board, then you start to get real numbers that you can be proud of and that you can say we’re actually changing something. So it's definitely turned into a form of like personalized activism. And an activism that’s a little bit less in people's faces about why they should change their mind and more just about changing your own behavior and role modeling.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, the Old Gandhi phrase “Be the change that you want to see.” So how many people are living zero waste? You started in Ann Arbor where you’re been going to school. How many people have been following you?

Samuel McMullen: We’re at 305 pledges which -- and they’re spread out, they’re all over so that’s 26 countries now where people are trying to limit. And we’re trying to get people hooked up with others that are living zero waste near them. So like we have pledges in Egypt and we have no idea what it's like to live zero waste in Egypt so we try to encourage those people to get in touch with each other and find the resources in their area.

Greg Dalton: So how do you handle things like Christmas, you know, those sorts of things. You give gifts without any wrapping on them or do you give gifts at all?

Samuel McMullen: Yes. So our version of waste or our definition of waste is pretty all-encompassing. So any new product we count as waste because of the eventual, you know, it’s been produced and eventually it will go to landfill somewhere. So anything new is off-limits, but thrift stores are totally inbounds, antique shops. I do a lot of Groupon giving. So giving experiences and that ends up people actually think you're really thoughtful if you do an experience with them for the holidays, really value your time or I do web design so I give people websites and people love that.

Greg Dalton: How would you describe your social group and your quality of life? I mean do you hang out with people that have more material possessions and you do the latest whatever, you know, cool to have in college these days?

Samuel McMullen: Yeah, absolutely. I’m in a comedy improv troupe and that was a huge blessing actually because they don't care what you're doing, they’re gonna make fun of it regardless. And that actually made it much more accessible to everyone else around me. So I’d often go out to meals with this person named Guy Majar [ph]. He would make fun of me in front of the waiter and he and the waiter would sort of get on a team making fun of me and then I didn't have to explain to the waitstaff that I was doing this thing, they already knew. And it was the same result, they brought me my stuff without waste but they got a laugh and that’s which is very helpful. But yeah, I mean my social group it hasn't changed because of this, but they're definitely aware and we do like secret Santas and whoever draws my name gets made fun of because they have to get a zero waste gift, figure out something. So I think if you handle it well and you’re not annoying about it, it can be a really fun thing for a whole social group to get behind.

Greg Dalton: And just to be clear. So if you give someone a bottle of tequila for secret Santa and that tequila bottle is recycled, is that count as zero waste?

Samuel McMullen: So we also have included recycling waste just because our main focus is really the production end of things. So as long as something is produced, that’s like just because of how much environmental load is upstream of the actual purchasing decision we thought it made sense to include recycling because it still has all the production of that item still happened even though in the postconsumer end of the lifecycle it's recycled and reused or melted down or whatever. So we've decided to include recycling in our definition of trash.

Greg Dalton: Well that’s remarkable because a lot of people, even in liberal eco-places like California say oh, I recycle so it's okay I can buy that because it's recyclable. And you’re changing the definition of recyclable as waste. And so all of us live in this what we think is an eco righteous coastal lifestyle, not so much, shown up by a student in Michigan.

Samuel McMullen: Yeah, I hope it’s not seen as showing up, but definitely I think there’s a valid point there and something to be aware of that recycling is not innocent. And it really like recycling doesn't get at the issue that I think environmentalists have, which is that our economy is based on extraction and based on sort of exploiting other people's countries and their natural resources and their environments for our own our own gain. And if you look at it that way then anything that's produced anywhere is suspect and a target for environmental action.

Greg Dalton: So you’re calling for like a change in capitalism, throwing our consumer society?

Samuel McMullen: Yes. Yeah, we get this a lot like well if everyone is buying used then there won't be any economy and that's fair and valid. But I think what the counterpoint that I always make is if someone’s job is producing straws, we’re wasting that human’s talent. Like we shouldn't have people whose job it is to produce straws or to produce things that we use for 15 seconds, you know, like napkins. That’s not a good use of our economic power and I think if we free ourselves of producing those sorts of things we can start to focus on things that will last much longer. And we can produce things that we need, I mean living zero waste, you certainly still use things. You still use soap you use all kinds of stuff. You just don't use unnecessary things. You don't ask for production that didn't need to happen.

Greg Dalton: So describe to me your bathroom and where you live. So what is it look like, how many things do you have, how many -- describe to me how bare in existence are you leading as a zero waste lifestyle?

Samuel McMullen: Yes. So I've been living zero waste for 2 1/2 years now. And I haven't noticed much of a difference in clutter. I think anyone who knows me will attest to that I’m not a clean roomie. So it’s just change what I have has changed certainly. And where I got it mostly has changed. So like sheets I get from the Salvation Army, I have more bags than I used too, more containers, reusable containers. My bathroom is a toothbrush that I got from a donation pile at Standing Rock, when I was there. So there were donations frozen into all the snowbanks so figured that was fair game because they were getting bulldozed unfortunately, and a little pot of baking soda for toothpaste. My shower is a bar of soap and a washcloth, but otherwise I don't think you'd be able to, I don't think you could look at my life and say oh, this guy’s got something going on like there’s something significantly different. It's just the procurement aspect is different.

Greg Dalton: Okay so you’re not a -- yeah, this lifestyle that you're leading wouldn't be telegraphed by someone looking at you. They wouldn't say, oh this guy is leading a radically alternative different lifestyle. You look like a regular guy.

Samuel McMullen: Yes I think that's a fair assessment.

Greg Dalton: And Samuel, do you think you'll still be living this lifestyle when you get out in the world when you're in your 30s? And it's one thing for a college student to live this zero waste lifestyle often college students living on a tight budget. Do you think you’re gonna carry this into adulthood and maybe even the comforts of middle life?

Samuel McMullen: I think it will be difficult not to continue living this way after college. Once you, we call it trash goggles, when people pledge we talk to them. And one thing we say is you get these trash goggles where once you've done it even just for a day, once you’ve done it, you start seeing trash everywhere. And that's the like golden nugget that we’re after is getting people that point where they’re like, wow, a lot of things we do create trash and none of them are really necessary. So I think after I leave college it's not gonna be much of a difference. And I’ve actually been helped a lot one of the things we offer through our organization is mentorship. And so a lot of people have come with challenges that I don't really have, so moving and dealing with children and cats and all kinds of things. And I've been mentoring them through something that I have no idea what to do about it, but I've done research on it and I can sort of imagine my way through it. So solving those problems creatively with my mentees has really helped prepare me for whatever happens next.

Greg Dalton: And what's one thing an average person can do to reduce the trash in their lifestyle if they were to say as you say, put on those trash goggles. What’s a simple thing that a person could do?

Samuel McMullen: Yeah. So one big differentiator that we have that we try to hammer home is that changing little things can be effective and you can get a long way with a little change. But it doesn't accomplish the same sort of cognitive shift that doing a radical change. So we really advocate for completely eliminating trash from your life for a day. Just try it, see what happens. And so like by doing it by time period rather than by items. So like if you were to eliminate aluminum cans that would be great. Aluminums are very high intensity thing to make. But you wouldn't experience the same like wow everything is made of aluminum because not everything is made of aluminum. So doing a big shift for a day I think is the best thing that I can offer in terms of sort of like a lesson learned. Like shifting your mindset for a little bit and then going back to your life and you have that knowledge then oh man, when I was doing my zero waste day I wasn't using this and now I'm using it again. You have to sort of pay attention to it in a way that you wouldn't if it were a small shift.

Greg Dalton: So do a comprehensive shift for a short period of time for the biggest impact.

Greg Dalton: Samuel, thanks for joining us on Climate One.

Samuel McMullen: Oh absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Announcer: Samuel McMullen, a student at the University of Michigan and co-founder of Live Zero Waste. This is Climate One. Coming up, we’ll hear about how waste reduction literally begins at home.

Sven Thesen: My wife’s requirement was it had to be beautiful. And then I was -- it has to be functional and comfortable and let’s see how energy-efficient we can make it.

Net Zero homes, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One, and the ultimate in energy conservation: a home that produces as much energy as it uses. To talk about these net-zero energy homes, Greg Dalton is joined by three people at the vanguard. Ann Edminster is a green home consultant and author of Energy Free: Homes for a Small Planet. Daniel Simons is a principal architect with David Baker Associates. And Sven Thesen is owner of a Net Zero Home in Palo Alto, California.

Here’s our conversation about getting to zero right at home.

Greg Dalton: Sven Thesen, let’s begin with you. What possessed you to want to pursue a Net Zero energy home?

Sven Thesen: So as a chemical engineer and someone who’s done a lot of climate work, I wanted to prove that you could have essentially your cake and eat it too, and that you could have -- well, one of my first -- my wife’s requirement was it had to be beautiful. And so it was beautiful. And then I was -- it has to be functional and comfortable and let’s see how energy-efficient we can make it. And so our small 5.9 kilowatts system powers the house. It also powers 10,000 miles of electric car carbon-free zero emission driving. And the house uses roughly 25% of the energy of an average house in Palo Alto. People don’t notice except in the summertime when it’s really hot they walk in and say, “Oh, this is really nice and cool, you must have your air-conditioning cranked,” and I get to say with this wonderful grin, “I don’t have an air-conditioning system. All I have is good building orientation, a heck of a lot of insulation and some shading on the sunny side, that’s it.”

Greg Dalton: Do you have to be like Jimmy Carter and wear sweaters in the winter?

Sven Thesen: So that was the whole point was to be able to prove that we could have comfortable, affordable, functional, and that you wouldn’t have to sacrifice anything. So, no, I wear no shoes, and t-shirt and shorts pretty much all year round inside and it’s nice and warm. And we don’t, again, we use 25% of the energy of a conventional house and it’s all generated in excess by our solar panels, and it’s not a huge solar system.

Greg Dalton: Ann Edminster, you wrote the book on Net Zero homes. Tell us about your home and do you have an 80-inch TV?

[Laughter]

Ann Edminster: No, actually we have a rather petite TV and can’t quite even figure out how to use it these days. My teenage son won’t give us the answer, so we’ve given up. We now watch on the iPad.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: How hip, yeah.

Ann Edminster: So that’s one of the measures that we take to reduce energy in our home.

Greg Dalton: iPad versus a TV. Okay.

Greg Dalton: Any other exotic features?

Ann Edminster: Exotic. We have a living roof, we do have a solar array, it’s quite petite, 2.4 kilowatts. We are not at Net Zero yet, we’re doing that sort of incrementally. So we have a few stages left to go. Most recent, Andy Wall, who you’ll hear from later, actually helped get our attic ready for the installation of some New Zealand sheep’s wool insulation. So that’s a pretty fun thing. Both my kids want to climb in there and nap.

Greg Dalton: Right.

[Laughter]

Is that expensive, sheep’s wool from New Zealand?

Ann Edminster: It is. There is a premium, but I was shielded from that fact by being an advisor to the company.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Inside deal. Okay. Alright. So, alright. So the rest of us have to settle for Levi’s or something else. Okay.

Ann Edminster: Well, it’s all a matter of priorities.

Greg Dalton: Right. Daniel Simons, tell us about your home.

Daniel Simons: Well, I actually don’t live in a Net Zero home but we’ve designed a couple of them. I think the key with getting to Net Zero or just being efficient is trying to figure out how to reduce the loads, like Sven was saying. Like the goal is really to make the buildings use as little energy as possible. I mean, any reduction that you can make just, you know, switching from an incandescent bulb to an LED bulb or insulating your house or upgrading the windows. All of these things, you know, incrementally reduce the energy consumption of the entire built environment. And when you get down really, really low, then it’s easy to put a small PV system on the roof and power the whole thing.

Greg Dalton: Ann Edminster, we replaced the windows on our home and my head started to ache with all the R-factor, those factors that measure the light that comes through and the energy that doesn’t come through, and it was mind-boggling. And I was very motivated, geeky, said I got to do this, right, I’ve got to walk the walk. But it was very complex. How many people really want to bother with the complexity, and that’s just one piece of a house, right? Changing the windows is no simple thing.

Ann Edminster: It’s true. I think, right now, one of the unique opportunities we have is it’s still very much an innovator’s world, Zero Net energy. And therefore the people who are willing to play are also willing to sort of absorb a certain amount of that geekiness. And they are in effect paving the path for the others in the future to sort of demonstrate what works, what’s a good investment, what was maybe an interesting idea but not necessarily widely applicable. So we’re in that process right now. All of us who are pioneering this field are still kind of winnowing those ideas and identifying the ones that are sort of winners across the board.

Greg Dalton: So what are some of the winners?

Ann Edminster: Well, sheep’s wool insulation.

[Laughter]

Really good insulation.

Greg Dalton: If you know the right people.

Daniel Simons: Thank you.

[Laughter]

Ann Edminster: Yeah. No, as Sven said, lots of well-installed -- I think this is one of the things that is sort of unfortunate is, some of the most effective things we can do are the least sexy. So really good job of air sealing, really good job of insulation installation, and that’s just not glamorous. But it has tremendous paybacks in comfort, energy reduction and so forth. Also, reducing potential durability issues related to condensation of moisture. So there are a lot of good reasons to do it.

Greg Dalton: Caulking doesn’t get a lot of respect.

Ann Edminster: So true!

Greg Dalton: We put solar panels on first because I think they’re cooler and sexier. And then did the sealing of the garage, et cetera. That’s actually backwards, right? Daniel Simons?

Daniel Simons: Yeah. I mean I think so. And I think it’s definitely -- I think that the -- you know, you have to be a little bit more careful when you start really super insulating the building envelope because there are, you know, moisture management things that you have to take into account. And there are, you know, when you really seal a building for air, you have to make sure that there’s fresh air. But none of the technologies to do that are that cutting edge. I mean, it’s stuff that people have been doing for years, it’s just different from the conventional way that buildings are built in this country now. And so it is, it’s just sort of shifting the paradigm slightly. And thinking about what’s valuable in a new home as being that it has to have, you know, continuous exterior rigid insulation. And it has to have an HRV. And it has to have these things which, you know, are really jargony and probably don’t -- you don’t really need to know them as consumers, you more just need to know that it’s possible and push the people who are building your house to look for them.

Greg Dalton: Ann Edminster, let’s talk about where someone should go. I want to improve energy efficiency in my home, where do I go? Where do I start?

Ann Edminster: Is this a softball for me to pitch my book?

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: You can pitch it, but other than your book -- yes.

Ann Edminster: Where do you know? I’m a board member of the Net Zero Energy Coalition and I think that’s an excellent place to start. We are online at netzeroenergycoalition.com. And you can peruse our membership directory, that’s a great place. We have folks all across North America, actually. You’re welcome to e-mail me and I can tell you all about everybody I know who’s involved in this world.

Greg Dalton: Sven Thesen, let’s talk about cost. This is perceived to be an elite thing for people who’ve got extra money, deep pockets. How much did you spend on your house?

