emissions & pollution

Artificial Intelligence, Real Climate Impacts

BenTestani — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:11:39 +0000

Artificial Intelligence, Real Climate Impacts

04/19/2024

Artificial intelligence can do some pretty amazing things, including for the climate. But, as with most technology, there are significant trade offs. The energy used by AI is massive and growing.

Tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon are building enormous data centers to make AI possible. Karen Hao, a contributing writer for the Atlantic who also has an engineering degree from MIT, visited one of these data centers in Arizona. It was a 97 degree day, and the data center stretched on into the desert. Hao decided she would walk around it to get a visceral idea of how big it is. She says, “Within two legs of the rectangle. I just started feeling very, very heat exhausted and I'd run out of water. It had already taken me around 20, 25 minutes and I was like, I gotta get out of here.” Companies are making huge investments in giant data centers. Hao says Microsoft alone is spending around 10 billion a quarter now on data centers.

Most of the hype right now is around generative AI. Think: ChatGPT. As a matter of fact, the G in ChatGPT stands for generative. The basic idea is that AI is being fed our data to train models that generate more data like that. Karen Hao says, “It's taking our writing to generate more writing. It's taking our images to generate more images.”

But not all flavors of AI use the same amount of energy. Much of theAI that might benefit the reasons is referred to as predictive AI. Predictive AI tends to use existing data to help it make predictions, rather than generating new sentences or images the way generative AI does. For example: it might use our images to make a prediction about what's in another image. Hao says, “Like cancer detection systems or facial recognition systems.” And predictive AI uses far less energy. This is because predictive AI is trained on a specific task, and once it achieves the desired accuracy, its energy use falls dramatically.

Predictive AI is also being used to track emissions. Climate TRACE, an independent greenhouse gas emissions tracker backed by former Vice President Al Gore, is one such organization. Gavin McCormick, Co-Founder of Climate TRACE, says, “we can see that some steel facilities pollute about 10 times more emissions than others to produce the same product.” That data helped companies like GM and Tesla switch to steel factories that produced less emissions. McCormick says, “Our hope is that this is a way that data can make it kind of painless to reduce emissions.”

“AI is being used in all sorts of ways to facilitate climate action from things like helping us better forecast solar power on electric power grids in order to help us balance grids with large amounts of renewables,” says Priya Donti, Assistant Professor at MIT and Co-founder and Chair of Climate Change AI. Efficiency is one of the best ways to reduce carbon pollution. If we didn't need so much power, we wouldn't need to burn so much fossil fuel. With more efficiency we could switch to renewable energy more quickly. AI can help do that, even with simple tasks like optimizing heating and cooling systems in homes and buildings to save energy.

Nowcasting is a weather forecasting model that combines a description of the current state of the atmosphere and a short-term forecast. Amy McGovern, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma, says, “our current average [nowcasting] warning is about 15 minutes. Can you imagine if you could bring that up to 30 minutes or 60 minutes?” McGovern also says, “As our climate is changing, a lot of these extreme weather events are changing. And I think AI can be used to help us improve our prediction and understanding of these events and, and be able to weather them better.”

Guests

Karen Hao

Contributing Writer, The Atlantic

Gavin McCormick

Cofounder and Executive Director, WattTime; Cofounder, Climate TRACE

Priya Donti

Assistant Professor, MIT; Co-founder and Chair of Climate Change AI

Amy McGovern

Professor of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma

AI is taking water from the desert (theatlantic.com)

Artificial Intelligence is Booming - So is its Carbon Footprint (bloomberg.com)

Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (dl.acm.org)

Climate Change AI (climatechange.ai)

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.

Male AI Voice: I’m not Greg Dalton.

Female AI Voice: And I’m not Ariana Brocious.

Male AI Voice: But this is Climate One

Female AI Voice: Today’s episode is all about artificial intelligence and how it’s going to solve the climate crisis.

Male AI Voice: That’s right — how harnessing the amazing power of AI will lead all of humanity into a greener, cleaner world.

[music change ]

Ariana Brocious: Whow, it's so strange. The intonation is totally wrong.

Greg Dalton: What is that thing? That didn't sound like me.

Ariana Brocious: Also, that's not how we feel.

Greg Dalton: No, I'm not buying that hype at all of, you know, the AI is going to do wonderful things in the Bay Area. That AI hype is just everywhere.

Ariana Brocious: And yeah, there is a lot of hype. There's a lot of hype around what AI can do, right? Artificial intelligence has a lot of powerful applications and we're starting to see some of those right now.

Greg Dalton: A lot of hype and a lot of fear, particularly around computers taking jobs from knowledge workers. A lot of technological displacement has been factory workers, blue collar jobs. Now it's coming for us, white collar workers.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, it is. It's concerning for a lot of people, though. I will say selfishly, from what we just heard, I think that radio host jobs are safe for the time being, Greg. I think we still sound pretty human, so that's good.

Greg Dalton: Maybe true for me for however many working years I have. For younger people like you, I'm less sure. My bigger worries are around AI's impacts on the climate. No, I do care about your career.

Ariana Brocious: Thanks, Greg. Yeah, there are climate impacts and they cut both ways. And as we'll hear on the show today, AI can help optimize the electric grid, make heating and cooling buildings more efficient, and do really cool things like detect where emissions are coming from. And it's able to complete these assessments in a fraction of the time it would take for a normal human.

Greg Dalton: Like most things in life, there are trade offs. The energy use of AI is massive and growing. A recent study estimates that in just a few years The extra energy need will equal whole countries the size of Sweden or Argentina.

Ariana Brocious: That's unbelievable. That is a lot of power.

Greg Dalton: I'm personally terrified that AI's insatiable power demand will more than outweigh any societal benefits.

Ariana Brocious: And that's the central question of today's episode. How do we weigh AI's environmental costs versus benefits?

Greg Dalton: And it's a complex topic we'll do our best to unpack for you today.

Ariana Brocious: So we're going to start with the fact that not all AI is created equal. There are different kinds of AI tailored for different goals.

Greg Dalton: And before we started working on this, I lumped all AI together. I thought AI was like Siri or ChatGPT, where you put in a question and then AI gives you an answer in written or spoken form.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, it's still a really new field for most of us, and we're just kind of getting up to speed. ChatGPT uses what's called generative AI, and that's actually what the G stands for. And GPT stands for, so it's supposed to generate new sentences or new images. And this is what has my journalist and copywriter friends really scared, right? Because it's kind of coming for their, their jobs, their work. There's also predictive AI, which uses existing data to do things like predict the weather or detect cancer in a mammogram.

Greg Dalton: Predictive AI uses far less energy than generative AI, and it's also probably where the most useful climate applications are.

Ariana Brocious: Right, you can think about the climate applications of better knowing the weather, right? That's going to be increasingly useful in the years ahead. So this balance of whether AI will be good or bad for the climate will probably depend on what kind of AI we're talking about and how it's being used.

Greg Dalton: To help us get a better idea of the overall AI picture, We want to start today's episode with Karen Howe. She's a contributing writer for the Atlantic who also has an engineering degree from MIT. These days, her writing focuses on the intersection of AI and society, and her reporting has taken her deep into the heart of artificial intelligence, including to the huge computing facilities that make it run.

Karen Hao: I'd never been to a data center before, um, and I really wanted to see it in person. And right before I went, I actually was speaking with a scholar, Mel Hogan, who had, has been writing about data centers for a long time. 10 years and I was asking her, Oh, like how big is the data center going to be? Like, what should I be expecting? And she was like, Oh, when I first started writing about data centers, I used football fields as a comparison. and now football fields don't make sense anymore. Now it's like university campuses.

Greg Dalton: Wow.

Karen Hao:and so when I arrived at the corner of this data center campus, it was like, I was in the middle of this really kind of desolate area within Arizona where there's farm fields on one side and then there's kind of just desert land, for miles and miles and miles. and when I stepped out, it was like 97 degrees and it was, that was actually the coldest, coldest day of that week. and the first thing that I thought was, well, let me try walking around the status center just to get a bodily sense of how big this is, because I could see it stretching out further than I could see. But I couldn't really, you know, when you're in a place that there's not really a lot of landmarks, you can't really assess like, how large is this space that you're in? So I just started walking and thinking, Okay, I'm just going to time myself and see how long it takes me to walk around the whole thing. And it did not work. Within,two legs of the, of the, um, rectangle, I just started feeling very, very heat exhausted, and I'd run out of water. It had already taken me around 20, 25 minutes, and I was like, I gotta get out of here. I'm gonna pass out if I don't leave. And it was, it was a really stark kind of illustration of how big these things are and also where we're actually building these giant silicon monstrosities. Like we are choosing quite intense, hot, dry areas to build these things.

Greg Dalton: So I got, I got to ask, why did they build this thing in the Arizona desert?

Karen Hao: So Arizona has actually become a really popular place for data centers. and part of the reason is because of its proximity to California. It also has cheap land. It has very importantly, a large enough utility company, to provide the type of infrastructure that you need to deliver the energy density, to a data center. And also it doesn't have earthquakes, it doesn't have floods. Like Arizona, other than the heat, has a lot of other things going for it. But of course the heat and the lack of water, and the sheer amount of energy that data centers are now requiring also makes Arizona sort of a controversial. place to have something like this.

Greg Dalton: And you've written that Microsoft alone is on pace to build between 50 and 100 new data centers each year for the foreseeable future. How much of that growth is due to AI?

Karen Hao: A significant amount of that growth is due to AI. Of course, we can't fully ascertain because these companies, and Microsoft in particular, does not actually have any transparency into the amount of AI growth that they're experiencing and what share of their data center growth is driving or supporting the AI development and AI use, but you can just see kind of from the historical patterns for Microsoft that once they made this all encompassing commitment to support it. Open AI, which is the main driver of the AI revolution right now, the amount that Microsoft has been spending on data centers has dramatically increased. So they're spending around 10 billion a quarter now.

Greg Dalton: So AI is not just one thing, yet people talk about it as it is. You know, how do you define different, the main categories of AI?

Karen Hao: Yeah, this is a great point. AI has many different technologies. and right now we're seeing this huge wave of what we're calling generative AI technologies. And that, generative AI, you can boil it down to the idea that it's just taking a lot of our data, to train models that generate more data like that. So it's taking our writing to generate more writing. It's taking our images to generate more images. But before that, there were what we now call predictive AI technologies, which is just taking our data to then make predictions about the world. so it might take our images to make a prediction about what is in another image or what people might may have heard of before is things like cancer detection systems or facial recognition systems. These are all of the category of predictive AI, where you're just trying to identify and classify something in the world.

Greg Dalton: And is there a meaningful difference in energy consumption between generative and predictive AI?

Karen Hao: The way that AI is being developed has completely changed. So before, when you're talking about predictive AI, you start with a problem, like, I want to detect cancer in this MRI scan, and then you collect data that's very well scoped to solve that particular problem. You train an AI model to do that specific thing, and you measure it on a benchmark that is to measure that performance. So you, you will ultimately do all the work and then you might develop an AI system that can do 99% accuracy on identifying breast cancer in an MRI scan, for example. and because it is like very narrowly and well scoped as a problem, the energy consumption is significantly less than what we're doing now. Now with generative ai. when you try to teach a system to be able to generate. any kind of writing or any kind of image, the sheer amount of data that you are feeding into these systems has already dramatically increased orders of magnitude. and we see stories about how these companies are running out of data on the internet to consume because of the sheer data imperative of these technologies. And once you have that much data, you also have a far larger AI model. And that means the amount of energy that goes into training it and also running it after it's finished developing has dramatically increased multiple fold.

Greg Dalton: And you, you said that Microsoft has been the primary vector for conflating the kind of AI that can be good for climate solutions, like optimizing the grid, maybe predicting weather, with the type of AI that like chat GPT is the greater villain when it comes to energy use, as you've just been describing. what do you think about Microsoft conflating the different types of, you know, sort of good energy, good AI and energy, bad AI?

Karen Hao: Yeah, I think what Microsoft has done that's quite clever, I guess you could say, is they Talk about AI as though it's one thing and they'll go to these, these forums like the World Economic Forum or COP, and they'll say, it is critical to accelerate the advancement of AI to combat climate change to make sure that we attain sustainability. And if you go into the weeds, what they're talking about, is there are many types of predictive AI technologies that are in fact great at optimizing, um, the grid to make sure that as more electric vehicles plug into the grid, you actually can distribute the power in a way that doesn't affect the, the grid resilience too much or they're talking about optimizing the energy consumption of a building to make sure that it drops by 40 or even 60%. But when they say accelerating the advancement of AI, what people register in the public is they think that they're talking about something like ChatGPT, because that is what Microsoft is supporting the development of right now, and so they think, oh, we need more ChatGPTs, we need more generative AI, we really need to double down on this in order to solve climate change. And that's actually not at all, they are not talking about the same thing. They're talking about a fundamentally different category of AI technologies that might be helpful. And they're using that as a cover to then allow or excuse the kind of investments that they are pumping into a much more energy consumptive version of AI.

Greg Dalton: I usually think I've thought about Microsoft as a climate leader. They were early to have an internal carbon price. They used to have people track the flights they took. They said they were going to zero out the carbon emissions of the entire history of the company. I think Microsoft's been a pretty legit climate leader. Is the pursuit of AI putting that at risk?

Karen Hao: That is absolutely what I heard from Microsoft employees, both current and former. There are a lot of employees that are very deeply concerned from what they're seeing within the company, and they think that there was a time when Microsoft was taking remarkable strides and pushing the industry forward, in terms of sustainability commitments, but that now, the imperative to support this AI development, because it is just so profitable and it's done wonders for Microsoft's share price, is starting to consume the original commitments in sustainability.

Greg Dalton: Right. And you also quote Sam Altman, who said at Davos that quote, we still don't appreciate the energy needs of this technology, end quote, and he then goes on to seem to suggest that we need an energy breakthrough such as fusion. So we're building these things that are going to need this energy supply that doesn't yet exist. We're creating these. I'm just getting all worked up here talking with you about how we're creating these beasts and the implications of what's being created and how it seemed to be that the seduction of AI and the profits is taking Microsoft off course of its sustainability commitments,

Karen Hao: And not just Microsoft, I think the entire tech industry, Google, Amazon, all of these companies also made sustainability commitments at one point. and that also did wonders for their share price. They were rewarded for that in financial markets for making these really strong commitments and they were rewarded in their brand, for making these strong commitments. And now all of them are in this race to the bottom to basically lay down as many data centers as they can to support, a technology, a version of AI, generative AI, that still has not fully demonstrated clear value to people, proportional to the amount of resources that it uses.

Greg Dalton: Right. Well, we've lots of hype cycles from Silicon Valley. They don't pan out the way the tech bros promise. Um, so. Do you ever get angry reporting on this?

Karen Hao: yeah, whenever I, I mean, recently, there was this article from The Information scooping the fact that Microsoft is sketching out plans to build a data center that would cost 100 billion, just a single data center that would cost 100 billion, and it would be the most expensive, and the largest and the most powerful data center that has ever been built in the history of humanity. And just seeing this kind of headline, it, it make, it does make me angry because I'm like, what are we doing here? Have, has no one noticed what we are allowing these companies to do? Are we just going to continue sleepwalking into this future where we end up with no energy or we end up consuming more and more and more and more fossil fuels into our oblivion? And whenever I, I get angry, my husband's always like, take that energy, convert it, and write it into your next story. Like, keep doing what you're doing. And, um, and that's what keeps me motivated. But it is, it can be kind of disheartening and demoralizing because sometimes I'm writing these stories and I'm like, is anyone paying attention? Like, we are it. in a massive planetary crisis right now. And yet we're still just talking about, ooh, like a hundred billion dollar data center. Wow. So powerful. So cool. Like what, where? Yeah. It's just, it's like really unfathomable to me.

Greg Dalton: So, not all flavors of AI are the same. Generative AI, like ChatGPT, uses a lot more energy than predictive AI, which is trying to answer more specific questions with smaller sets of data. How do you personally balance AI's potential for reducing the climate crisis with its potential to make it a whole lot worse?

Karen Hao: There are so many AI technologies that we already have that could improve things from an energy and climate perspective, like we already have algorithms that reduce the energy consumption of a building and optimize it, or we already have technologies that can optimize the grid to bring more renewables onto the grid. We should just be more clear eyed about the differences between the different AI technologies and where we should be applying what.

Greg Dalton: Mm hmm. Karen Howe, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us on Climate One.

Karen Hao: Thank you so much for having me.

Greg Dalton: Coming up: Researchers are using AI to help track emissions, and to see who is being dishonest about their pollution …

CLIP: The type of misinformation we are actually seeing is typically corporate.

A really disproportionate share comes from oil and gas companies.

Greg Dalton: How watchdogs can use AI. That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Ariana Brocious Please help us get people talking more about climate by sharing this episode with a friend. And we’d love to know what you think of the show. Please give us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device – and it really helps people find the show. Thanks!

Ariana Brocious: This is Climate One. I'm Arianna Brocious. AI use is growing and growing. That means it needs more energy, more resources, and produces more emissions. Yet, it's also being used to track emissions. One of the groups using AI in this way is called Climate Trace. It's an independent greenhouse gas emissions tracker backed by former Vice President Al Gore. Their data is available to everyone for free, and the results they've published in just the last few years have created a whole new level of staggering transparency. Polluters who are able to mask their emissions through their own reporting or misinformation campaigns can no longer lie and hide. And even honest players have more accountability tools at their disposal. Gavin McCormick is co-founder of Climate Trace. I asked him how AI is making emissions tracking on a large scale possible, and what results he's seeing.

Gavin McCormick: One of the things that has happened for a long time in climate change is we've had good monitoring of the total emissions in the atmosphere. We've had pretty good monitoring at a country level of what's going on, but the difference between what's the total industrial output of China versus what is this factory's carbon footprint, is it's way more actionable. So just to give you one among many examples, we've been working with a bunch of companies who buy a lot of steel and we can see that some steel facilities pollute about 10 times more emissions than others to produce the same product. So now that we have data like this, we've been able to help a lot of companies like Tesla and GM, start to buy steel from steel factories that were really clean, but actually had more capacity. And our hope is that this is a way that data can make it kind of painless to reduce emissions because nobody had to go build a new clean steel factory to get more steel. We're just using what we already have smarter.

Ariana Brocious: So shifting the sourcing to a source that is less greenhouse gas intensive, uh, or emitting. I was recently at an oil and gas conference and there was a lot of discussion about methane emissions in particular, and the rise of more monitoring like climate trace. And, my guess is that big industries are concerned and aware that they're now going to be monitored more closely. And so they may need to rein in some of their practices. But when we talked before, you also mentioned that there are just sort of unknown emissions, even by companies or, um, practices that may be trying to kind of keep their emissions in check. So tell me a bit about what you found when you've been able to point source these emissions.

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, one of my favorite examples is landfills. So landfills turn out to be a surprisingly significant source of emissions. The biggest thing we've found using satellites to look from space is there's just a lot more landfills worldwide than were commonly known. So we've compared to a lot of nations inventories of landfills, and in some cases there's four times more than were known. What I think is interesting about landfills, it's not like anyone was trying to hide those emissions. They were just kind of forgotten. And so I think one of the most interesting things data does is it doesn't just answer the question that you thought to ask, it sort of says, what emissions are you maybe not paying attention to that, uh, maybe you're not opposed to doing better.

Ariana Brocious: So that's great. That's a great example. And then let's return to this idea of the sort of keeping people honest, you know, for lack of a better word. So how has the data that Climate Trace has been gathering helped, industries or countries maybe from a regulatory side, be able to better track and monitor emissions.

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, so, we've worked, for example, with one country that did not know how, uh, intensive its own oil and gas sector was in terms of emissions. I can't promise that the next step is they're going to clean it up, but I can tell you that the regulators literally had no idea, and we were able to quietly, behind the scenes, inform them that there's a lot more methane coming out of their facilities than they thought. We worked with another country, who, uh, suspected that the states of that country were lying to the federal government about their own emissions, and the federal government was interested in cracking down on emissions, and what we were able to do was give them sort of objective third party validation to which of their states were probably giving them accurate data, and which of their states maybe were fudging some numbers. We will never know behind the scenes what the next step is, but we can tell you that a year later that country announced some pretty significant environmental policies, and we like to think we might have had a hand in that.

Ariana Brocious: Cool. Okay. So landfills, as you were talking about, are a huge source of methane. Another big source is feedlots and dairies, particularly here in the US. There's a lot. When we look at a country like the US and these sources, are there any kind of national inventories of emissions data for those industries that this is complementing, checking, and so forth?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, it's a mix. So we've really seen different countries are in different places. So, for example, for factory farms, the country worldwide that does it best is Uruguay. They have a really, really good inventory of every cow in the country. A country that does it really badly is the United States. Where, uh, for political reasons, uh, there's been a lot of pressure to actually forbid the government from keeping, the federal government from keeping a detailed inventory of factory farms and their emissions. That's fairly complicated. But the United States actually is quite good at monitoring, uh, transparently power plants, which other countries don't do very well. And we see patterns like that all the time.

Ariana Brocious: So you're saying, just to underscore this, that the US prohibits the collection of emissions data from factory farms, from large dairies and, and feedlots.

Gavin McCormick: The EPA is not allowed to have a list, and that is clearly not a scientific, that is clearly a political decision.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, interesting. Okay. so. This episode is about the role of artificial intelligence. Climate Trace went from publishing data about thousands of emitters to 350 million emitters in just over a year. How did AI enable that?

Gavin McCormick: So AI, and really all software is like this, but AI is a good example, really has this property where it can take a long time to make a model, but then running that model many, many times is actually quite easy. So it took us more years to set up the ability to monitor a facility from space. Then it took us to go towards more than half of global facilities, and we're hoping this year to more or less finish the job.

Ariana Brocious: So we've talked on this show about the energy demands of AI, and the concerns around how much it can consume. And when we talked before, you were very helpful in sort of explaining that there are differences in where the power is coming from, how clean it might be at any given time. and then also the sort of power needs of different aspects of AI implementation. So you were just describing building the tool. And from my limited understanding, that takes a lot of power, right? Whereas maybe running it doesn't. So could you unpack that a bit, the sort of complexities behind the concern around AI's energy usage?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah. So first of all, I think that energy usage is the environmental issue here. We as a society are using so much more AI now. All signs are pointing towards more and more. And it's really that electricity consumption that, uh, could cause such environmental harm. And in general, the pattern of AI is training a model is very, very electricity intensive, whereas using a model, not necessary, very electricity intensive. Kind of similar to building a factory is harder than using a factory. and so what I think is really interesting there is that, uh, that means that in many cases you have an enormous amount of electricity consumption at a particular time. And then kind of like a little dribble of electricity consumption later. And, the carbon footprint of that totally depends on, well, what time was it? Was it a time when the solar panels were shining and the wind was blowing and there were relatively clean power plants on the grid? Or was it a time when it was peak energy demand and they were running extra oil plants and coal plants to run that power? You could have a radically different carbon footprint for the exact same AI model training, um, which is kind of a new thing. We're not used to thinking about electricity that way as a society.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah. So you're a co-founder of climate trace, which is mostly what we've been talking about. You're also co-founder and executive director of Watt Tme, which is a separate nonprofit that helps people in companies and governments slash their emissions. So tell me how the work of Watt Time can address some of this, you know, less carbon intensive energy sourcing on the grid.

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, so we're a non profit trying to raise awareness at this point that, um, Watt time you use electricity really affects its carbon footprint. And so a great example of that is, if you have data, well, when was the wind blowing? When was the sun shining? What is the moment that they were throwing away surplus renewable energy because nobody was using it? And if you train your AI models at that time so much cleaner, then you can Then running the exact same model at another time, and it's actually the same way that you reduce the carbon footprint of charging an electric vehicle, charging a battery, running a thermostat. But what's particularly interesting about AI is so much of the electricity consumption happens in a really short time, and you can even do crazy things like you could even choose to, you know, train a model in a different location. So, we're also working with companies like Microsoft to say, hey, if it's a really clean grid in France right now, and a really dirty grid in Germany right now, uh, maybe you want to run that compute job in France today. And that's a very different way of thinking about energy than we're used to.

Ariana Brocious: This sort of gets at this like meta idea of, you know, AI being used to make AI better. Um, is that in practice happening? Are we seeing AI being implemented to make itself cleaner?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah. We are now using A. I. to figure out how to run A. I. to have a lower carbon footprint. and there's this wonderful, eat your own dog food component of it.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah. As we know, there's been commitments made by countries all around the world to reduce their emissions by certain targets to hope to meet the Paris Accord goals of keeping global warming under 1. 5 degrees. how are governments using Climate TRACE’s information so far?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, the main thing that we've heard so far is it is difficult to affect the official system of country. There's often years of inertia in the ways that the books are kept, but a lot of what actually happens in the Paris agreement is about reputation. So the secretary general of the UN in particular has been very insistent that having an open transparent data set like Climate TRACE that makes it really clear which countries are lying about what really changes the politics in a hurry. One thing I'm delighted to share is that the outcome of that has been different than we expected. So we went into this thinking that we were going to find a bunch of liars and that there was going to be really awkward conversations at the next COP. That's really not what happened. So one of our biggest findings is that the vast majority of countries have been much more honest with each other. Then the climate negotiators themselves thought. And so oddly, the political implications have been a higher level of trust between countries trying to figure out whether they want to kind of like, uh, trust each other more and commit to deeper cuts, which is not the way we expected this project to go, but that's science.

Ariana Brocious: That's great. I mean, that's, uh, yeah, counterintuitive, but, nice to hear that the countries are sort of, being honest about what they're doing. Yeah.

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, you know, trust is the foundation of the Paris Agreement. I think it's easy to, a lot of folks kind of think of it as like, there's some set of rules or some cop who's going to force us to cut emissions. There's nothing like that. Yeah. Yeah. The only thing the U.N. has is reputation and trust, and it turns out if we have that, that really matters.

Ariana Brocious: hmm. So we touched on the concerns around energy consumption of AI. There are some other concerns as well. One of those is misinformation. So my brain goes to things that got a lot of attention, you know, like videos that have been edited, um, to make somebody sound different or to say something different than they actually did, um, or images that have been altered to misrepresent something. But when we're speaking about misinformation, particularly in the climate space that is aided by AI, what does that look like?

Gavin McCormick: In this case, I actually think that AI is more of a solution than a problem. I think in the specific space of climate, we've been up against misinformation for a long time. This goes back to the 70s. And the general playbook is just kind of obfuscate, deny, pretend nothing's happening. And AI that can just show you real imagery, not tampered with, of what actually happened. It really tends to empower those seeking truth more than those seeking, um, the opposite. And so as a general rule, I'm actually not terribly worried about misinformation from AI in the climate space, although it probably is a big problem in other fields.

Ariana Brocious: So you, you feel that way because you think that the power of AI, it can, validate truthful data,

Gavin McCormick: Yeah. And I think one of the things that is really interesting is the only place I am seeing some misinformation is As it gets harder and harder to deny the real world physical emissions, we're seeing more corporate shell games on saying, Ah, those emissions might be happening in the real world, but due to some funny accounting rule, they're not my fault. They're not my problem.

Ariana Brocious: or I've offset them over here.

Gavin McCormick: or I've offset them over here. My favorite new trick is one company is trying to cite data centers, the ones powering AI near nuclear power plants or windmills because they argue that that makes them clean. That doesn't do anything for the windmill or the nuclear power plant.

Ariana Brocious: Right, right, right. Unless they're connected directly to it, which they probably are not.

Gavin McCormick: Right. Which they never are.

Ariana Brocious: Well, speaking of the energy consumption, How concerned are you about the actual amount of energy that AI is going to continue to consume?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah. So this is another area where trying to follow the data, I reached a conclusion that is not what I originally would have expected. So I think the volume is going to be large, but also I am really seeing serious activity by most AI companies to, to really try to power it with renewable energy and it helps the renewable energy so much cheaper now. So I actually think as a society we are doing pretty well on the carbon from AI and people actually maybe should be relaxing about it a little bit. I do think that other industries like Bitcoin are very different. We've noticed a real difference in, you know, if Bitcoin and AI both use a bunch of electricity, how much are different companies trying to power it from clean sources or not? It's Bitcoin where I'm seeing more powering it on coal and oil, and in AI I'm seeing a lot of powering it on solar and wind.

Ariana Brocious: Interesting. Well, and also with Bitcoin, it's sort of in an exponentially more energy needed to crack the code, right? As it, I don't think AI works quite the same way. So, how do you personally balance AI's potential for mitigating the climate crisis with some of these risks we've talked about?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, so we actually just, last week, tried the exercise of counting our own carbon footprint. It turned out that, we can measure about 50 million tons of emissions that we've reduced and something like three tons of emissions that our AI carbon footprint has caused. So it's not zero, but that ratio is pretty staggering. so we actually concluded that flying is a bigger source of carbon footprints for our team than all the AI compute we use. And, I don't mean to say we shouldn't be cleaning up AI, but I do think that, when you actually look at the numbers, particularly given how much of it is powered on clean energy, it's probably not as bad as you think.

Ariana Brocious: And then hopefully there's this potential for continued optimization of these other renewable energy systems that we want, to actually improve the grid and emissions writ large, right?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, and so, you know, a different category is AI is also very much used by the coal industry and the oil industry. And what generally happens is that doesn't get talked about, whereas the AI power of the wind industry gets talked about. So I couldn't tell you how many extra tons of pollutions are we going to have because the oil industry has better technology now, but that's probably a large number too.

Ariana Brocious: Mm hmm. Yeah, that's a good point. Gavin McCormick is co-founder and executive director of WattTime and co-founder of Climate TRACE. Gavin, thanks so much for joining us on Climate One.

Gavin McCormick: Thanks so much for having me, this was fun.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about the climate implications of artificial intelligence. Coming up, we know that burning fossil fuels continues to amplify fires, floods and droughts. Can AI help protect us?

Amy McGovern: A lot of these extreme weather events are changing, and I think AI can be used to help us improve our prediction and understanding of these events and be able to weather them better.

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

Ariana Brocious: This is Climate One. I'm Arianna Brocious. One of the best ways to reduce planet warming emissions is through efficiency, basically using less energy. If we didn't need so much power, we wouldn't need to burn so much fossil fuel. And predictive AI can help us understand how to do that. Priya Donti is an assistant professor at MIT and co-founder and chair of Climate Change AI. A global nonprofit trying to foster the responsible use of AI for impactful climate action. Her own research focuses on optimizing the country's electric grid and maximizing efficiency throughout our energy system. She sees countless ways AI is already being used to advance the cause.

Priya Donti: AI is being used in all sorts of ways to facilitate climate action, from things like helping us better forecast solar power on electric power grids in order to help us balance grids with large amounts of renewables, to helping us better optimize things like heating and cooling systems in buildings in order to improve their efficiency by taking into account things like the occupancy of the building, the temperature of the building, in order to improve things like the, thermal comfort of the building while still reducing the overall energy use, to helping us do things like accelerate the discovery of next generation clean technologies like batteries by helping us to analyze the outcomes of past experiments and then suggest which experiments we should try next, but also helping us adapt to the effects of a changing climate through things like extreme event forecasting, through flood forecasting and flood mapping, as well as strengthening things like, policy, education, and finance by helping us get more fine grained information to provide an input to those kinds of strategies.

Ariana Brocious: So one area I'm really fascinated by that I know you work in is grid optimization. Specifically looking at that area. Can you tell us a bit more how AI is being used?

Priya Donti: When we think about our power grid, it's the system that needs to be maintained at this sort of exact balance between supply and demand at every single moment in time. And so AI is being used in a couple of ways across this. So one, is sort of helping us to forecast things like solar power or electricity demand. So in the case of solar power, for instance, what you would do is you say, I might have some historical data about how much solar power was produced. And related to that is information about things like how sunny was it? Were there clouds overhead? And I can basically take in the same kind of information. Maybe I have a forecast of how sunny it'll be. Maybe I have a video of how clouds are moving overhead. And I can try to learn patterns in that underlying data to figure out, in the past, how did it relate to how much solar power I actually got, and then use that same kind of relationship between the data to make predictions in the future of if the cloud cover looks a certain way and the sun looks a certain way, what will my solar power output look like?

Ariana Brocious: So that makes total sense to me. I'm also thinking about applications of balancing that grid, And that is currently handled by humans, right? With the help of computers and software. But is there a significant leap forward that can be made with artificial intelligence in this space? Or is it just kind of making better what we already do?

Priya Donti: Yeah, So right now what tends to happen is that a power system operator has sort of a view of what the power generators are on the system as well as some aggregated notion of what demand will be, and as well as some notion of what the solar power production will be and the wind power production will be. And then they figure out how to kind of control your controllable power generators, like your coal plants, your natural gas plants, your nuclear plants, in order to balance the overall system. And this is done, as you said, by humans who are aided by computers. So there's some optimization algorithm that is running, that's actually taking in information about the system and its physics and the costs of different power generators, and actually spitting out a suggestion of how you should actually schedule your power generators. And then that might be modified by humans based on knowledge they might have that's not in the system, or based on considerations like, okay, 24 hours ahead, there's a different person at a different desk who thinks about one hour ahead, and so you need to coordinate with each other. and there are a couple of ways that this kind of needs to change going forward. So one is that the computational tools that power grid operators are using today, they are not scaling to meet some of the kind of requirements that we have for managing a grid that needs to be managed faster because you have more and more variability from things like renewables and also at larger scale because you have more devices, more batteries, more electric vehicles, more things that are plugged into the grid that you have to account for. and there are ways that AI and machine learning can help to speed up some of the algorithms behind some of those computational tools in order to enable them to run faster and deal with a larger scale system.

Ariana Brocious: So there's a lot of discussion right now about AI. It's kind of viewed as this next big thing. There's excitement. There's also a lot of trepidation around how much energy it uses or can use. And I'm wondering how much you personally worry about the energy demands of AI.

Priya Donti: Yeah. So I definitely worry about this, and not necessarily because I necessarily know that the impact is going to be big or small. But precisely because we don't know, and as a result, we actually don't, I think, have as good a sense of what specific levers we can really be taking in order to address some of the growing computational impacts. I mean, fundamentally, we have to drive every single sector. to net zero when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. That includes AI, and so we need to know what's going on underlying in terms of how compute loads are being run and things like that in order to do something about it.

Ariana Brocious: Another aspect of the potential downsides of AI revolve around its use in misinformation, particularly in the climate space. And I'm curious what your thoughts are there. And if you've seen any positive developments in, um, maybe limiting the spread of, of AI generated climate misinformation.

Priya Donti: Yeah, climate misinformation is something that I, again, really do worry about. I mean, climate misinformation and sort of misinformation in general, its effects on how we relate to each other, how we relate to facts, and that the broader implications of that for not just climate action, but many other kind of aspects across society. so I think this is another example of a place where you have an algorithm that's embedded in some broader context. So, for example, Often social media platforms are optimizing for clicks or engagement, and incendiary content tends to be more engaging in various ways, and so the algorithms underlying learn that. It's like, okay, you're optimizing for engagement, so what is more engaging? And you kind of tend to trend towards more incendiary or potentially false content. And so that's, I think, really concerning, but something that sort of, in theory, a change in the thing you're optimizing for can help with. There are some ways that AI is being used, I think, to, to positively help with this issue. So things like, um, AI is used for, in some cases, misinformation detection. and then as a result if you detect something that might be misinformation that gives you the opportunity to do something like annotate it and kind of display that information to people. And so I think there are some good applications here but I think fundamentally without changing the objectives of the platforms that AI algorithms are accelerating, that misinformation is going to be a huge issue and changing objectives, in a situation where engagement, is ads, is money, and that's how these companies are profiting. You really have to change the underlying incentives in order to really change what's going on here.

Ariana Brocious: Tricky. So overall, how do you balance the potential risks of applying artificial intelligence to climate challenges with the potential benefits?

Priya Donti: Yeah, so fundamentally, when it comes to AI, there's an extent to which the cat is out of the bag, right? It is used across society, and I think while, I understand the rationale for doing things like saying, let's halt the development of AI, given that it's accelerating systems across society and disproportionately accelerating, again, things for people with money and power already, I do think the cat is out of the bag there. And so then the question is, you know, how do you make sure to sort of steer the way society uses AI in the potentially most beneficial directions? And I think that has to do with a combination of how do you get people who are, first of all, like working in AI. to actually leverage those tools for beneficial causes like climate action and sort of channel that interest, make it an attractive and viable career to be someone who works in climate using those skills. But then making sure that we don't just think of, AI be used for good as layering a couple of AI for good applications on top of business as usual, but we really need to think about how we actually manage our business as usual as well.

Ariana Brocious: Priya Donti is an assistant professor at MIT and co founder and chair of Climate Change AI. Priya, thank you so much for joining us on Climate One.

Priya Donti: Absolutely. Thank you.

Greg Dalton: We know that weather is becoming more and more extreme as the planet heats up. That extreme weather has a real human cost, especially in poor areas. Places that don't have the resources to protect themselves from the worst of the damage. What if AI could help make weather predictions more accurate and make them sooner? That's what I wanted to talk about with Amy McGovern. She's a professor of both computer science and meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. She researches developing trustworthy AI for severe weather.

Amy McGovern: I want AI to be able to make a positive difference in the world. I want it to be able to save lives and save property. And my personal experience with weather isn't just living in Oklahoma, although I think I get every single piece of weather in Oklahoma that I got anywhere else I ever lived. We just get it all at once and sometimes in the same day. And because you experience it every year and particularly every spring, everybody knows that. So, oh, today's the day, you know, and we're, we're worried about the hail. We're all cleaning our garage out. We're getting our shelters clean. We're getting our cars fixed up. We had a storm come through about three years ago, came through town, destroyed all the roofs on the north side of town and all of the cars that were out. Because you're talking about like baseballs that came down and just destroyed all the glass. We're on roof number four in nineteen and a half years.

Greg Dalton: Wow, How is AI improving weather predictions with all this volatility around the country?

Amy McGovern: AI is being used to improve weather predictions. across a wide, wide variety of predictions, right? So you're talking about severe weather and we can talk about that specifically, like trying to improve the predictions multiple days in advance so that we could tell you, you know, eight to 10 days in advance, for example, that there's likely to be severe hail so that you could start to think about your emergency preparedness preparations. Those probably don't matter so much to the individual homeowner, but imagine you're an airline, and you know that, you know, a large chunk of the area where your planes are gonna be is under the place where there might be four inch hail. Planes don't like four inch hail for the record. Um, so you'd like to have them out. And if you have 30 planes parked somewhere overnight and there's likely to be storms coming through, you can't fly them all out in five minutes. That doesn't work that way. So you know, those kinds of operations. We had a discussion with a car manufacturer who was looking to get forecasts both multiple days in advance and then they wanted multiple hours in advance, which is another place AI can help. And then AI can help with the now casting scale, which is trying to help us, you know, our current average warning is about 15 minutes. Can you imagine if you could bring that up to 30 minutes or 60 minutes, um, with a high rate of being right, right? If AI could help you with that, then people could take more protective action. And I think at that scale, you're talking about the individual homeowners. You're talking about the people who say, okay, I have an hour to quickly clean my garage and throw everything from my garage into my house. So my car fits.

Greg Dalton: Right. I get the the time scale longer, better, with high degrees of accuracy to give people more time to prepare, move cars, move planes if you have them. And how about a spatial dimension? Is it really going to affect me in my path? So let's talk about the spatial scale in terms of, you know, my street, my neighborhood, what can you tell me about my risk?

Amy McGovern: Yeah. So the spatial scale tends to correlate with the temporal scale, right? So we're getting a lot broader and the multiple days in advance, you're going to get a really broad spatial scale. Something like the Eastern third of Oklahoma is likely to have these storms and, you know, four or five days in advance. You're likely to get that. The scale that you're talking about at the street level doesn't really exist yet in the sense of we can tell you precisely 30 minutes or 60 minutes in advance that it's going to come down your street. That's just not possible yet. But it will be. and it's certainly a goal that the weather service is working towards. I think the predictability is so low for something like hail and tornadoes that we're not going to be able to get that street level prediction multiple days in advance. It's just not, there's too much chaos in the atmosphere right now.

Greg Dalton: Sure, things are moving around. So expanding the time window, narrowing down the geography in place so I can know about my path, or at least maybe my town, if not my street. And AI has potential to improve these things. I imagine it's an exciting time for you as an AI expert working on meteorology. What gives you lumps in your stomach about AI and weather?

Amy McGovern: I'm worried that. Somebody might misuse it. So AI and weather is looking so promising and it's getting deployed in so many ways and there aren't really safeguards and we don't have any legislation. The EU just passed something called the AI Act that's gonna have a lot of legislation on different AI and it's based on the the risk that you're gonna have. Like they don't even allow things that are unacceptable risk if they're high risk, that get to go through certain amounts of review and things like that. We don't have that in the United States yet. I'm concerned somebody's going to deploy a model. It might not even be weather, but I'm concerned on the weather scale.Imagine that somebody sells you an app on your phone and tells you, this is going to tell you all your warnings and you don't need to worry about it because it's AI and it's going to be right. And then somebody is going to trust it and it's going to be wrong. And I'm not saying AI is always going to be wrong. Just, it's just like any other forecast, right? But it's going to get it wrong sometimes. And then there's going to be a lack of trust, but I also worry that people are going to lose their lives to it, that they put too much trust into it. And I, that worries me.

Greg Dalton: Some studies say that AI's energy use and understand that AI is a broad set of different types of technologies that get lumped together They all require a lot of computer processing power that could take this amount of energy of a country like Sweden, and I hear other talk about AI's potential to solve some really wicked problems. How do your peers and you think about the possible trade off of making climate worse with a bunch of data centers creating emissions while also trying to use the tool to do some good?

Amy McGovern: I think a lot of people just try to stick their head in the sand and pretend that it's not happening. that the cost doesn't exist, but that isn't the right answer. The right answer is to pay attention to the cost and to try not to just train my AI models over and over again. The other answer is to try to look for sustainable data centers. And just trying not to waste cycles. Oh, well, that computing's free. I think for many years people have kind of thought that. It's free. It's free disk space. It's free GPUs, but it's not. It costs energy and people need to realize that.

Greg Dalton: Right?, we don't often think about, all the files we store in the cloud, for example, that's using some data somewhere, right? Using energy. It's not, not free storage in an energy sense or a climate sense. I've read that AI models can be biased. For example, a lot of us have heard about facial recognition and, whether it recognizes primarily white faces, I don't really understand what that means for applying AI to climate problems. Can you talk about how bias could affect climate and weather modeling?

Amy McGovern: Yeah, I'd be happy to. So, It doesn't come into it the same way that it does for the faces that you're talking about, right? Because we're not recognizing white faces and black faces, although that is definitely a problem for AI in general. But if there's an underlying bias in the data set, then the AI models are going to replicate that. That's all they were doing with those face data sets. So if you're trained on only white faces, you just have no clue. concept of what a blackface looks like, because you haven't been trained on it. And the same is true if you're trained on only data from a certain part of the world, So for example, uh, crowdsourced data, anything that's crowdsourced, which means that you've had somebody provide the sensor to you, like the general public, tends to be more clustered in the more affluent areas because it's the people who have the money to buy the crowdsourced, you know, instruments. So if you were trying to do, An air pollution sensor, uh, you know, prediction problem for AI. Maybe you only got your data from the affluent areas because that's where you had the crowdsourced data. That could be a problem. That could create a bias that then your model will then not give you good values for places where there might be really big problems.

Greg Dalton: So how do we build trust into AI in this context?

Amy McGovern: That's a large question. Trust is not a binary, trust is a spectrum, and trust is something that we really need to work with our end users. We need to make sure we're meeting their needs, we need to make sure that they're, you know, seeing what we're doing with the AI that, that they're co developing is the word that, that we're using, that they are part of the development process and that they are putting their thoughts into it so that the AI we develop does meet their needs and that they're evaluating that the AI that you develop and give back and say, here's our model, let's try it. They have feedback that, okay, well that didn't really meet our needs. So let's talk about how we can adjust it. Or here's all the ways in which it's wrong. Let's fix it. You know, things like that. That will really help with trust. and also I don't think you can just develop something and hand it to somebody and say, here's your AI model. You should trust it. That's actually gets us back to the lumps in the stomach question you asked earlier, right? Because I'm going to hand you that model, but it might not work for what you need.

Greg Dalton: Right. So as we wrap up, you know, is there one place you come to about this mix of excitement and, and concern about where AI and weather are going?

Amy McGovern: I'm excited. I mean, you asked me for the concerns, so I gave you some concerns, but I'm excited that AI is going to be really able to improve our predictions, both on the short term and on the longer term, so that we can be better resilient as a species and as an environment, like not just our human species, but all the species. As our climate is changing, a lot of these extreme weather events are changing, and I think AI can be used to help us improve our prediction and understanding of these events and be able to weather them better.

Greg Dalton: Thank you very much, Amy, for sharing your excitement and concern with us candidly appreciate it. Thank you.

Female AI Voice: So, Artificial Greg Dalton, where does this leave you?

Male AI Voice: Well, I see both sides now. AI can be used to solve some tricky problems. But in the process, it may create others. How about you, Artificial Ariana Brocious?

Female AI Voice: I agree. I think the problem is not the computers. It’s how they are used.

Male AI Voice: In other words, it’s the humans.

Female AI Voice: Ha! Ha! Ha! Yes. It’s always the humans.

Male AI Voice: But I still worry about where all my energy is going to come from…

Ariana Brocious: And that’s our show. Thanks for listening. Talking about climate can be hard, and exciting and interesting — 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. Or consider joining us on Patreon and supporting the show that way.

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 producer and production manager. Wency Shaida is our development manager, Ben Testani is our communications manager. Jenny Lawton is consulting producer. 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. I’m Greg Dalton.

Explore the ClimateTRACE Map

3:53 - Karen Hao on visiting a data center in Arizona
7:40 - Karen Hao on the main categories of AI
10:26 - Karen Hao on the energy usage of different types of AI
18:34 - Gavin McCormick on the state of emission tracking with the help of AI
31:19 - Gavin McCormick on the energy consumption of AI
35:13 - Priya Donti on using AI to help optimize the grid
42:44 - Priya Donti on the pros and cons of AI
44:46 - Amy McGovern on using AI to help predict weather
52:21 - Amy McGovern on the future of AI and weather

Play

Busted: The Newest Emission Cheaters

BenTestani — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 23:07:11 +0000

Busted: The Newest Emission Cheaters

02/09/2024

A settlement for the largest civil penalty resulting from the Clean Air Act has just been reached. The EPA, DOJ and the State of California have agreed to a $1.7 billion fine for engine maker Cummins Inc. The fine is the result of Cummins being caught using “defeat devices” to fool the emissions testers and regulators into thinking the engines pollute less than they really do.

The settlement’s announcement was fairly surprising to many in the industry, as Cummins had been seen as a leader in sustainability. In one of their online promotional materials, they say, “We want to do our part to address climate change and any other environmental challenges that threaten our future. Our mission is to leave a positive impact in every community where we operate.”

This sounds like a rerun of the famous Volkswagen Dieselgate story from nearly10 years ago. Like Cummins today, Volkswagen made headlines for using defeat devices to cheat on emissions tests. So what is a defeat device? Rachel Moncrief, Acting Executive Director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, says there are many different kinds of defeat devices. In general, “they're reducing the effectiveness of the emissions control device without getting prior approval from the EPA.”

Car manufacturers have turned to defeat devices for decades. In one early example, a car company designed a system that would trigger a more efficient engine mode when the hood was open. They did this because they knew that the only time the vehicle would be running with the hood up was during testing. Now defeat devices are much more complex.

The California Air Resources Board tests every vehicle before it can be sold in the state. In the case of VW, CARB did their normal testing but found that their results did not match the results of tests that the University of West Virginia had done. The big difference was that much of the university’s testing was done by driving the cars in the real world.

“When they took the cars out on the road. They were getting very different readings,” says California Air Resources Board member Hector De La Torre.

In the end VW were fined $2.8 billion in criminal penalties and around $25 billion overall.

Fallout from theVW scandal can still be felt today. VW had been focused on diesel; now they have a robust EV lineup. Money from the settlement has been used to electrify transportation throughout the US, from building out charging infrastructure to replacing dirty vehicles with clean ones, including electric school buses. One of the biggest outcomes of the settlement was the requirement that VW build out a nationwide charging network, now known as Electrify America. Unfortunately, maintenance on Electrify America’s stations have not kept pace with demand.

“Almost every company has cheated, from Toyota to GM to Honda,” says Margo Oge, Former Director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at U.S. EPA. Cheating is an industry wide problem that will challenge regulators as long as they are emissions to test. So as CARB’s Hector De La Torre says, “The variety of cheating scandals on internal combustion engines, whether they are gasoline or diesel shows that we have to get away from combustion period.”

Guests

Rachel Muncrief

Acting Executive Director, ICCT

Hector De La Torre

Member, California Air Resources Board

Margo T. Oge

Former Director, Office of Transportation and Air Quality, U.S. EPA

Alberto Ayala, PhD, MSE

Executive Director, Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District

Volkswagen's huge diesel emissions scandal: the full story (theverge.com)

Cummins to pay record-setting $1.675 billion US environmental fine (reuters.com)

ICCT Guide to Vehicle Nox Emissions: The Basics (theicct.org)

California Air Resources Board Explainer: VW Diesel (ww2.arb.ca.gov)

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.

I'm in California, which is still drying out from some record rainfall and big storms recently. Some places in Los Angeles received 10 inches of rain in two days. That's a month's worth of rain.

Ariana Brocious: And all that rain means a lot of flooding, it means downed trees, it means power outages, it has some real severe consequences. And, you know, the same day I was reading about the California floods, I was also struck by news about Chile's wildfires. These huge wildfires that have been ripping through Chile's coastal region, which are also really devastating. And this is climate change. This is the stuff we're seeing with increasing frequency happening around the world.

Greg Dalton: Scientists tell us they know, they have measured from space that for one degree of warming since industrial times, there's 7 percent more moisture in the atmosphere. We remember from high school science, warm air holds more moisture, that means more severe storms and rainfall.

Ariana Brocious: And we know why this is happening. It's because of emissions. Emissions that we as humans are creating, a lot of which are coming from our tailpipes of our gas fueled cars.

Greg Dalton: That's right. Vehicles are the biggest source of emissions in the United States, and they're growing where other emissions are declining. One story that caught my eye that didn't get a lot of attention recently is that the engine manufacturer Cummins has been caught cheating on their emissions tests.

Ariana Brocious: So you may have not heard of this company Cummins, but that doesn't mean you haven't encountered their products because they make engines for hundreds of thousands of trucks and buses. And most notably for today's episode, the Dodge Ram, which is a truck you've probably heard of.

Greg Dalton: Every vehicle sold in the U.S. must get tested for how much pollution comes out of the tailpipe before the vehicle can go on the market. So passing these tests is critical. And it was discovered that Cummins installed so called defeat devices to fool the lab tests into thinking that the engine's emissions are much lower than they really are.

Ariana Brocious: It's pretty extraordinary that they can build technology that is that smart, that it can outsmart the emissions detection, but it can't actually solve the problem. Um, and you know, this really reminds me of what we heard about with VW Volkswagen, not so many years ago. So Cummins and state and federal regulators have reached a settlement of around 1.7 billion for using these defeat devices. And that's a pretty big fine.

Greg Dalton: It is the largest find ever under the Clean Air Act. And the other thing that was really surprising was this:

[Playback]

We want to do our part to address climate change and any other environmental challenges that threaten our future. Our mission is to leave a positive impact in every community where we operate.

[End Playback]

Greg Dalton: Cummins had been known in the industry as a leader on emissions reduction, and even used that as a big talking point in their promo material.

And a couple of years ago at a transportation conference, I was on stage CEO Jennifer Rumsey on stage.

Ariana Brocious: And I’m sure that’s not the only time an executive has been slippery…but it’s particularly disappointing in this case. AND, let’s point out Cummins wasn’t the only company in the news.

Greg Dalton: BMW is facing a new government investigation in Germany into another possible emissions scandal. GM, Ford, Daimler, Subaru, Nissan have all faced litigation or investigations into their emissions. Cheating - especially on diesel engines - seems to be so common in the industry.

In the wake of the news about Cummins, I reached out to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation for comment. No response.

Ariana Brocious: You also talked with Rachel Muncreif [Mun-creef], Acting Executive Director of the International Council on Clean Transportation about the news of the Cummins settlement.

Rachel Muncrief: I was surprised. I was definitely surprised about the fact that they were using defeat devices. I guess we were not as much surprised about the fact that there was elevated emissions on, on a bunch of RAM trucks because actually my organization had analyzed emissions, and we had actually found elevated emissions on some RAM models back then. At that time, Cummins and the EPA had announced that they had discovered, um, some emissions deterioration issues, that they were recalling some vehicles around. So we sort of thought. That was the main reason. So we were surprised to hear that there was also defeat devices,

Greg Dalton: Can I just ask, what is, uh, emissions deterioration? I'm not sure, does that mean it gets worse as the car is driven more miles?

Rachel Muncrief: Yeah, so there's, there's basically like almost a mini power plant on the back of some of these diesel vehicles to control the emissions. It's a fairly sophisticated system and like a key part of that system is a catalyst. just like all of the cars out there have a catalytic converter, and, If not made properly, they can sort of deteriorate faster, than they should and so that sometimes happens and then typically, um, the manufacturer will work with the EPA, to recall those vehicles and fix them.

Greg Dalton: So it sounds like kind of a filter on the tailpipe that gets clogged and doesn't work as well over time. So Cummins installed defeat devices in RAM and other trucks. How do they work? What do they do?