Sven Thesen: We spent -- the rough estimate is less than 5% above and beyond what we would have paid for the house. So it’s not a huge amount. The way I look at it was an investment in green jobs because they spend a lot more time on the framing, and they spend a lot more time putting in insulation. We spend a lot more time doing air checks, the sort of pressurized test to make sure the building was extremely well sealed, all that caulking paid off. And I think people, you know -- how much does a car cost? Well, you can buy a new car for 18,000 or half a million. What sort of car do you want? And so we wanted a home, it’s only 2200 square feet; there are four of us living in it. We wanted a reasonable home that was extremely comfortable, extremely functional and still had an extremely small carbon footprint. And then the joy is we won, we did most of the things right, it is really comfortable.

Greg Dalton: Daniel Simons, is this -- are these homes an elite thing only?

Daniel Simons: I mean, you know, to a certain extent, yes. I mean, how many people actually, you know, hire an architect and design and build their own home. I mean -- and I think that as we move into a more sustainable future, you know, single-family homes are a thing that probably aren’t the most sustainable model for living. I mean, we probably should be building higher density. We probably should be living more in cities. And there is a point at which buildings get tall enough that it’s actually really, I mean, I would say impossible for them to be Net Zero, you know. I mean up to a six-story building maybe, but, you know, when you start getting high rises, there’s just not enough roof area to power with PVs. But like I was saying before, that doesn’t mean that making those buildings super energy efficient isn’t still a really good goal. And hopefully, you know, as we move forward into this more sustainable future, more people will have the option of not going to some great effort to hiring an architect but rather just picking the Net Zero home as the one that they buy or rent. And when that happens, I think it will be more accessible to everyone.

Greg Dalton: Daniel Simons is a principal at David Baker Architect in San Francisco. We’re talking about Net Zero homes at Climate One. Ann Edminster, one of the critiques of Net Zero homes is that they are the suburban single-family home. But you say that there’s actually some urban examples and it’s not just this sort of suburban home with lots of roof area for solar, et cetera. Tell us about the urban application.

Ann Edminster: Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, one of our real rock stars in the Net Zero Energy Coalition is a man named Shawn Armstrong who is developing multi-family, affordable housing that is reaching Net Zero Energy up in Arcata. So these are unit buildings with 2,650 units. And Shawn has been finishing these projects and reaching these goals for about the last three years. And one of our earliest projects here in the Bay Area was a zero lot line, very small townhome over in Oakland.

Greg Dalton: Zero lot line means what?

Ann Edminster: Means wall-to-wall houses built right up next to each other. So it’s not the sort of suburban castle and the moat model, much more dense even though it’s a single-family home, really different model.

Greg Dalton: And on the cost issue, Sven Thesen said 5%, is that what people think about, you know, in terms of the cost premium for Net Zero or is it --

Ann Edminster: I only wish that’s what they thought about. There really is, I think a very widespread thought that there is a dramatic premium for Zero Net energy. My belief and my experience is that there is no cost premium. Because any commissioned project, you’re given a charge and a budget and you’ll either meet that charge within the budget or you don’t. And if you don’t, you’re generally off the job. So all of the projects that I’ve worked on, Zero Net Energy hasn’t been achieved accidentally, it’s been part of the initial design charge. So we meet it within budget. It doesn’t cost extra any more than the kitchen sink would cost extra if you were being asked to remodel a kitchen.

Greg Dalton: Right. But as Daniel said earlier, very few Americans these days start from scratch, they probably buy a house or remodel a house. How about the upgrade path? Getting to zero with an existing building, they’re doing it incrementally, is that slow and painful and costly?

Ann Edminster: It’s slow and costly. Personally, I think it’s really fun.

[Laughter]

I wouldn’t call it painful at all. But, yeah, there has to be a certain commitment. You know, we’re dealing it for philosophical reasons. On the other hand, I’m a great believer in what I call opportunistic remodeling, which is if you’re thinking about remodeling for whatever reason, there always ancillary opportunities that you may not be aware of that you can take advantage of if you are already planning to do x, then you can do y at the same time.

Greg Dalton: So let’s go to audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Thanks. I’m expanding the definition of home from a single-family home to like home of kids, meaning schools, kindergarten’s, home of sick people, hospitals, home of inmates, prisons and home of the worker bees like in the office buildings. So I’m just curious like if you have any examples of like Net Zero in that like arena, sort of like the larger buildings?

Greg Dalton: Institutional owners have a big incentive to save energy on things. Daniel Simons?

Daniel Simons: There’s a great -- the West Berkeley Library is Net Zero energy, it’s a really great building and they have a dashboard. But it’s a really nice library as well. There’s also a manufacturer of modular classrooms that just came out with a Net Zero energy module. So that when you’re doing the modulars on your local elementary school, they don’t have to be those horrible little white boxes that they usually buy, they can be really nice and have no energy use. So yeah, I think there is-- there are tons of examples out there.

Greg Dalton: Interesting. Let’s have our next question at Climate One.

Male Participant: Thank you. So many people in San Francisco rent including myself, and my three housemates and I pay our utility bill. And in this situation, our landlord has no incentive to retrofit our building which is an old Victorian building. So my question is, have you thought about this dilemma of decoupling, and is there any way to address it?

Greg Dalton: Ann Edminster, it comes up with solar as well.

Ann Edminster: Really challenging question. I think that there are certain things that the occupant does control, all of the stuff we call plug loads. So you may or may not have the opportunity to decide about what appliances you’re going to use. When we do a better job with building enclosures, we find that increasingly the loads are dominated by things like electronics. When you don’t have the opportunity to have an impact on the enclosure, it’s a little bit tough. But there’s an interesting phenomenon. Lawrence Berkeley Lab did a study a couple of years ago where they looked at 10 so-called deep energy retrofits. So this essentially is what Daniel was talking about earlier without the solar necessarily but we’re really working on getting the loads down. And one of the interesting conclusions that they arrived at was that there are two primary prongs to the strategy for achieving Zero Net energy, one being behavioral and the other being technological. And so depending on which case study they were looking at, the solutions were dominated by either the technological or the behavioral approaches. So I’d say as a renter, you’re kind of left with the behavioral as your primary strategy, unfortunately. But there are no Zero Net energy buildings without Zero Net energy occupants.

Greg Dalton: Last question, welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Hello. Thank you. I have the opposite of the landlord-tenant problem. I have a great landlord and she would like to do these things, but I receive all the benefits. And she’s been gradually, painfully retrofitting. Are there any arrangements happening or can you perceive -- can you imagine ways that the incentives could shift so that landlords really do have an advantage to doing this where the tenant receives so much of the benefit?

Greg Dalton: If a landlord improves the building envelope and they’re paying utility bills, don’t they benefit from better windows and ceilings --

Daniel Simons: Yeah, but a lot of times, they don’t pay the utility bills.

Greg Dalton: Alright. They don’t pay, the tenants pay utility bills. So there’s a problem. I don’t care ‘cause you’re paying, you don’t care ‘cause I’m paying, how do we solve that?

Daniel Simons: It’s really. I mean it’s a huge issue. We design a lot of multi-family housing and the whole, you know, incentive metering thing that has come up a couple of times, it’s really difficult to navigate for a number of reasons, like photovoltaic systems are really difficult -- or not difficult, but it’s difficult to work with PG&E to allow you to put one on a roof and to feed, you know, 15 or 20 or 100 units in the building because they like to just go back into one meter, which is usually not for the residents. So it’s a difficult thing. I mean, I think that there are economic models out there that can show where if you’re renting and you can prove that you’re -- the utility burden for that renter is lower that the rent can be higher. And even with affordable housing, that’s the case. So there are ways that it could incent people. But in an existing situation like you described, it would be very difficult to do. I mean, maybe you could figure out some way of splitting the difference with your landlord, you know, where if you could show that you save 20 bucks a month, you give them 10 or something like that.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking about net-zero homes with Ann Edminster, author of Energy Free: Homes for a Small Planet, Daniel Simons, a principal architect with David Baker Associates, and Sven Thesen, who owns a Net Zero Home in Palo Alto, California.

To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more.

Please join us next time for another conversation about America’s energy, economy, and environment.

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Carlos Manuel and Tyler Reed are the producers. The audio engineer is Mark Kirschner. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch edit the show. I’m Greg Dalton, the Executive Producer and Host. The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

Greening Professional Sports

Otto Pilot — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 14:45:00 +0000

Greening Professional Sports

09/22/2017

People who are involved in the sports world have seen the benefits of greening their professions. Many athletes and executives gathered at the Green Sports Alliance Summit in Sacramento, CA where they shared ideas for reducing food waste, running stadiums on clean energy and encouraging fans to reduce their carbon impact.

Justin Zeulner, Executive Director of the Green Sports Alliance
Julia Landauer, Championship NASCAR Driver
Dusty Baker, Manager, Washington Nationals
Jennifer Regan, Chief Sustainability Manager, We Bring It On
Chris Granger, former president, Sacramento Kings
Vivek Ranadive, owner, Sacramento Kings

Portions of this program were recorded at the Green Sports Alliance Summit in Sacramento, CA on June 27, 2017.

Guests

Dusty Baker

Founder, Baker Energy Group; Special Advisor to the San Francisco Giants

Play

REWIND: Sea Heroes: Extreme Edition

Otto Pilot — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:01:00 +0000

REWIND: Sea Heroes: Extreme Edition

04/16/2017

Our planet’s oceans drive our weather and generate much of our oxygen -- and they’re being severely impacted by climate change. What can be done about it?

Liz Taylor, President, DOER Marine
Peter Willcox, Captain, Rainbow Warrior, author, Greenpeace Captain: My Adventures in Protecting the Future of Our Planet (Thomas Dunne Books, 2016)
Stiv Wilson, Director of Campaigns, Story of Stuff

This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on May 12, 2016

Guests

Liz Taylor

President, DOER Marine

Peter Willcox

Captain, Rainbow Warrior

Stiv Wilson

Director of Campaigns, Story of Stuff

Greg Dalton: From the Commonwealth Club of California, I'm Greg Dalton. Today we’re going to sea with three people who have spent their lives exploring and protecting the world's oceans. The seas generate much of the oxygen we breathe and drive much of the weather we think about when we get dressed every day. But most people know very little about the ocean below the surface and how it's related to climate change. In the next hour, we’ll explore how global warming is impacting the ocean and what you can do about it. We’ll also hear tales of drama and intrigue and violence on the high seas, as well as positive stories about marine ecosystems coming back to life.

Leading us on this journey are three salty veterans of the sea. Liz Taylor is president of DOER Marine, an Alameda based company that builds robots and other vehicles for deep-sea exploration. She grew up learning about the sea with her mother, the legendary ocean explorer Sylvia Earle. Peter Willcox is the former captain of the iconic Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior that was sunk by French government agents in 1985. He’s the author of the new autobiography Greenpeace Captain: My Adventures in Protecting the Future of Our Planet. Stiv Wilson is Director of Campaigns at the Story of Stuff, an education and advocacy group based in Berkeley. He sailed over 35,000 nautical miles to four of the big garbage patches in the ocean and lives on a sailboat in the Bay Area. This program is underwritten generously by the Bernard Osher Foundation. Please welcome them to Climate One.

[Applause]

Liz Taylor, let's talk, begin with you and tell us about Hydrolab; it was one of your first experiences in sort of this underwater world.

Liz Taylor: So Hydrolab was a subsea habitat. Very basic basically like underwater camping and a team of aquanauts and mixed team was down about 50, 60 feet in the Bahamas. And my job as a kid maybe 10, 11 years old was to man the radio overnight, make sure that everybody was still breathing. And be ready to alert the surface team of anything went amuck and then during the day to take supplies down to the Hydro Lab. And so it took some ice cream we watched Boyles’ law in action when there is only half-full at the bottom, things of that nature. Didn't smuggle any rum down to them even though they asked but it was great.

Greg Dalton: And so that turned you on to sort of a life of the sea or did you have any choice maybe it was for –

Liz Taylor: Well I was kind of thrown in early on but to breathe normally underwater worked out alright. But what is interesting I mean just spending a few weeks there traveling down every day began to recognize the fishes as individuals. There was a barracuda that was always there underneath the surface barge and just very big curious animal, bigger than I was but not aggressive at all, he just checked everything out, kind of like the resident watchdog.

Greg Dalton: Fabulous. Peter Willcox, you started sailing at six months old which just terrifies me as a parent. But tell us how you started came from a sailing family, six months old.

Peter Willcox: I did, my grandparents were sailors my father is still a sailor today. And I caught the bug at an early age it's something I've always enjoyed doing. Last year I sailed 18,000 miles and I came home and I went sailing. That and sailing for a reason, is what makes it so rewarding.

Greg Dalton: And we’ll get to some of your stories. Stiv Wilson, you were a surfer and had a seminal moment where you realized that you wanted to focus on oceans and on advocacy way. So tell us about that moment when you were surfing.

Stiv Wilson: Yeah, I actually started surfing when I was 30 years old on the Oregon coast. It was very pristine and beautiful place. The Oregon coast is very remote comparatively to California and it was just primeval wood you can’t see a human made object from the lineup. And I came in, my dog was running on the beach and he seemed distressed and I thought he might've lost his tennis ball. And I was sort of looking around and then I noticed just tons and tons of plastic on the beach and what assailed my senses was the aesthetic incongruity to the natural order there. Not necessarily the environmental implications, but that put me on this journey of working on plastics issues in the ocean for the rest my life.

Greg Dalton: We’ll get into some of that plastics and exploration and ocean stewardship. Peter Willcox, take us to the Rainbow Warrior in 1985; you’re in Auckland and you woke up. So tell us what happened then.

Peter Willcox: Well, 1985 was our year of protesting nuclear testing in the Pacific. We had just come from the Marshall Islands where we had relocated a group of Marshallese people that have been used by the U.S. Military purposely as guinea pigs to test the effects of radioactive fallout. And over the years that generation from 1955 when the first hydrogen or the biggest hydrogen bomb the 20 megaton Bravo shot was launched until 1980, which is when they started appealing to a way they’ve had increasingly poor health, especially in women's reproductive health issues where many women had 6, 7, 8 miscarriages.

They had jellyfish babies, which is just what it sounds like. And after as I said, a generation of this they appealed to the U.S. and the Marshall's government to move them. They said no. So five years later when we came with the Rainbow Warrior we did move them about 150 miles away. After that we went down to New Zealand to resupply for a trip out to the Polynesia where the French had been testing nuclear weapons for many years. The French were worried about this and so they sent a team of soldiers, espionage people, whatever you want to call them to New Zealand. They sailed in with some explosives, one night about the fourth night after we were in they took us two of them took two of the divers went across the harbor, tied up on the pier across from us, dove underwater planted the bombs, swam back and went back across the harbor.

The people from across the harbor saw them come in throw the outboard engine over the side. Drag the boat at the beach and leave it there halfway up and then jumped into a waiting camper van. And they thought, oh some kids have stolen the boat again so they wrote down the number. About two hours later, on board the Rainbow Warrior the boat shook fantastically. I was asleep in bed. I thought initially that we had been involved with a collision with another ship at sea. When I looked out, the lights, the port hole in my cabin to the dock I could tell that we were safely tied to the dock. But the sounds weren't right, so I got up. About 40 seconds after the bomb went off I'd made it 20, 30 feet back to the engine room door and the boat was already almost completely flooded. The water level was 2 feet below our feet where at normally should have been 15 or 16 feet and you couldn't see it. So my first thought was to go back to the after accommodations where people were rising.

The first bomb went off about a minute later. The second bomb went off and it had given our photographer Fernando Pereira just enough time to go to his cabin. And the second bomb was directly underneath his cabin. It racked the door and he drowned in his cabin. I got off on the dock and there was not anything we could do. There was tons of diesel fuel floating on the surface. We were questioned by the police most of the night, they were furious at first it was only the second act of political terrorism in New Zealand history. Going to New Zealand for us at the time in 1985 felt a bit like coming home because they were about to become a nuclear free zone and we felt so welcomed there and relaxed.

What happened then was the two French agents who were masquerading as Swiss tourists, the next day about 36 hours after the boat had been bombed returned the camper van to the airport, asking for a refund for a day’s rental because they had to fly home early because her uncle was sick in Switzerland. Well there's a big note under the counter. They were detained by police, interrogated and put in a hotel room that night and said “Look we’re sorry we’ll take you to the airport in the morning. Please feel free to order room service, use the phone, do whatever you want just please don't leave the hotel room.” So the agents immediately got on the telephone to Paris DSEG headquarters and said “We blew up the boat it all went cool but we’ve been detained but we’ll be home tomorrow.” The New Zealand police recorded the whole thing. Two days later they were arraigned and about a month later they copped a plea to second-degree murder. Obviously losing a shipmate is about as bad a thing that can happen on a ship; it’s the Captain’s first priority to keep his crew safe.

And it was a bad day, but all of us on the boat felt in some weird way that if we had scared the government of a first world superpower so badly they would set out to kill us, that we must be doing something right. And myself and another crew member sailed out to Moruroa a couple months later on the Greenpeace sailboat that had been out there many times. We sailed across the 12 mile limit when the French announced that they were going to do a very small insignificant nuclear test. We’re arrested and deported banned for life from French Polynesia. Eventually a couple years later the French were forced because they wanted their agents back from New Zealand to arbitrate with Greenpeace and paid us quite a bit of money. But they have never apologized either to us or the Pereira family.

Greg Dalton: One of the agents expressed remorse that he was involved in it?

Peter Willcox: He absolutely did, and I think that was a courageous move on his part. I appreciate his sincerity. I have no doubt the Pereira family has not accepted his apology and I don't think it's a matter that for me to say yes or no. They feel it's too little too late, that France or he had a responsibility to say something 35 years ago and this happened 30 years ago.

Greg Dalton: Is there any indication or evidence how far this went in the French government?

Peter Willcox: Yes, absolutely. We learned 20 years after the bombing that it had been approved by President Mitterrand. It had come right from the top.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about sea adventures at Climate One. And that was Peter Willcox, former captain of the Rainbow Warrior.

Peter Willcox: I’m sorry; I’m still Captain of the Rainbow Warrior.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Still captain, there you go. And there’s Rainbow Warriors 1, 2 and 3. So you’re now captain of the number 3 which is looks fantastic.

Peter Willcox: Thank you. It’s just a funny issue because I've been introduced for 20 years as the former captain of the Rainbow Warrior. And I don't know how it happened but here I still am.

Greg Dalton: People think that it sunk and there’s two other ships after in that.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, tell us what you're seeing below the sea in the oceans about climate impacts. How is climate change changing the oceans?

Liz Taylor: Well, we’re seeing a lot of it happen in terms of the just the ocean temperatures. We’re looking at this great bleaching that's going on in the Great Barrier Reef right now. It’s just devastating about 90% gone of the Great Barrier Reef. It's shocking.

Greg Dalton: Can it come back?

Liz Taylor: There's hope that parts of it can come back. It depends on how long the surface temperature is sustained at a high rate. With the remotely operated vehicles and human occupied vehicles that we are developing, we’re able to go down into deeper water and see if some of these corals are coming back. Were they more resilient where the water is cooler instead of just being at the surface? There's some discussion about transplanting corals from deeper water back into shallower water as temperatures cool. We’re trying to collect them, and then to rear them in captivity in the same way that some other endangered species have been saved. Now we are looking at being able to do that for corals. But it’s quite shocking to see these sudden changes happening just, you know, we’re all witnesses to it.

Peter Willcox: I would like to add to Liz’s story that we were down on the Great Barrier Reef three years ago and got a chance to talk to the scientists from Townsville who know coral. They were hypothesizing that was then 15 to 20 years the waters would be too warm and acidic to support coral growth.

And here we are three years later, with major sections of the reef gone and that's the one constant that’s in climate change is that you make a prediction, two or three years later you can tear it up and start all over again.

Greg Dalton: It's happening faster. Why is coral so important as the base of the food chain? And why is that so important, Liz Taylor?

Liz Taylor: Well, it’s I mean well the plankton is really the base of the food chain but the coral contribute to that when they spawn all their little corallettes are water born into the into the planktonic soup that’s there. But beyond that they are very important barrier to storm damage and they’re one of the first lines of defense that we have. So we have all this goes to development most of the population lives in 50 miles of the coast around the world. And so if we’re tearing down things like mangroves and coral reefs are dying that just opens the door for these huge storm surges to race in much further in than they would have in the past. So the coral reef helps to calm the storm conditions ahead of them reaching the shore and so they're very critical for that reason. And just the myriad of fish that they support, all kind of different fishes there.

Greg Dalton: And lots of people subsist on – farmers rely on that fish. So it gets to people pretty quickly. Stiv Wilson, what does an average American and their lifestyle what are some of the most impactful things that we do as consumers that get to the oceans?

Stiv Wilson: You know, really I work on plastics in the ocean because I like to think of it as the visual evidence of climate change. About 10% of petroleum products go to the production of plastics. Interestingly with coral, coral is filter feeders and fibers from synthetic clothing that come off in the washing machine. About every load of laundry about 1,900 fibers going out into the ocean. Ultimately coral is choking on this too so they’re kind of getting a one-two punch from acidification and synthetics.

And the footprint of plastics per capita in the United States is about 326 pounds of plastic per person per year, 50% of which is single-use plastics. So if you want to talk about the most impactful not only problem but also empowering device is getting out of single use plastics. You can literally reduce 50% of your footprint overnight.

Greg Dalton: And we've heard about bag bans, plastic bag bans. I heard from you the first time about straw bans. So why are plastic straws, tell us the scale and scope of plastic straws and what's being done about it.

Stiv Wilson: Well, San Francisco is sort of leading the way. There may be a measure introduced to ban them. We as Americans use 500 million of them a day. There’s 308 million people in the country. So I don't know if you've had your quota of 1-1/2 straws today, but that's about how many we use.

Greg Dalton: And why do bars like them so much?

Stiv Wilson: Well there's been some research to determine that if you drink your dark and stormy which is my drink of choice, that you’re going to drink two of them if you have a straw rather than just one.

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, we’re talking about, you know, banning things and Greenpeace is, environmentalists are often thought about stopping things. Stop bags, stop straws, is that really gonna be effective or is that just kind of a game of whack a mole?

Peter Willcox: Oh geez, I don’t know. You know, listening to these folks to my right. I'm aware that as people on the planet we don't take good care of the oceans. We don't pay the first attention to them. A farmer living at home would never treat his farm the way we treat the oceans.

We constantly overfish, we constantly fish a species to decimation and then we move on to the next one. And Greenpeace believes that the oceans are a resource that need to be shared by everybody and can produce a lot of food for everybody. But when we overfish a species into extinction, we’re destroying the resource. And we’ve done this over and over and over again. Most recently we have wiped out the tuna by three quarters of their normal population. And that's not the way to get the most food out of the ocean. But there's no regulations on the high seas and that's something we desperately need to change.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, is sustainable aquaculture or farming what’s the way to do it right in terms of to utilize the oceans bounty for humans without overdoing it?

Liz Taylor: Well, first of all we need to stop treating the ocean as a supermarket and a sewer at the same time; that’s kind of fundamental. But beyond that, it's really looking at do we want to continue this kind of trade in global wildlife. You know, we’re shipping fish all around the world. We have tuna that are caught off the coast here or caught elsewhere and they’re shipped overnight to a fish market in Japan. That’s a huge carbon footprint. It seems a more logical way to fish locally, fish with artisanal methods of hook and line and not have these massive commercial trawling operations going on. The McDonald's filet o’ fish sandwich supports the largest trawler a ship more than 400 feet long in the Bering Sea. That just takes metric tons of pollock out of the environment and, you know, how does that affect the other animals that rely upon that food source?

Greg Dalton: I've read that even there is fish caught off the coast of the United Kingdom, sent to China for processing and then back to the UK for fish and chips. So that, yeah –

Liz Taylor: Right. So I mean the answer is to know where your fish comes from. Know your fishmonger, make sure that the methodology used is as low-impact as possible.

And for the farm fish, you know, maybe bring it onshore in these closed systems. Don't discharge things directly into the ocean or feeding antibiotics to fish that are penned in the ocean. You could be doing it onshore.

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, do you eat fish?

Peter Willcox: I do more and more reluctantly every, all the time. I haven't eaten meat for 40 years because I read how President Reagan was signing a special bill every year, allowing beef farmers to use steroids and hormones to grow their beef. Yet he was serving organic beef at the White House so he knew better. That made me so mad I gave up on meat. And now I listen to these folks and I realized that even wild caught fish contain a high number amount of plastics. I don't know how much longer I will.

Greg Dalton: There is even a report recently about cocaine found in salmon off the coast of Seattle.

Peter Willcox: Yeah, the NPR report.

Greg Dalton: Stiv Wilson, what did you think about when you heard that story?

Stiv Wilson: Well, I was wondering how they get up these very rough streams to spawn and now it seems to make sense.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: And how about your personal diet?

Stiv Wilson: I don't eat fish and that largely comes from, you know, when you’re sailing across an ocean you often just have a line dragging, you know, you can catch a Dorado or a tuna and, you know, we would get to these very remote places in the South Pacific with these reef systems and there’d be no fish. And there’d be tons of plastic on the beach but no fish. And it just – and there is one atoll in the South Pacific called Henderson which is actually where Herman Melville got the idea for Moby Dick from chasing a whale there. And I, you know, swimming to shore I was like this should be Shangri-La. This should be the Jacques Cousteau video that I saw when I was kid and there was nothing there.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about ocean conservation and exploration and age of climate change at Climate One. We’re talking with Peter Willcox, Captain of the Rainbow Warrior Greenpeace ship. Liz Taylor, who is an explorer based in Alameda and Stiv Wilson, who’s a plastics expert.

I want to go to our speed round, lightning round and ask a couple some quick questions of each of our guests today at Climate One. Stiv Wilson, bans on plastic bags are feel-good measures that don't address bigger threats to the ocean?

Stiv Wilson: False.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, most you do work with industry and we’ll get into that in a minute. Liz Taylor, most offshore oil wells are operated safely and responsibly?

Liz Taylor: Maybe.

Greg Dalton: We’ll get to Peter Willcox’s vacation in Russia. Peter Willcox, is the food in the Russian jails better or worse than the food in American jails?

Peter Willcox: Fortunately, I don’t know. I haven’t been in that many American jails.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Maybe some of your Greenpeace colleagues here in the audience have. Peter Willcox, is Siberia a good place for a vacation?

Peter Willcox: I wasn't in Siberia, I was in Murmansk which is the only ice free port Russia has on the northern shore and I was in St. Petersburg.

Greg Dalton: Okay and so we’ll get to that story. This is a quick word association. If I mention a word, just what pops into your mind first. Don’t need to explain it; just the association is what we’re looking for. Peter Willcox, sea world.

Peter Willcox: Orcas.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, the actress Liz Taylor.

Liz Taylor: Still alive.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, the ocean protection group Sea Shepherd.

Peter Willcox: Good group. I don’t appreciate their sometimes use of violence.

Greg Dalton: Stiv Wilson, the proposed new coal terminal in Oakland.

Stiv Wilson: Bad.

[Laughter]

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, Bluefin tuna.

Peter Willcox: Threatened in their existence.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, the U.S. Navy.

Liz Taylor: They’d like a better white front door.

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, French food.

Peter Willcox: Excellent.

Greg Dalton: French agents.

Peter Willcox: Not so smart.

Greg Dalton: Okay. That ends our lighting round. How they do, I think they did pretty well. Let’s give them a –

[Applause]

– round for getting through the –

Greg Dalton: Who are some of your sea heroes? Liz Taylor, who are adventurers that you look to, people that are protecting and stewarding the oceans?

Liz Taylor: Well, increasingly I think we’re seeing real heroism from citizen scientists, people that are every day trying to go out and make positive change. Whether they’re staging a beach cleanup or there’s a sailor that's looking for ghost fishing gear or they're contributing to the different NGOs and trying to keep them going and just making good personal choices, educating themselves.

Greg Dalton: And what are some technologies that are enabling them to do that?

Liz Taylor: Well, certainly we’re seeing the Internet is a huge thing. You know, we worked at DOER Marine we worked for three years with Google on the Google ocean layer in Google Earth. We converted it from being Google dirt to being Google Ocean, the whole thing.

Greg Dalton: Initially, it just had lands not the ocean, okay.

Liz Taylor: Exactly, the ocean was left out in the beginning. But we work to them and with the U.S. Navy so it’s kind of a three-way team with a cooperative research and development agreement. And we brought in partners from around the world to add their content into that platform. And I think it's something that will continue to grow that will have the ability for more people to add their adventures, their observations and has its big searchable encyclopedia for the world be very powerful.

Greg Dalton: For a part of the world that’s kind of off the radar for most people they don't go there. Stiv Wilson, sea heroes who are your ocean adventure protection heroes?

Stiv Wilson: Well when I was – I mean Jacques Cousteau is that's what really opened my brain to this whole other world that ultimately comprises 70% of planet Earth. And it’s funny my girlfriend is actually knitting me six red caps that Jacques Cousteau so there will be a requirement on my sailboat that going in and out of port that everybody will have to wear a red Jacques Cousteau cap.

Greg Dalton: Nice homage to the King. Peter Willcox, heroes.

Peter Willcox: Well there’s a French yachtsman named Eric Tabarly who over and over again just did extraordinary things with sailboats. And he's always somebody I have looked up to.

Greg Dalton: Cuba recently opened up, is opening up more so and Liz Taylor, Cuba is one of the few places hasn't been trampled by tourism, et cetera. I’d like to hear from any of you if that's a place for exciting undersea exploration. There's some sea life there that might be less touched by humans than elsewhere in the world.