Rachel Muncrief: Well, there's many different kinds of defeat devices. In general, what it is, is they're purposely reducing the effectiveness of the emissions control device without getting prior approval from the EPA. And that can happen. in many different ways, because there's a lot of sort of sensors and controls and everything again around these pretty sophisticated emissions control devices but we don't know exactly what it was in this particular case. That hasn't been released publicly.

Greg Dalton: Right, so, cars and trucks these days are, you know, mobile entertainment platforms and they're highly sophisticated. Is it possible that defeat devices were there unintentionally?

Rachel Muncrief: I would say no. Typically what happens is these emission control devices are calibrated by the engineers, you know, working on these systems and they know them quite well how they're going to behave. I would think it would be unlikely that they could sort of accidentally install a defeat device.

Greg Dalton: Okay, so it's not possible that someone like, oh, turned a screwdriver or changed some code and it slipped in there. The settlement has forced a recall as those Cummins engines are almost in a million vehicles. Many of them are Ram trucks. What's been the fallout for Cummins so far?

Rachel Muncrief: Yeah. It's still early days, I think, so it's really difficult to say. I'll tie it back, I think we're all familiar with the VW scandal. When that happened, we weren't kind of sure what was going to happen with VW. I would say to VW's credit, they really did sort of turn around the culture of the company from everything we've seen. They did huge investments in battery electric vehicles. They have very public targets now for EV sales goals for all of their brands pretty much globally. So I'm, you know, curious if something similar will happen at Cummins, if there's anything that they will do to sort of get more aggressive around really moving towards fully zero emission vehicles.

Greg Dalton: Right. And Cummins and VW aren't the only ones to receive hefty fines and get caught cheating. How common would you say this type of cheating is in the auto and truck sector?

Rachel Muncrief: Cheating versus finding loopholes in the regulations are something that I would like to mention. So what we've seen is that it is very, very common. In fact, in many, many tests that we do, the emissions from vehicles, and I'm not just talking about sort of like diesel NOx emissions, which is this particular case, but even the CO2 emissions of vehicles can be much, much higher in real world driving than it would be in the lab or what you would think it should be based on sort of the official targets that have been set, and that is something that's very, very prevalent, whether those are all cheating or whether those are just exploiting loopholes is a lot of times difficult to say from, from where we sit. I will sort of just give a little plug that that's one of the major benefits that we see with battery electric vehicles because they don't have a tailpipe, so we don't have to worry about this problem.

Greg Dalton: Sure. Yeah, it's hard to get intent. and also shows how laboratory conditions don't reflect real world driving, right? In fact, That's how West Virginia caught VW because they actually put their cars on the road and drove them around with human beings and realized, wait, this is different than the lab. Something's going on here.

Rachel Muncrief: Yeah. And, and hey, we contracted West Virginia to do that work. So just to give a little plug for that.

Greg Dalton: Thank you. Yeah. Your, your group was, your group was part of that revelation.

Rachel Muncrief: Yeah, yeah. That cheating by VW in that particular case was very, very egregious because the, the emissions were, were like an order of magnitude higher than they should be. But a lot of times we might. be seeing things that are just only double something like that, I do think it's very prevalent, and I do think, you know, we should actually consider ourselves fairly lucky in the United States, we have a environmental protection agency, we have a department of justice who has the authority, and I guess in this case, you know, the political will to really pursue these kind of cases. In many or maybe even most markets that we work in across the world, that's just not the case.

Greg Dalton: Right. And also outside groups such as ICCT checking the regulators, et cetera. There's different layers of, um, kind of observation and verification. How do you think this will change how Cummins operates? You said it's early days. Do we know, and there's some, I guess there's some litigation going on with the Department of Justice. What do you think this is going to mean for Cummins and, and for trucks?

Rachel Muncrief: Yeah. I would like to say that the way that we're seeing the world going is that I think we're all seeing in the light duty car sector that EVs are really coming now. We already have regulation in Europe that's going to go to 100 percent EV sales by 2035. We have a regulation that's about to be finalized ideally in the U. S. here on a similar trajectory. Heavy duty vehicles are a little behind, but the really good news is that I think we're finally at the stage where we can confidently say we have the technology, um, and it's going to be cost effective from a total cost of ownership perspective to actually be able to move away from needing to have an internal combustion engines in the trucking sector. And I think most trucks. that are on the road today can be replaced by, by battery electric trucks. a lot of the manufacturers are sort of already getting on board with that. They're doing massive investments. They're making commitments. The infrastructure is slow, but it is coming. and so, you know, I just hope that Cummins will be sort of getting on board with that as well.

Greg Dalton: And meanwhile, there's still this calculus. And, we've heard that GM, Ford, uh, we know about VW now Cummins. What is it about the incentive to cheat that makes these companies risk billion dollar fines and settlements and VW stock got it took a huge hit. You know, the CEO of Audi got a suspended jail sentence for one year and paid a million dollar fine personally. What's the payoff for cheating?

Rachel Muncrief: Yeah. I would say specifically in the VW case, it's very interesting. I think that was a very sort of built in culture. at the time VW, they weren't like a massive player, obviously in the U. S. market at the time, but they were selling a lot of diesel vehicles in Europe and in Europe, they basically were not doing very much enforcement. And we had known this for years. I mean, there was a lot of very high emissions coming from diesel cars in Europe, where diesel cars were much more prevalent. And. The manufacturers were really not held accountable. Um, so I think, you know, what probably happened is VW came to the U. S. and was like, Hmm, we can just kind of do a similar thing here and maybe we'll get a slap on the wrist. I think they were very, very surprised at the level of penalties that they got, both civil and criminal.

Greg Dalton: What was learned from the years after Dieselgate that could make the Cummins settlement more effective at preventing this happening again or more effectively using the money that comes out of it?

Rachel Muncrief: Yeah. Because the Volkswagen settlement, obviously the, the, for the, the civil case, the Cummins settlement slightly larger than the Volkswagen settlement, but they, Volkswagen also had much larger criminal findings. So they hadn't, there was another like 20 billion, basically, and so the actual like money that went back into trying to undo some of those harms from that excess pollution that had been happening, was higher in the Volkswagen case than it will be in the, in the Cummins case, but that being said, I mean, I do think, you know, the fact that we had the VW settlement going to states to help them sort of get ready to install, you know, electric vehicle charging and all this stuff. I mean, it did help us to get prepared for where we are today, where the EVs are kind of getting more mainstream and coming out. I think it did set us up for, for a good situation now.

Greg Dalton: What is the most important outcome of dieselgate?

Rachel Muncrief: Yeah. So, I mean, to me, Dieselgate really, really changed the game, um, not just in the work that ICCT does, but just, um, overall in especially to speed up this transition that we know is going to have to come anyway if we have any hope of,staying anywhere close to the Paris, uh, climate targets, we need to transition to battery electric cars. And I think in the end, if you look back, Dieselgate actually did a lot to help accelerate that transition.

Greg Dalton: Sure. Tens of billions of dollars in capital was moved by VW. And that to me, pressure GM and other companies Rachel Moncrieff, thank you so much for sharing your insights on climate one.

Rachel Muncrief: Thank you.

Greg Dalton: We know that companies try to cheat the system for a reason: there are financial incentives to fool these tests.

Ariana Brocious: Right, cheating allows them to basically cut corners and save money on every car or truck produced.

Greg Dalton: (react) And in VW’s case, they wanted to build market share in America but their diesel engine couldn’t meet our emissions standards, so they used defeat devices to cheat the emissions test. After a few years of selling the cars, they actually did crack the technology to make their diesel engines meet the standards – but they decided it would still be cheaper to keep using the defeat device.

Ariana Brocious: (react) I had one of these diesel VWs, they were great cars, and it seemed like such a great combo– super long range and low emissions.

Greg Dalton: But regulators had a hunch that something was up, and over the course of years, their investigation got sharper and sharper.

Greg Dalton: Coming up, how did VW get caught?

Alberto Ayala: We really put them in a corner. It really was a point where they just had no other place to turn than to admit that it was a defeat device.

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

This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

Ariana Brocious: And I’m Ariana Brocious. Recently, the engine manufacturer Cummins got caught cheating on their emissions tests. They were making engines that you find in trucks like the Dodge Ram – and those engines were fitted with a device that allowed them to pass emissions tests, when they should have failed them. If that sounds familiar… 10 years ago, the same thing happened with VW and their diesel cars.

Greg Dalton: Ah yes, Dieselgate. And uncovering that deceitful practice was a huge feat in and of itself. It took a whole army of engineers working in different organizations to crack the case.

If you want to understand how they did it, you’ve gotta start with an organization called the California Air Resources Board.

Hector De La Torre: the California Air Resources Board touches anything that emits, um, so that's pretty much everything in our economy, right? It's vehicles, it's factories, it's, uh, farms, it's trees, uh, everything that emits, we regulate, um, and interestingly, a lot of people don't know the California Air Resources Board was created by Ronald Reagan in the late sixties, uh, and the California Air Resources Board predates, uh, the United States Environmental Protection Agency. It predates the United States Clean Air Act. So California was a leader, uh, even back then, and it was bipartisan.

Greg Dalton: That’s Hector De La Torre, a member of the California Air Resources Board.

we are a board, with about 1,600 staff statewide, mostly technical staff, a lot of engineers, a lot of scientists, um, that are doing the analysis that leads to the regulations

Greg Dalton: He says it actually took years for regulators to figure out that VW was cheating. At the time, regulators really didn’t know much about diesel technology.

Alberto Ayala: Diesels had never been very popular in California or in the U.S. for that matter

Greg Dalton: Alberto Ayala worked at the California Air Board and led the investigation.

Alberto Ayala: and as we began to promote and expect, uh, the, uh, fraction of, uh, diesel cars in the fleet to grow, we quickly realized that we didn't really understand the technology. We had not tested it. We had not researched it to the level that We had other technologies like gasoline cars, for example, and that was really the beginning of our interest in, um, as I often say, just kick the tires, just trying to get our feet wet, trying to understand the technology. Just by the mere fact that we started testing, uh, as many different types of cars as we could get our hands on, um, it was, that's when it became clear to us that some cars were not performing the way that we expected them.

Greg: And that’s when the authorities came in… but not the ones you’d expect. Hector De La Torre remembers that moment well.

Hector De La Torre: It's actually a really great story. the European Union wanted to affirm that, um, clean diesel was a thing.And because, you know, they have a lot of manufacturers over in Europe that were making diesel vehicles and claiming that they were very, very clean. And these vehicles had passed all of the CARB tests, the normal ones, for every vehicle that's sold in California, it has to be tested by CARB. So, what happened was they hired the University of West Virginia, uh, to affirm that, that these cars were fantastic and clean. But then they got some odd test results that were not matching the test results that CARB had done when the vehicles had been built in the first place. And the California Air Resources Board had analyzed the vehicles like it analyzes every vehicle that is sold in California, regardless of what the federal government does. California has its own stricter Uh, rules and regulations.. And part of it is because we have some areas, namely in the Central Valley and the Los Angeles Basin that are more polluted than the rest of the state or, in fact, more polluted than the Clean Air Act allows. So California has its own authorities. We have to check in with the feds, but we have our own authority. So for that, we do our own testing of all vehicles and the two didn't match. the testing that was done by CARB when the vehicles were. First sold and throughout their tenure, uh, and the test results that University of West Virginia was getting. So they asked us to double check what they had done because they thought they had done something wrong. And what we found out was that the University of West Virginia had done much more on road testing than is normally the case. Normally you do it in a lab. You put the vehicle on a dyno.

Greg Dalton: Kind of like a treadmill kind of thing, yeah, mm hmm, mm hmm.

Hector De La Torre: So, uh, so most, most of the time, that's how cars are tested. And there's this, there's a cadence to it, right there. You speed up, you slow down. And so the testing is all kind of very rote. But when they took the cars out on the road. Um, they were getting very different readings and so they, again, they thought they had done something wrong. Um, uh, you cannot control, uh, the patterns on the road, right? You're going to hit a light, you're going to speed up, you're going to slow down, uh, at different cadences

Greg Dalton: and there's a lot of driver variability too, people's got a, you know, people have a heavy foot or they, yeah, so there's human variability and all that sort of thing, which is why I guess I understand to get consistent results you do it in a lab. That allows companies to cheat.

Hector De La Torre: And that's exactly what they did. They put in what is known as a defeat device. It is a computer in the vehicle that can tell when there is a pattern to the driving that is happening, and if there's a pattern, then it assumes it's being tested and it downshifts everything to reduce emissions,which if it's random, the computer would turn off and the defeat device would not engage, and it would just do its normal thing. So that is that was the key to this case was, uh, taking the car out, and they normally are driven out, but for very, very brief periods compared to the lab. And so in this case, they took it out and drove it more out In the wild, so to speak, and found the same things that West Virginia was, the University of West Virginia was finding, and then we knew there was something wrong.

Greg Dalton: And when the dust finally settled, VW was fined $2.8 billion. How was that money spent?

Hector De La Torre: Well, the feds got, um, a good chunk of it, and we got a good chunk of it, again, because California has separate rules, and they broke our laws, too, not just the federal ones, and that's why we were entitled to part of this. Um, the part that was spent in California was put into a multi year commitment to mitigate the pollution that they had done with these diesel vehicles. And so over the last few years, in fact, just last week, we did the last vote on the last tranche of 800 million, uh, from that settlement that went back into the communities, back into, uh, the transition to zero emissions. So we have done things like supported a zero emission car share. with that money from Volkswagen. We have supported building new charging infrastructure in the state of California. We have supported promoting EVs in the state of California. Uh, and then we've done some other things that were direct emissions reductions. Purchasing clean vehicles to replace dirtier vehicles so that we would reduce the emissions. All in all, it cost Volkswagen over 20 billion dollars when you take into account the vehicles having to be taken off the road, um, Uh, recalls that they had to do, et cetera, et cetera, over 20 billion. It costs them for cheating our systems. And interestingly, I mean, we started with Volkswagen, but we've been doing this for a while. Uh, the, one of the earlier cases was in 1997, when General Motors, uh, did something, uh, similar. They had software on, uh, their vehicles that was not taking all of the data that was being produced by the vehicle as it was running. And so it was giving a false impression of the emissions that were being produced by that vehicle. So it goes back 1997 and beyond that, um, car companies tried to cheat, uh, California's laws and they were caught

[music]

Greg: Even after regulators knew VW was cheating, Alberto Ayala says it took years to break the news to the public.

Alberto: The agencies did not announce the violation until 2015. And the reason for that is because we spent all that time doing a lot of testing, going back and forth with the company. It wasn't a trivial issue. But at one point in time in, in late 2014, The company, for other reasons, had already planned a recall, and before they can do that, they have to get approval from the agencies, and they sold it to us as an opportunity to fix the more recent problem, and that makes sense to us. We figured, uh, let's be efficient about it. They're going to be bringing the cars to fix this completely unrelated problem that will present the opportunity, and it made sense to us at the time, and that's why we approved it.

Greg: So they’d confirmed the cheating. The next step was to take that evidence back to VW.

Alberto: After years of work with the company going back and forth, we really put him in a corner where they had no other answer, which was a lie. Now we know other than just to admit that it was a defeat device. It really was a point where they just had no other, place to turn than to admit the cheating.

Greg: One important thing to remember is: VW wasn’t the only company trying to cheat. Here’s Margo Oge, has been a top pollution regulator for the EPA.

Margo Oge: Almost every company has cheated from Toyota to GM to Honda. What was different here is the level of cheating. I mean, 40 percent above the standards. And the fact is, Alberto said they kept on lying. Let me give you an example. In 2009, under the president Clinton, we caught all diesel track manufacturers cheating for a decade. They were improving fuel efficiency, and they were cheating. It took us 10 years to figure out. Nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide. The first company that we caught, because we tested the engine, Cummins engine in our lab, I brought them into the office, and they said, Well, you know what, you know, uh, we really could not read the regulations. They're maybe vague. One company after the other, all seven of them came in. Within six months, the Department of Justice had to deal with them. They polluted 1 million metric tons of NOx. By the way, we never recover more than 10 percent of that. The total penalty for these companies, all seven of them, 1 billion dollars. Why? Because they admitted early on. They didn't keep on saying, you know, we're not cheating. We haven't done anything, you know, keep on lying. So every company for the most part cheats. And in the U. S., the good news is that we do have strong, you know, federal programs and California is very strong. So between California and EPA, we enforce those laws. In Europe, they have never had an enforcement case against the car company until the dieselgate broke.

Greg: So this is how VW was able to get away with their scheme in the US. But how about Europe?

Margo Oge: So basically what happened, Mercedes, for example, I'm not picking on Mercedes, could be any of these companies, goes to Portugal, and they ask a private company to certify their car. And they pay them. They don't pay EPA, they don't pay California in the U. S. So the company in Portugal, gives them a certificate. Then Mercedes takes it and can introduce their cars in any country in Europe. No penalties, no enforcement, until now, after the disalgate, that things have changed.

Greg: After years of investing heavily in diesel, VW changed their tune.

Margo Oge: They had a religion when it comes to diesel. Diesel was everything for them. So starting 2015, 2015. VW has made huge commitments to electrification of the 90 billion the industry totally is going to spend on electrification, 40 billion comes from VW. So Tesla was there showing the way, but Tesla is not the only way. You have a company like VW, which still is the number one company. 600,000 employees that is committed to this point. I cannot speak for them what's going to happen next year or the year after, but right now I can tell you with a lot of certainty that they are serious about electrification and they're making the investments. So, looking at the economics of electrification, that soon, in the next five years, electric cars will be as cost effective as diesel cars on the internal combustion engine. The fact that in Europe, in Germany, um, Stuttgart, the house of Mercedes, Munich, where BMW is, the highest court in Germany said that these cities can ban diesel. You can imagine the chill factor that is going down the spine of all these companies. So setting Tesla aside, dieselgate has a huge impact beyond what happened in the U.S., in Europe and other countries, to get citizen states realizing that the air pollution that they're facing comes from diesel cars, London, Paris, they're talking about banning diesel, even India, even California. But actually what is happening in Germany, where these most powerful companies are, to ban diesel cars, I think, is a big, big win for electrification.

[music]

Greg: So the regulators and the car company had wrestled it out. But over the span of years, hundreds of thousands of the cars they had been arguing about were on the road, being driven by actual people – who had places to go and needed those vehicles to get there. How did this news hit them?

Phillip Forbes: I own a 2013 Volkswagen Passat TDI 6 speed manual.

Greg: That’s Phillip Forbes, a VW owner in Hollister, California.

Phillip Forbes: I got a job that I knew was going to involve a lot of driving, about 50, 000 miles a year. And the day after I started, I went and bought this car. Mainly, it was just purely financial. I wanted to save money. My environmental concern was more the, uh, non renewable resource of fossil fuels. You know, in my mind, this was a vehicle that would consume less of that resource, and so that was a good thing. My car is one of, I believe the number is 12,000 or fewer out of the almost 500,000 in total, there will never be a fix available for my model. Honestly, this hasn't really impacted my views on Volkswagen. I know they're far from the first company who's done this. Obviously, it's wrong, but uh, I'm gonna keep driving the car. You know, I'm driving 50,000 miles a year. I've driven this car over a thousand miles between fuel stops before. That's insane. I mean, if I had 11,000, but not this car today, I have no idea what I would replace it with. So, uh, you know, I'll keep driving it.

Edward Niedermeyer: There's a saying it's actually I really like the saying, which is your mileage may vary. Right?

Greg: That’s Edward Niedermeyer, author and auto industry analyst.

And, and this is something I think everybody who's ever owned a car knows, right? You get the window sticker, uh, which comes out of the testing that the regulators do. Um, and that's sort of a, a, a baseline that you kind of hope to achieve. And some cars are better at, at hitting that, and some are not. And, and actually a lot of it has to do with how you drive the car. You know, how aggressively you accelerate. And certainly at a, in this country we don't really think or talk or, or teach people about how to drive more efficiently. It's not really part of our, our discourse around cars, right? Um, and so the Challenges with catching cheating really comes down to this issue, right? Um, the, the regulatory system is set up to be an even playing field. That's why we test in labs. We can control the variables, right? Um, and as a result, once you get them out, cars out into the real world, there's going to be variation from that because the conditions vary. A headwind, a tailwind, things like that. Um, and so, um, I think people are, are very used to sort of seeing some variants. And I think the car companies, that's one of the reasons it's so hard to catch this kind of cheating, is because people just expect these variations to exist. And rightly so, because, you know, the real world is, is very, you know, chaotic and, and, and variable. Um, and also, um, you know, consumers are, are quite conservative. They get used to certain things, and they want to keep doing them that way. Uh, things like You know, time between gas stations, uh, you know, stops for fuel. That's actually really important, and it's actually a really big challenge when you start to think about the new technologies that are coming down the road that will hopefully replace, um, some of these, these more polluting ones. You know, new technology is, is hard to develop, but I think when you compare that to changing people's behavior, uh, it's actually easier.

Ariana Brocious: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about emissions cheaters. 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.

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

Coming up, what is the best way to handle an industry that won’t stop breaking the rules?

Hector De La Torre: These cheating scandals just lead us back to needing to get to zero emissions.

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

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton

It’s been 10 years since the VW emissions scandal known as “dieselgate.” With the recent news about the company Cummins doing much the same thing, you might wonder: did the action taken after the VW scandal have any impact? Let's hear the rest of my conversation with Hector De La Torre – he’s a member of the California Air Resources Board, which helped uncover the Cummins cheating.

Hector De La Torre: Well, we have had multiple defeat devices. That's been the new leap forward. And I think, you know, talking about Volkswagen, um, we put everyone on notice after Volkswagen that we were going to revisit every single vehicle in production and being sold in California, and so we went out and retested with this new knowledge about defeat devices, because again, that was like that was new to us, um, having software that doesn't include certain things like GM in the late nineties, or Uh, Ford, uh, in 2014, right before Volkswagen, uh, they had, uh, some, uh, limitations on their emissions control systems, same, same kind of thing as what, uh, GM had done, uh, but, but the idea that you would have a defeat device that is specifically there, uh, to, uh, cheat our testing and, and make it seem cleaner than it is. That was a new, uh, dynamic. And so we had, um, Volkswagen. Then we had Fiat Chrysler. Uh, we found that they were, uh, cheating with their Jeep grand Cherokee and Dodge Ram 1500s. Uh, that was one that came right after Volkswagen, um, and a Navistar another. Uh, diesel, uh, truck manufacturer, they cheated by submitting one thing and producing something completely different.

Greg Dalton: in the case of Audi, which was owned by VW, Rupert Stadler received a suspended jail sentence of one year and nine months for fraud in the diesel gate scandal. Also find about a million dollars. Does the California air board have power to put executives on the line? It's one thing to a billion here, a billion there. It's kind of the cost of doing business, right? Can the, does the California have the power to go after the executives themselves?

Hector De La Torre: We have not done that. And I do not think that we have that authority. Um, maybe the Attorney General does, uh, through through his authorities, but CARB itself does not.

Hector De La Torre: Yeah, but it's not just Electrify America. It's not just VW. We have found that most of the charging infrastructure is substandard. And that is why, again, we at The California Resources Board need to be more focused on the consumer protection, that it's reliable that it's available throughout the state underserved communities have their share obviously near the highways for folks who are on road trips, et cetera that these are all available and working for the general public,

Greg Dalton: Air Board that we're talking about, the California Air Resources Board has brought in, as we said, billions of dollars by catching car companies cheating. Some would say that you're interested in busting companies because you fund your own coffers. Is the Air Board becoming too dependent on these big fines to fund the agency?

Hector De La Torre: not at all. The money does go right back out in the form of programs. I mentioned some of them for Electrify America. We also, we also enforce our regular emissions regulations. For example, we have had situations where trucking firms were not complying with our, just our regular diesel emission regulations.

And in those sense, in those situations, we will find them and then the money goes right back out. In the form of mitigation for the pollution. So I have been at many a ribbon cutting at schools that are right alongside some freeways like the 7 10 where they put in filters in classrooms to protect the students from that diesel that is right next door.

And there are many. Programs like that we run that are based on the fine monies that we received. So it is not a, it is not a situation where we're getting the money for the agency to pay for staff or things like that. No that funding is built into our budgets every year funded by the legislature

Greg Dalton: What do you think is the real end game that should be done on light and heavy duty trucks regarding local pollution and climate change.

Hector De La Torre: Well, I think, you know, the variety of cheating scandals on internal combustion engines, whether they are gasoline or diesel shows that we have to get away from, uh, uh, combustion period. And so we have the advanced clean cars rule for passenger vehicles. We have the advanced clean trucks and advanced clean fleets rule, which is a supply and demand regulation for medium and heavy duty trucks going forward. By 2035 there will not be for sale a new internal combustion engine passenger vehicle. And there will not be new, uh, internal combustion, medium and heavy duty trucks sold in the state of California. They will all have to be zero emission. That doesn't mean we're taking away people's cars. It just means you will not be able to go buy a brand new internal combustion engine. And again, these cheating scandals just lead us back to needing to get to zero emissions on all of our transportation, and we are absolutely doing that with these regulations that have a glide path over time so that by the time we get to 2035 there will be significant numbers of zero emission vehicles on the road. In fact, California, last year, around 25% of new car sales in California were zero emission. Uh, that and that, that's way above our targets. So that is the market speaking. Those are consumers that are deciding they want these vehicles because of high gas prices, because the lifetime cost of a zero emission vehicle is less than an internal combustion engine. There's a lot less moving parts that can break. Uh, and, and the fuel is cheaper, um, as well than gasoline. And then on the diesel side, we already today, are two years ahead of our targets on medium and heavy duty trucks that are available today. Um, that are being used today. So we're very proud of that. And we're going to keep pushing on medium and heavy duty, uh, trucks to be transitioned to zero emission as well, specifically because of the diesel issue.

Greg Dalton: The road to zero all across our economy. Hector De La Torre is a member of the California Air Resources Board. Hector, thanks for coming on Climate One.

Hector De La Torre: Always a pleasure to see you, Greg. And, uh, thank you. Um, you know, we, we just, uh, we are here. To protect the public and, uh, the way, the way we do that is by cleaning up pollution that gets into our lungs and harms us, uh, in multiple ways. So we are, uh, absolutely honored to be representing the state of California that is a leader in the United States and in the world.

[music change]

Greg Dalton: There are still a lot of questions we can’t answer about the Cummins settlement, since other than the use of defeat devices and the settlement amount, not much has been made public.

Ariana Brocious: Right. And sadly it sounds like that kind of cheating is a pretty common occurrence in the transportation industry.

Greg Dalton: And it’s been like this for decades. I talked with an insider who told a story about an early attempt to cheat the emissions test. When the hood on the car was open, a device triggered the engine to run more efficiently because they knew the only time it would be running while the hood was open was in a lab…for testing. And as the cars get more sophisticated, so does the cheating.

Ariana Brocious: Now it’s complicated computer programming to try and achieve the same thing.

Greg Dalton: So the fines obviously make headlines, and there are some genuinely good things that come from these settlements. More EV charging, more access..

Ariana Brocious: And here’s one that many people may not know about: electric school buses. A school in Montana applied for money from the state to buy electric school buses. And that money came from…you guessed it, the VW settlement.