Liz Taylor: Well, a lot of people are looking to Cuba to see what’s going happen. There's a lot of concern about the opening of the cruise ship industry in there and what’s going to happen with discharge from these large vessels. It’s very, very pristine at the moment and will they have the wisdom and the courage to sustain it in a pristine state or will they just capitulate to capitalism. So it does represent an opportunity for again, to serve a nursery opportunity for corals that have been decimated elsewhere through the Caribbean. And I think it represents the opportunities for sustainable tourism with just really eco-innovation if you will looking for new ways we can enjoy these environments without large footprints. So whether it's highly regulated diving whether it's diving with small submersibles so we’re standing off the reef but we’re able to spend more time at depth; there’s a variety of ways it could be done.

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, marine protected areas are one of the positive stories in the ocean. There are basically national parks in the oceans and some of the people would say that they've actually come back some of those areas signed into law by George W. Bush. Do you see that as one of the bright hopes in the ocean, we can set some areas off-limits and maybe they’ll come back?

Peter Willcox: Well we have to respect the ocean, that's a start. And Marine protected areas are an excellent way to do it. We haven't nearly done enough. We’re still decimating the life in the oceans by overfishing. Everything else we do our activities are not congruent with protecting the ocean. Marine protected areas are a good way to start, but we haven't done nearly enough of them.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, marine protected areas?

Liz Taylor: Well like you’re saying we really need to do a lot more. One of the goals is the loftier goals is 20% by 2020 for ocean protection. But, you know, we see marine protected areas and we have a lot of them right along our own coasts here the marine sanctuaries, Cordell Banks, Gulf of the Farallones. And yet fishing is still allowed in those areas to some extent. So we really need areas where these animals can just be left alone and there’ll be plenty of fishing outside the boundaries but we need to spend more time in the ocean directly observing to understand where the real key areas are for breeding, for resting. Somewhat what Ducks Unlimited did on the land where they went out they observed, this is where the ducks are breeding we need to protect these areas, and yet a hunter can still go out and take a few ducks but we don't have commercial duck hunting anymore.

Greg Dalton: Stiv Wilson, you’ve been out to the plastic gyres, these garbage patches. Can they come back to life? You’re a plastics expert.

Stiv Wilson: Yeah, I mean this will astonish you, but people talk about the garbage patches as being the final resting place. The plastic will never escape there and it's there in perpetuity. The good news is actually when these gyres rotate, takes the North Pacific gyre takes about three years to rotate, spits out about 50% of its contents. That’s either gonna enter another gyre or wash up on land. So I mean hopefully what I say is beach cleanup is gyre cleanup. If you're capturing that stuff before a surge or a storm puts it back in the ocean, you have effectively clean the ocean. So the key is we need to stop it going in. I mean the first thing you do when a bathtub is overflowing is you turn off the faucet. And that's what we need to do is turn off the spigot and then the ocean will take care of itself. The best thing to do for the ocean, it seems, is to leave it alone and it'll figure itself out.

Greg Dalton: Nature's okay without us. Talk about the microbeads story.

Stiv Wilson: Yeah, so I had spent all this time at sea looking at plastics and I'm originally from Minnesota and I grew up sailing we have 10,000 lakes there. But I wasn't a salty dog as you say; at that point I was a fresh dog I guess. But after doing all this, you know, adventure around the world what I realized is, you know, very few people actually have a connection an emotional connection to the middle of the ocean.

And so, you know, bringing it back to my boy Jacques Cousteau he said, you know, we protect what we love. So I said let's look at the Great Lakes. Let's see if we find plastics in the Great Lakes. And we found really big concentrations of them. Hitched a ride on a tall ship out of Erie, Pennsylvania it was a replica of a war of 1812 brig, it was actually pretty funny. We were literally hitching a ride and I would ask the captain if I could throw the trawl in, he’s like oh, we’re just actually about to be in a battle reenactment. And I was like, that's why you’re dressed funny. So but we did find these really high concentrations of these plastic beads that were traced back to personal care products, scrubs and toothpaste. And that said, I started a campaign about 3 1/2 years ago to get rid of them and happy to say, through both California State legislation which gave us the leverage for a federal legislation. Obama signed my bill at the end of 2015 and we have effectively eliminated them from commerce in the Western world.

[Applause]

[CLIMATE ONE MINUTE]

Announcer: And now, here’s a Climate One Minute.

There’s a growing amount of plastic choking our oceans – and yet, we keep making more. Adam Lowry of Method Products says our planet already has all the plastic it needs. His company harvests the plastic from oceans and beaches and recycles it into bottles for its cleaning products.

Adam Lowry: Now, the reason we've done this product is really to raise awareness. We’re not trying to solve the ocean plastic problem by taking plastic out of the oceans and making bottles out of it, but by doing that we’re demonstrating that what people say is impossible actually is possible. And I believe taking sort of the first most important step towards addressing the ocean plastic pollution problem.

We gather the plastic for our ocean plastic bottle on the beaches of Hawaii because, it's sort of horrifying, but the beaches of Hawaii actually act as a natural sieve, and they collect the types of plastic that we can use to put back into a recyclable bottle. But like I said, this is really done to raise awareness about the fact that we should use the plastic that's already on the planet. As consumers, we should demand products that come from recycled plastics because it's a solution we have today that works and, combined with other things, it's a solution that I believe is not utilized enough.

Announcer: That’s Adam Lowry, co-founder of Method Products, speaking at Climate One in 2014. Now, let’s join Greg Dalton and our live audience at the Commonwealth Club.

[END CLIMATE ONE MINUTE]

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about the oceans and plastics and climate change at Climate One. That’s Stiv Wilson, director of campaigns at the Story of Stuff and a sailor. Also today here with Peter Willcox, Captain of the Rainbow Warrior for Greenpeace and Liz Taylor, who's directs a company that explores the deep ocean.

Peter Willcox, let’s go back to your Arctic vacation. You were on the Arctic Sunrise in 2013 going out in the Barents Sea after Gazrprom which is a large Russian gas company. Tell us that story.

Peter Willcox: Yeah, as Siberian oil fields wind down Russia is very interested in maintaining its petroleum exports, which is a huge their biggest export. So they opened up oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean. Now the Russian oil industry as a rule, and this is something that shocked me, spills five times what BP spilled in the Gulf every year just as a way of doing business. They do not have a good track record. You could say that they’re about the farthest thing from it. Combine that with what scientists are telling us that we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground if we’re going to do any mitigating of climate change. And I think you'll agree that the idea of the Russians drilling for oil in the most hazardous marine environment possible is not a good idea.

We had gone up in 2012 and planted a banner on the rig taking pictures and come away and it was no big deal. When we went back in 2013 they immediately started shooting machine guns at us, not at us but in the water. We have videos of machine gun bullets landing 3, 4 feet away from our inflatable. The Russian Coast Guard guys came up in their rubber boats and start slashing ours with knives and they, we got two climbers up the side of this really massive rig. I mean, this rig goes up about 100 feet above the water and its solid steel on all sides because they need to protect the pipes and the drilling equipment from the ice. And these steel walls go right down to the ocean floor, which at that point is about 120 feet deep, and then most of it is filled up with stones to make it just as strong as possible against the ice. But we put a couple climbers up there and the Coast Guard guys started pulling them way away from the rig and smashing them back into it in a real, real dangerous situation. So they came down and we’re arrested and we spent about the next 36 hours having face-offs with the Russians who wanted us to leave.

We didn't want to leave; this rig is in international waters. Now it's inside the Russian EEZ; they have every right internationally to drill for oil in that place. What they're doing wasn't illegal; it was just in our opinion, not very well guided. 36 hours after we did the operation they flew over us with a helicopter, spetsnaz, special forces sailed down onto the deck. The Russian spetsnaz guys don't wear any insignia they wear balaclavas and they’re a little scary at first. They rounded all the crew up and pushed the crew onto a couple cabin, searched them, searched all the cabins, stole everybody's liquor and immediately got wildly hammered that night so we had a dozen spetsnaz guys running around drunk as skunks, while we were supposedly being arrested. The next morning they start, they towed us the four-day tow to Murmansk. And up to that point it all fell pretty much like another day at the office. We’ve been arrested before we’ve had this before it just felt to me very déjà vu. We got into Murmansk and the first surprise was an embassy everybody's embassy officials came out. The American one came into my cabin and said, oh I think you guys are in trouble and I said, nah, I ain’t worried about it. He said, I hope you're right. And he left a few minutes later the soldiers told us that we're going to go into shore for a couple hours. Maybe we should bring a toothbrush with us, that's all we have to bring. So we went into the investigator's office and the first thing they told us was we’re getting done for piracy, which in Russia is 10 to 15 years in jail.

Now the way the Russian judicial system works is that once you’re put in detention there is a 99.99% chance you'll be found guilty at trial. The trial’s pretty much of a rubberstamp just to finish off your detention before you start your prison sentence. (0:49:11)

So them telling us that we were going to be spending 10 to 15 years in Russia and we better start studying Russian because we need it when we got to the work camps, it was not very reassuring. And it was a month before I was able to meet with a lawyer or contact my wife Maggie home to find out what was going on. The food was not very good but your friends can send you food into the detention center, which is an unusual part about the Russian system. So once we got our supply line set up we did all right and we start getting some clothes sent because nobody had enough. After a month or I guess about five weeks the charges, they added the charges of hooliganism to our piracy thing. They have no way of taking away the piracy charge. The mechanism just doesn't exist, as does neither does the mechanism for receiving bail money. They just don't do that in Russia.

Six weeks after we were detained we were transferred down to St. Petersburg where I got a chance to spend some time in the Europe's oldest jail which was built in 1860 called the Kresty it wasn't a bad place. Two weeks later we had to have another detention hearing and that's where we were given bail. We were held under city arrest in St. Petersburg for a month and finally the Duma passed an amnesty which was also what was used to kick Pussy Riot out of jail. Although I have to say in their case, being the incredibly strong women they were, they wouldn't leave. They had been in jail for 20 months they only have four months to go, they didn’t want amnesty which confers that you had done something wrong in the first place. We, on the other hand, we’re like no problem I'm ready. Thank you very much. (0:51:04)

They threw them out of jail physically threw them out of the jail. I didn’t have to be thrown out. But I think the person in Moscow who decided to have us arrested in the first place knew that the amnesty was going to be coming up. It was something the Russians do every 10 years to celebrate their new constitution after the fall of the Soviet Union. And Soshi, the Olympics were coming up they didn't want us in jail for the Olympics. But I think it was their way of sending us a message that we had better no longer mess with their ambitions to do more oil exploration in the Arctic. I'm not sure what our plans will be for the future if somebody had asked me before I left that, you know, you might go to jail for a couple months but you’ll radically improve the level of the campaign, that more people become aware of the dangers of drilling for oil not only in the Arctic, but anywhere I’d say well that's part of the deal that's what we do. If somebody had said you might go to jail for 10 to 15 years, I'd pull the covers back over and wave goodbye and say no, that's not in my plan.

But I'm quite willing to take those risks, I'm quite willing to spend a couple months in jail because I think the threat of climate change, which is we’re already seeing as we’ve described tonight is so real. I've got two children, ages 21 and 24 and almost 33, that's what gets me up in the morning. I'm not at all, I don't at all regret doing what we did. I would do it again if I knew it was only gonna be two months because of what we’re facing.

Greg Dalton: What’s your next action? What's Rainbow –

[Applause]

– Peter Willcox is the Captain of the Rainbow Warrior Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior. What’s your next action, where are you going next?

Peter Willcox: Right. I expect now to meet the boat in Malta beginning of August and then go to Lebanon and Turkey to do climate change, which probably means anti-coal work. We were there in Turkey two or three years ago, it all blends in after a while. Where we helped a small village fight off a coal-fired power plant that was attempting to bulldoze their olive groves, which would've killed the whole village of 150 people so they could build another coal-fired plant. And because of the Greenpeace support from the office in Istanbul who provided lawyers, witnesses, support in one of the actions I've been most proud of in years. We stopped that coal plant from bulldozing the olive groves and closing down the village. And I suspect it will be more actions like that we’ll be doing when we go back this fall.

Greg Dalton: Let's go to our audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Thank you. Stiv, I'd like to ask you about the plastics. A little while back there was some young kid, a brilliant kid who supposedly invented a machine that was gonna scoop it all up. So I have two questions. One, is some of the plastic gone to the bottom of the ocean and is that gonna stay there forever or is it gonna be eaten by the fish and how bad is it in the food chain? And then the other question is how does all that plastic get in the ocean, where is it coming from, cruise ships or is it blowing offshore or coming out of rivers and into the ocean?

Greg Dalton: Thank you for the question. Stiv Wilson.

Stiv Wilson: Well luckily Liz is inventing machines to go get it all off the bottom, no I’m kidding. Yeah, the sad truth is a lot of the – half the plastics we use sink. So we don't really have much data on what's on the bottom of the ocean and Liz is where she was talking earlier about seeing a lot of this stuff down there, both at depth and in near shore environments. With regard to how it gets there this is really a story of death by a thousand cuts. It's every river, it's every stream, it's every cigarette butt, I mean here’s 7-1/2 billion people on the planet and, you know, they’re using a lot of plastic. And some of it escapes the waste stream, especially in developing countries. We’re working very hard with an international team to develop a strategy for five Southeast Asian countries that account for about 80% of what goes into the ocean because of poor waste management infrastructure. So I'm very hopeful that this is gonna be really successfully get some really interesting zero waste models by creating value to the plastic at the end of life from a recycling standpoint.

With regard to cleaning it up – you know, any of us on this panel can tell you it's really hard to explain how big the ocean actually is. It’s really, really, really, really big and you know, I mean you get out there and you're like I'm two weeks away from land, no helicopter could carry enough fuel to come and save us right now. You know, there is nothing we are an island on to ourselves and totally reliant. And that's how big and that's how widespread the problem is. And so I think unless we turn it off, unless we turn the spigot off and we capture the stuff before it gets into the ocean, it's gonna be a dog chasing its tail no matter how good this technology works or not. But to give you a quick example: 95% by count of plastics in the ocean are smaller than a grain of rice. The kid from the Netherlands who - Boyan Slat, who is talking about cleaning the stuff up, his devices aren't designed to capture any of that. So really what we you know we’re talking about maybe 5% of the problem. But, you know, when you’re talking about plastics this big, there’s a lot of sea life that is this big. Like most sea life is, you know, 50% of fish in the ocean by weight are this size or bigger. So you’re gonna catch a lot of by-catch if you try and seen the ocean for plastics. And to me it's just it's not the right strategy you need to get at the root of the problem, which is the plastics going in in the first place. (0:59:10)

Greg Dalton: Let’s have our next question at Climate One. Welcome.

Female Participant: I wanted to ask Ms. Taylor to expand a bit on the words that you said about Cuba. It sounds so promising but is there work being done, are there people there who are already working on this? It sounds like it will be wonderful if it works but it sounds like it's going to take an awful lot of work.

Liz Taylor: Well, it is going to take a lot of work and dedicated effort. There are groups that have been going to Cuba, you know, those of us in the United States have been pretty good from there for a long time but there’s a lot of other countries that have been going there already for a long time in trying to get good stewardship in place. But now we’re seeing some of the Gulf of Mexico, the Heart Research Institute and some of the other institutional groups that have been really kind of forming bonds with the Cuban government for a long time and they’re very concerned with maintaining the pristine nature of that area. So I think although there is a lot of work to do and agreements to be made it's all going to be about getting the local people to understand and the same with any marine protected area. It’s all about getting the local people to understand the value of what they've got and that they are really going to enjoy sustained tourism, sustained bottom-line benefit if they look after pristine intact environments versus these trash areas that no one wants to go to.

I thought for a long time instead of having sort of the seafood watch card that we should have the watch card for places we want to visit that are doing good jobs. And, you know, have those kind of validated somehow; this is an area that’s got green protection they’ve got enforcement they’ve got sustainable fisheries and choose where you spend your tourism dollars. Don't take it to a place that’s gonna support shark finning and just bad stewardship.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor is president of DOER Marine a company in Alameda that builds deep sea exploration vehicles and explores the deep ocean. Let’s go to our next question at Climate One.

Male Participant: Thanks. The three of you touch and go into the ocean almost I would say pretty much on a daily basis. Do you have any suggestions about people at home maybe from flyover states who don't necessarily get to see the ocean on a daily basis, about how they can get more involved and more impactful?

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor.

Liz Taylor: Yeah, I think everyone has the ability to be very impactful. Whether it's a decision to, you know, tear out their lawn and put in native plants. Whether it's a decision to just make those choices. The single use plastic is by far I think the largest of the choices people can make whether they live in a completely landlocked area, if you have your soda bottle and it goes into a lake and then it goes to the creek and then it goes to the stream and it goes downriver. It’s gonna get to the ocean in due course. So every choice we make every day, we have that opportunity to make a difference.

Greg Dalton: And how would you explain to a person in a flyover state how the ocean matters to their life if they seem so far from it, why does it matter?

Liz Taylor: Well, I’ve heard it said many times in my own household. Do we like to breathe? You know, that’s what it comes down to; the plankton in the oceans are generating more oxygen than the rain forests. And we really need to look after them together.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our next question. Thank you.

Male Participant: Hi, this is for Liz. With the Chinese economic slowdown they’ve been closing down a lot of seafood processing units. Do you see that as an opportunity to improve the localization of seafood from Alaska, from other ports in America?

Liz Taylor: Well I think we’d like to see sea life differently. I don't like the red lobster “sea food differently.” I like the “sea life differently.” But I think if we encourage again encourage tourism to the areas where fishermen are doing a good job locally and not really supporting these vast extractive fisheries but looking after the place and doing an incredible job that these is the areas we want to see supported. And, you know, aquaculture has a role in it, sustainable fisheries has a role in it. I think it’s mostly the large strip mining activities that go on around the world that we want to back away from. And being able to really look and see where, you know, you see this little package of fish in the market, it looks like a little package of chicken in the market. It’s this disassociation we don't really understand what is going into that to create that animal. We don't eat a 20-year-old chicken but we think nothing of eating a 20-year-old orange roughy, so –or a 50 or 100-year old orange roughy. So we need to look at these aspects and think about it.

Greg Dalton: We've been talking a lot about extraction of living organisms from the oceans. Liz Taylor, I want to talk about mineral extraction. There’s a bit of a gold rush going on in the oceans. So tell us about that and how that's playing on particularly with China and the geopolitics of that.

Liz Taylor: The deep-sea mining issue is tremendous and of course it’s below the surface. So we don’t really think about it, everybody sees the beautiful surface of the ocean. The sun setting, rising, the big seas we deal with. But what goes on below is a huge rush at the moment particularly as oil and gas kind of slows down a little bit. We’re looking at going in mining these deep-sea vents. These areas where we’ve recently seen just on these live streams these very robust colonies of crabs and unique mussels and all kinds of animals that live around these chimneys that are just spewing deep minerals from the crust of the earth in deep water. China now has the deepest ocean presence in the world. They have a manned submarine that can go to 7,000 meters. They’re working on a full-ocean depth submarine. We, in the United States spent $50 million on one submarine that now goes no deeper than it did before that we spent $50 million dollars. You know, it's incredible that all around the world we have countries that are making investments, not for the right reasons, but to lay claim to these deep-sea minerals to fuel our cell phones. And really what's going to happen we’re not doing the environmental research or impacts reports we do on the land in the deep sea because it’s out of sight. So we need to be there in person on a regular basis a lot more.

Greg Dalton: And it’s not really regulated and the U.S. won’t sign the law of the sea. So it’s kind of, right. We have one more audience question. Welcome.

Male Participant: Yeah, Michael Stocker, Ocean Conservation Research. I really appreciate you guys lovely ocean how you expressed it in your lives, so it’s really encouraging. A little extension on what you're talking about Liz in terms of the industrialization of the sea. I really want to highlight that, maybe get some of your comments about it.

It’s not just deep-sea mining but also offshore energy industries, extraction industries for fossil fuel, but also large wind farm productions. These are huge industrial scale factories; they’re building refineries on the bottom of the ocean. They’re using a lot of underwater communication systems that are all acoustic. The ocean is an acoustic environment, and the ocean is getting increasingly noisier, not just from shipping but also from industry out there. I wonder if you guys could comment a little bit about that.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, so Liz Taylor, pick up on wind farms; people think of clean energy is a good thing. We need to get off fossil fuels, but oh wind farms could be bad.

Liz Taylor: Well, the wind farms I mean certainly a cleaner alternative. The installation is very similar to the oil and gas platform. It could potentially be repurposing of some existing platforms could be converted to a combination of solar and wind, perhaps. In addition they make kind of a nice artificial reef over time and probably better thing than trying to take them out in some cases because they’ve been heavily colonized by animals. So may not want to cut them off. But, you know, there’s trade-offs in every way of it. In general, the ocean is incredibly noisy at this moment in time. If you just look on again going back to Google Earth or these other search engines you can track all the ocean ships going across the planet. And it’s just like, it’s like watching airplanes going across the planet it’s just stripes everywhere these tracks going back and forth. These enormously loud propellers hrumming away.

Greg Dalton: Stiv Wilson, some people might say well it's there; it's a resource to be used for humans, what’s wrong with mining the ocean, just like we mine the land. If it’s going to be done responsibly? People want their cell phones; people want this high consumption life.

Stiv Wilson: Yeah, I mean I think what we live in a fundamental paradox. We live in a linear system, a finite system with finite amount of resources. Yet we have an economic system that supports exponential growth. It’s a paradox in and of itself. The idea of sustainability is it's not the sort of hippie mantra that I think it's often made out to be by the right, it's actually looking at what can we do and what can we not do. And we can fish some; we can burn some things that emit carbon. The issue is that we are now at this point where we gained this divine power from the industrial revolution, but we did not gain the divine wisdom on how to wield that power. And right now I think we’re bearing that consequence. And so we’re playing catch-up to figure out, you know, what the Earth can sustain and what it cannot. And eventually it will happen; if we don't kill ourselves in the process it will happen because it's necessary. And, you know, I don’t even think of it as a political issue it's like, you know, what Peter said earlier is like it's happening, it's there and it’s present. Climate change is real, if we want to survive as a species we are going to have to adapt. That's the bottom line.

Greg Dalton: We have to end our conversation with these three heroes of the sea. Peter Willcox, Captain of the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior, Liz Taylor, President of DOER Marine in Alameda and Stiv Wilson with Story of Stuff and a sailor. Please thank them for coming here to Climate One.

[Applause]

Play

C1 Revue: Racing to Zero

Otto Pilot — Wed, 30 Dec 2015 17:31:54 +0000

C1 Revue: Racing to Zero

12/30/2015

The path towards a clean energy future entails reducing our carbon footprint. But can we actually shrink that footprint down to nothing? That’s the idea behind “net zero” – using no more energy than the clean, green energy we can create. Landfills are another target of the zero movement; put nothing at all in the trash bin. Solutions range from recycling competitions to carrying your trash on your back – just to feel how garbage is weighing us down. Around the country, states, communities and individuals are racing to zero.

Part 1: Net Zero Homes
Sven Thesen, Owner of a net zero home
Ann Edminster, Green Home Consultant; Author, Energy Free: Homes for a Small Planet
Daniel Simons, Principal, David Baker Architects

Part 2: Net Zero Waste
Diana Dehm, Founder, Trash on Your Back
Kevin Drew, Residential Zero Waste Coordinator, San Francisco Department of the Environment
Lauren Hennessy, Outreach Manager, Sustainable Stanford

Part 3: Competition for Power
Matthew Freedman, Staff Attorney, The Utility Reform Network
Geof Syphers, CEO, Sonoma Clean Power
Dawn Weisz, CEO, Marin Clean Energy

Play

Beyond Plastic

Otto Pilot — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 16:35:52 +0000

Beyond Plastic

01/31/2014

Who should take responsibility for reducing the amount of plastic debris that litters our cities, waterways and oceans? While many consumers have given up their plastic grocery bags, most still rely on the convenience of plastic water bottles, liquid soap and fast food in styrofoam containers. “Many of our companies are looking at bio-based materials and other kinds of plastics,” says Keith Christman of the American Chemistry Council. “High density polyethylene, made from sugarcane, is one of the largest uses today of bioplastics.” But is plant-based plastic the answer? As Molly Morse of Mango Materials points out, without oxygen to break them down, bioplastics can last as long as or longer than conventional plastic. Her company is working to create plastic out of methane gas harvested from wastewater treatment plants. “It can break down in the ocean,” she says.

Bridgett Luther, President of Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, helps steer companies toward more responsible solutions for design, manufacturing and packaging their products. She points out that this approach led to market success for one company that eschewed the use of non-recyclable foam in their chairs. “ [Herman Miller] developed one of the fastest selling office chairs ever, the Aeron Chair. The end of use of that Herman Miller chair was a lot of super valuable materials that can be easily recycled.” The household cleaning company Method Products has been harvesting discarded plastic from beaches in Hawaii to produce their Ocean Plastic bottle. “Using the plastic that's already on the planet is a solution that we have today,” says co-founder Adam Lowry. “So I tend to favor solutions that we can employ right now rather than saying, “Yes. The technology is coming.” Despite these promising steps, all agree that it’s going to take a village -- manufacturers, consumers and legislators -- to work together if we’re going to rid our world of plastic waste.

Keith Christman, Managing Director for Plastics Markets, American Chemistry Council; Co-chair, Global Action Committee on Marine Litter
Adam Lowry, Co-founder and Chief Greenskeeper, Method Products PBC
Bridgett Luther, President, Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute
Molly Morse, CEO, Mango Materials

Guests

Keith Christman

Managing Director for Plastics Markets, American Chemistry Council

Adam Lowry

Co-Founder and Chief Greenskeeper, Method Products

Bridgett Luther

President, Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute

Molly Morse

CEO, Mango Materials

Greg Dalton: Plastic is everywhere in our homes, offices, streets and oceans. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels that took millions of years to create. It’s made into products used for just a few moments and then thrown away or recycled. Plastics made from plants are favored by health and environmentally conscious consumers but are they really any better for people or the planet? Over the next hour, we will look at petroleum and bioplastics as well as the generation of entrepreneurs cooking up new technologies that will move away from a fossil fuel economy. Along the way, we will include questions from our live audience here at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

With us, Keith Christman is Managing Director for Plastics Markets at the American Chemistry Council and Co-chair of the Global Action Committee on Marine Litter. Adam Lowry is Co-founder and Chief Greenskeeper of Method Products, a maker of home cleaning supplies. And Bridgett Luther is President of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute. She previously was director of the California Department of Conservation where she oversaw the state’s recycling program and regulated the oil and gas industry. Also Molly Morse, CEO of Mango Materials, a start-up company developing technology to make biodegradable plastic from industrial waste. Her PhD at Stanford University focused on bioplastics. Please welcome them all to Climate One.

[Applause]

So Bridgett Luther, I want to begin with you. And tell us first how plastics resulted, it's a huge industry, something like $400 billion in the United States a year, started as using a waste product.

Bridgett Luther: Yes. When I was at the Department of Conservation I learned a lot about plastics because we ran the beverage container recycling program and they recycle billions of containers, 18 billion containers a year. I thought, “Oh, we’re going to eat this plastic before it's all over” but it was really thinking about plastic and where it came from that got me all engaged in the program at Stanford which Molly was a student at. And it was a waste product so the oil companies kind of said, “We have all this leftover waste from refining oil. What can we do with it?” and they’ve developed polymer. So now there are other things that are going on and other people are looking at ways to develop polymers like Molly and some of her colleagues and so we can use a different product for plastic that would be much more recyclable and we wouldn’t be using a non-renewable resource.

Greg Dalton: So Molly, tell us how you went from your path developing a waste product to Mango Materials.

Molly Morse: So my background was actually looking at construction materials and we were looking at biodegradable materials that could replace timber for temporary applications.

And we became really interested in the different kinds of glues you can use in the construction industry. And one of the glues that is environmentally friendly is called PHA, polyhydroxyalkanoates. We became very excited about alternative ways to produce this because it’s normally made by sugar, bacteria that are fed sugar. So instead of doing that, you can feed them methane, a waste gas or any form of methane. And so that was just part of the work that was going on at Stanford, it was part of my PhD as well as many other people’s PhD’s.

So after I graduated from Stanford, I actually consulted for a bit and then realized that although this idea was really in its infancy, it really could drastically change the state of plastics in the environment and the world. So I started Mango Materials with some of my friends from Stanford and some other colleagues that I had met, and we started the company to commercialize this. It’s still very early stage but we’re very excited about the potential.

Greg Dalton: Early stage, I think your current office is in a shipping container, is that right? Okay.

Molly Morse: Yes. So our field demonstration site is in a shipping container at a wastewater treatment plant.

Greg Dalton: Excellent. Adam Lowry, let’s talk about -- you were a former climate scientist. How did you get into making soap?

Adam Lowry: Yes. I worked for Dr. Chris Field, he's a well-known -- world-renowned climate scientist and one of the lead authors of the IPCC reports, as sort of the low man on totem pole. I did a lot of the climate science that was supposed to lead to policy change, and this was over 10 years ago. And the reason I went into business and started a business is I was, well, firstly, not the world’s greatest scientist, I learned. And then secondly, I wanted to find a way to really make mainstream ideas around sustainability and responsibility materials, and I was finding that by doing climate science, even though I was passionate about the science, we all know the uphill battle that climate science is in the political sphere. And so I decided to go different path, and that’s what led me to starting my business much of the way you have fifteen years ago. And now we’re the world’s largest green cleaning product company.

In North America, we’ve got about 120 employees. Worldwide, we’ve probably got about 250 or so. I don’t really keep count. We make probably close to 100 million bottles a year, almost all of which are completely free of virgin plastic altogether.