Greg Dalton: I read that story too, and they seem to really love their electric buses.

Ariana Brocious: And the buses they are replacing are diesel, so it comes full circle.

Greg Dalton: Another headline grabbing result of the VW settlement was the EV charging network called Electrify America. It was supposed to provide more charging infrastructure to help pave the way for more EVs.

Ariana Brocious: Well, why don’t we ask our in house EV correspondent more about that, producer Austin Colón

Austin Colón: Hey Ariana and Greg, thanks for having me on. As you both know, I’m a bit of a road trip lover. In just the past year, I’ve put about 30,000 miles on my EV traveling around the US.

Greg Dalton: So what is the state of Electrify America?

Austin Colón: Well, in my experience it’s not great. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped at an EA station where every stall works. And it’s not just me, it was rated the worst charging network in a J.D Power study.

Ariana Brocious: I imagine in a time when we need to be moving quickly to decarbonize, that could be a significant speed bump.

Austin Colón: Yes. It’s a real bummer. I want people’s early experience driving EVs to be as positive as mine. But they’re often not. YET. Just about every major EV manufacturer in the US has decided to switch to Tesla’s charging standard. And a bog part of their decision is because of their frustration with Electrify America’s network. And that’s going to slow down EV adoption because people don’t want to buy a car with an outdated charging standard. And right now, outside of Tesla, that’s what they’re being offered.

Greg Dalton: Meanwhile, the Biden administration is looking to put money into building more charging infrastructure.

Austin Colón: Right, and the administration has included standards and benchmarks that the chargers must hit to be funded, so hopefully that can help with some of the frustration EV drivers have been feeling. But I can’t help but feel like we would be much farther along had regulators created strict operating standards for the charging network from the beginning.

Ariana Brocious: Thanks for that Austin.

Austin Colón: Anytime.

Greg Dalton: It’s pretty amazing that we can still see the aftermath of the VW cheating settlement affecting our lives today. Both good and bad.

Ariana Brocious: Though I wish these companies getting caught would be more of a deterrent.

Greg Dalton: Right it still feels like these are parking tickets and the cost of doing business. And the best way to stop this kind of cheating is to stop burning fossil fuels.

Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- 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. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend.

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. Jenny Lawton is consulting producer. 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. I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

Revisiting The Enablers: The Firms Behind Fossil Fuel Falsehoods

Otto Pilot — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 08:01:00 +0000

Revisiting The Enablers: The Firms Behind Fossil Fuel Falsehoods

12/30/2022

For years, fossil fuel companies have claimed to support climate science and policy. Many have recently pledged to hit net zero emissions by midcentury. Yet behind the scenes, they fight those very same policies through industry associations, shadow groups, and lobbying – all while spending vast sums on advertising and PR campaigns touting their climate commitments. And they don’t do it alone. They’re aided and abetted by PR firms, ad agencies and business consultancies like McKinsey & Company.

Michael Forsythe, New York Times investigative reporter and co-author of the book “When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm” says this one global consultancy wields far greater influence than more public-facing corporate giants like Amazon and Google. “McKinsey works with almost all the companies in the world and has influence on almost all the major companies in the world and many of the governments.”

Fossil fuel companies are McKinsey’s bread and butter. When pressed by a group of young employees to take real action on climate and push their clients to do the same, senior executives said they couldn't stop working with their fossil fuel clients and remain relevant.

“No one is saying that McKinsey shouldn't work with these companies,” says Forsythe. “What we’re saying is and what the McKinsey employees were saying is that McKinsey should work to reduce the carbon emissions from these companies.”

PR firms and global ad agencies like Edelman also work to protect the fossil fuel industry and slow down the clean energy transition. Despite fossil fuel advertising that touts their clean energy endeavors, that’s not where the money is really going.

For example, a House Oversight Committee reports that from 2010 to 2018, BP spent about 2% of its capital expenditures on low carbon investments. Exxon spent less than a quarter of 1% on cleaner energy. Jamie Henn, founder and director of Clean Creatives, says these numbers tella story that big oil’s supposed commitment to climate action is little more than greenwashing.

“ExxonMobil just made record profits because of high gas prices,” says Henn. “And what are they doing with it? They are telling their shareholders that they are going to increase oil and gas production, and they're doing a $10 billion stock buyback to reward their shareholders. In comparison ExxonMobil spent maybe upwards of about $300 million on algae research, which over the last 10 years, so that's about 30 million a year maybe. Yet that's the focus of all their advertising.”

Despite how much money these companies have to spend, they are still losing the battle of public perception. 60% of Americans say that fossil fuel companies are to blame for the climate crisis and about 50% of them want them to pay damages.

Christina Arena, former VP at the global PR firm Edelman, argues that proponents of clean energy can use this reality to help deal with the climate crisis: “I think that opens the door for clean tech marketers and clean energy marketers to come in with a more compelling narrative. Tell your story better be more creative. Capture America's hearts and minds.”

Guests

Michael Forsythe

Reporter, New York Times

Ben Franta

PhD candidate in History of Science, Stanford University

Jamie Henn

Founder & Director, Fossil Free Media

Christine Arena

Founder, Generous Films

Scientists’ Letter to Ad Agencies (cleancreatives.org)

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm (penguinrandomhouse.com)

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: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. For years, fossil fuel companies have claimed to support climate science and public policy advancing decarbonization. Many have recently pledged to hit net zero emissions by midcentury. Yet behind the scenes they fight those very same policies, through industry associations, shadow groups, and lobbying. All while spending vast sums on advertising and PR campaigns touting their climate commitments.

This week we’re looking at some of the entities that help these companies slow the transition away from fossil fuels, starting with consultants and public relations firms. Many of these groups are now facing their own pressure to drop their fossil fuel clients.

A new book profiling the power and influence of consulting firm McKinsey and Company has drawn attention to their work helping maximize “efficiency” and profits for fossil fuel companies and other large emitters.

New York Times investigative reporter Michael Forsythe, co-author of the book When McKinsey Comes to Town, spoke with Climate One’s Ariana Brocious.

Ariana Brocious: Let's start by talking about the power of this consultancy firm, it’s mostly hidden and yet incredibly pervasive. You write the firm has advised virtually every pharmaceutical company and their government regulators, along with health insurers, airlines, universities, museums, weapon makers, private equity firms and so on. It operates in more than 65 countries. As you are reporting this what surprised you about the extent of McKinsey’s influence?

Michael Forsythe: I think that the thing that surprised me the most was the pervasiveness of it. There's plenty of powerful companies in the world, you know, Exxon Mobil, for example, Amazon, Google. These are all huge companies that affect the lives of almost everybody, especially in the United States but around the world. But McKinsey works with almost all the companies in the world and has influence on almost all the major companies in the world and many of the governments. And you know we wouldn't have written the book unless we thought that the advice that McKinsey gave actually made a difference.

Ariana Brocious: Right. And maybe that the public needs to be more aware of their influence.

Michael Forsythe: Absolutely.

Ariana Brocious: So, unlike some other companies McKinsey often advises companies that are actively in opposition or regulators and those they regulate simultaneously. They say internal firewalls protect each client's interest. How real or effective do you think those firewalls really are?

Michael Forsythe: So yes, that is the mantra that you know McKinsey has long worked for many companies in the same industry field. Like, you know, for example working for Allstate or State Farm at the same time. They say they have firewalls; certain consultants can’t work for two different companies in the same field. But we've seen especially recently, some documents coming out especially in the pharmaceutical area where there was one senior consultant who was working for two opioid makers at the same time. And we also found that some of the consultants working for these opioid makers like Purdue Pharma were also working on projects for the FDA, the regulator of these drug makers.

Ariana Brocious: That’s pretty staggering. I don't know, it seems like that should be disclosed, right?

Michael Forsythe: It’s something that Congress is certainly taking a look at. I think a lot of people in Congress and there were hearings on this in April actually are also very concerned that McKinsey is advising companies that are regulated and the regulator as well.

Ariana Brocious: So, McKinsey markets itself to young Ivy League grads as a values driven place to work, where they can play a role in changing the world for good. Yet many of those that you spoke to for this book had a different experience actually working there. And I was hoping you could tell us about the story of Erik Edstrom.

Michael Forsythe: Sure. So, Erik Edstrom is actually not an Ivy League graduate, he's a West Point graduate and then he went to Oxford, you know. I guess the British Ivy League equivalent, to get a masters. And he focused in the environment and climate, you know, while getting his masters at Oxford. And, you know, he is one of the many highly idealistic people that McKinsey has recruited. And McKinsey is very successful in recruiting some of these people because they really do appeal to their idealism. Don't go work for Goldman Sachs or some other bank, you know. At McKinsey you can make a difference, you can make an impact on the world and often in that recruiting process they focus on some of the things like climate change like you know spreading vaccines against polio in Africa. These really good projects that really do make a difference in the world. The thing is when they start working at McKinsey some of those people are quickly disabused of that because they're working not for those companies.

Ariana Brocious: You write about how there's sort of a culture internally of needing to be active in kind of in the game, right. And so, a new hire decides they don't want to work on something because of values driven judgment, then they're kind of benched and they might miss the opportunity to actually prove themselves and then have a position, right?

Michael Forsythe: That’s right. So, McKinsey does have this policy and they do honor it of allowing people to opt out of certain types of work. Like working for a coal mining company or a tobacco maker or an opioid maker for example. The problem we found with that is that puts the ethical dilemma and the ethical choice on very young consultants, you know, these 25, 26-year-old people. And so, they're the ones that have to make the ethical choice, not the company itself. And so, we found that McKinsey only stopped advising tobacco makers last year in 2021, which is I think that's absolutely nuts. That’s 57 years after the Surgeon General said that smoking causes cancer, 57 years, you know, And for Erik, you know, he's in Australia – that's where he was hired by McKinsey. He was working in the Melbourne office. That is the city in Australia that is also the headquarters for some of the big resources companies like Rio Tinto. I think BHP is also there. Coal mining is a big industry and that's something he opted out of, and, you know, some other people. And that does deny them a chance to work with certain partners, you know, that may advance their careers. And when they don't have an assignment to work on it’s called being put on the beach. That's what’s it’s called in the internal McKinsey parlance, you know. You don't have an assignment and if you opt yourself out of those some of these assignments, and especially there are so much of that work in Australia it could really crimp and hurt your McKinsey career.

Ariana Brocious: So, McKinsey publicly advocates for climate action and they publish clear eyed analyses on the risks faced by the climate crisis. The McKinsey cost curves are a seminal piece of work in decarbonizing the global economy. But you report that today the firm's recommendations tend toward feel-good market actions rather than government policy. Why is that?

Michael Forsythe: Yeah, so, I think McKinsey has done a lot of good work in the climate field. And you mentioned the climate cost curves. I think they came out in 2007. That was new and used by many people. And also, McKinsey you know does play to its strengths for some of its best climate work which is the ability to synthesize, you know data and present it in a way that is understandable. And they've done that they're very clear. A certain part of McKinsey is very clear eyed about the dangers and the problems and the crisis, you know, that's caused by you know, increasing carbon emissions. That's one part of McKinsey. The other part, the part that really makes the money is its extensive work with the biggest carbon emitters of the world. And if they were working with those companies to reduce their carbon footprints, well then, all the power to McKinsey. But we discovered that a lot of the work that McKinsey does with these companies has nothing to do with making them greener.

Ariana Brocious: Right. They work to make coal companies more profitable and actually extend the life of fossil fuels or our continued dependence on them.

Michael Forsythe: That's right. And that's something that really upset Erik Edstrom. Again, you know, Eric he's an American West Point graduate, he fought in Afghanistan as a platoon leader as a young junior officer. He's a man of strong ideals. And he just saw in Australia that McKinsey was promoting this success story, you know, turning a coal mine into a diamond where a McKinsey team went in and increased production at a coal mining company by 26%. And this was viewed as a good thing; it's akin to you know, we went into Phillip Morris and we found a way for them to increase tobacco consumption by 26%. We got more people smoking, bravo us. You know it's the same thing. And the idea that the company thought that this was something laudatory that they passed around as an attaboy really incensed Erik. And he wrote the mother of all farewell letters when he did leave the company in July of 2019 where he mentioned this particular note about this coal mine increase.

Ariana Brocious: Well, and that conflict of know, on the one hand, producing really useful data and analyses about the climate crisis and the risks faced by organizations. And on the other hand, actually helping these big fossil fuel companies continue to grow or develop. You mentioned that there's, you know, a real profit incentive here and that some of these companies are the most profitable. So, what's the business case for hiring a firm to cut emissions and is there any of that activity happening?

Michael Forsythe: There certainly is, you know, and McKinsey pointed out in their responses to us that they have worked with fossil fuel companies to help reduce their emissions. They said in one case they helped an energy company cut their emissions by 82% which is pretty darn good. But the big clients, the really big clients, the ones with the deep pockets. The Chevrons, Exxonmobils of the world. They may not necessarily be interested in that kind of work. And certainly, we had to look at a way to just an amazing leak I guess you would call it where we got a chance to look at McKinsey's biggest clients, Chevron's among them and also the kind of work McKinsey was doing for them. And it's certainly nothing on the Chevron list gave any indication it was a carbon work reduction. It was all about increasing efficiency, you know, analyzing upstream oil production, digitizing things that kind of work. And, you know, so the work done with some of these big companies really in many cases has everything to do with them being able to be more efficient. And when I say efficient, I mean, cost-efficient producers of carbon. Whether it’s oil, natural gas or coal.

Ariana Brocious: So, when pressed by a group of young McKinsey employees to take real action on climate and push their clients to do the same, senior executives said they couldn't stop working with their fossil fuel clients and remain relevant, citing the need to stay in relationship with clients in order to influence them. And this echoes the defense given by the head of PR firm Edelman in response to similar pressure from their employees. So, based on what you were able to find, does this kind of constructive engagement with clients work that McKinsey is arguing for?

Michael Forsythe: Yeah. So, in many instances with McKinsey the pressure from within from consultants does seem to have some sort of effect. This was certainly the case, you know, when a lot of junior consultants, especially were upset about its work with ICE the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency. With climate it's kind of like Pharaoh's heart has hardened. So, just to give you an idea of the extent of McKinsey's work. So, in the past few years McKinsey's worked with 43 of the top 100 carbon emitters in the world. And those companies, those 43 companies in 2018, were responsible for 36% of the planet’s carbon output. So, McKinsey works with the big boys. And this is a lot of revenue for McKinsey. So, the argument that McKinsey had is and I just want to read it to you because I find it extraordinary. I'm just gonna read the chapter here because, so this, these are words actually from the current managing partner of McKinsey, a guy named Bob Sternfels. He lives in San Francisco in the Bay Area. Went to Stanford and was a Rhodes scholar. so, Bob Sternfels kind of gave a prebuttal to an article we wrote, in October 2021 for the New York Times. They knew the article was coming so he decided, I mean McKinsey decided to do a prebuttal in the Wall Street Journal on their editorial page. And he said, “companies can't go from brown to green without getting a little dirty. And if that means some mud gets thrown at McKinsey, so be it.” Coming from a Rhodes scholar, I have to say that was a kind of unusual argument. No one is saying that McKinsey shouldn't work with these companies. What we’re saying is and what the McKinsey employees were saying is that McKinsey should work to reduce the carbon emissions from these companies. In this instance, even though 1100 McKinsey consultants, you know, McKinsey employees sign this petition to get McKinsey to focus more on reducing carbon emissions from its big clients and actually publicizing the emissions of its clients and letting people know. Certainly, the pushback was strong.

Ariana Brocious: And you sort of touched on this, but if they took a stance of wanting to prioritize carbon reductions with those relationships with these long-term clients, these big oil majors. What kind of positive influence could they have?

Michael Forsythe: So, one of the strengths of McKinsey is that it communicates best practices, industry best practices. And so, you know, one of the advantages of McKinsey working with competitors in the same industry is that they learn a lot. The company is a knowledge company in a lot of ways. And so, you know, while it can't take the you know, trade secrets of Total and BP and give them to Chevron it certainly can anonymize some of the lessons that it’s learned and pass them on to Chevron or Exxon Mobil. The big problem here though is that McKinsey is hired by these companies. McKinsey works for them. Does what the client wants them to do. And if these clients aren’t asking them to help them reduce their carbon footprint then McKinsey's not going to be doing that kind of work with them. And, you know, I mean you see a lot of ads on TV about like algae, you know that Chevron is growing. I've seen them for years and years. I think they’ve gotten more mileage out of their algae ads than the money they’ve actually put into algae research. But, you know, it doesn’t strike me that Chevron and ExxonMobil and some of the big US oil majors are that committed. You have companies in Europe, oil companies in Europe that are actually cutting their dividend payments in order to transition more quickly to a carbon free future.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, those algae ads are classic case of greenwashing. The amount of money being invested in that versus their overall operations is insignificant to say the least.

Michael Forsythe: Right. Right. And ExxonMobil same thing with their carbon capture and storage that they’ve been talking about for over a decade now. They keep talking about it and talking and talking and talking.

Ariana Brocious: So, how has senior leadership responded to these apparent contradictions between their values and their actions that you cover in the book and particularly these climate aspects?

Michael Forsythe: Yeah. So, as I said, you know, with climate I think they’ve pushed back quite strongly. Because of the revenue I would surmise it's because of the importance of these energy companies. With the other issue so you know over the last few years that you know my colleague Walt Bogdanich and I have been writing about McKinsey. They have changed a little bit the way they select clients a little bit more careful. I think new systems and process is in place to make sure that they don't work with authoritarian countries, or at least with you know the police or defense ministries or justice ministries and authoritarian countries. So, they have made some kind of changes. And they have for climate they have launched some new initiatives to focus on this area. But as far as we know the most important thing which is to be working on carbon reductions for its big carbon emitter clients. And that really hasn’t changed and they're still doing the work for Aramco and Chevron and Exxon that Aramco, Chevron and Exxon want them to work on.

Ariana Brocious: How did your thoughts about capitalism evolve over the course of writing this book?

Michael Forsythe: Yeah, so, I'm a big believer in free markets and the power of free markets to present innovation. but I do think that with capitalism must come some responsibility. And it's the responsibility over free press and also the government to keep capitalism in check. And that's the thing about McKinsey. So many McKinsey consultants, especially former consultants have said that McKinsey's work is often an accelerant. You know, it adds fuel to the fire. Whether it's turbocharging opioid sales, you know, it’s focused on shareholder value. It's focused on whatever the client wants and whatever the client wants is usually to increase their profits. This has been McKinsey's work. They really have profited off the rise of shareholder capitalism.

Ariana Brocious: Mike Forsythe is a reporter on the investigations team at the New York Times and co-author of the book When McKinsey Comes to Town. Mike, thanks so much for joining us on Climate One.

Michael Forsythe: My pleasure.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Let's get some historical perspective on what fossil fuel companies knew about their effect on the climate. Dr. Benjamin Franta is Head of the Climate Litigation Lab at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme. Climate One’s Ariana Brocious takes it from here.

Ariana Brocious: Through years of research, Dr. Benjamin Franta and others have uncovered just how long fossil companies have known their products could hurt the climate–and how long they avoided telling anyone about it. Franta found one key example of this from more than 60 years ago in a Delaware archive.

Ben Franta: It was a speech given by Edward Teller, the famous physicist who worked on the hydrogen bomb, and he was giving a speech to an industry audience. It was a special conference put on by the American Petroleum Institute in 1959. And he warned them about the eventuality of global warming from fossil fuels and that that energy supply, that fossil fuels would have to be replaced.

Ariana Brocious: Franta says in the subsequent decades, the industry’s understanding of the climate impacts of fossil fuels only continued to grow.

Ben Franta: And by the early 1980s, the industry had a very sophisticated understanding of the issue. We now have internal reports from companies like Exxon from that time that predict very accurately how global warming would develop, many of the impacts and also had a clear understanding that the central problem causing it was fossil fuels and that fossil fuels would need to be replaced to stop the problem from developing. Around that time, I'm talking about the early 1980s even the late 1970s, scientists studying this problem and companies like Exxon were aware of the fact that if climate change was going to be avoided it was time to act then.

Ariana Brocious: This understanding wasn’t limited to U.S. companies, though some of them were leaders in hiding the facts. Instead of taking action on climate, companies did the opposite.

Ben Franta: In the mid-1980s Exxon informed many of the other oil companies about this issue, and essentially raised a red flag for them and said we’re going to be regulated as an industry because of this climate problem. And we as an industry need to be prepared and have a counter response ready to deal with climate legislation and climate treaties.

Ariana Brocious: Franta says throughout the 1980s, French company Total and others followed the strategies developed by Exxon to dispute and counter climate science.

Ben Franta: These included things like emphasizing the cost of climate action and deemphasizing the benefits of climate action and even distraction techniques which might surprise you things like emphasizing the need for reforestation or efficiency like these are things that alone would be good but they were deployed by the industry in order to distract attention away from fossil fuels. And they’ve been doing it ever since.

Ariana Brocious: In the late 90s and early 2000s, the industry started to reposition itself as integral to solving climate change.

Ben Franta: That's when the industry really began promoting things like carbon capture, things like hydrogen and almost all hydrogen is made from natural gas is made from fossil fuel currently, at least. But basically, promoting industry friendly solutions to climate change that really you know have at least so far have not really been solutions but have continued to perpetuate the fossil fuel regime.

Ariana Brocious: Those tactics included shifting the blame to the public by popularizing the idea of an individual carbon footprint and personal sustainability.

Ben Franta: There are ad campaigns from the early 2000s that portray climate change as the fault of individual consumers and encourages them to do things like carpool more or change their light bulbs and portrays the fossil fuel companies as the leaders. And it was even worse because in reality those fossil fuel companies were not in fact taking the lead to address climate change. They weren't investing substantially in renewables, for example.

Ariana Brocious: Another frequent tactic of fossil fuel companies has been the use of so-called “advertorials” in major newspapers like the New York Times – often a full page ad written in the form of an op-ed.

Ben Franta: So, it’s made to look authoritative and neutral or objective but in reality, it's paid for by in this case a company like Exxon. And Exxon took these out you know for many, many years in the New York Times and used them to cast doubt on climate science but also to convince the public that climate action would be too expensive to undertake, that it would hurt the economy. And in fact, sometimes Exxon would cite studies by economists that said this, but those economists had actually been paid to do those studies by the oil industry. So, there's a lot of trickery involved and you know these were messages seen by huge numbers of people because they're in these, you know, very mainstream incredible authoritative newspapers like the New York Times.

The New York Times still runs these sorts of ads for fossil fuel companies, and many of those ads still contain false and misleading statements like calling natural gas clean or exaggerating the amount of investment in renewables that the oil companies are making. And that of course skews all of our perceptions of what these companies are doing and, in a way, that New York Times stamp of approval on that ad it’s a form of the third-party technique. It's people who might not necessarily trust Exxon, but they might trust the New York Times and so they see it in the New York Times and they believe that message.

Ariana Brocious: These tactics – especially the economic arguments–have also been targeted at politicians, policy makers and business leaders.

Ben Franta: I saw then-President Trump give his announcement to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement. And to justify that he cited an economic study paid for by the industry and written by some of the very same economists who have been doing this for the industry since the 90s. And so, this strategy is still going on. It's still affecting public policy at the highest levels. And, you know, we need more oversight of that. We need to understand that whole phenomenon better, you know, because the future is at stake.

Ariana Brocious: In recent years, Franta says the fossil fuel industry has shifted to more greenwashing or climate washing techniques, often via social media.

Ben Franta: We see this all the time now with major oil companies. Exxon Mobil might be bragging about how much carbon capture it's doing, but if you actually run the numbers it's minuscule. So, they sort of specialize in giving a narrowly true fact that is presented in an overall misleading way. So, it's sort of a sin of omission or a sin of presentation.

Ariana Brocious: But there’s growing public awareness of this greenwashing, which Franta says is the first step in combating it.

Ben Franta: Because if the public is aware of the trickery, then the trickery doesn't work as well. But also, this is unlawful, often, to deceive the public in this way about your company or about your products. And so, different parties can bring climate lawsuits that focus on greenwashing and try to put an end to it. And, you know, we’ve seen some suits like this in the United States and we’ve seen suits like this in other countries in Europe for example. And I think we’re gonna see a lot of these kinds of lawsuits as companies make climate pledges, as they try to green their images, as they make net zero commitments that might not actually have anything behind them. That's gonna be an important accountability mechanism to ensure that what these companies say they're doing or portraying themselves as doing, that they're actually doing that and not just not as trying to look good. So, it's a very, very important legal campaign, global in scope and the stakes are very high of course, because it’s going to affect the long, long-term future of the planet.

Greg Dalton: Dr. Benjamin Franta is Head of the Climate Litigation Lab with the Sustainable Law Programme at Oxford University.

We’re talking about the firms that enable fossil fuel companies to maintain their social license to operate. I’ve invited a couple guests to weigh in: Christine Arena is a former Executive Vice President at Edelman and founder of the production company Generous Films, and Jamie Henn is founder and director of Clean Creatives, a project for PR and ad professionals who want a safe climate future.

Companies spend a lot of money on advertising and messaging in order to appear more climate conscious. ExxonMobil is one big oil company to announce that it aims to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. But Exxon's plans only cover Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, meaning it won't cover its biggest carbon impact: consumers burning the fossil fuel that it generates. Those are called Scope 3 emissions. I asked Christine Arena what she thinks about net zero pledges from fossil fuel producers.

Christine Arena: Practically none of them to your point include Scope 3 emissions; they don't factor in the actual emissions generated when people use their products is a little bit deceptive. I think that at the very least, these marketers need to include the fine print so that people understand that Scope 1 and 2 emissions basically mean bringing fossil fuels to market more efficiently, not decarbonizing our economy not scaling back on the emissions that scientists say we need to focus on

Greg Dalton: Many large oil and gas companies say they support a price on carbon pollution. Yet the House oversight committee reports that less than half of 1% of their lobbying effort over the past decade focused on carbon pricing. The committee also reports that from 2010 to 2018, BP spent about 2% of its capital expenditures or CapEx on low carbon investments. Exxon spent less than a quarter of 1% on cleaner energy. Large oil companies are spending pennies on carbon pricing policies and low carbon energy. I’ve asked executives in the past to specify their CapEx on renewables and they dance around the actual number. Jaime, what story do those numbers tell about capital expenditures and lobbying?

Jaime Henn: Well, I think it tells a story that big oil's supposed commitment to climate action is little more than greenwashing. ExxonMobil just made record profits because of high gas prices. And what are they doing with it? They are telling their shareholders that they are going to increase oil and gas production, and they're doing a $10 billion stock buyback to reward their shareholders. In comparison, ExxonMobil spent maybe upwards of about $300 million on algae research, which over the last 10 years, so that's about 30 million a year maybe. Yet that's the focus of all their advertising; it’s all about how they’re making fuel out of algae and things like that. So, again when you actually peel back the glossy advertisements and messaging from the industry the real numbers show that practically they're spending more on burnishing their image than they actually are changing their business plans.