Greg Dalton: Okay. We’ll get into more of that shortly. Keith Christman, tell us how you came to into the plastics industry, your background.

Keith Christman: I’ve worked at American Chemistry Council for, I guess, about 23 years on different policy issues. And today I work on plastic markets, things from building and construction where plastic is used for insulation and products like that, automotive where we’re working on CAFE standards and increasing fuel economy with lighter weight cars with plastics and also with packaging products.

Greg Dalton: Now, I looked up -- in researching for this program, I looked up at a site 5gyres.org. And one of their tag lines there is that ‘It’s made to last forever, and designed to throw away.’ We know that that’s plastics, right? And so there’s a lot of plastic pollution in the oceans. I think a lot of people have seen birds where their stomachs are full bottle caps, et cetera. So what is the industry approach to addressing that plastic pollution problem in the oceans?

Keith Christman: Well, first off, we know plastic doesn’t belong in the oceans. We don't want it in the oceans. Our products are too valuable to end up there. We want to keep them from being in the oceans and other water ways. Our associations across the world have joined together, announced the public declaration at the Fifth International Marine Debris Conference, over 50 associations in over 30 countries committed to actions to reduce marine debris. And since that time in 2011, we've announced over 140 different projects to help reduce marine debris.

Greg Dalton: And a couple of the ones -- the biggest ones you think will be most effective.

Keith Christman: Well, here in California an example is we've worked with California State Parks and keep California beautiful to put over 700 recycling bins on state beaches. We’re doing research with some UN organizations on microplastics and issues around that. We're also working with Keep America Beautiful on a nationwide campaign called I Want To Be Recycled. It promotes recycling and raises people’s awareness about the ability and need to recycle more products and the benefits of doing so.

Greg Dalton: Bridgett Luther, you used to oversee California’s conservation and recycling program. What do you think of that industry approach to marine water -- plastic pollution?

Bridgett Luther: It's great. It's just a small -- there are so many holes in the dike where you can put your finger. I guess for me at the Cradle to Cradle it's not just that the plastics are in the ocean, but they're toxic. And so the toxic plastics are getting into the fish and that's getting into our food stream. So it's not only poisoning marine life and it just looks terrible when you look at it and you look on the beach and it's a terrible thing, but wouldn't it be great if we had some innovators who actually invented a plastic that was good for fish? So if it was good for fish, it might be good for people. And I know that at Stanford they've also been looking at a plastic that has a salinity trigger. So then when it gets in the ocean it would actually disappear or it becomes something that would be valuable.

So I think we need to always talk about what are we actually doing with the stuff we make and is it having a positive benefit. And that's the whole philosophy behind the institute and our certification program. And I think that the innovation that's going on just in the two universities -- there's so much innovation going on in this area, at Berkeley Green Chemistry, at Stanford Woods Institute. I mean, there’s a lot of things out there that would be super valuable if we could just have the demand for it.

For Mango Materials – she’s going to invent this great stuff but we got to get it off the shelf and get it out there so that comes actually start using it. So I'd like to see the American Chemistry Council just have this whole innovation thing going on. I think it would be so fun.

Keith Christman: And innovation is part of the things we do. We have members who are making bioplastic. One of the world’s biggest producers of bioplastics is one of our members. So innovation is something we certainly endorse and certainly promote. And one of the great things about plastic is it can be made from a variety of different forms of carbon whether it's bio-based carbon or other types. So that is one of the benefits of plastics and you can organize it in ways to make different products.

Greg Dalton: Adam Lowry, you're actually harvesting some of the plastic from gyres and making bottles out of them or from beaches anyways. Tell us about that.

Adam Lowry: Yes. We’re making this product here which is – I’m holding a small gray teardrop shaped bottle that’s 12 ounces that is made 100% from post-consumer material, a good significant portion of which comes from plastic we've harvested out of the oceans. Now, the reason we've done this product which is just two products amongst many that we have, Method branded products, is really to raise awareness. We’re not trying to solve the ocean plastic problem by taking plastic out of the oceans and making bottles out of it, but by doing that we’re demonstrating that what people say is impossible actually is possible. And I believe taking sort of the first most important step towards addressing the ocean plastic pollution problem.

The real solution is actually what Method does with the tens of millions of other bottles that we make which is - this is a bottle that's made out of 100% post-consumer recycled PET, the same plastic that's in a common water bottle. And this was something that not too long ago people said was absolutely impossible. You could not make a clear high quality bottle that looked this good that was made entirely out of post-consumer material.

And the carbon footprint of this plastic resident resin is 60 to 70, 75% lower than virgin plastic. And what I think is really important about that is there is a lot of exciting development going on in the bioplastics sphere but there's also some things that we don’t talk about in terms of where this stuff really ends up. And using the plastic that's already on the planet is a solution that we have today. So I tend to favor solutions that we can employ right now rather than saying, “Yes. The technology is coming.” Yes, we need to invest in technology and technology is going to help. That shouldn't stop us from doing what's right today.

Greg Dalton: And what about just sending big ships out to the oceans and suckin’ that stuff up and -- I mean, it sounds naïve. Is it too simplistic to go out there and suck all that up?

Adam Lowry: Yes. There are organizations that are working on that. As a chemical engineer I can tell you from just kind of energy standpoint, it doesn’t really work. The plastic is too small, too spread out in order to practically do that. We gather the plastic for our ocean plastic bottle on the beaches of Hawaii because, it's sort of horrifying, but the beaches of Hawaii actually act as a natural sieve, and they collect the types of plastic that we can use to put back into a recyclable bottle. So we've kind of used that infrastructure and then partnerships within Hawaii with beach clean up organizations to kind of get the stuff.

But like I said, this is really done to raise awareness about the fact that we should use the plastic that's already on the planet. As consumers, we should demand products that come from recycled plastics because it's a solution we have today that works and, combined with other things, is a solution that I believe is not utilized enough.

Greg Dalton: Keith Christman, let's get you on that. Utilizing the plastic that already exist and is that economic?

Keith Christman: Oh, absolutely. There is more demand for recycled plastic than there is supply. People putting it in the recycling bin, that's the challenge we face. There are a lot of companies that want to use the material. There's a lot of recycled carpet. Recycled materials goes into a variety of different products and the demand in the United States exceeds supply today. So the key is really getting everyone to put their plastics in the recycling bin when they're done using it.

Greg Dalton: Let's get at that. There's demand -- because a lot of times we've heard the opposite about recycling, that people recycle their stuff and there isn't a demand for recycled materials, et cetera, and it ends up getting thrown away. Bridgett Luther, you've managed this process in California.

Bridgett Luther: Yes. The demand is getting much higher now because of the cost of virgin, the cost of recycles. There's more parity now. And a lot of this is by what's happening in China. So we’re all affected by this “world is flat” syndrome that we face but I think with Adam - companies like Method - would actually demand the recycled plastic, more states would actually participate in recycling. I don’t know, when you go out of California, what you see but I know what I see. There's not a lot of recycling going on in some of the other states. There’s only 11 states that have what they call the Bottle Bill program where everybody gets a little incentive to take your bottle back because you paid it a nickel at the store and now you want the nickel back.

So a lot of plastic is going in the landfills in many states around the country that we could actually help. If they could just be like California, it would be much better and there'd be plenty of recycled plastics for people like Adam.

Greg Dalton: Them’s fighting words in some parts of the country.

[Laughter]

Bridgett Luther: Those are fighting words in some of the parts of the country but it's California so you can kind of put it right out there, right?

Greg Dalton: Bridgett Luther is President of the Cradle to Cradle Innovation Institute and former Head of the Department of Conservation in California. Let's talk about plastic bags.

Started in San Francisco in 2007, there was a ban on plastic bags. Now, currently about 100 cities and counties in the state of California have either banned or put a price on plastic bags. Keith Christman, is that a good thing to do?

Keith Christman: Well, I think there are some challenges in that. One of the concerns we have about bans alone are that the infrastructure that we use to recycle plastic bags and other product wraps, wraps that go around cases of soda or a case of paper towels or diapers or other products, those things can be brought back to the grocery store. A lot of people don’t know that. So that infrastructure to recycle those materials is mostly in the grocery stores around the country. There’s more than 15,000 different locations that people can bring them back to.

We've been working with Sustainable Packaging Coalition in their How2Recycle label to get labels on those products so that people know to bring those things back to their grocery store. So one thing we are concerned about is the unintended consequences that that infrastructure at grocery stores to recycle other kinds of wraps. Today we recycle over 1 billion pounds of could be inadvertently lost. There could be an unintended consequence of that.

Greg Dalton: But what's the consequence for the members of the American Chemistry Council in terms of if those bags come back, do they make less money? Is it kind of a nuisance? Are there lots of other companies that are more interested in virgin plastic? What are the consequences for the members of that closed cycle, that supply stream?

Keith Christman: Our companies want to increase the recycling rate. It's a strong desire of our companies to dramatically increase the recycling of plastics. And that's why we’re working on film recycling with groups like SPC in the state of Wisconsin with a new wrap program to increase plastic wrap recycling. We've got a program on rigid containers. And so that isn't a threat to our plastic companies. They want to dramatically increase recycling recovery.

Greg Dalton: Bridgett Luther.

Bridgett Luther: Show of hands? Who really misses their old bags?

[Laughter]

Okay. Just for the radio audience, not one person showed their hands.

So we can all make changes. And there's a lot of energy that goes into making bags and making just reuse bags over and over. And just think it's a great thing. It's nice that the infrastructure was there but in the end, it's not just about recycling but it's also about reducing our waste too -- because there's just a lot of stuff that we could spend our energy better on than recycling bags that we didn’t need in the first place.

Keith Christman: I will say too that we do strongly support reducing, reusing and recycling. So people reusing their bags -- and using reusable bags is also something that we support.

Bridgett Luther: And that's a great thing.

Greg Dalton: But does the industry oppose putting a price on plastic bags, that sort of thing? It's been back and forth in California between a ban or a price. I think there's a bill in the state legislature, that is trying to get out to ban plastic bags. Obviously a lot of members think that’s probably a bad idea, right?

Keith Christman: Well, we’re not the organization that works on plastic bags any longer. So I want to be clear on that first off. The side we’re working on is the recycling side of plastic bags and wraps. So there is also some concern when places that we've seen put in place attacks. Sometimes they've taken out their recycling bin because people would go into the recycling bin and pull out bags to use. So there are some concerns about that as well.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about plastics and carbon at Climate One at the Commonwealth Club. Our guests are Keith Christman from the American Chemistry Council, Adam Lowry, Co-founder of Method Products, Bridgett Luther with the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, and Molly Morse from Mango Materials. How about plastic bottles, that's another thing that's a topic here in San Francisco? We don’t allow them or like them here at the Commonwealth Club. The City of San Francisco is trying to ban them. Keith Christman, let's talk about plastic bottles. Is it the same thing as bags or are they different?

Keith Christman: Well, plastic bottles are highly recycled in California. The recycling rate is over 80% for CRV bottles. So they can be recycled, reused, made into a variety of new products, fleecejackets and other products. Reducing, reusing, recycling is something we strongly support.

Greg Dalton: Adam Lowry, what do you think about plastic water bottles?

Adam Lowry: Personally, I think that the way we use plastic needs to change along with the infrastructure to recover it and reuse it. So using plastic the way we do now which for many single use applications where the plastic is only there to keep something pristine until you take it home and either throw it away or recycle it. We should try to move away from that as a use of plastic because while Keith’s got some nice stats about how much does get recycled, the national average for PET recycling is 24 percent. So every pound that gets recycled, three of them are in the landfill for water bottle plastic. And water bottles are very large user of those things. And California is a great example but it's not like the rest of the world.

So I think we should adapt -- we should find new ways that is both technologies as well as consumer behaviors to move away from single use plastics. I'm not one to demonize plastic however. I think plastic, as everyone here would agree, is a high value material. We just need to make sure that we use it correctly and then pair it with the ability to get it back whether through a technical cycle like a petroleum-based plastic or biological one through a bioplastic.

Greg Dalton: Let's talk about bioplastics. Molly Morse, you've done your dissertation, a lot of research on this. A lot of people think that that salad fork made out of corn or potato is better, that compostable salad container is more virtuous than one made of big bad oil. Is that really true?

Molly Morse: That's a complicated question actually. So it depends on a lot of factors. I mean, some plastics, bioplastics as we call them, could be made from certain sorts of -- use agricultural lands in their production. For instance, maybe they use a lot water.

There can be all sorts of different concerns with the way they're made. Yes, I think there's a lot of different types of ways to make bioplastics from different sorts of plants. What we’re doing at Mango Materials is using methane gas which can be a waste gas from wastewater treatment plants or landfills or agricultural facilities. Using methane gas is a really different story than using corn. Maybe you're converting the corn into sugar into some other chemicals that you ultimately make a plastic out of. It's really hard to compare those two materials. And at the end of the day, the plastic that you make is often different as well.

So the common bioplastics that people often are familiar with such as this cup that Adam has that's made by NatureWorks, it's a polylactic acid, a corn-based plastic, that's really different than the type of plastic than Mango Materials is producing. It's a different polymer, it has different properties, it has different end-use properties. So the way it breaks down in different environments is different. For instance, that material needs industrial compost, it needs oxygen, it needs certain infrastructure to break down.

The type of biopolymer we’re currently producing actually can break down under anaerobic conditions if no oxygen is present. It can break down in the ocean. That plastic is not going to break down in the ocean.

Adam Lowry: And I think Molly is bringing up a really good point here which is bioplastics as a whole can give people, consumers, a false sense of responsibility, and I think that's very important. This plastic that I'm holding in my hand which is an ordinary drink cup made out of a bioplastic, PLA in this case. When people use these things at a concert or a place like this and then throw it in the trash, people think that this thing is going to biodegrade. And it doesn’t. It's going to be there decades or centuries later just like the red Solo cup because, as was said, it needs an industrial compost. It needs heat and moisture in order to break down.

And so I think that's really dangerous because there are millions of these things around right now. And people think “Oh, it's biodegradable. I'm just going to chuck it.” And it perpetuates the single use behavior of using plastics and chucking them away when really what we've got to do is we've got -- if we’re going to use something like this, we've got to pair it with the ability to get all of it back so that we can reuse it, in this case, in a biological cycle, or do stuff along the lines of what Molly is doing which is recycling or using a technology that can actually degrade in conditions that aren't special.

Greg Dalton: So here, the plastic cup that Adam is holding up, the Commonwealth Club thought “Oh, this is better than [crosstalk].” Similarly, I went into a -- we have composting in San Francisco so it's totally fine. So Bridgett Luther, when we put that in the compost stream in San Francisco, is that plastic cup going to get broken down in an industrial kind of composting way or is it going to be there in 30 years? You worked with Recology, which is the recycler trash collector in San Francisco.

Bridgett Luther: Yes. Just like Adam said, we’re super lucky but I think we are fooling ourselves so that’s kind of -- I was really excited when I got up here because you said, “Oh, there's going to be a water bottle next to your chair.” What's next to my chair is something that's reusable. And that was just a great thing to see. How often you don’t see that. You go to these environmental conferences and then they've got all these water bottles everywhere and we’re all like “What's happening here?” It's kind of crazy.

Adam Lowry: Yes. Greg, the Bay Area is pretty --

Greg Dalton: So we’re batting 500 here tonight.

Bridgett Luther: Yes. [Laughter]

Adam Lowry: I mean, the reality is that the Bay Area is the only place in the country that has industrial composting on any sort of scale.

Keith Christman: I think Seattle is the only other one but yes.

Adam Lowry: Yes, but not nearly the scale that we have here. So hopefully that's going to grow but we need to make sure that we use these materials along with that growth so that we don’t get things out of balance and inadvertently end up just exacerbating the problem with plastic pollution.

Greg Dalton: So how can an average consumer keep up with all this stuff? It's so confusing. I mean, I do this for a living and I learn stuff that we’re doing the wrong thing. Bridgett Luther, this is too complicated for an average citizen. Molly has a PhD in this and it's hard for her. So the rest of us are just in trouble, right?

[Laughter]

Bridgett Luther: I think we should all become designers. One of the things we talk about at Cradle to Cradle is design for the end of use. And so when you're thinking about your own use of something, really think before you buy it. What's going to happen to this at the end of use? In San Francisco, the compostable thing is a good thing but you have to make sure it gets into the right container. And I think a lot of what we do, where is it going to go next because there is no “away,” and so how are we using things in our own life and then what does that look like at the end of it whether it's a refrigerator or a car plastic cup. And I think that's one of the things I love about Cradle to Cradle so much because it really takes you to that higher level of “Where am I going next with my stuff?”

Greg Dalton: So the idea is that something at their end of the life can be made into something of equal or greater value, upcycling, that sort of thing, right?

Bridgett Luther: Right, right.

Greg Dalton: How much of that is really -- Bill McDonough who founded the institute you head , has been talking and writing about that for a long time. How much of it is actually happening today?

Bridgett Luther: Well, part of it is the infrastructure need -- one of the things I was just writing about because there was a lot of talk about this at Davos, in the circular economy, the infrastructure has to be there. So we've got all this stuff and it could somewhere else. Who’s actually going to get it there? And California made a big investment in recycling 40 years ago. They put the infrastructure in place. We’re seeing the payoff in that now. What about all the other things that we have that don’t have a place to go, the used hair dryer, the old vacuum cleaner, your cell phones, whatever? Is the infrastructure in place to make sure that all that material gets back not into the ocean, into something that's really valuable at the end of use. So I think there's got to be a real thought now about what's the next series of infrastructures that we need to build so that we get stuff back and we don’t keep mining and we don’t keep destroying forests and all these kinds of things, and rivers because, really, there's enough aluminum in, probably, landfills around the world.

I see Mike Biddle right here on the front row -- to build a whole fleet of airplanes. We wouldn't have to mine any aluminum at all. So California has really got to put themselves out there on the sort of take it -- sort of beating the drama on the infrastructure to get stuff back and really start thinking about what's the next round of infrastructure that we need, whether it's industrial composting or a collection facility for all electronics so they're not just shipped to California.

Greg Dalton: Adam Lowry, you talked earlier about policy failure and the role of business but do you think policy needs to happen? And if so, what kind of policies in California to move this along, to move us toward more of a circular economy where things are reused rather than just chucked in landfills?

Adam Lowry: Yes. Like a lot of people, I'm not generally optimistic about our government’s ability to create progressive policy right now but, yes, policy would help. I started my business because I believe that business can and is the primary force for leadership when it comes to creating benefit for society and the environment. And because frankly I was sick of banging my head against the wall trying to create policy that never happened.

So the reality is that policy could really help us if it helped to level the playing field for more responsible materials versus less responsible materials, and help us make choices about the types of infrastructure that we want to build so that we can recover materials responsibly but that shouldn't stop us. There are millions of business opportunities that come from recovering and reusing materials that regardless of any policy that may come down the pipe, that still exists.

Greg Dalton: Adam Lowry, is co-founder of Method Products. We’re talking about plastics and carbon at Climate One. I'm Greg Dalton. Molly Morse, let's ask you. What are some of the companies out there, other than your own, that are really exciting, that you think are creating really cool things, taking waste and making it into an input that will really kind of change the way waste is handled and products are made?

Molly Morse: One of the companies, I think, that's actually pretty interesting is called Harvest Power. They do dry fermentation of compost. So this is thinking very far into the future of what a sustainable society could look like. And rather than compost as we conventionally think of it where there's a lot of oxygen present, you can do anaerobic compost so there's no oxygen present. And in those cases you actually collect the gas. So you collect the carbon that's coming off of that material. And then you can reuse that for other things. You can use it for electricity, heating, you could make it into more plastics. So I think that's one of -- sort of like making materials sort of far thinking technologies. And if we think of where recycling was 40 years ago and we think of how far we've come on that front, how far compost still has to go, I think things like dry fermentation is really interesting.

Greg Dalton: Molly Morse is CEO of Mango Materials, a start-up company here in the Bay Area. Bridgett Luther, we talked a little bit about carbon being not a villain. A lot of people think of carbon as the enemy. We got to get it out. We got to beat it down. Paul Hawken was here recently and said, “Carbon is a friend. Carbon should not be our enemy.” Tell us about how carbon could be an input and a foundation for making products?

Bridgett Luther: Now, we've been hearing a lot of companies now who are trying to pull carbon out of the air and make it into materials. I'm not sure how likely that is but I love that people are thinking about it. How do you take carbon and pull it out of the air and make something amazing? I mean, just the whole idea of methane-based polymer makes me so happy and I'm so excited for Molly.

And the one reason I love it is it keeps going around. One thing about recycling plastics every time you recycle it, the polymer gets a little different so that can't happen in perpetuity but with a methane-based polymer, it can. So you would actually make something if you kept it. It could just keep going around just like aluminum, it just keeps going around and around and around. It's just such a strong bond that it's reusable over and over and over again. So those kinds of activities need to be incentivized.

Greg Dalton: And let's ask Keith Christman, how many of your member companies are looking at those sorts of thing? There's the innovator’s dilemma which is well-known which is large companies often don’t innovate because they protect, defend the franchises that they've built that are so profitable. You've looked at the Mango Materials, et cetera. Do you think they might eat the lunch of your members one day?

[Laughter]

Keith Christman: Well, many of our companies are looking at bio-based materials and other kinds of plastics. Some of the largest companies are leaders in bio-based plastics in the world. High density polyethylene, it's made from sugarcane, is one of the largest uses today of bioplastics in addition to bio-based PET. So many companies are looking at and making many innovations to deliver new products along those lines.

Greg Dalton: Adam Lowry.

Adam Lowry: Yes. I was disappointed when Coca-Cola shut down the largest PET recycling plant in the world in South Carolina, and decided to do bio-based PET instead because here was an opportunity to actually make a market for recycled material and instead they went a bioplastic route that, without going into the science, isn't quite as good from an environmental impact.

Greg Dalton: This is the plant bottle that's [crosstalk]?

Adam Lowry: Yes, so that they could put a green triangle on the bottle and say plant bottle. Now, the reasons for that are obvious, right? Consumers who are mostly uneducated about plastic issues say “Oh, plant bottle. That's great. Awesome. They've solved my water bottle dilemma. And I can just keep using it.” And I don’t pretend to know the reasons behind that but I wish that we would make more use of the technologies that we already have rather than keep pointing to the technologies that we could have tomorrow.

Bridgett Luther: A lot more recycling needs to happen. That's the thing. There's just not enough of it going on. We’re not capturing these materials in good cycles. That's why I say more states have to be like California. They have to start investing in the infrastructure to get this stuff back so that we can actually recycle it so that getting a piece of recycled plastic won't be any big deal. It will be your first choice instead of your second choice. You would just do it. It will become natural for you to say “Oh, it's going to be recycled. I'm just going to do this and this is part of my business plan now.” So I'd like to see just more states following California’s lead.

On the other hand, on some of these people making the bioplastics, they ought to be also investing in compostable facilities so that they know at the end of use that compostable, whatever it is, gets back into something that’s valuable and doesn’t become a piece of waste that's just sitting in a trash can in Georgia.

Keith Christman: Can I add something on the -- I think there are a lot of exciting things happening in recycling across the country. And one of the things we've seen happen just in the last four years or so is a dramatic increase in the number of communities that have the ability to recycle non-bottle rigid containers locally. You look back just five years ago, only about 30% of people could recycle that stuff at their home. Today, the number is over 60% and it's growing very, very fast. And we've seen, as a result of that, the recycling of non-bottled rigid plastics go from 300 million pounds to over a billion pounds in just a few years. So it's tripled since 2007.

Greg Dalton: And non-bottled hard plastic, what’s an example of that?

Keith Christman: Yogurt tubs, butter tubs, large five-gallon pails, so a variety of rigid containers that people can now recycle at home that they weren’t able to before. And I think that's something that we are seeing is more opportunity to recycle those materials.

Greg Dalton: Bridgett Luther, does industry obstruct recycling plans and laws? Only 11 states have laws, you said earlier. Is the industry sort of --

Bridgett Luther: Well, yes because they have to pay a little bit into the front and then they get the money back on the backend. So it starts to disrupt their business plans. So they don’t like it. So yes, they fight it. Wouldn't it be great if we just had a national bottle bill and somebody just stood up and said, “We’re all going to recycle, and that's going to be the end of it.” They do it in Germany. They do a lot of it in Europe. So it would be really fun.

People are pretty -- they get really excited when those things happen but if we can sort of -- we could learn from what's going on in California. We could see -- it was really interesting to be in Sacramento. And we went from four cents on a bottle to five cents. The recycling rate went from 62% to over 80% just with the addition of the penny. People just wanted to get that nickel back. Four cents didn’t seem like enough. The nickel seems like a lot. And everybody started recycling a lot more. It was amazing to watch that happen in 18 months. So it was pretty amazing to see how quickly that nickel started incentivizing consumers. But also the infrastructure was there so we could get the stuff back and put it into the recycling stream.

Greg Dalton: And we should clarify. You were a Republican serving in the Schwarzenegger administration when that happened.

Bridgett Luther: Yes.

Greg Dalton: McDonalds recently --

[Laughter]

Bridgett Luther: One little thing.

Greg Dalton: One penny. It's amazing what one penny can do.

Bridgett Luther: Yes. Amazing what a penny can do.

Greg Dalton: McDonalds recently announced that they're going to move from polystyrene to paper cups for hot beverages in their 14,000 restaurants in the United States. Is that a good move or is that another one of those unintended consequences? Well, it sounds good, it sounds better but maybe not so much. Bridgett Luther, do you think?

Bridgett Luther: Whenever you can rid of Styrofoam, I'm all for it because there's nothing you can do with it much at the end of life. So I think it's a good move.

Keith Christman: Ironically there's more ability in the State of California to recycle polystyrene foam cups than there is to recycle or compost paper cups. Fifty percent of people in California can recycle polystyrene cups in the top 50 communities in California. And only 15% of people can either recycle or compost paper cups.

Greg Dalton: How many people know they can recycle Styrofoam cups?

Keith Christman: Well, it's not in San Francisco but you go in Southern California and L.A. and other areas around there, they do.

Greg Dalton: Okay.

Keith Christman: It needs to be put with your infrastructure that you have locally. So that's the important part.

Greg Dalton: Before we go to audience questions, I want to come back to consumer confusion in labeling because all this is so complicated. How can consumers be educated? There are lots of attempts to have some kind of simple label for what's recyclable, recycled. Is there any hope there, Adam Lowry, for some simple logos or is it all at the brand level which is where you do it?

Adam Lowry: Yes, exactly. I mean, what we do is we try to use our brand to carry a message. We call this ocean plastic bottle “message in a bottle.” And it's really that we’re just trying to raise awareness about think about it before you buy it whether you're talking about a cleaning product or any other type of product. And that really is as simple of a message as we go with because it is super confusing. We can't expect consumers to be plastic scientists. That is just unrealistic. And until such point that we have a system, which I hope we do, where we can clearly identify plastics and those plastics are matched up with the ability to recover them and recycle, and ultimately reuse them, unfortunately we’re going to have to rely on people like everyone here to know or at least seek out something that's a little bit more responsible. (0:46:01)

Keith Christman: Yes. I think the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s new How2Recycle label will offer a lot in that regard because it will make it easier for consumers to recognize things that are recyclable and it will inform them what to do with things. An example is the film that goes around a case of soda or the film that goes around a case of paper towels. People don’t know that material can be recycled but this new label will tell them they can recycle it and tell them they could bring it back to the stores and put it in the recycling bin at the front. So that's a real opportunity we've been working with them in the State of Wisconsin to promote that and make more people become aware of that. It's an easy thing to do. Dry cleaning bags and other products like that as well.

Adam Lowry: Greg, ultimately it's going to be a multifaceted and multilateral solution. I think one other really key component is the business community should take the onus on itself to make things out of the materials that are already recycled because if they do that, then they're also sending a message to consumers when they buy those products. This is already made from a recycled material so you should recycle it again so we can keep that going.

Greg Dalton: Just one thing on soap. Wouldn't it be better to use a bar of soap with no plastic bottle at all?

Adam Lowry: From a plastic standpoint, it certainly would. Unfortunately, a bar of soap has fairly limited applications, if you've ever tried to use it to clean your laundry or clean your floors, you'd [crosstalk].

Greg Dalton: But hand soap. I mean, some environmental groups say, “don’t use plastic bottles for hand soap, use the old fashioned bar.”

Adam Lowry: Yes. You certainly can do that. I think one of the things that is important to recognize is that there are many different consumer habits out there. And it's harder to change consumer behavior than it is to redesign products. And so if you can actually redesign products, you can get people to adopt a more innovative and more sustainable format, you can keep people moving along to progressively more innovative and sustainable products. So you got to do both.

Greg Dalton: Pumping hand soap is more fun when it comes to --

[Laughter]

Adam Lowry: Well, I mean, to many consumers, it is. And it's also a better experience on your hands and things. So there are a lot of reasons why people use liquid hand soap. You've got to work with that, not against it necessarily.

Greg Dalton: Molly Morse, then we’ll go to audience questions. Molly.

Molly Morse: I was just going to say I think there are two confusing issues in terms of labeling. One is where did this material come from? Where did the carbon originate, that's in the packaging? And the other is what's going to happen to this material when you no longer need it? So those are two issues that can really confuse consumers. And clearer labeling is definitely needed.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. You just heard from Molly Morse, CEO of Mango Materials. Our other guests today are Bridgett Luther, President of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, Adam Lowry, co-founder of Method Products, the cleaning products company, and Keith Christman with the American Chemistry Council. I'm Greg Dalton.

Male Participant 1: Good evening. Great presentation. Thank you. You mentioned that there's enough aluminum on the planet to not have to mine anymore. Is there enough plastic on the planet to do the same thing?