Greg Dalton: Christine, there's a line from a Guardian article about this that stands out. It says, “Oil companies almost never advertise their products, opting instead to advertise ideas, particularly the idea that they're working hard to address the climate crisis." Give us a sense of how PR firms work with fossil fuel clients on messaging and the relationship of their product versus making people feel they’re on the same side.

Christine Arena: Fossil fuel marketers are basically bombarding us with their messages, doing very aggressive media buys across channels, right? So, if you have logged into Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, Politico, or listened to a podcast recently, chances are you've probably heard a fossil fuel ad, and really, if you look at the nature of those very, very pervasive ad messages you're right, they're not really selling us products. They are advertising ideas. They are advertising ideas that they're far more socially and environmentally responsible than they are in reality. Ideas that we can't live without them that it's dangerous to imagine a future free from fossil fuels and ideas that just generally confuse people about climate change and what the real solutions are. So, I think this is a very dangerous mix. This mix of misleading messages from fossil fuel marketers amplified so aggressively across media channels. This is a systemic issue, and it's an issue that is a serious problem because fossil fuel marketers aren’t restricted the same way tobacco or opioid marketers are. And they’re spending vast resources so their agency partners are turning around and creating these messages and programs and social and ad platforms are themselves not incentivized to police misinformation or police the problem. So, this is a systemic issue and to your question, you know, what is that role that PR partners play well, you know, they basically take the client’s money and execute messaging that fits the objective of that client. The objective of most fossil fuel ads is you know to do one of two things. Either you know it's not to transition us away from clean energy anytime soon. The agenda and the messaging are designed to keep the demands for fossil fuel products up and to avoid regulatory intervention and that's why they're trying so hard to influence public opinion and reaching out so aggressively.

Greg Dalton: And so, what is the possible avenue for regulatory intervention? Obviously, we have, you know, First Amendment, etc. regulating free speech very contentious. Is there a path for oversight by a government entity?

Christine Arena: There is, and if you look at opioids or tobacco, they provide models. Fossil fuel products kill 8.7 million people a year through pollution. If you compare those numbers to fatalities in tobacco, you know, tobacco products kill about 480,000 people year opioids, I think deaths from opioids are at about 70,000 a year. So, why aren't fossil fuel marketers restricted in the same way that tobacco marketers are? There are clearly mechanisms for this level of intervention it just hasn't happened yet and that is partly thanks to the power of the fossil fuel lobby.

Greg Dalton: Jamie, you lead Clean Creatives that campaign pressuring public relations and advertising agencies to quit working with fossil fuel companies to spread climate disinformation. In January, your group joined with more than 450 scientists who signed a letter calling on advertising at PR agencies to drop their fossil fuel clients. What was the impact of what you’re trying to achieve?

Jaime Henn: Well, I think the impact of that letter really showed that this is a topic that PR and advertising agencies can no longer avoid. I think the role of PR in advertising in blocking climate action has been hiding in plain sight for years because it's the water we swim in every day. It's the messages, the advertisements that create the reality in the very language that we used to talk about the climate crisis. And as we've seen over the last few decades. These industries have played a huge role in blocking the type of conversation that we need to have about climate change and then the type of political action that could result from that. So, about a year ago my colleague and friend Duncan Meisel and I were looking out there and actually seeing all of this advertising out there that was flowing during the 2020 election and feeling like there had to be a way that we could begin to try and dismantle or at the very least throw a wrench into the gears of this propaganda machine. And so, we launched Clean Creatives as an effort to really go after the PR and ad agencies that work most closely with the fossil fuel industry. The idea being that ExxonMobil, you know, their business plan really depends on selling oil but a firm like Edelman or WPP they can make money doing all sorts of things. They could work with sustainability-oriented clients. They can work with really big companies like GM which you know doesn't have a perfect track record, but is making the transition to electric vehicles and trying to move into this clean energy economy. So, the idea was that these were really essential agencies that were a part of the way the fossil fuel industry blocked progress but they were also movable targets who we could really bring onto the right side of this issue and tap into the incredible talent that exists in the creative sector. And instead of using that to destroy creation try and get those creatives to actually help address the climate crisis

Greg Dalton: In late 2022, PR firm Edelman released a global survey finding that business has a trust problem on sustainability. The survey of 14,000 people found that national governments have a stunning 22-point advantage over business when it comes to which institutions people think should lead on climate change. That report was issued after we recorded our conversation with Jaime Henn, Founder of the Clean Creatives campaign and Christine Arena, former Executive Vice President at Edelman. We spoke shortly after reporting from The New York Times revealed that Edelman’s CEO told staff the company would not walk away from fossil fuel clients who need its services as they transition to clean energy. I asked Christine how much this kind of outside pressure has shifted Edelman’s business model.

Christine Arena: Well, I didn't expect Edelman to walk away from very lucrative client contracts. I mean we know that between 2008 and 2018 Edelman did about half a billion dollars worth of work for that’s just trade associations fossil fuel trade associations, including the American Petroleum Institute, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, National Mining Association and others. So, Edelman has different practices and the energy practice is extremely lucrative. So, I don't expect them to divest. But what I do expect is for them to continue to be a primary target for lawmakers and that's not just because of activist campaigns are my personal experience, but it's because there is real evidence showing how PR firms have played that central role in promoting misinformation on behalf of fossil fuel clients. I do suspect that that the focus and scrutiny on this industry will increase, not decrease. I am concerned that the industry is just really unwilling to acknowledge the core problem of misleading communications. PR firms just haven't wanted to talk about this despite the fact that there is an ongoing congressional investigation into climate disinformation. There are 13 active state AG lawsuits that center on that basis of misleading communications in advertising. I just think that PR and ad firms are in a position where they're not only having to fight off activists but they're under some real scrutiny. So, I just think this is a conversation the industry needs to have much more openly and it needs to take actions to stop damaging potentially communities through misleading marketing communications.

Greg Dalton: We invited Edelman to join this discussion and they declined. Our invitation is still open and hope they’ll come on another time. Jaime, Chevron is hiring journalists who work in an internal “newsroom” to cover stories it doesn’t think mainstream outlets will write about. Isn't it possible that oil companies can just bring these functions in house and they may not need ad agencies or PR shops?

Jaime Henn: Well, I think you are seeing that from a variety of different fossil fuel companies and it's a real concern. Chevron's been engaged in a fight for years over in Richmond, California, which is the largest point source, their refinery there is the largest point source of pollution in the entire state of California and had a devastating impact on the local community with their air pollution. And, yeah, Chevron started not only hired its own journalist, they started their entire own newspaper to try and put out their own spin on the news about local issues in Richmond. And of course, accompanied that with the major political campaign to try and take over the Richmond City Council. I think thanks to the work of grassroots communities there, activists and community members were really able to push back on that. And that is where the hope lies. I think that the fossil fuel industry when it tries to be so egregious to go so far to create their own newspaper or create their own content, they do tend to get called out on that. And I think people are a little bit sharper consumers these days and when they see stuff that looks so clearly like propaganda, they’re able to push back on that. And I think so examples like that are places where I think we’re able to try and make progress. I think the bigger risk is when actually a fossil fuel company isn't putting forward outright climate denial, but they're actually talking about solutions when they pretend to be our friend. That’s the harder stuff to really cut through. But ultimately, it's just as damaging because the goal of that content is to delay the type of public outrage and ultimately political pressure that could cause these companies to really change. And so, in some ways I'm less worried about Chevron coming out there and really pushing back on regulations. I'm more worried about them pretending that they are big fans of climate action when in fact they’re lobbying behind the scenes to block regulations everywhere from the local level all the way up to the international.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, these days everyone agrees on decarbonization and net zero; the debate is really about how fast. Whether it takes decades or centuries, or happen on the timeline that science wants.

Jaime Henn: I think that’s really critical because we've had the conversation with a lot of advertisers who we've talked to about signing our pledge and they say hold on a second, we’re working with BP or Shell all about their climate solutions and how much they care about the issue. So, we’re helping the transition happen by putting out advertising from BP about how committed they are to climate action. And I think the thing to understand is that that is exactly the tactics that an industry under pressure would do, right. They want to act as if they’re solving the problem; they want to pretend as if they're making progress so that they won't face the type of pressure and regulations that would cause them to really change. And so, that advertising that “helping” is actually even more damaging. And I think that that's hard for people to hear because it is a beautiful ad about how committed BP is to climate action. But when only a few percentage points of their capital expenditures are going to clean energy and the rest is being poured into fossil fuels, that ultimately is false advertising and it should be called out as such, and ultimately regulated as such.

Greg Dalton: Let’s look to the other side. Christine, the clean energy sector is growing quickly, but it's a small amount and it’s fragmented compared to fossil fuels. They don't spend as much on advertising. They don't have the mega national consumer brands that happen that we know from the oil companies. Although car companies are starting to advertise EVs more, you know. Look at that side of it where is the power and the brand power and spending power on the clean side. Because ultimately these firms will move when there’s money to be made by these other clients.

Christine Arena: Well, yes, I mean, look, the fossil fuel industry is unique in that they have an exorbitant amount of money to spend. it's just a huge industry and clean tech marketers can't match that scale at this level. But what they can do is command the narrative. Fossil fuel marketers even though their messages are so pervasive even though they're so aggressive about telling their story and trying to position themselves as part of the solution, people are losing faith in fossil fuel companies. We have about 60% of Americans right now saying that fossil fuel believing that fossil fuel companies are to blame for the climate crisis and about 50% of them want them to pay damages. And that's now I think that's only gonna increase. So, this industry is kind of losing control of the narrative, even though it is trying so hard to direct it. And so, I think that opens the door for clean tech marketers and clean energy marketers to come in with a more compelling narrative. Tell your story better; be more creative. Capture America's hearts and minds.

Greg Dalton: Jaime, how do you see the power dynamics there of this sort of less mature, more fragmented, less wealthy clean energy sector, compared to these fossil giants who have been around and had 100 years to accumulate power and brand?

Jaime Henn: Well, I think Christine put it exactly right. I mean there’s no doubt that right now the oil and gas sector is dramatically outspending clean energy when it comes to PR and advertising. We did a report to launch the Clean Creatives campaign that looked at some data that we had available and this was between 2014 and 2018, which there’s a lag time because it's hard to get this information from advertisers at certain points. But during that period what we could find, suggested that the fossil fuel industry had spent over $1 billion over the course of just five years to influence public opinion on these issues. And that outweighed the clean energy by a factor of 400 to 1. So, there’s just no competition between the two. That said, I think Christine is exactly right that this is changing and there's a few reasons why. One, everybody knows that this is where the future is headed. And if advertising and PR is about anything it’s about trends. It's about predicting the market, driving the market and everybody's clear that the market is moving away from fossil fuels to clean energy. Second, those are the companies that people want to work with. If you go to the main PR and advertising agencies around the country and around the world. Hardly any of them put their fossil fuel clients on their website. And if you're not proud enough to put your client on the website, maybe you shouldn’t be working with them. This isn’t a work that people are happy about or proud about or that is attracting talent and winning awards it’s kind of the dirty secret that maybe keeps the lights on. So that's saying something about where the industry is going. And finally, it's not just clean energy companies that are part of this new economy or have something at stake in this conversation, it's also huge consumer facing brands that are trying to convince their consumers that they are committed to sustainability and wanna be part of a more sustainable economy. So, if I’m a brand like Unilever and I'm trying to convince my consumers that I care about the climate, I care about the environment, do I really want to work with an advertising agency that is also working with ExxonMobil to block climate action to put out propaganda about my product? That just increases the type of distrust that is destructive to brands. And so, I think that conversation is one that we’re really trying to have with major companies that might not be involved in clean energy but do have a stake in this conversation to say hey, just like you take a really close look at your supply chain to figure out whether or not the products you are sourcing are sustainable. Take a close look at your advertising firm and ask them if they're working with clients that are really aren't aligned with the mission and the values that you’re trying to put out there in the world. And I think that's beginning to happen. I think again this has been a sort of sector that's avoided the type of scrutiny perhaps not surprisingly, because they're very good at shaping public narrative. But it's something that's beginning to really take effect and I think in conversation that’s only going to expand in the years to come.

Greg Dalton: So, as we wrap up, what’s the next chapter in this Christine, what do you think the next term will be that you’re looking for trying to make happen?

Christine Arena: The next term is I think, you know, accountability. I think we’re seeing a wave of accountability journalism. I think we’re going to probably see some PR firms and executives specifically called as witnesses to testify at the oversight the House hearings on climate disinformation. I also think that we’ll probably see a lot of activity on the state level those lawsuits, the state AG lawsuits filed against oil firms for their deceptive advertising. I think that we’ll see some of the marketing partners named as defendants in some of those suits. And I think we're going to continue to see this wave of public interest and curiosity about this issue because climate change is something that everyone listening and everyone in the world is experiencing on some level.

Greg Dalton: Jaime, Martin Sorrell is like one of the gods of the advertising industry. He's made some moves recently. What does that told you about the way the winds are blowing in PR and marketing?

Jaime Henn: Well, I think it's a good sign and for those who don't know Martin Sorrell is one of the early kind of leaders and founders of WPP which has emerged as one of largest advertising firms in the world and he's now started a new company and one of the first steps he took was to sign the Amazon climate pledge and say that his agency was really going to focus on this. Since then, the details have been a little scant about what exactly that means. So, there's some accountability work that needs to be done there. But the point is that this is clearly where the market is headed. You are not gonna be an advertising agency in 2030 and not have a position on climate change. There is a parallel with big tobacco here, however imperfect. And I think people need to look at themselves and ask what I've been proud of working for Phillip Morris to block action to address cancer from cigarettes. You know would I have wanted to have been on the account that put out the lies about that. And if the answer is no, then you better ask some serious questions about the work you're doing for the fossil fuel industry right now. Because the level of anger that people feel towards those companies today is only going to magnify as the impacts of climate change become more clear. We need those creative minds working for the good guys instead of putting out propaganda for Exxon.

Greg Dalton: Thank you so much for coming on Climate One.

Christine Arena: Thanks for having us.

Jaime Henn: Thank you.

Greg Dalton: Lastly, it’s fair to admit that these issues are complicated and changing. Years ago, Climate One did accept funding from major oil companies. We no longer do.

Greg Dalton: Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe to our podcast 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 managing director is Jenny Park. Our producers and audio editors are Ariana Brocious and Austin Colón. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Our team also includes consulting producer Sara-Katherine Coxon. 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

What’s in My Air?

Otto Pilot — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 08:01:00 +0000

What’s in My Air?

12/02/2022

Key to addressing the climate crisis is having an accurate picture of greenhouse gas emissions. Over a 20-year period, methane is 80 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Yet those responsible for releasing methane into the atmosphere often don’t even know how they themselves are emitting. And methane is only one of many harmful air pollutants that result from our dependence on burning fossil fuels.

Now, research coalitions, citizen scientists and activists are using a slate of new tools to detect and report emissions. They’re also using many of the same tools to shine a light on exactly how and where other deadly fossil fuel pollutants, like nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter, are affecting community health.

Davida Herzl is co-founder and CEO of Aclima, a company tracking climate change pollution at the local level to address what she sees as two big gaps in our understanding.

“Although we are facing a global climate crisis right now, we actually don't have the measurement infrastructure to really know where those emissions are coming from. And two, we don't really understand who’s being impacted by those emissions down to the block level, down to that really hyper-local resolution,” she says. The data collected by her group has been used by the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project to build a clean-air action plan to reduce emissions across the community. Herzl says the plan had almost 100 different interventions based on Aclima’s hyper-local data. “Everything from investing in reducing bus idling and truck idling to really using the data to identify major opportunities for retrofits at the port.”

On the other side of the spectrum, the research collaborative Climate TRACE is publishing data on global emissions gathered through a combination of satellites and artificial intelligence. Project co-founder Gavin McCormick says the data has actually been encouraging when it comes to verifying countries’ emissions reduction pledges made under the Paris Agreement. The data can also provide clear guidance as to what to target next.

“We can see who the biggest emitters are. We can see their ownership in a lot of cases, but most intriguingly to me, we can see who is producing cleaner and less clean,” McCormick says.

Air quality data also makes plain the inequities faced by front-line communities who have long suffered the effects of harmful air. Environmental groups like Earthworks have been collecting data in oil and gas fields using specialized cameras that record visual evidence of emissions. Kendra Pinto is an Indigenous Field Advocate with the group, and member of the Navajo Nation. She prioritizes collecting oil and gas emissions data in residential Indigenous communities, which she feels are underserved by state and federal regulatory agencies.

“How often are we listening to folks who are dealing with direct impacts of extraction?” she says. “Even if we stop permitting new leases, that's not gonna stop the toxic pollutants from the existing infrastructure that's already there,” including abandoned and orphan wells. And a lack of sufficient regulators means many problems go unaddressed.

“We can talk about rules and regulations for the industry all we want but the cold, hard truth is these rules and regulations don't mean squat if they're not enforced by the appropriate agency,” Pinto says.

Aclima’s Herzl hopes that increasing the amount of reliable, real-time, accurate air-quality data will make a difference.

“We’re mapping this image of pollution that has been invisible up until now,” Herzl says. “Now policymakers and city governments and state governments and companies can really target their dollars on reducing those sources of emissions.”

Guests

Davida Herzl

CEO and Co-Founder, Aclima

Kendra Pinto

Four Corners Indigenous Community Field Advocate, Earthworks

Gavin McCormick

Cofounder and Executive Director, WattTime; Cofounder, Climate TRACE

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: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

Over a 20-year period, methane is 80 times more harmful than carbon dioxide to the atmosphere that makes life possible on earth. Yet many companies responsible for releasing methane into the sky often don’t know how much is really being emitted. And methane is only one of a suite of harmful air pollutants that result from our dependence on burning fossil fuels.

Now, research coalitions, citizen scientists and activists are using a slate of new tools to detect and report emissions. They’re also working to shine a light on how communities are affected by other deadly fossil fuel pollutants, like nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter. Such data will be an increasingly critical part of local regulation and hopefully bolster the accountability of international agreements to cut emissions.

People in the fire-prone west may be familiar with Purple Air, which provides hyper local particulate data and became popular during the mega wildfires. Davida Herzl is co-founder and CEO of Aclima, a company working on a new approach to diagnosing the health of our air and tracking climate change pollution at the local level.

Davida Herzl: I actually founded Aclima over a decade ago because it was clear that there was a big gap in our understanding of two really critical features of air pollution and greenhouse gasses. One is that although we are facing a global climate crisis right now, we actually don't have the measurement infrastructure to really know where those emissions are coming from. And two, we don't really understand who’s being impacted by those emissions down to the block level down to that really hyper local resolution. And there's been a big push and I think a demand I think a lot of the citizen sensor consumer sensor devices and adoption, what that represents is demand for local knowledge when you're trying to protect your family and yourself from these big sorts of events, right. What we're really trying to do is to create the measurement and data infrastructure to not just respond to the short-term events but to really understand over long periods of time and on an ongoing basis really quantifying all pollution everywhere. We literally measure everything. So, we measure PM and all the criteria pollutants. So, basically all of the pollutants that are regulated by the United States EPA. We also measure all greenhouse gasses. So, we measure things like methane, an extremely powerful short-term greenhouse gas that short-lived has very significant warming effect. And we’re not doing enough to manage methane emissions. And then we also measure toxics. So, all of the pollutants that are associated with petrochemical production and heavy industry. So, benzene, toluene, ethylene, all the enes. And they tend to be associated with things like cancer and really significant and acute health impacts. We measure all of this with a proprietary and specialized sensing technology that we've developed over many years that gets deployed on fleets of vehicles. And as those vehicles are driving through city streets we’re mapping this image of pollution that has been invisible up until now. And so, we're really focused on finding those sources of emissions and where they intersect with people. So, that now policymakers and city governments and state governments and companies can really target their dollars on reducing those sources of emissions.

Greg Dalton: So, what happens with your data and what ways do you make it accessible for people?

Davida Herzl: So, under the United States Clean Air Act there are specific requirements for how you measure air quality. But the technology that's been used for those kinds of measurements is very expensive, very difficult to deploy. And you only see, they only measure a few pollutants. And so, where we really invested significantly was in the science to enable really high-quality data that could be used to target sometimes billions of dollars into big emissions reductions project. So, to give you an example of how our data gets used, one of our long-standing partners is the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, which is led by an incredible group of cofounders that have really been building out incredible capacity in using data to drive local policy solutions. And so, here in California they were the first community to actually have block by block data that we developed and generated with them. And using that block level data and other kinds of data that they integrated into their analysis, they worked with the local regulators to develop a transformational plan to reduce emissions across the community that had almost 100 different interventions based on that hyper local data. Everything from investing in reducing bus idling and truck idling to really using the data to identify major opportunities for retrofits at the port. And so, that has been really a model for how you can use data to shape climate action plans that improve the community that reduce air pollution and also make those communities that are able to not only address climate change but actually use it as an opportunity to create jobs and bring in more economic development. And of those hundred interventions a third are in active implementation.

Greg Dalton: And for people who aren't familiar with West Oakland, it's a neighborhood sandwich between a band of freeways and one of the largest ports on the West Coast. High concentrations of local air pollution. That’s a powerful image, the idea that you know an idling bus so we could actually visualize capture and present how much pollution is being generated by an idling bus or another source of pollution. It's well-established that low income communities often near freeways like West Oakland and Long Beach and elsewhere, and other sources of pollution have dirty air. So, in one sense, you know, it sounds like your data is kind of providing more proof of what we already know that low income communities of color have terrible air.

Davida Herzl: We do know that and that's largely because of historical redlining practices, right, where in the United States because of land-use practices that were fundamentally racist communities of color got relegated to very extreme proximity to major sources of emissions whether it's freeways or whether it's ports or factories or energy production from fossil fuels. And so, in West Oakland, for example, a lot of people aren't aware that the 580 and the 880 are segregated. That the part of the freeway that's going through, you know, the community of color. That's where all the diesel trucks are allowed to go. The freeway that is going through white more affluent communities, diesel trucks are actually not allowed. It's illegal to drive through that freeway corridor. And so, what ends up happening is you get this disproportionate burden. Now communities have been speaking to this issue forever. I mean you can look at the health outcomes, whether it’s asthma or, you know, other kinds of disease that is associated with pollution. I think what our data is doing is really giving those issues color; they’re quantifiable, you know, we can now hold and create a framework for accountability that can say if I'm going to invest you know as if investment is gonna come into my community I wanna make sure that it's going to the highest impact use. And that block by block measurement is critical because one of the things that we've discovered through our work with West Oakland and now a lot of follow-on scientific work that we've done, including with the US EPA, is that pollution is truly hyper local. It varies by 800% from one block to the next. But because pollution is so hyper local you can't actually understand those specific sources and specific impacts unless you have the data to then see am I having an impact, right. I mean we can see, for example, not just idling trucks, but we can see precisely where all the natural gas leaks precisely where is methane emitting from, you know, a facility where the community has been plagued with odor issues. And we can actually go and measure that and say okay this is an area that needs investment. And so, that is critical to actually shape investments which at the end of the day is what we need to do to really restore an equitable situation where we all have access to clean air.

Greg Dalton: Well, it’s clear that you're filling a data gap. The federal government hasn't made the investment in these technologies but it’s probably not a real for-profit business case for companies to develop this technology on their own to generate a revenue stream. So, how are you funded and are you a public benefit corporation, nonprofit, you know, who saw the need to kind of put the money into this gap between private market and what the federal government has invested in?

Davida Herzl: Yeah. So, we are a private sector company. And we are for profit, but we are a public benefit. In that we’re not singularly for profit. as a corporation we take our obligation to society and our stakeholders very seriously, but actually we think that in the same way that you have to measure what you manage if you're a business and look at the bottom line and make sure that you know you are managing costs and revenues and ins and flows, ins and outs. That when it comes to climate change that’s the fundamental problem, Greg, that we haven't integrated these costs into our decision-making across the board. And so, we had a different idea we said actually in order to start incorporating these issues and impact on society and to how we measure performance across the board we need data that measures and tells us what are those emissions. We talk about global CO2 levels. We talk about global methane levels. Well, there’s just a few stations that are taking those measurements. But when it comes to actually changing the game and changing the state of affairs of climate change, we need to think about climate data and emissions measurement as importantly and as significantly as we think about financial performance and financial data. Because it's not just about financial performances actually, are we actually collectively as an economy, ensuring a livable planet? The answer today right now is no. And so, how do we really create shared accountability here to improve conditions for everybody. And my argument is that that a breathable layer of air is actually foundational to a functional economy,

Greg Dalton: Yeah, human right, perhaps even yeah, there’s a whole economy burgeoning around carbon accounting and measuring, etc. So, I’m thinking about your cars driving around and detecting all sorts of pollution and levels that hasn’t been detected before by the more centralized EPA collection models. And that could be pretty uncomfortable for factories, refineries, industrial sources of pollution who suddenly feel visible and think that you might be able to help them by saying hey, you’re leaking methane. But what's been the real reaction by going to sources and say, hey, did you know you’re leaking this much?

Davida Herzl: I understand why you would why people would have that perception, right, that industry would be pushing back. And that was frankly one of my biggest concerns as we were scaling up our data collection. Concerns that you know we would have a lot of pushback because we are providing unprecedented transparency and we’re doing it at a level of scientific accuracy that hasn't been done before. So, we have a cooperative research and development agreement with the United States EPA. In order for us to be adopted by these regulatory customers at the state level at the local level, you have to pass a very high bar of scientific rigor. What’s happened though, and I think you're, you know, we’re all seeing this is that there is a ton of pressure either from a regulatory perspective or from shareholders or from just basic license to operate. That we are no longer in a reality where it's just okay to emit these pollutants and to do it in a way that is harming people or harming communities but also in many instances is actually undermining performance. If I’m a gas company and I'm emitting methane, which today, look at the current global energy market, every single iota of gas that I'm losing that’s wasted product that is really hard to replace right now because of all of those supply chain issues. And so, I think there's been a real shift in the marketplace and in the private sector and frankly, the private sector is quickly becoming one of our larger customers because they are being really held accountable to improving emissions, reducing emissions and our community partners are playing a big role in that.

Greg Dalton: Has there been an enforcement action based on your data has any air quality board gone into a particular industrial facility and said, look, we got this data you need to clean up your act.

Davida Herzl: We’re letting the regulators tell those stories and they will be ready to tell those stories soon. But what I'll say about our data is that imagine that you could put on x-ray glasses right, look out your window and suddenly be able to understand where all of these emissions are coming from. Well, when you have those x-ray glasses on that tells me if I'm a regulator where to go and look, right. And before our customers were doing this work in the blind based on complaints and they had very limited resources. I mean if you look at the scale of emissions and pollution, there's just there's a lot to do to catch up right, with the scale of the problem. And so, if we can more efficiently tell them where to go look or if I'm a gas company where to go fix the leak. you can respond much more quickly, you can reduce those total emissions and take action to actually fix the issue. And it's not always enforcement, right. We also, our data also directs investment. I’ll go back to the example of West Oakland where our data helped target incentives to improve equipment that was emitting pollution and that needed modernization in order to really reduce total emissions. And sometimes I have to say we find really crazy things that you would not expect the size of some of the leaks that we see, for example, is kind of staggering.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Let’s get back to my conversation with Davida Herzl, co-founder and CEO of Aclima, which is mapping hyper local air quality. Recently an EPA advisory board criticized the agency for not using satellite air data to track local emissions. I asked Herzl how much of Aclima’s data is available–and thus actionable–to regulators and the general public.

Davida Herzl: So, it took years for us to figure this out because the regulators want to make sure that as they're taking action with the data that they really understand the rigor behind it. And so, there is a long process for us in going through that evaluation and rigor. But we’re now making that information in the maps publicly available and we’ll be doing a lot more. working to make that data really accessible and usable for the nonscientific kind of members of the public. And that’s gonna be very important information for really gauging you know potential long-term impacts of being exposed to those pollution hotspots and really understanding those persistent levels of pollution over time.

Greg Dalton: Elsewhere in this episode we talk with Gavin McCormick of Climate TRACE which is mapping carbon emissions of methane on a global scale. How do you see your two approaches working together to bring emissions in check? One is very hyper local and his is, kind of global macro.

Davida Herzl: The way we see it is that all of these different approaches to measuring and understanding emissions are critical. We need all resolutions of data we need all resolutions of understanding. We’re really filling a critical gap because in the absence of measurement at the local level what's been done is the development of these tables where you sort of you know map the kind of emission with emission source with the typical sort of emissions that may come off of that. They literally go and test an engine to see how much a specific engine may emit. And then they develop these factors that you apply to entire sectors of the economy. But those models have not been ground truthed with hyper local measurement. And so, we see our role as a source of ground truth to really improve our understanding of those emissions at scale and ultimately improve the models and how we can actually you know forecast much more accurately the work that he's doing is incredible. He's providing a global view and doing it at a more sectoral level and also looking at the largest emitters. Where really Aclima where we differ is that we’re just very, very focused on that human intersection like where are the sources relative to where people are experiencing those sources. And it's just a different view of a massive problem that needs to be better quantified across the board.

Greg Dalton: As we make this energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables it’s about one source of power, electrical power. It's also about other forms of power. Human power political power. How does your data shift power?

Davida Herzl: Fundamentally, I think you know one of the major motivators for doing what we do we truly believe that you know air, the climate we live and breathe in is the fundamental ingredient, one of the fundamental ingredients for life. It's the one thing that we all have in common. Every few seconds we all take in a breath of the same air. And we should have much more agency in that and much more power to influence the direction of our long-term health of our environment that we depend on. Transparency changes that formula; transparency changes that equation, the equation of power to actually be able to create a much more informed public to give companies that want to do the right thing the information needed to step up and actually do what they need to do for regulators to write the rules for policymakers to write the rules that ensure that we all get to experience that right to clean air. And so, I think fundamentally that is the role of transparency. That is what we’re here to do is to ultimately translate all of this data into a more just and cleaner and fairer world.

Greg Dalton: Davida Herzl is CEO and Cofounder of Aclima. Davida, thanks for sharing your story of transparency and empowerment and innovation. I really appreciate it.

Davida Herzl: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Greg.

Greg Dalton: Whereas Aclima uses cars and computers to gather emissions data in urban environments, others are out on the ground in rural areas tracking similar air pollutants. Kendra Pinto is a Diné activist in New Mexico. In her role as Indigenous Community Field Advocate with Earthworks, she collects air quality data and advocates for clean air and water in the Greater Chaco Canyon region. She spoke with Climate One’s Ariana Brocious.

Ariana Brocious: The Four Corners Region contains significant oil and gas development on federal and tribal lands. So give us a sense of what it feels like as a resident of the Navajo Nation in Western New Mexico.

Kendra Pinto: Growing up in this area, it wasn't anything that I really paid attention to. Like I knew some of my family was working in the gas fields, but it wasn't something that I considered dangerous or toxic. It wasn't until my sort of early adulthood when I considered how dangerous all of this can be. This land has mostly been untouched around my home. But within the past 10 years, it has completely changed. And so there's a lot of, not just physical, but there's mental aspects that are included among this struggle within the checkerboard area that I'm in. Back in July 2016 we actually did have an explosion happen about five miles west of where I live. And so, you know, at the time it was sort of a, well, maybe or what if, but now we say, when will it happen again? Because these well sites are multiplying everywhere around me.

Ariana Brocious: Gosh, that has to be scary to have an explosion happen so close to you. Did anybody get hurt?

Kendra Pinto: There was a brief investigation on that explosion. I never got a full report. I mean, I didn't live in the immediate zone, but there were 55 residents that were evacuated within that area, and the fire burned for five days because that was deemed the safest route possible. That's horrendous. Just imagine all of those toxins that were off gassing and burning and the people in this area were breathing it for almost a week. And there was nothing we could do about it.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah. That does really paint a picture of what it is like to live in such an active oil and gas region. So your work as a thermographer with Earthworks involves using this specialized camera that helps you visualize emissions. Can you give us a sense of what a typical field day is like when you go out with your camera equipment?

Kendra Pinto: So this camera has a special filter inside that basically makes invisible visible. But the gasses that we are looking at are hydrocarbons. And so one of the main gasses that we focus on at Earthworks is methane. We can spot it with the camera because the camera's based on how the hydrocarbons absorb infrared energy. And so it creates this visual picture. And whenever I go out into the oil and gas sites, I focus on oil and gas wells that are located, in and near residential areas. I'm able to go up to the outer edges of the oil and gas sites and sort of scan the site with the camera. If I do find emissions that are sort of pouring or venting out of either like the thief hatch or flare sticks on compressors, I will record a short video and send these videos to the New Mexico Environmental Department under an environmental complaint form. And so this basically gives the agency and the operators direct evidence that this is happening. Like emissions are not constantly. Some of them are intermittent, but emissions are happening out in this area.

Ariana Brocious: Once you've submitted it to the New Mexico Environmental Department, what happens then to the data on their side of things after you've shared these videos?

Kendra Pinto: Well, Earthworks, we keep a running log. So we're better oriented. But also, this is technically sort of a paper trail, you know, it's creating this log of emissions that are happening that aren't found by inspectors. And when we get these complaints, they definitely serve as a tool for the community here. One of the biggest challenges with living with oil and gas in my area at least, is that when they do happen, if someone happens to be out hiking or riding the horses and they smell like a rotten egg odor in the air, who do they tell? Who do they report it to? And that's what I'm here for, is I want to be able to tell people, well, you know, if we smell something suspicious in the air or you see some kind of liquid that's black or brown running off a tank, you get a hold of so and so. There's not a lot of educational tools that are available for locals to report those kind of events that are happening around them, even though they're dealing with them.

Ariana Brocious: If the state agency wants to sort of verify the findings that you and others are reporting, have they done that? Do they take your imagery and then go and check up on those sites and let you know if in fact it's a problem that needs solving, what happens?

Kendra Pinto: The agency that I filed these complaints with rarely contacts me afterwards. I've only ever had one successful complaint followed through with and that was back in July of 2019. I reported an unlit flare stack as a community member, not as an Earthworks staffer. And I think that might have made a slight difference, but I wouldn't say that could happen every time. When I did report this event, it was about a mile near my area and I actually did get a call back, but it wasn't from the agency that I reported to. It was actually a phone call from the oil conservation division. And the OCD staff was on site to check out the complaint that I submitted.

Ariana Brocious: So I understand that a lot of the communities you prioritize are rural. And also indigenous and that's a big focus of your work residential communities that are amidst these oil and gas fields. Why is that important?

Kendra Pinto: I think it's important because it's been missing for hundreds of years. I mean, how well are we listening? How often are we listening to folks who are dealing with direct impacts of extraction? A lot of the time when we talk about oil and gas or uranium or coal, a lot of the talk is about the industry or the companies itself that are sort of propelling the country to a number one stop in energy development around the world. But who are they stomping on in order to be number one in the world? It's the little folks, the little people that are dealing with toxic air and contaminated water. And it's super important that also, sort of these non-profit organizations or any organization should be listening to indigenous folks because we have been here for a millennia and we didn't destroy the land like we have been doing in the past couple hundred of years. So I want to be here to be able to help those who are willing to put up that kind of public fight.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah. And there's a proposal I'd like to just mention here. In November, 2021, interior secretary Deb Holland, announced that the Biden administration was thinking about a 20 year drilling moratorium on new federal oil and gas leasing within a roughly 10 mile radius around Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, which is in the area, part of the area where you are. But critics point out that that ban wouldn't do anything to stop the existing leases within that zone or just outside of it. And according to the BLM, about 90% of their lands within that area are already leased. So I'm curious what your opinion is on this proposal from Deb Holland if you think it would have any impact.

Kendra Pinto: Even if we stop permitting new leases, that's not gonna stop the toxic pollutants from the existing infrastructure that's already there. Well sites that are from the early nineties, there's sites that are even older than that, that are decrepit and rotting, and they have no operator managing it. So these are abandoned and orphan wells, and those type of things exist in my area. And I do think it has a lot to do because with my location and the fact that this is an indigenous community. And so creating a 10 mile buffer around the boundaries of the park is not enough. I will say that now it's not enough.

Ariana Brocious: And what solutions do you think there are then to make some changes short term?

Kendra Pinto: I think one way would be providing public resources for folks who are dealing with the impacts. I mean, in my area, I don't have a hospital. No fire station. No police station, which is kind of odd when you think about how much money, how much funding goes to the state from my area. Back in 2019, they made like over 20 million off the land that's near me. But what do I have in my area to show for it? Except pollution and metal barrels.

Ariana Brocious: So maybe diverting some of the money back into the community investing. More locally.

Kendra Pinto: So the communities have the ability to make their own decisions about what they wanna do with their home. That's not happening every day. And even with the public scoping that the Bureau of Land Management does with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, that's not enough and it's super late. I think they started having their joint public scoping meetings in like 2018 that was right around the corner. How long has oil and gas and other minerals been extracted from this country and from indigenous lands. But yeah, let's all remember that this is all stolen land. This is all indigenous land.

Ariana Brocious: Right. I guess I'm wondering if you think having these new tools can turn into action basically. If measuring the emissions is a method of getting more enforcement, more regulation and a way to sort of track and improve the air quality.

Kendra Pinto: We can talk about rules and regulations for the industry. All we want but the cold hard truth is these rules and regulations don't mean squat if they're not enforced by the appropriate agency.

Ariana Brocious: And why is that difficult in your region?

Kendra Pinto: Because of our ruralness. Some of us call this no man's land. Some of us call this the desert. Some of us call it the middle of nowhere. But the closest grocery store is about 50 miles away. We're nestled in the middle of the mesas. And because we're so spread out and also the Navajo Nation is so large. I think that leads to a lot of limited enforcement within my area. And also the fact that there's not enough funding for New Mexico Environmental Department to increase their amount of inspectors. And if they did that, if they increased the amount of inspectors, maybe they could get to the well sites that are in the rural area where I am. But I don't know, sometimes I feel like that’s setting the bar pretty high.

Ariana Brocious: Well as we wrap up here, Kendra, if you were to communicate one message, from the work that you've been doing in the last few years to people who don't live in a region that's so saturated with oil and gas production, what would that be?

Kendra Pinto: I think one of the messages is about folks who aren't familiar with the oil and gas within indigenous communities is that not everyone is benefiting with royalties. That's a huge misconception that happens. Like I don't receive any oil royalties, but I'm pretty sure folks out there think I do just because I live in this area. Or just because I'm Dine, I don't know. But I think the biggest message is there's no need for this outside help to come in and try to save us. These folks should be asking us what we would like and what we need done. That often does not happen within my area. We do ask for support. But the support needs to be flexible with indigenous ways of life.

Ariana Brocious: Kendra Pinto is Four Corners Indigenous community Field Advocate with Earthworks. Thank you Kendra, so much, for joining us on Climate One.

Kendra Pinto: Thank you for having me.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Mapping neighborhood-level emissions and regional air quality is one end of the spectrum. On the other end, more and more entities are working to gather emissions data on the global scale using satellites. Gavin McCormick is one of ten founding members of Climate TRACE, a coalition of tech companies, non governmental organizations, and universities working together to combine satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to make greenhouse gas emissions transparent. I spoke with him about their most recent dataset released during the COP 27 climate summit in Egypt.

Gavin McCormick: The big thing that we've done is we've been able to move from measuring the emissions of entire countries to the largest 72,000 sources of individual emissions on the planet. So I think one of the most interesting headlines here is we can see who the biggest emitters are, we can see their ownership in a lot of cases, but most intriguingly to me, we can see who is producing cleaner and less clean. So I'm intrigued by stories like which steel mills worldwide are producing cleaner steel than others, which ships produce less emissions per nautical mile. And we're hoping to accelerate, what it looks like to get better sort of climate intelligence about the best way to go green.

Greg Dalton: So if I hear you, you're not just about sort of shaming the dirty sources, but you wanna sort of celebrate the cleaner ones, the relatively cleaner ones.

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, I personally think, I mean, it's gonna grab all the headlines, like who is dirtiest, but I think if you talk about how are you really gonna fix climate change, naming and shaming is fine. But what really helps is figuring out, okay, what's a viable plan to do better? And one of the things that I'm blown away by, for example, is we are seeing oil fields that are 52 times cleaner per barrel of oil. There's a stunning capability here that allows us with better data to say, all right, what would you have to do differently to go greener, not just catch a few heavy polluters.

Greg Dalton: Interesting, cause I did note that 1% of facilities measured emit 14% of global emissions. These are some of these mega facilities often in Asia, Russia, et cetera, where they're just part of it was just massive scale. So that was part of my question was, some of the biggest emitters might be just cause they're really large, but you're measuring relative pollution output.

Gavin McCormick: Exactly, and so the first thing we wanted to do was kind of align around countries because we were there at COP. That's what the UN system is designed around. The second thing we wanted to do is to say, okay, let's get concrete about what we are actually talking about. I'm fascinated by stories like in Tunisia, 20% of the country's emissions come from a single facility. So I think it's really good to move to very concrete, what are we talking about when it would take to stop climate change. But as you say, I think the third and most interesting step is to say who's not bigger just because they are causing more economic activity. But who is more emissions per unit of something. That really lets us say, how could we do better?

Greg Dalton: And do these facilities know what you know as a, what's been the response to putting this data out there?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, it's been interesting. So far we have had exactly one conversation with a company who disputed some of the emissions numbers. It turned out what was happening is that there were two very nearby facilities that we had thought were one facility. So they had a good point, but the emissions numbers were fundamentally right. So far the conversation with the emitters has been pretty straightforward actually. What I think is so fascinating is the conversation with buyers and governments. So not the folks causing the emissions, but the folks who have a lot of influence and sway about what would you do about them. So I'm intrigued with conversations with steel buyers, with cargo owners, with city officials, thinking about how they could clean up their cities, these kind of conversations.

Greg Dalton: And would you publicly name or call out? I mean, the data's available. You put it out there, but you don't sort of lift up or curate the data or name particular facilities, cause that's the, really what you're bringing here is this asset level, facility level data. Not like the Permian Basin, which we know is a big oil and gas field, of course it's gonna be a big emitter, but you're naming the actual locations in there. Will you publicly name them in the future?

Gavin McCormick: So they're all on the website for anyone to see. So anybody who's interested can go to climatetrace.org and see who do we think the biggest emitters in the world are and how that's evolving over time. But we have kind of a policy, we, we view ourselves as closer to Wikipedia. We don't wanna be in the business of editorializing too much and sort of picking favorites. So I probably actually won't in future be doing much naming names, although I'm sure there are organizations out there that are gonna do that with Climate TRACE data. We're a kind of just the facts situation.

Greg Dalton: How about at the country level? Your report cites Russia, Turkmenistan, US and Middle Eastern countries as areas of concern.

Gavin McCormick: The expectation we had going into this project is what we were gonna find is there were some countries that were wildly falsifying their emissions numbers to the UN. To my considerable surprise, that's kind of not what we found. And I think it's always interesting when you have a scientific finding that's not what the scientists are expecting. But the real thing we found is, although there are some areas for concern, the bigger story is not that there are certain countries falsifying. It's certain industries. So, I for example, would have told you before this project that I don't know, the coal industry and the oil and gas industry, they're both big fossil fuel industries that expect pretty similar behavior, but we've seen a really big spread. The coal companies, they emit a lot, but it's pretty much exactly what they've always said they emitted. But the oil and gas companies worldwide are the big outlier. We are seeing really significant discrepancies between the emissions we see from space of many oil fields, and what had been reported. And what's interesting is we’re seeing that in a lot of different countries, so I think if I'm gonna name anything, it's an entire sector.

Greg Dalton: So once again, oil and gas is the villain here. Is that because of the, perhaps coal facilities tend to be sort of one big, really large coal plant. But oil and gas can be many wells, many pipelines, more vast infrastructure. And is it possible that they just don't know what's leaking?

Gavin McCormick: It is very possible. So in the defense of the oil and gas industry, it's pretty hard to measure all of the emissions of entire massive pipelines. Something interesting on a technical level is that more of the emissions come from leaks in that industry. And so you can have the situation that a single leak, if it's happening at a really large pipeline, even in the middle of nowhere, very high pressure, can be responsible for an enormous share of your emissions. So I suspect that if they wanted to find these emissions, they could be doing a better job. But we are generally finding that a lot of the emissions in that sector, they come from accidents instead of intentional activity.

Greg Dalton: And in agriculture, I was rather surprised to see most of the top 100 emitters are rice fields, predominantly in Asia. And I'd been covering climate for a long time and didn't realize rice was such a dominant emitter in the agricultural sector. What surprised you in the data?

Gavin McCormick: I didn't realize that either. So this has been an education for me. I'm originally an electricity expert and in learning how emissions and other activities work, I didn't know that rice was so different than other crops. And I also didn't know in agriculture that so many of the emissions come from unnecessary fertilizer use. There's just sort of a common pattern of overdoing it. Which of course brings me hope because it's not like people are gonna stop eating rice. There's not a lot you can do about that, but totally unnecessary fertilization that we can spot from space and say, hey, you could do better, that's extremely actionable.

Greg Dalton: So how do you think these new findings should impact international climate action, bringing this new level of transparency?

Gavin McCormick: One of the most interesting things that we've been hearing is from a lot of environment ministers at the country level or the city equivalent, I guess it would be a sustainability manager at a city. That often they sort of had a vague sense that it was important to reduce emissions. But when you're trying to justify that to the treasury ministry in your country, the difference between, hey, we really have clear data on exactly what's going on, we have a plan for how to verify it. If it gets reduced, we can tell you in concrete terms exactly what facilities need to. The difference between that and ah, somebody should do something. It's like night and day. So I think the big potential here is to essentially line up what are the biggest sources of emissions. Not knock down all of them, cause some of those are really important for crucial economic activities. And it could be a long time, but sort of say, what are all the big sources that'd be pretty easy to do something about? And of all the conversations we've had, the two fastest moving I think are in the city space and in the corporate sector where we often find there is a big will to do something, but people don't have infinite resources. And if you can really say right for you in your city, these emitting assets are the priority for you in your city. It's a completely different to-do list. We are seeing a lot of interest in essentially getting more bang for the buck out of your dollars that you wanna invest in fighting climate change. So I think a lot of the story's about leverage.

Greg Dalton: And targeting resources and giving data to cities that may not have the capacity to do that. As of last fall, no country had submitted a complete accounting of its emissions to the UN climate change agency. It seems your work could force their hand and also check their math, which I guess you're saying is that their, their math, their self-reporting of numbers by countries to the UN seems to be accurate. So how is this gonna enhance that process?

Gavin McCormick: So I should sort of be precise and say we had an expectation going in that was going on was that countries were reporting information and it was not true. By and large, that is not what we have found. But what we have found is there's a lot of missing information. So there are plenty of countries that it's been 20 years since they reported anything. Now, that's one thing if like, oh, data is old. But think about that means that anything anyone has done in that country under the Paris Agreement, it's less than 20 years old. We have no record of that. And so, if a country doesn't have any information, I think there's a tremendous amount of value in providing independent information and that's sort of a different use case than we are expecting because although I think it's very valuable to ensure that everybody stays honest as a general rule, the problem we're seeing is like failure to report, not reporting untrue information.

Greg Dalton: It's nice to know that countries aren't fudging their homework. At last year's UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, more than a hundred countries signed the methane pledge promising to reduce methane emissions globally by 30% from 2020 level. Supporters of methane, also known as natural gas, say it burns cleaner than coal, but it can be worse than gas of small amounts leak as we've been talking about. So how does your work connect to the methane pledge?

Gavin McCormick: So one thing as we were just talking about how until now, countries have largely been honest with each other, and I think that that has tremendous potential for underlying the trust that is what makes negotiations work. But I think the pressure is gonna increase to falsify data. So if you think about a lot of these binding pledges, they're just now starting to have teeth, and the global methane pledge is a huge example of that. It's gonna start to be more tempting to kind of stray off that path. And so we think getting ahead of the system and making sure that there's honest, independent monitoring kind of from day one. So everybody making these pledges knows all along, like don't even bother trying to fake it because everybody's gonna see. I think now that the pledges are there and we are in this amazing place, the countries have all committed to doing the right thing. I think just sort of keeping everybody on that path is, is just fundamental to the climate fight at this point, particularly in methane where so often it is accidents and things that would be so easy to sweep onto the rug if no one's looking.

Greg Dalton: That's an interesting point that the stakes are gonna increase and there's gonna be more penalties, more incentives to cut corners or fudge numbers. Explain how the combination of satellites and artificial intelligence is allowing projects like climate TRACE to gather and synthesize data and how has that shifted your own understanding of emissions?

Gavin McCormick: So what brought me to this project is I was working on power plants in the United States and we had some technology that can reduce emissions automatically. But we can only do it because the US does such a good job of publicly and transparently monitoring its power plant emissions. Every hour, every power plant in the United States has a public reporting of its emissions. There's nothing like that in the world anywhere else. I had always assumed that in every sector, in every country, in the fight against climate change, everybody had access to good data and the more I've learned on this project, it's not the case in most places that you can monitor things on site. It's too expensive. And it's not the case that you can monitor easily from the sky because if you see a bunch of CO2 near a power plant, it's very common that it didn't come from that power plant. We forget that 90% of CO2 emissions still come from nature and there's wind and all of that stuff. And so it's actually very difficult by just looking at CO2 to be totally sure of where everything is coming from. So the big innovation here is you layer in machine learning. And what machine learning can do is it can, it can match up against all of the stuff we really know for sure, but it can bring in additional signals that give us further clues. My favorite example is a power plant when it's producing a bunch of steam, that is extremely, highly correlated with it's turned on and causing emissions. Okay, this year, how often was this power plant turned? When you see a factory farm, seeing the cattle from space, it doesn't tell you exactly how much methane they emitted, but it gives you a really good sense. And so what machine learning can do is bring in all of the other stuff we can see from space and the internet and true it up to what the CO2 emissions and methane emission sensors are seeing. So you get a way more detailed, accurate picture.

Greg Dalton: People involved in direct measurement say this type of modeling is not accurate and could be challenged by polluters. What's your response to that?

Gavin McCormick: I think the definition of accuracy in science is when you have an accurate measurement, you compare it and you see if they match. So, the way machine learning works is it's got a measurement of accuracy there. And so, it would be very unscientific to say because of the method you used, it is accurate or not. The right way to do it would be to look at the data and see how accurate is it in practice. And so I'll, I'll agree that some of our current, it's not like everything in Climate TRACE is perfect now, but I would really disagree with the idea that the method you use is the right way to measure accuracy in science. I think it's the match with the actual ground truth data that you can see. And that's why we're making all that public so that you can see for yourself where our algorithms are more and less accurate, and where there is more uncertainty.

Greg Dalton: California has a law that's requiring measuring, say factory farms, methane emissions from dairy and feed lots. So could a regulatory body use your data to actually look at a particular factory farm and use that for compliance purposes. Is that happening? Do you envision that happening where regulators could actually use this for compliance?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, we're just starting to talk to regulators now, because we do take accuracy so seriously. I would say it's pretty early days for Climate TRACE. So I think it's useful now for any big picture rules. Like, there are some laws, that you cannot emit more than X and if we say you're 10 times more than X, like, okay, obviously it's happening, but I would be a little bit hesitant to use the current version of Climate TRACE for any, like really the details matter, legal enforcement situations, but AI is improving. Check back next year, and it might be different. We'll get there in the end.

Greg Dalton: Right. Or you might point regulators where to look, right?

Gavin McCormick: Mm-hmm.

Greg Dalton: Why is real time monitoring critical for this?

Gavin McCormick: So, my career began in electricity emissions and so a good example of why real time matters in electricity, if you have a power grid that is charging up an electric vehicle and at one time that power grid is mostly producing coal and at another time that power grid is mostly solar, the real world consequence of charging that vehicle, they're wildly different emissions numbers. And so by synchronizing electric vehicles, smart thermostats, batteries to when the power grid is cleaner, you can reduce a lot of emissions in a way that kind of doesn't cost anything. And so I think literally real time is only useful in those applications where you can pull a lever, and do something. But also consider that the state of the art in a lot of countries has been seven years, in some cases, 20 years since we had a look at all. So something not quite literally real time, but at least up to date, it's very useful for policy makers who wanna know if a law worked. So I had missed how often cities and states and countries they're experimenting with new strategies. And if you have to wait 20 years to find out how strategy worked, you will know so much less than if you're getting continuous real time feedback. And this is how corporations manage, you can't manage what you can't measure. And we're basically trying to bring that to emissions too.

Greg Dalton: So what kind of action do you hope will occur by shining a light on individual industrial facilities? Like you said earlier, it's kind of encouraging or celebrating the clean and efficient ones. What else do you hope will happen as a result of this new level of global transparency?

Gavin McCormick: So one use case we've seen a lot of is a policy maker who is trying to reduce emissions in their city or state who literally didn't know what the biggest source of emissions in their area was. So think about how you would prioritize, should you be investing in electric vehicles or in forestry if you don't even know which of those is the biggest deal in your region. So we think that just sort of saying, hey, here's where the emission is coming from, is one big part. Another big part we've seen is a lot of climate efforts fail. If you think about how many dollars have been spent on carbon offsets, and we often say like, ah, those didn't really work. Let's flip it in reverse. What if they did all work? And so I am really hopeful that we can support carbon markets and policies in saying, all right, we, we invested in reducing emissions. Did we see that yield? And can we hold people accountable for making sure that money is all actually achieving something? Be a lot of extra emissions reductions. And the last thing is just trust in the Paris Agreement. I know it's, it's not an amazing headline that we didn't see as much lying and cheating as people thought, but that actually is enormously good news for climate negotiators realizing they should be trusting each other more than they thought.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, that is encouraging that the self reporting is more accurate than you, than you expected. So how has working on this project affected your own personal hopes and fears and expectations for our shared climate future?