Greg Dalton: Adam Lowry.

Adam Lowry: Well, nearly every single pound of plastic that humanity has ever produced is still here. Most of it is in the ground. And we can't practically get it back.

Plastic use is growing so it's growing a little bit. So no is the simple answer but the vast, vast majority of it, we actually could do with the plastic we already have on the planet if we have better ways of getting it back.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our next question. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant 1: Thank you all very much. It's been quite interesting however every time we hear these panels, we hear one thing; lots of plastic in landfills. Has anyone considered mining the landfills for all this plastic? It seems like that's where most of it is.

Greg Dalton: Bridgett Luther, you used to oversee the department. Is that economic?

Bridgett Luther: [Laughter] I'm laughing because we've had this conversation over and over again that there’s this -- we actually call our recycling program urban mining because I also oversaw all the mining industries in California. And there are ample opportunities to try to get stuff out and reuse it. We have lots of experts in the room who could talk about this much more than I can. And I would just encourage you to look at Mike Biddle’s Youtube video. And he's done a lot of study on this, and he's with us here tonight. He's with MBA Polymers and he's probably one of the world’s great experts on where we can get the next round of resources. So I would just encourage everyone here to look at Mike’s Youtube video.

Greg Dalton: Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant 2: One of the things I've heard quite a bit about is infrastructure. And you mentioned that the rest of the states in our country really need to get onboard with an infrastructure like we have in California.

How can we make the responsibility on those folks who are making these products to create the infrastructure to recycle these products and maybe focus our policy on requiring them to use the recycled material that they're creating?

Greg Dalton: So Bridgett Luther, there are some things where producers have to take back, computers, there's a charge for consumer electronics, et cetera. There are some closed loops there but plastic is so ubiquitous.

Bridgett Luther: Yes. Plastic is the hardest thing because they're so small and there's not that much value in it. But one of the things you do with the Cradle to Cradle certification program is when you design the product, you're actually thinking at the end of use. So have I developed the system that gives back whatever it is, whether it's a refrigerator or a car or a plastic bottle?

And the businesses start to get really involved with the getting back of these nutrients because it's really important because they want them back to put them into their next material. See, if Coke had been smart they would have said, “We should get all our bottles back so we won't have to make new bottles,” and they would have just sucked up all the recycled plastics on the planet. But they're not thinking about that. They're just thinking about getting you to drink that drink. They're not thinking about what's going to happen to that.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our next question.

Female Participant 3: My question is directed for Mrs. Luther. I'm a huge fan of your work and Cradle to Cradle mission. And I read The Upcycle in which William McDonough discussed stripping products of their plastic packaging and instead including displays in these stores so that people can simply get the product and leave. Have you done any of this work with the companies that you're currently working with?

Bridgett Luther: We don’t do the work with the companies. We just give them the idea. They do the work and then they tell us what they've done. But lots of companies are starting to think about this; what's going to happen at the end of use? So we have to start talking about end of life. And when you start doing that as a designer like the Method team has done, it just gets to be really dynamic and all kinds of fun things can happen.

The Herman Miller chair, the Aeron Chair, actually got developed because Herman Miller didn’t want to put foam in their chair. So they developed one of the fastest selling office chairs ever, the Aeron Chair, because in their designs -- so what's going to happen in this? Well, now we’re going to end up with all this foam. We don’t have anywhere to go. The end of use of that Herman Miller chair was a lot of super valuable materials that can be easily recycled.

Greg Dalton: Adam Lowry.

Adam Lowry: I think one of the keys to moving towards progressively more sustainable formats, and to your question, getting entirely out of plastic packaging altogether, is serial innovation. So I always say that the key to the innovation process is not necessarily technology and creativity and all of that. That's important but actually the most important part is adoption. You've got to get people to use it. And if people use that thing, that's cool, that's more sustainable, then that wave of consumer adoption gives that company the license to innovate again. And it's through a couple of steps like that that you can actually change entire industries. I don’t have time to go into it but we've actually done that with a couple of categories that we compete in and radically changed industries that are very stodgy in a very short period of time just through a couple of innovation steps but adoption is the key.

Female Participant 4: Yes. I don’t know if there's anything going on right now about -- businesses, they seem to be making an awful lot of products that are single use and small. An example is the little coffee cup things that you get. They're all over the place, you go to a dentist’s office, anywhere, and the whole concept of just making a pot of coffee, the whole concept of refills. And I don’t see anything in our government or in our environment that’s encouraging that. I see the opposite. I see mops. It used to be, like 10 years ago, you can just get a mop and mop the floor but now you've got to get Swiffer and throw things away and buy new things.

Greg Dalton: Thank you. Yes. Bridgett Luther, we live in a disposable society.

Bridgett Luther: We actually -- the espresso -- not plug it, but they're actually recyclable, we could actually take them back, and they thought that through. That's what makes it so neat. What's going to happen to that little coffee thing at the end of use? You can actually take your little coffee things back to the espresso store and they're recycling them and they're made out of aluminum which is highly recyclable.

Greg Dalton: I wonder how many really do but okay. Adam.

Adam Lowry: All I was going to say is that's just evidence that convenience can often produce behaviors that aren't necessarily the most sustainable. I don’t think we can try to make our lives a whole lot less convenient. I don’t think that's actually practical. I don’t think that that would create mass adoption. But what we can do is redesign those products to be more responsible which is, I think, the example you get.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about plastics and carbon at Climate One. Let's have our next question. Welcome.

Female Participant 5: Thank you. This has been an excellent forum. Something that's very frustrating to me and to my family when I go out of state to visit them, they very much want to recycle and they do their due diligence collecting the newspaper, collecting cans and bottles, and then they drive them once a month to a recycling center that they get a certain amount of cash for, pennies on the dollar. So I think they are probably indicative of people throughout the United States and that they're -- I think the people want to recycle. Why can't we make a stand here tonight, now with Climate One, to get all the other states onboard and recycle?

Greg Dalton: Bridgett Luther.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: We’re going to march to [crosstalk].

Bridgett Luther: March to D.C. to start the national recycling bill. Yes. Actually driving your stuff to recycling center is a way that started in California. So the fact that people are starting to see value in this and getting paid for it is really important. But there are lots of businesses in it too. It's not a trash truck, it's a resource truck. There are lots of valuable resources in those trucks. As more companies demand recycled plastic, then somebody in those states will actually say, “Oh, I should get that plastic back because Method will want it and whoever else will want it.”

Adam Lowry: Financing is key. The facility at Pier 96 here in San Francisco cost $40 million, the machine cost $40 million. Now, it's producing product that is now being sold but financing is key. You've got to find ways of creating long term income streams to defray the upfront investments.

Greg Dalton: And there are also commodity prices. Dave Steiner, the CEO of Waste Management was here a couple of years ago. And he realizes the economic value that he hauls away in those trucks everyday but it’s largely dependent on commodity prices for aluminum, paper, et cetera. When those fluctuate the economics are favorable or not and they're so volatile that it's tough to build a business. Let's have our next question at Climate One.

Male Participant 2: I wanted to address, shall we say, the short term economic incentives. Keith, you mentioned that there's basically more demand and supply for recycled plastics. And I guess part of that is that, as you say, there are films that can be recycled. Very few people know that. Bags can be recycled at stores. Yes, you can bring your bag back and maybe you get to feel good but you don’t get any money back for it. You do get money back if you bring your bottles. And so the people who roam the streets are picking up bottles but they're not picking up film, they're not picking up the other stuff that could be recycled.

So I guess one comment would be that recycling is third in the order for reason, that reduce is better and reuse is second, then recycle. But what is your stance on basically paying people to bring stuff back to have a usable return program for all the other stuff that they're not currently recycling?

Greg Dalton: Keith Christman.

Keith Christman: Well, I think there are some potential downsides to having everybody bring their stuff back instead of having a truck that goes and collects multiple recyclables rather than just one. And that downside is that there is a lot of carbon emissions with people making special trips to drop stuff off. However, some states have actually gotten rid of the Bottle Bill.

Delaware, for example, had a bottle deposit legislation in place and they found that they didn't have other recycling programs as a result. So instead they got rid of the statewide bottle program and replaced it with statewide curbside recycling. That is another thing to consider because right now you have people bringing back one product, and that sometimes brings one of the more valuable materials out of the recycling bin that people have at their house and can make it harder for recyclers to be profitable.

Greg Dalton: Keith Christman is the Managing Director for Plastics Markets at the American Chemistry Council. Let's have our next question at Climate One.

Stiv Wilson: Hi. My name is Stiv Wilson. I'm the Policy Director for the 5 Gyres Institute. And a lot of what we’re talking about tonight is recycling. And when I look at our policy agenda with 5 Gyres, we’re looking at what solution is actually going to address the problem. And recycling is a very small part of that. If we look at generation in this country, the average footprint of plastic per person in the U.S. is 326 pounds per person per year. That’s set to be upwards of 500 by 2020.

We talked about modest gains in recycling. Well, as a percentage of generation, that's actually really, really minimal. And if you talk about things like low density polyethylene or high density polyethylene, these have flat lined, or gone backwards. So when I look at our policy agenda, we say, “Yeah, ban the bag.” We say container deposits because do you know the number one barrier to a Cradle to Cradle strategy for the PET bottle is? It's container deposits. You can actually make a water bottle, a food grade water bottle out of a water bottle. And you have people like Nestle Waters looking at this now. And they say, “Yes. We have 50% recycled content.” The barrier to 100% is a container deposit. We could solve this problem overnight.

So I'm wondering we talk about recycling as a solution, are we really talking about the big picture solution or are we talking about a very small part of it? And shouldn't the conversation be more focused on source reduction? Thanks.

Greg Dalton: Thanks. Keith Christman.

Keith Christman: Absolutely. Actually that's a great point. I mean, the hierarchy is reduce, reuse, recycle for a reason. And we strongly support reducing, reusing and recycling plastics as well as other materials. I think one of the things that people should also recognize is when you look at plastics, one of their major benefits is reduction in the amount of material you use for plastic product compared to the alternative. You look at a truck, for example, a replacement of a running board from a metal running board to a plastic running board reduce the amount of material by 50% and results in just that one part in saving 2.7 million gallons of gasoline. So reducing is an important factor. And actually plastics can help achieve that both in automotive applications and in packaging. Reusing and recycling are also very important.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our next question. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant 6: Thank you. This is sort of a follow on to the last question. I'm really encouraged to hear the discussion about redesigning products to hear about starting from the beginning of the product because what we’re seeing in the marketplace right now is a growth of unrecyclable products and a growth of products that are either designed for the dump or what I would call built to be burned. It's not happening in much places in California but in many placed around the U.S. a lot of wastes still gets burned. And the American Chemistry Council and other industry actors push really hard for an increase in plastics and other parts of wastes being burnt. And that's a real problem for the communities who have to live with the toxic pollution from the burning of plastics and other wastes.

So my question is we’re hearing that we have a lot of policy solutions. We’re hearing that industry doesn’t want them. What's it going to take for us to get to a place where we can actually achieve the types of policy solutions that we need? We know we need them.

Greg Dalton: Keith Christman, does the industry support burning of plastics?

Keith Christman: Well, I think that there are a couple of things that are really exciting on the energy recovery front for plastics. Today, it's not just about burning when it comes to energy recovery. There are new processes to take plastics, put them into a system where it's not burned but you're able to recapture the fuel from it or recapture the raw materials and make them back into new fuel or new plastics.

A company in Oregon is doing that, for example, called Agilyx. And there are other companies around the world pursuing those processes. It's not burning technology. It's taking the plastic and breaking it back down to its original raw material so it can be reused again. And that's part of a solution. I think what we need is a wide range of solution including reducing, reusing, recycling, composting and energy recovery. All of those together would be a healthy part of the solution.

Greg Dalton: I think we actually reached out to Agilyx in building this program. We got a couple of minutes left for two more questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant 3: Adam, you mentioned that the onus to promoting change is on businesses. And I'm wondering what's different for Method as a certified benefit corporation in terms of how you conduct your business.

Adam Lowry: Yes. Just a quick background. We’re a certified benefit corporation. We’re also a benefit corporation. We’re incorporated as a benefit corporation in Delaware which just means that our directors and officers have fiduciary -- their fiduciary duty is expanded to include social and environmental benefit as well as economic. For us, it means that through everything that we do with the business, that we’re making sure that we’re trying to accrue value economically, socially and environmentally.

And so from a material basis, we put our material choices through the lens of what is going to maximize all of those things. That's why we look to technologies that are available today so that we can deploy them at scale because we’re a consumer products company that has a reasonable amount of scale. And then, of course, we’re constantly looking towards new technologies to say, “Is there a better one available?” If so, we migrate to it.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our last question. Welcome.

Female Participant 7: I'd like to follow up with some of the questions that I think the audience has brought up and just sort of the overall theme that has been coming up relating to infrastructure and the kind of lack of any hope of there being policies made on a national level or, I mean, could we say international level, to make these things happen.

And it's so amazing what you guys are doing to have the certification process for manufacturers. However, is there any discussion on generating policy that does require end of use responsibility on the manufacturing side? I think it was a really great question that the woman in the green shirt brought up about governments being so strapped at this point.

Greg Dalton: So Bridgett Luther, if you could wave your magic wand, one policy in Sacramento that would help this, what would you want?

Bridgett Luther: All the products have to get Cradle to Cradle certified.

[Laughter] [Applause] [Crosstalk]

Bridgett Luther: Well, if they did, they'd design, reuse and they'd designed with materials that won't kill us and they'll pay everybody a fair wage and they'll care about water and they'll move to renewable energy. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to do this work because I was sitting at Sacramento and I said, “We’re not going to get there the way we’re doing it” because as a regulatory community we sit at the end of the pipe all day long and we say, “How much stuff can we have in our air, our waters, ourselves before it will kill us.?”

And we will not get there with the regulations that are now because that's the way they're designed and that's the way they're implemented and that’s the way the companies get fined. And Cradle to Cradle goes all the way up and says, “Let's design products with systems and processes that don’t harm people and planet.” It's really up to businesses like Adam’s because he's right there with us and he's designing this incredible products that not only cleans like crazy but it's got this social benefit as well. And he's designing it with processes and he's completely renewable energy and he's done all this great stuff. You can't imagine the stuff he's done with his company.

And Molly too, I mean she's just -- she's got a Cradle to Cradle polymer and I just can't wait for it to scale because I'm going to push it out in any way that I can. And I just want the American Chemistry Council to say, “I'm with you Bridg.” So anyway --

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Sound like a proud mama there. Okay. We have to end it there. We've been talking about plastics at Climate One. Our guests are Bridgett Luther, President of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, Adam Lowry, Co-founder and Chief Greenskeeper at Method Products, Molly Morse, CEO Mango Materials, and Keith Christman, Managing Director for Plastics Markets at the American Chemistry Council. I'm Greg Dalton. Thank you for coming and listening to Climate One today.

[Applause]

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