Gavin McCormick: You know, it's interesting. It's pretty stunning for an environmental activist to say that they're calming down. But I have just been stunned by how much good news I see in the data.

Greg Dalton: Can you say that again please?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah. I have been stunned by how well we are doing as a species. Nobody talks about this part. So one of my favorite analyses, for example, is I looked at how much are countries emissions increasing each year. And what I'm seeing in the Climate TRACE data is that the rate of increase is shrinking so fast we are getting real close to flatlining here. And I'm seeing that it's happening in every industry and every country. We aren't seeing a story that some people had believed that it's only the global north reducing emissions or something like this. And I'm seeing really a large number of cases where there's a concrete, simple action you could take that would reduce a lot of emissions without anybody having to lose their fortune or anything like that. And I'm becoming much more hopeful that we have underestimated how easy it is to make progress on climate change. I know that's not a common opinion, but I think people are gonna start seeing that in the data when they actually look at the real numbers.

Greg Dalton: I'm gonna replay that on a loop and when I need a little pick me up, I'm gonna replay those words along with David Wallace Wells saying the worst case scenarios are less likely that we are making progress. We need to acknowledge and celebrate that rather than get locked in this doom and gloom narrative that has prevailed in recent decades.

Gavin McCormick: And it's bad, but we're seeing more and more hope, frankly, than I'm used to. And I'm just adjusting to what I'm seeing in the data.

Greg Dalton: Great. Well it's credible for you to say that being data driven rather than kind of motivated, wishful thinking driven, it's a lot more credible. Gavin McCormick, founder and executive director of watt time and also founding member of Climate TRACE. Thank you so much for sharing your data and your authentic optimism today.

Gavin McCormick: Thanks so much for having me.

Greg Dalton: POD version: Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- 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. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Our producers and audio editors are Ariana Brocious and Austin Colón. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Our team also includes consulting producer Sara-Katherine Coxon. 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

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

Hot Cities, Methane Leakers and the Catholic Church

Otto Pilot — Fri, 21 May 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Hot Cities, Methane Leakers and the Catholic Church

05/21/2021

In 2017, it got so hot in Phoenix that airplanes literally could not take off, and airlines cancelled dozens of flights. Extreme heat is likely to become more common, and last longer, as climate disruption continues.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently released an updated set of so-called "climate normals" – averages it compiles every decade. And to no one’s surprise, they showed that our world has gotten warmer.

“Heat is really a silent threat. You can’t really see it. So it’s different from your hurricane or flooding or tsunami where you immediately see the impact,” says Ariane Middel, an associate professor at Arizona State University and Senior Scientist with the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation. She studies extreme heat on the local level.

She uses a robotic weather station named MaRTy to measure how shade and different urban and landscaping designs may affect people’s actual heat experience. Middel says that localized information is essential to keeping places like Phoenix livable into the future.

“As these conditions become more harsh and more extreme, we have to make sure that people can still be active outdoors. And in order to achieve this, we have to come up with urban design strategies and interventions that can protect people from the heat.”

Middel says cities can use data like hers to target interventions like shade or cooling stations in neighborhoods where people need them the most.

Mapping has other applications, too. The Roman Catholic Church is one of the largest landholders in the world. In 2016, a young Catholic geographer named Molly Burhans approached the Vatican about using advanced software to map the lands under Catholic ownership as a starting point for climate action. Burhans, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Goodlands, says she realized the Church had power to affect positive change through land stewardship.

“I think any belief system – Catholic, Muslim, agnosticism, humanism – we all share I think a common core value of helping others in need and helping our communities flourish and a desire for the world to flourish. And I saw that land and the environment is the multiplier of every single one of these missions,” Burhans says.

Burhans uses powerful mapping data tools known as geographic information systems (G.I.S.) to help dioceses better understand their lands and connect them with local conservation organizations.

Another project, Carbon Mapper, uses satellites to identify emitters of both CO2 and methane in real time with the goal of reducing emissions. Carbon Mapper CEO Riley Duren says many companies or operators don’t track their methane emissions because it’s complicated and expensive, and there aren’t many regulations requiring it. For now his group is working with a “coalition of the motivated,” which Duren says tend to be larger oil and gas or waste management companies with decarbonization targets. But he’s seen that across different industries people are anticipating more in terms of future regulation and trying to get ahead of it.

"There is still an opportunity to bend the curve on emissions and avoid the worst-case scenarios, but that window is rapidly closing,” Duren says. “We will not solve everything with greenhouse gas monitoring but we perceive that Carbon Mapper, with this unique partnership, will help fill some critical gaps and it will do it quickly.”

Related Links:
ASU SHaDE Lab
Goodlands
Carbon Mapper
NOAA "climate normals"

Have you ever had a difficult conversation about climate? A disagreement, perhaps, or coming to terms with a new reality? We’d like to hear your stories. Please call (650) 382-3869 and leave us a voicemail about your toughest climate conversation. Or drop us a line at climateone@gmail.com. We may use your story in an upcoming episode.

Guests

Ariane Middel

Assistant Professor, Arizona State University

Molly Burhans

Founder / Executive Director, GoodLands

Riley Duren

CEO, Carbon Mapper; Engineering Fellow, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. How can data help us respond to the climate emergency?

Riley Duren: There’s still an opportunity to bend the curve on emissions and avoid the worst-case scenarios, but that window is rapidly closing.

Greg Dalton: The Catholic Church is one of the largest landholders in the world. One effort is mapping their lands to work toward climate solutions.

Molly Burhans: You know the last thing you want is another cool tech platform that doesn’t get anything done. (laughs) But rather helps people who already are committed and intelligent to get more information that will help them continue to make better decisions.

Greg Dalton: And what are the benefits of mapping heat on a very local level?

Ariane Middel: So it’s really important not just to look at a city and say, okay this will be the temperature 30 years from now but you have to really know neighborhood by neighborhood what’s going on so you can really target your interventions and help the neighborhoods that are most in need.

Greg Dalton: Mapping carbon emissions, extreme heat, and Catholic landholdings. Up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: What’s the value of maps and data when it comes to combating our climate crisis? Climate One’s empowering conversations explore all aspects of the climate emergency. I’m Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently released an updated set of so-called “climate normals” -- averages it compiles every decade. And to no one’s surprise, they showed that our world has gotten warmer. In 2017, it got so hot in Phoenix that airplanes literally could not take off, and airlines cancelled dozens of flights. Ariane Middel [air-ee-ah-nah mi-DELL] is an associate professor at Arizona State University and Senior Scientist with the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation. She studies extreme heat on the local level.

Ariane Middel: Last year, I think we broke every record in the books. We’ve had over 144 I think days of 100 degrees. We had 53 days over 110. So, it was fairly hot here in Phoenix. It’s really an ideal place to study heat it’s like a living laboratory.

Greg Dalton: You’re in the right place. And what are the factors that affect how humans experience heat on the local level? Like what determines the kind of micro factors on a particular block in a particular neighborhood?

Ariane Middel: The factor that most influence is how we actually experience heat when we’re outdoors is the direct sunlight. So, it’s the radiation that hits our bodies from the direct sunlight, the shortwave radiation. And there’s a concept called mean radiant temperature which is slightly different from air temperature. So, you’re probably familiar with air temperature, that's a temperature that you get from your weather forecast, but mean radiant temperature is more. So, mean radiant temperature is the radiation that hits the body from 360 degrees from all directions. So, it’s the shortwave radiation that comes from the sun that’s the direct sunlight, the visible sunlight, the UVB. But it’s also the longwave radiation which is essentially the heat that gets emitted from hot surfaces. So, imagine you’re standing on top of the asphalt parking lot and the asphalt parking lot has been sun exposed for most of the day. So, that heat gets stored in the asphalt and slowly radiates back at your body. And so, mean radiant temperature incorporates all of this. The longwave and shortwave radiation and it’s a good measure of how you actually feel when you’re standing outside in the sun.

Greg Dalton: Right. And you talk about asphalt absorbing heat and then releasing it. We hear a lot about urban heat islands. Can you explain what they are and why they are problem for people living in cities?

Ariane Middel: Urban heat island is a big problem because it causes temperatures to be warmer at night. And that’s because as we build cities, we bring in all these artificial materials into the city. We have to build infrastructure, roads, sidewalks. They consist of concrete and asphalt. And those materials are really great at storing the heat during the day. They have a very high thermal admittance. So, that means as the sun hits those surfaces during the day they heat up and they store the heat like a sponge. And then as the sun goes down, the surface slowly releases the heat back into the atmosphere which makes the city warmer at night than it would be if we didn’t have these artificial surfaces.

Greg Dalton: Wow. So, just when people are looking for relief and cooling off in the evening their driveway and the parking lot is releasing more heat. Heat is a leading cause of weather-related deaths in the country, what are the human health impacts of excessive heat?

Ariane Middel: Heat is really a silent threat. You can’t really see it. So, it’s different from your hurricane or flooding or tsunami where you immediately see the impact. So, heat is a silent killer. So, as it’s hot in the summer and the stress on the human body accumulates over time, people get more and more stress and this causes in the long-term morbidity and mortality in regions that are hot. But there’s also the small things like you would like to walk your dog in the middle of the day and it’s just too hot and you get sun burned. And it’s just really an aspect of life that affects everyone here in Phoenix during the day.

Greg Dalton: I was speaking to a urologist recently and he said, yeah, we see more kidney problems during heat waves, because people get dehydrated. That was a new one to me. I'm constantly thinking I think I've heard a lot of all the climate impacts but airplanes can’t take off and kidney problems during heat waves was a new one to me. Do some groups feel the health impacts more than others, elderly, children, etc. who's more vulnerable?

Ariane Middel: There’s definitely an unequal distribution in the impacts of heat. So, people like you and me who can afford to run their air-conditioning we’re probably fine most of the summer. But people who cannot afford to run their air-conditioning 24/7, people who don't have a lot of money, people who are older, who maybe don't notice the heat as much as you get older your body kind of loses its ability to detect these heat stress situations. So, those folks are much more vulnerable than your average person.

Greg Dalton: Right, that’s on the individual level. It’s well-established wealthy neighborhoods have more trees and shade. I understand your research is focused on technically measuring heat in different ways. But if you look at the literature and the research of others. Is there a correlation between race and class and the impacts of heat on people in cities?

Ariane Middel: There is definitely a correlation between the heat distribution in a city and the demographics and the socioeconomics in a city. What we see frequently is that neighborhoods that have lower income families also have less trees, they are hotter. If you look at surface temperature maps you see that those neighborhoods are really hotter during the day and at night than neighborhoods that have more trees that are wealthier. And that’s a common pattern in many cities around the world.

Greg Dalton: And as I was reading about your work I thought, gee, how long is it before some of the websites that incorporate property data and, you know, this house is in a good school district and its access to walkable school. And I thought about, well, how long is it gonna be before your data is incorporated into those websites so that people can know how hot it's going to be if they buy this house, is that happening?

Ariane Middel: I wonder why people haven’t done this yet actually. Because the data exist so there are satellite images that show you the heat distribution in cities and it would be fairly easy to intersect that information with housing data and add a heat safety score to your neighborhood.

Greg Dalton: Right. Some desert cities like Tucson have adopted goals for tree planting to help reduce the urban heat affects. Do you think that makes a difference that specific goals for planting trees?

Ariane Middel: I think that setting these targets is important to get something done, to have a goal, to have an aim. But broadly increasing the tree canopy cover to a random percentage of more trees is not necessarily helping because trees have a very localized impact. So, it’s really important to do targeted interventions and plant those trees where people actually walk where people exercise where people are outdoors so that those trees have the maximum benefit.

Greg Dalton: You were involved in a report titled 50 Grades of Shade that measure the effectiveness of trees and engineered shade. What do you think cities and residents should do to provide the most effective shelter from rising heat?

Ariane Middel: There are many ways to provide shade. Cities frequently experience these infrastructure challenges where they have a location where they would really like to plant a tree, say, a bus stop for example. But then there are these sewer lines or power lines in the way businesses can claim that people can’t read their signage. So, in this 50 Grades of Shade study, we looked at shade alternatives to see if there are any other viable types of shade that could be used in those situations. And what we found is that generally any shade is great. So, no matter what type of shade you use you’re really reducing the heat stress and the heat load on a person’s body. But engineered shade types such as shade sails structural shade from awnings, overhangs can be as effective or even more effective than a tree. And they may not require a lot of irrigation or maintenance such as trees. So, there are certain benefits to engineered shade type as well.

Greg Dalton: Tell me about MaRTy your robot.

Ariane Middel: MaRTy is a mobile weather station that can measure how you experience heat. So, it measures the heat load on a human body. It has three net radiometers and they look a little bit like Wall-E. So, when we go out measuring with MaRTy we’ve frequently get asked, so is this a Mars rover, is this Wall-E, what are you doing here? So, MaRTy can measure the radiation or the mean radiant temperature that hits the body from all directions. And we can pull MaRTy literally anywhere.

Greg Dalton: And what’s the benefit of mapping heat on that level. What can we learn from that data?

Ariane Middel: Mapping heat using MaRTy is a very human-centric approach because MaRTy, you can think of him as a human, right. So, MaRTy can go where humans can go. MaRTy has the same height same size approximately as a human. MaRTy really measures how we feel the heat as opposed to just the air temperature that we get from the weather forecast. So, that’s why MaRTy is really great in measuring shade and the impact of different urban designs, different landscaping and how people actually experience the heat.

Greg Dalton: And what are some of the real-world implications of this research?

Ariane Middel: It is projected that Phoenix will break many, many more heat records in the near future. So, conditions anywhere in the world will just get more extreme, heatwaves will last longer, they will be hotter and they will occur more frequently. And as these conditions become more harsh and more extreme, we have to make sure that people can still be active outdoors. And in order to achieve this, we have to come up with urban design strategies and interventions that can protect people from the heat.

Greg Dalton: I flew into Portland, Oregon a while back and saw a sea of white roof, as the airplane was ascending. Why aren’t white roofs the norm, especially in hot regions it seems so simple and cost-effective?

Ariane Middel: That’s a good question. Painting roofs white works in a way that the energy that comes from the sun is actually reflected back into the atmosphere as opposed to being stored inside the roof. Because the roof is similar to the asphalt and concrete has a very high thermal admittance it’s really great at storing the heat during the day and releasing it at night. So, if you paint a roof white or with a highly reflective paint, it can stay cool during the day it’s not going to heat up as much so that will reduce your urban heat island. It’s a very effective way of cooling an urban area and we have plenty of roofs available.

Greg Dalton: Right. And I also saw something on your website about painting sidewalks to reflect heat. That was a new one. Is that effective and is that happening?

Ariane Middel: The city of Phoenix last year started a pilot project where they painted roads in age district neighborhoods with a highly reflective paint. It’s a type of coating that increases the reflections so as the sun hits the asphalt, the energy is going to be reflected back into the atmosphere as opposed to being stored in the road which makes the road stay cooler to the touch during the day and also then reduces the urban heat island at night. In terms of the results, it definitely reduces the actual surface temperature of the road up to 10, 16 degrees Fahrenheit. So, it was actually fairly sizable.

Greg Dalton: Right so we may see white roads instead of black roads in the future. How do you see localized mapping fitting in with larger mapping of climate impacts?

Ariane Middel: I think local mapping is really important because resources for heat interventions are limited. Cities don’t have those amounts of money to plant trees and to provide shade. So, producing these localize maps help cities actually plan those interventions and find areas that are in the most need for these interventions. So, it’s really important to not just look at a city and say, okay so this is gonna be the temperature in 30 years from now but you have to really know neighborhood by neighborhood what’s going on so that you can really target your interventions and help the neighborhoods that are most in need.

Greg Dalton: We also talk about the cultural adaptation. I lived in China and other places in Asia where people just carry around umbrellas for heat, something we don't really see in the United States. I’m curious about the kind of the human adaptation. We’ve been talking about planting trees and building overhangs and shelter and that sort of thing. I know this maybe on the edge you’re focusing on your robot and I don’t know if your robot is going to go around with an umbrella maybe not.

Ariane Middel: Well, actually we had jokingly we had planned a study called MaRTy Poppins where we wanted to investigate the effectiveness of different types of umbrellas. And put different types of umbrellas in top of MaRTy and see how he feels. So, that’s definitely something that’s on our research agenda.

Greg Dalton: Right, okay. MaRTy Poppins I like it. So, on a personal level do you think heat will ever cause you to move away from Arizona are you so excited to stay there and study it as it rises and rises?

Ariane Middel: I’m actually tired of rain. I'm from Germany so I’m actually perfectly desert adapted and perfectly happy in the heat. So, I don’t think there will be a point in time where I will be moving away from Arizona because of the heat. But I could see that other people might make other choices and this might be a consideration for some to as summers get hotter and hotter and we have more and more 110-degree days.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, internal climate migration is already starting to happen in the United States. Ariane Middel, thanks for coming on Climate One.

Ariane Middel: Thank you so much for having me. It was fun.

Greg Dalton: Ariane Middel is an associate professor at Arizona State University studying extreme heat. You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about the power of data to respond to the climate crisis. Coming up, we hear about an effort to map the landholdings of the Catholic Church to find opportunities for climate and environmental solutions:

Molly Burhans: It’s been, not just a massive digital development effort but a massive storytelling effort for communities, walking them through getting excited about this.

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

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about how mapping at the local, regional and global level can help humanity respond to the climate emergency.

I’ve been hosting and producing this show for 14 years, most of that time booking and interviewing guests on my own. Happily, our team is growing, and we’re starting to include more voices on the show. One of those is producer Ariana Brocious, who now also edits the program. She’ll be a regular voice on Climate One going forward. Today, Ariana talks with a young Catholic geographer who is founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization, Goodlands. Molly Burhans approached the Vatican in 2016 about using advanced software to map the lands under Catholic ownership as a starting point for climate action.

Ariana Brocious: You’re a Catholic and a cartographer. What inspired you to look to your religion as an avenue for combating climate change?

Molly Burhans: Initially I was really looking at land-use and regenerative agriculture as a whole. Climate change being that critical piece of you know the kind of systemic environmental problems we’re facing, including biodiversity loss and habitat destruction as well. And I was considering becoming a nun and I had met these really cool nuns. There are really cool nuns. And I noticed that their land management at the large motherhouse was, you know, there are erosion issues, invasive species and I, at the time had cofounded my first company which is Grooperative the worker owned cooperative in Buffalo which is one that is indoor vertical farming company. And, you know, I thought wow like before I do this, you know, what could I bring to this community would be that, you know, sustainable land management including regenerative agriculture because I realize it was just a multiplier for every single mission, you know. I think any belief system whether it's, you know, Catholic, Muslim, even, you know, agnosticism, humanism, we all share I think a common core value of helping others in need and helping our communities flourish and a desire for the world to flourish. And I saw that land and the environment is the multiplier of every single one of these missions. It was just kind of seeing that oh wow, we’re like collectively as a network the largest land total in the world and there’s no one really doing this and like everything we do would benefit from sustainable and management.

Ariana Brocious: Right. So, for those who don’t know, what’s the Laudato Si’?

Molly Burhans: Laudato Si’ was Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, this document. And it is an absolutely, if you haven’t read it, I completely just recommend checking it out. It interweaves spirituality and science with the Catholic faith and with climate change. And also, at the end there is an invitation of prayer for the faithful. There's one, also he has one included ford everyone also who is reading the document who you know from whatever perspective they are because he really shows how within that document, he beautifully shows I think how this is a problem for all of us right now and we need everyone to work together.

Ariana Brocious: And how influential is that document on you and the work you do?

Molly Burhans: You know before that I was really into environmentalism. I mean my parents, you know, I grew up in a house that was like part of the Sierra Club and like we always spend time in nature growing up as a kid and my parents are scientists and like. Yeah, so I always have this deep-seated just love and celebration of nature. So, I guess, you know, the nonfarm thing kind of was way before Laudato Si’ that was like a couple years two years before. So, it was like kind of moving, you know, before that. I think Laudato Si’ really helped create the energy for the larger vision. I wasn't afraid to like you know to be Catholic and be in the public sphere and be doing this and like to be a totally imperfect human who is a work in progress, which I shouldn’t have been afraid of in the first place. But you know, I guess I was kind of like young and you know everyone when you do something big there is kind of you know it take some courage.

Ariana Brocious: Absolutely. Well, I have this remarkable story of approaching the Vatican as a 26-year old to learn more about the landholdings of the Catholic Church. And can you take back to that moment like what motivated you to try to meet directly with the Vatican. What was your mission and your goal at that point?

Molly Burhans: So, I wanted to start with a global vision of classifying dioceses. I knew that if we were going to say work with researchers’ algorithms for say stormwater management or certain you know types of understanding different foliage patterns and habitat patterns in an area. I want to be able to classify every diocese in the world that we could scale the application of these algorithms that were used to analyze the environmental, social and financial kind of landscape of a property portfolio within whichever jurisdiction it was. And also, to be able to classify dioceses to see if they were like a map that we made is like where the Catholic Church is the most important non state actor for biodiversity preservation. Which areas are really highlighted risks for climate migration, immigration or emigration. And those are areas where I see like our work being maybe less like oh yeah, we’re gonna do conservation here and focus on even though that's critical on those places. But I think like in emergency situations it’s more about okay, land use how can we get this data how can we work with people to get it to like Jesuit refugees services or somebody else who can help prevent informal settlements which can be really damaging to the environment and address immediate needs. So, that’s how I ended up in the Vatican. We had been working and researched for months and months and months. We just couldn’t find these maps. And it was just strange so I said, no worry, I’ll just go to the Vatican and I’ll get them. And one of my mentors I’ve met a couple cardinals at a conference. And she mentioned my work and I got one of their emails and I got the Vatican switchboard number I just started like calling and emailing. I created the graphic prototype for these maps and I met with these cardinals. So that’s how it happened. And, yeah, and they didn’t have maps.

Ariana Brocious: Well, that part of it I think is so interesting because you have this meeting with them and you sort of -- that the church is in a sense like lost track of all their lands or any sort of comprehensive way. And when I read that I found that to be hugely surprising. Were you surprised were you expecting to go in there and find like a, you know, database of maps?

Molly Burhans: You know, I was. I was expecting to find like diocese maps at the very least, I mean that's not properties, properties are a bit different. You know, bless the naivety I had the time for thinking that they would have it nevertheless you know governments even or municipalities. It’s actually shocking once you start to learn how so many of these large institutional governmental and even private landholders really just don't know what they have. I went into this assuming that, you know, we would go in and we use their map data to just do the analyses and run the design workshops and get systems set up. But no, and the result of this all was that -- so, this is GoodLand’s fifth year, most of the since I founded it in the fall of 2015 most of that time has been devoted to foundational data development and contracts with record digitization of property.

Ariana Brocious: I’m talking with Molly Burhans, founder and executive director of GoodLands, a nonprofit organization that’s working to empower change in climate action through land stewardship. So, Molly, can you tell me more about some of the land changes that you made possible maybe or you’ve explained could be options for the Catholic held lands that could impact climate change.

Molly Burhans: I think one of my most basically almost simple stupid contributions of the last handful of years has actually been communication and helping people realize that they should understand the environment if they're gonna do environmental programs. Maps have really helped communities be able to see that kind of environmental why that piece is so important. I mean we have done a lot of this work pro bono. I've had to carve out kind of this space to first, okay, this is what a digital map is. Most people, why do maps matter. Why are we gonna do this why should we care? Okay, I guess we should have an Excel spreadsheet of our properties but why do we need anything else. And so, it’s been this like it’s been not just a massive digital development effort but a massive storytelling effort for communities, walking them through kind of getting excited about this. And now we have so many requests actually that we can't like take them all and we’re working to expand right now, which is really exciting and we have a lot of environmentally focused requests.

Ariana Brocious: You mentioned that one possible use of land as we see more of the impacts and climate disruption will be maybe providing space for people who are kind of forced to move to those changes. And I think that’s a really interesting sort of forward-looking use of some of these properties. So, it's your belief that the Catholic Church has a role to play in some of these large-scale changes because they are already sort of directed toward or as an institution it is focused on being inclusive and just in that sort of part of its mission, right?

Molly Burhans: Yeah. I would say even further. James Joyce has a quote; I think it might be in Finnegans Wake. It’s, “Here comes Catholic. Here comes everyone.” just because we’re the most organized even though we’re pretty disorganized but we’re the most organized religious institution on the planet. Like as far as its size and you know there's a lot of other sub denominations or different groups, but the Catholic church is, you know, has that infrastructure that really nobody else has globally and in is the largest network of humanitarian aid unless you count all member organizations of the UN. It is the largest network of healthcare globally; Catholic health facilities are 26% of healthcare facilities globally. It’s the largest network of nongovernmental education serving over 54 million students around the world. So, of course, when I founded GoodLands I was like, oh yeah, they must have the largest network of conservation. I'm so excited to be a conservation nun then I realize I would have to be the original conservation nun maybe I don't know. With migration, absolutely. I mean, I think it’s not only migration. Actually, I think having a group like the Catholic Church involved in climate solutions or people like you said who are looking at this kind of inclusive view is potentially I see as important. And one of the reasons that I see as important is when we look at the history of, what do we mean by ecosystem itself. What do we mean by landscape restoration? The reality is Landscape Ecology, Richard Forman really made it into a science in the 80s. It’s still sort of becoming itself. In the anthropocene we don’t know; we just don’t really get we know what doesn’t work we know what’s making people unhealthy. But, we’re in this age where I’m actually it gives me so much hope to think that like as we define and understand how we really relate ecosystems human health has to be of a piece of that. And there has to be a concern with climate solutions for every single human on this planet and their inherent dignity. Otherwise, this is going to be really divisionary and you know I don't think it's gonna work climate solutions.

Ariana Brocious: Are there other large landholders or institutions that can benefit from this kind of mapping, especially when we want to scale or we’re gonna need to address climate concern.

Molly Burhans: Yes is gonna be the first thing that I’m gonna say. I love so much like I stepped back the other week actually to look at GoodLands kind of how we've been working with these parallel processes of the Vatican Cartography Institute, which is under renegotiation, So, the Vatican Cartography Institute, the spatial data infrastructure for the Catholic community, the kind of regional clients that we work with those are really the kind of contracts and what I've described mostly is that regional work. And then there's the boots on the ground, which is the champions, who are really excited about the environmental or social causes or, you know, locally, or the Catholic groups. There are so many like Focolare or, you know, Catholic workers who can really like make things come to life because you know the last thing you want is another cool tech platform that doesn't get anything done. But rather helps people who already are committed and intelligent to even get more information that will help them continue to make better decisions, you know, they are more scientifically informed. land and religion really been such drivers of civilization. You know what we believe and what sustains us and our civilizations and the power that comes of land. And the two together I think are very powerful leverage points. Within the Vatican Cartography Institute hopefully or even outside having a kind of convocation of different major NGOs within the Catholic world and groups to discuss spatial data infrastructure. So, infrastructure what is that? It’s the policy it’s the people and it's the technology coming together to help facilitate interoperability so that really transference of the information between them and secure ways and also to support you know the use of that information well. So, good example be spatial data infrastructure for example, could help if we did a mapping project in California and the big one hits. And that infrastructure could help them quickly open their data with their own approval with the security standards in place to disaster relief immediately. That we see as outside of the Vatican and we have that’s actually in its third phase of development and there is like open kind of hub of nonsensitive information that we’ve launched. It’s something that really shows that provides this framework for any multinational organization to intelligently implement some sort of coordinated environmental programs that can also maximize other mission-based work that they're doing.

Ariana Brocious: I’ve been speaking with Molly Burhans, founder and Executive Director of GoodLands, a nonprofit mapping organization working to empower change in climate action through land stewardship. Molly, thanks for being on Climate One.

Molly Burhans: Thank you so much, Ariana.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about using maps to advance climate solutions. This is Climate One. Coming up, we discuss a new program that uses satellites to identify specific sources of carbon emissions.

Riley Duren: Someone needs to take action now to clean up what is a very wasteful set of infrastructure and practices right now, in the energy sector, in the waste management sector, in the agriculture sector. You know, we just don’t have time for do-overs or missed opportunities because the data is incomplete or bad.

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

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking about using maps and data to help address the climate emergency. Technology for measuring the totality of global carbon emissions is highly refined. For example, we know that half of all the carbon pollution humans have dumped into the sky has happened in just the last three decades. That’s mind-blowing. But understanding the specific sources of those emissions at the scale of factories or communities has been more elusive. Carbon Mapper is a new nonprofit organization that uses satellites to identify carbon emissions down to the level of a farm or factory. It’s a public-private partnership that includes universities and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and is backed by philanthropists. Carbon Mapper CEO Riley Duren says it’s built on a “system of systems:”

Riley Duren: The carbon mapper program is both building and launching new satellites that will begin to launch in 2023, it also includes airborne remote sensing surveys of key regions around the U.S. to find methane super emitters and work with decision makers to do something about it. And it also includes the data systems and analytics that puts that data in the hands of businesses, governments and the public, where it needs to be to support decision making. So all of that, under that tent, is a system of systems.

Greg Dalton: Who have you caught cheating or underreporting their emissions of climate eating gases?

Riley Duren: So, I would start by saying what have we found in terms of methane emissions and CO2 emissions that was surprising. And I hesitate to use the phrase you did cheating because I think the biggest challenge we have is just general lack of awareness on the part of operators, regulators and the general public about where greenhouse gas emissions are occurring, how much they're emitting and why.

Greg Dalton: So, are you saying that companies have leaking pipelines and leaking facilities and they don't even know how much is coming out because they don’t have the equipment or they don't have the financial incentive to know what's leaking out from their factory or refinery or pipeline?

Riley Duren: Yeah, I think that’s generally right. There are certainly cases where facility operators are well aware that they have emissions from a piece of equipment, either because they're not required to mitigate those emissions which is you know is the case in most sectors in most regions today. There isn't much in the way of rules or regulations regarding methane, although that's changing. But it is generally true that the bigger challenge is that the technology required to find pinpoint and measure methane emissions at the scale of pieces of equipment where people can actually do something about it. That technology tends to be expensive and it's difficult to deploy it over large areas quickly. There's are a lot of gaps in the net right now.

Greg Dalton: And what are the relative climate impacts of carbon and methane? We certainly hear a lot more about carbon but we know that methane is more important.

Riley Duren: Sure. And the first thing to remember is that both methane and carbon dioxide or carbon molecules. They both have carbon in them. People often use carbon shorthand for carbon dioxide. There is more in terms of the magnitude of CO2 emissions, but methane really packs a very powerful climate punch. By that, I mean it's global warming potential on a 20-year time horizon is nearly 90 times greater than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. Additionally it is important to understand from air quality perspectives because methane is both an ozone precursor and, in many cases, it comes along with co-emitted reactive pollutants that have health impacts.

Greg Dalton: Right. And one reason why methane is sometimes often called one of the super pollutants. You collaborate with operators of polluting facilities, land dumps landfills and the oil industry. What are those conversations like how do you walk into those rooms with industries who know that there are more eyes in the sky and more eyes on their operations now?

Riley Duren: You know, frankly, it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, our research collaborations with facility operators as well as you know, state and local regulatory agencies is largely a coalition of the motivated these tend to be larger companies that have you know, well-established or recently established decarbonization targets. So, I'm talking here about some of the major oil and gas producers, natural gas utilities. Some of the larger waste management companies in the US and in Europe.

Greg Dalton: So, they have plans to reduce this stuff and to reduce it they got to measure it, manage it. And to manage it they got to measure it. And you’re helping them?

Riley Duren: Right. I mean those sorts of organizations have gone on record as establishing ambitious targets for reducing their methane and CO2 footprints. And there are variety of motivations, you know, their motivations range from this is pressure from shareholders. There are also economic incentives I mean if you think about it particularly with the natural gas industry leaks are equivalent to product loss. And then of course there are regulatory incentives. They’re paying attention to what's happening in the government space and they know the writing’s on the wall in terms of future regulation. And I think they’re trying to get out on front by making investments now to clean up their act. But all that said, it is also true that there is a huge range of actors out there and it includes other entities that are probably less forward-looking. And to be fair, it also includes businesses and sectors of society that simply just aren't as far along technologically. And the best example I can give of that is agriculture. We’re often talking about small family-owned farms and we’re also talking about you know biogas produced by livestock and things like rice cultivation. And there aren't necessarily immediate solutions to those emissions although there are people working on it.

Greg Dalton: Right. Though you mention small ranchers etc. There are also huge factory farms which are massive sources of methane. You mentioned the changing regulatory environment we’ve seen in the headlines recently that the previous administration, presidential administration rolled back methane rules now they’re back again. So, updates on that on those rules and why they're important and how that connects to your work.

Riley Duren: My sense is and again I'm not a policy expert, but just in terms of talking to people in these sectors. Despite the back and forth with US regulatory policy over the last few years there's actually been a fair bit of stability in other jurisdictions. Some examples of that include action by state actors like California and Colorado and also major international actors. And by that I'm referring to the European Union. The Europeans are talking very seriously about establishing new intensity standards on natural gas supplied to EU member nations. By intensity I mean what fraction of gas produced is lost during transmission or delivery to the customer. And they’re establishing or have stated intent to establish standards that are measurable and ideally independently verified so that customers like EU member nations and potentially ultimately states and localities in the US can look at the methane intensity certification of a given supplier and make informed decisions about where they want to purchase their gas. And what we are hearing from the industry is that again, I think these companies see the writings on the wall and they’re not gonna wait around for things to settle down.

Greg Dalton: So, it sounds like, you know, there's a patchwork effort across the state inconsistency at the federal level. Are government agencies doing a good job monitoring emissions of methane?

Riley Duren: I think it's important to parse that a bit and understand what monitoring means. There are existing well-established frameworks in some jurisdictions, and I'm talking here about the US EPA and in states like California using something called the greenhouse gas emission inventory. So, those are accounting protocols that use the best available activity data. For example, how much fuel or livestock or commerce or energy supply or familiar pieces of information. And that activity data combined with emission factors that is what a certain activity should emit in terms of kilograms of methane per hour or CO2 or other gases. Putting those two things together activity and emissions factors allow regulators like the EPA and CARB the California Air Resources Board to generate an inventory of greenhouse gas emissions within their jurisdiction. And that’s an aggregate total for the whole jurisdiction but it’s usually divided into key emission sectors and activities, and it tends to be aggregated at the level of the year. And so, that is one form of “monitoring.” But I think what you really mean in this context of monitoring is direct measurement and that is using measurements of the atmosphere, either with handheld instruments or aircraft or satellites to directly pinpoint and track emissions. In that case, the answer is most decidedly no, most governments are not doing that kind of monitoring again because the technology is expensive and challenging.

Greg Dalton: Will this project be able to verify the self-reported emission numbers that countries are putting forward to meet their Paris goals. Are you kind of, you know, independent auditor, so to speak of what countries are saying about their emissions?

Riley Duren: Yeah, I think we’re part of that, so, the program that we’re working on Carbon Mapper is in fact designed particularly to reporting and verification of emissions at the scale of individual facilities both for methane and CO2 globally. And not just to check the reporting but actually to provide data to operators who may not be making the measurements because it's just not financially practical or physically practical to do that. And so, we’re both trying to improve confidence in reporting where it occurs, but also trying to deliver data where it doesn't exist or where it would be difficult to deploy.

Greg Dalton: Right. You partnered with the state of California and the former chair of the state’s air regulator Mary Nichols is on your advisory board. California caught VW and other automakers cheating on their tailpipe emissions. The scandal cost VW nearly $40 billion in criminal fines and other costs and it really change the auto industry. VW pivoted toward electric cars they’re investing, you know, it’s a different company now these days say they are. They are building an electric vehicle charging network across the United States. It was a big deal and that was happened because California have the technical capability to find these companies cheating. Will it be analogous case of revelation and reform resulting from Carbon Mapper, you know, who are the big utilities who are the big sources of methane out there. I understand that there's regulatory difference here that some of this reporting there’s not explicit cheating in the same way there was in the auto industry. But is there an analog in the industrial sector for what could be a big revelation and seachange in the industry?

Riley Duren: Yeah, I think the biggest one is what I alluded to earlier with methane intensity standards for natural gas and maybe oil and gas supply chains around the world. If there were to be robust, transparent, trusted, independent measurements of the actual methane emissions and methane intensity of those global supply chains from different suppliers, then those could be fairly significant shifts. Another example maybe closer to home is the Permian Basin. So, the Permian Basin is the largest oil-producing region in the world now; it's in West Texas and Southwest New Mexico. Many of these emissions are quite large and intermittent compared to other parts of the US. And about half of the emissions that we see in the Permian Basin are relatively persistent that is, they're probably there most of the time which implies there may be a leak or a malfunction. And in many cases the operator doesn't know about it and that's based on feedback we get from operators there where we share the data. Another 25% of the emissions that we see when the operators go out and do a follow-up on the ground, they don't find it probably because the emission is very intermittent but the other 25% that they report are so-called expected emissions. Emissions are expected include flaring of gas and you may ask well, why is gas being flared instead of sold. And the reason is in the Permian it seems pretty obvious it's in a state of overproduction more gas is being produced than can be hauled away given limitations in the physical infrastructure things like pipelines. So, you can imagine that if there were additional spotlights and public awareness in civic society and on the part of consumers that there are practices that resulting in a large fraction of wasted gas, we could see changes in what is considered "expected practice" not just fixing the unexpected leaks.

Greg Dalton: Are you helping to extend the life of the oil and gas industry?

Riley Duren: I don’t think that what we're trying to do will directly impact the, how to say this, the transition period of gas. The way I like to or fossil fuel energy and I just say that because my own naïve assessment is it's a fairly complex landscape of incentives and actors and the idea of what we’re doing could prolong or extend something is I'm skeptical of.

Greg Dalton: Or are you enabling because there are some people who say, look, we got to get off fossil fuels as fast as possible. The climate science is scary, we gotta keep it in the ground. And I can see you saying well, you know, we’re cleaning up a dirty industry but I can also see you saying, well, you're enabling them to --

Riley Duren: Well, I guess I have a different perspective. I mean it’s the alternative to not make the measurements and just push to shut it all down and hope for the best. I'm pragmatic in the sense that unfortunately I think that human efforts to mitigate greenhouse gases are not moving as fast as they need to because it's complicated because there are many conflicting forces. And so, my feeling is, and I think this is grounded in the science, is there is an opportunity to get real traction now not in 20,30 years, but the next 5 to 10 years to significantly reduce emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases now and have an immediate climate benefit. So, if we’re talking about action now, we’re talking about the infrastructure that's going to be in place over the next decade. So, I don't think what we’re doing to help pinpoint and expedite repair of methane leaks in any way should impact or dilute efforts to transition to a truly renewable energy source. I think it’s just a pragmatism that someone needs to take action now to clean up what is a very wasteful set of infrastructure and practices right now in the energy sector, in the waste management sector, in the agriculture sector.

Greg Dalton: Pres. Biden has proposed a $16 billion plan to plug abandoned oil wells that are leaking greenhouse gases fixing hundreds of thousands of orphaned wells is favored by Republicans and Democrats. Can Carbon Mapper help guide that program if it is enacted?

Riley Duren: Yeah, I mean I think this was long overdue, and it's critically needed. The Biden administration's recent announcement of cutting emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, by 50% by the end of this decade that's less than eight years now is incredibly ambitious. And I think that one thing that I think is still missing is a commitment and recognition and a commitment to make science-based emissions data part of the solution. I think that we've talked about the current state-of-the-art and the fact that existing monitoring systems are pretty sparse. And so, I think if the US is truly serious about being a climate leader on the international stage, then I think to suggest the need for serious investments and critical climate data infrastructure like the kinds of measurements we’re talking about to operationalize and scale up methods. We just you know, we just don't have time for do overs and missed opportunities because the data is incomplete or bad.

Greg Dalton: On a personal level, what keeps you up at night? Do you really think the technology is gonna solve this?

Riley Duren: What keeps me up at night is the fact that with the data we have the answer is unequivocal that the window for action on climate change is narrowing. I think you know that there is still an opportunity to bend the curve on emissions and avoid you know the worst-case scenarios but that window is rapidly closing. We will not solve everything obviously, with greenhouse gas monitoring but we perceive that Carbon Mapper with this unique partnership will help fill some critical gaps and it will do it quickly. And hopefully government will pick up the ball and run with it in the second half of the decade so that this need not all be on the backs of philanthropy going forward.

Greg Dalton: And on the note of philanthropy, we should note that after we booked you we realized that one of your philanthropic supporters the Lawrence family is also philanthropic supporter of Climate One. Riley Duren, is CEO of Carbon Mapper and a research scientist at the University of Arizona. We’ve been talking about mapping methane, carbon and other climate eating gases. Riley, thanks for coming on Climate One.

Riley Duren: My pleasure, Greg. Nice talking to you.

Greg Dalton: You’ve been listening to Climate One. We’ve been talking about the power and value of maps to help us respond to the climate emergency.

Greg Dalton: To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation.

Greg Dalton: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Ariana Brocious is our producer and audio editor. Arnav Gupta is our audio engineer. Our team also includes Steve Fox, Kelli Pennington, and Tyler Reed. Gloria Duffy is CEO of the Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. [pause] I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

EPA Chief Andrew Wheeler on Cars, Coal, and Climate

Otto Pilot — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 20:22:00 +0000

EPA Chief Andrew Wheeler on Cars, Coal, and Climate

03/15/2019

Greg Dalton sits down for a rare interview with newly-confirmed U.S. EPA Chief Andrew Wheeler on cars, coal, and climate. Mary Nichols, Chair of the California Air Resources Board, responds to Wheeler’s position on vehicle standards, and discusses her agency’s role leading a group of states in contesting the Trump administration’s revised auto emissions rules.

Also featuring Albert Cheung of Bloomberg New Energy Finance on the future of personal mobility, and Helen Clarkson of The Climate Group on getting some of the world’s biggest companies to commit to 100% renewable energy.

Guests

Andrew Wheeler

Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Albert Cheung

Head of Global Analysis, BloombergNEF

Helen Clarkson

CEO, The Climate Group

Mary Nichols

Chair, California Air Resources Board

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

Andrew Wheeler: It's not the job of the EPA, the authority of the EPA to pick winners and losers between the different fuel sources.

ANNOUNCER: Andrew Wheeler was recently confirmed by the US Senate as Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Andrew Wheeler: I think it's important to make sure that we have a balance of fuel sources in order to make sure that we have electric power for everyone across the country. But again, that’s not the role of the EPA. Our job is to set the regulations that govern the industry.

ANNOUNCER: But some of that industry isn’t waiting on action from the federal government.

Helen Clarkson: We’re doing the innovation, we’re doing the work on figuring out how to sort out the CO2 in the finished product but in the meantime we will really make a commitment on energy efficiency. These markets are moving already but it’s really about accelerating and moving the pace on.

ANNOUNCER: EPA Chief Andrew Wheeler and more. Up next on Climate One.

ANNOUNCER: Climate One conversations – with oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats – are recorded in San Francisco. I’m Greg Dalton.

I recently attended a conference on the future of personal mobility organized by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. I sat down with U.S. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler and other leaders to discuss how people will get around in a hot and crowded world.

Dalton: Administrator Wheeler, thanks for coming to Climate One.

Wheeler: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Dalton: During your Senate confirmation testimony, you said that climate change is not the greatest risk facing humanity, but at somewhere around an eight or nine on a scale of 10, so what is the Trump Administration doing to address at eight or nine challenge for humanity?

Wheeler: Sure. We're moving forward with our ACE proposal, the Affordable Clean Energy Act, which will reduce CO2 from the electric power segment. We're also moving forth our Cafe Standard, which will also reduce CO2. On the ACE Proposal, it's projected to get 33 to 34 percent reduction in CO2 in the electric power sector over the life of the regulation.

Dalton: Though I think there was a Harvard study that questioned whether that will really reduce reductions, reduce CO2 compared to the Obama Clean Power Plan, which I think that's trying to replace.

Wheeler: Well, you got to remember the Obama Clean Power Plan never took effect. It was stayed by the Supreme Court because, in my opinion, it went outside of the Clean Air Act. It's really hard to compare apples and oranges when you have a regulation that was never implemented outside the jurisdiction of the agency and the outside of the authority of the Clean Air Act versus a proposed regulation that follows the law, follows the Supreme Court precedents, and will reduce CO2.

Dalton: A lot of this was really about coal. Coal production, coal capacity in the United States is down about a third from 2010. Banks, insurance companies, hedge funds are all moving away from coal, as you well know. Do you really think that that easing regulations on coal will help bring back an industry that's in decline for lots of reasons?

Wheeler: I think the important thing here is that we're not tipping the scales. The Obama Administration tipped the scales away from coal. It's not the job of the EPA, the authority of the EPA to pick winners and losers between the different fuel sources. That would be either Department of Energy or FERC, or even more likely, the state PUCs. Our job is to set the regulations that govern the industry, and that's what we're doing, and it's, and we believe we have a responsible regulation that will reduce CO2 in the electrical power segment, following both the Clean Air Act and the Massachusetts versus EPA decision.

Dalton: There was an effort to require utilities to stockpile a bunch of coal, which even the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission didn't go there. That seems like a pretty clear effort to help coal by requiring power plants tends to stockpile coal

Wheeler: That is outside of the authority of the EPA, and I know the Department of Energy and FERC were looking into those issues. As far as their authorities are concerned, I think it's important to make sure that we have a balance of fuel sources in order to make sure that we have electric power for everyone across the country. But again, that's not the role of the EPA. Under the Obama Administration, the EPA really took that on as their role, which is not what the pavers set up to do.

Dalton: Some people said to me that it's really Texas frackers that hurt coal because it's cheap natural gas had hurt coal more than the Sierra Club or Obama. Do you think there's some truth in that? The Texas frackers really hurt coal?

Wheeler: There might be some truth to that, but if you have a coal-fired power plant, and you're trying to make a decision whether or not to put on additional equipment or shut it down, that's a big driver for the future of coal. I don't think you're going to look at, "Natural gas is cheap, so I'm gonna go ahead and shut down a functioning coal-fired power plant just because natural gas is cheap."

Albert Cheung: Look, coal power generation in the U.S. is increasingly uneconomic.

ANNOUNCER: Cheap natural gas is undercutting coal in US power markets. Moments after I sat down with Andrew Wheeler, I talked with Albert Cheung, Head of Global Analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Albert Cheung: What’s happening is with the advent of cheap natural gas, and cheap renewables it’s driving power prices down. And those power prices are increasingly not able to support the price of coal. So I think the current administration are telling a narrative about environmental regulations and the idea that it’s regulations is killing the coal industry. I think it's really hard to make that case. I think what we've seen over the last several years is really a story about new technologies coming in and providing power generation at a lower cost.

ANNOUNCER: We’ll hear more from my conversation with Albert Cheung later in the program. Right now let’s hear more from EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler

Dalton: We’re here talking at a Bloomberg Conference on Mobility. A lot of talk about the California waiver clean car standards. California and the federal government are kind of at a deadlock there. How's that gonna play out?

Wheeler: Well, hopefully we can end up with something as a regulation that California likes and can agree with, but California's only looking at it as one policy issue and that is energy efficiency. The Trump Administration, the federal government, we're looking at more than just one policy issue, including highway safety, lives saved. Our proposal will save 1,000 lives per year over and above the Obama proposal.

Dalton: Is that because of bigger cars? what's the basis for that?

Wheeler: It's older cars. Right now, people are keeping their cars longer because the high price of cars. The average lifespan for a car on the on the road, the average age of a car on the road, today is 12 years used to be eight years. People are holding onto their cars longer. When you buy a new car, you buy a more energy efficient car, you buy a safer car, and what we're trying to do with our Cafe Proposal is bring down the cost of a new car, which would bring us down around $2,300 per car on average. That will incentivize more people to buy newer, safer, more energy efficient cars.

Mary Nichols: Well there’s no factual support for that statement whatsoever.

ANNOUNCER: That’s Mary Nichols, California’s top air regulator. I also talked with her at the Bloomberg conference, where she held a private meeting with Andrew Wheeler. She responded to his contention that the Trump administration’s effort to relax fuel efficiency rules will save lives.

Mary Nichols: The administration tried to use the safety argument as an excuse for why they had to roll back on emissions and fuel economy. And since fuel economy improvements pretty obviously benefit consumers they had to try to pin it on the initial cost of the vehicles. Unfortunately, there just isn't any support for this argument, and in fact, it seems that the opposite is true. But from all of the comments that have come into the record now as a result of the Trump administration putting out this argument as part of their proposal to rollback the standards they’re gonna have a very hard time surviving a challenge to that decision just because the facts aren't there.

ANNOUNCER: We’ll hear more from Mary Nichols in just a bit. But let’s get back to EPA Chief Andrew Wheeler at the Bloomberg Conference on Mobility.

Dalton: Here at this conference, we've heard Audi and other companies touting about how there's going to be more EVs coming to market, and there was a poll taken at the audience here, and policy was a tiny part of what they thought would shape the future direction of the auto industry. The the top winners were really business models and consumer preferences, so it's not, according to this audience here, it's not policy driving the market.

Wheeler: Well, the Obama Administration tried to use policy to drive the market. We're not. We're, we're looking at the consumer data. We're looking at the same thing that the automobile manufacturers are looking at as far as what people want to buy, but what we're trying to do is set a standard that will save lives, bring down the cost of a new car. There's a lot of automakers who really like the idea of bringing down the cost of a new car $2,300 and getting more new cars sold.

Dalton: They also have said that they don't want to roll back of the auto emission standards. Ford has come out and said that. Other auto companies and said, "We want certainty. It's not good for industry, for the federal government and California to fight it out in court," and they don't know who's gonna win. So what about the voice of industry here who saying, "Hey, we want some clarity," which is what they always want?

Wheeler: Well, industry came to us the beginning of this administration and said that they can't meet the Obama standards going forward. Right now, they're not. If you look at the 2016 data, they paid $77,000,000 in penalties because they did not meet the 2016 Obama Cafe Standard, and that amount is supposed to increase dramatically over the next 10 years.

Dalton: Right. So how does this play out? Do you think that ended up in court, or is there going to be kind of a deal where either California gets those standards? California often drives national standards. That's been the history.

Wheeler: True. What we're looking at though is on the energy efficient CO2 side. We aren't taking away California's ability to set standards for the health based emissions from automobiles. That's very important. All We're looking at are the energy efficiency standards, not the health based standards. California has driven development of standards over the years, but we're trying to set a standard for the entire country.

Dalton: There's legislation in Congress now. Pricing carbon pollution is now on the table. Again, it hasn't been that way for about 10 years or so. There's something called the Carbon Dividend Plan that was co-authored by James Baker, George Shultz and supported by one of your predecessors, Christine Todd Whitman, Will Rob Walton the scion of the of the Walmart family, Ben Bernanke, also corporations, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Excellon, AT&T. This is the corporate and political establishment. What do you think of that plant?

Wheeler: Well, if the goal of the plan is to set a carbon tax.

Dalton: They call it a fee and dividend. Give money back to the people.

Wheeler: I've never seen a fee and dividend that actually gives 100 percent of the money back to the American public.

Dalton: They say this would be-

Wheeler: A carbon tax is one of the most regressive taxes you can put on the American public because lower income people, people on a fixed income, end up paying more of a percentage of their income. Well first of all, they paid more of a percentage of their income for energy today then people upper brackets, so it really does hurt lower income people, people on a fixed budget, and it's not just- I know they're talking about paying dividends back to people so they have a rebate for their gasoline or a rebate for their home heating and air conditioning, but what about the dividends to make up for the increased price on goods from the small businesses, from the restaurants, they go to? From the local McDonald's where they're paying more for their electricity? It's a regressive form of taxation. It may be economically one of the easier ways of addressing CO2, but it's really harmful to low income people.

Dalton: The backers say that most people, Americans would come out ahead. They would get more back from the plan than they would paying forward, which is why-

Wheeler: I think they're looking at the indirect costs that people pay for energy costs when it's increased prices on goods and services and what they paid, not just for their own heating and cooling bills with what they pay at the gas pump.

Dalton: And what is the way, if you say climate change is an eight or a nine, I heard you talk about the clean energy plan. What are the other ways to tackle climate change? Because we're seeing storms, fires and deaths in California. Storms are more severe, Houston, etc. It's getting very expensive.

Wheeler: It is a global issue. It's a global problem that needs to be addressed globally but not through a mechanism such as the Paris Climate Accord, which is really unfair to the United States, United States manufacturers, and United States citizens compared to the people who live in China or India or other countries. If you're going to address it, it has to be done globally. But also equally important is looking at adaptation and making sure that when a natural disaster strikes that we rebuild in order to sustain a larger storm surge. Things like that are very important.

Wheeler: As far as the California fires, and this is a topic that I got into in my confirmation. I believe the unofficial name is Little Hoover Institute here in California. The draft of the report based upon the fires, and they blame the, the forest management practices of the last hundred years more than climate change. I think it's important not to lose sight of that aspect because we really do need to have better forest management in order to stop the wild destructive fires that we've seen in recent years.

Dalton: There's forest management. I've interviewed some of the firefighters it's high winds, hot temperatures, a lot of fuel, low precipitation, lots of things kind of combined, no single factor.

Wheeler: But we can't say that this was just because of climate change, which a number of people try to do.

Dalton: Sure. But would you say that it's amplified or turbo charged by, but not caused by? Anyone of Barry Bonds’ home runs-

Wheeler: How do you define turbo charge? It's a factor.

Dalton: Right? We say here in San Francisco that we know that you can't attribute any one of Barry Bonds home runs to juicing, but we know that some of those 750 home runs wouldn't have happened without steroids. Last word in terms of, going forward, do you feel a sense of urgency on climate change or is this something that technology will solve and we have time to work on?

Wheeler: I have a lot of faith in technology. When I said at my hearing that climate change is not the biggest crisis we faced worldwide on the environmental side, I think our biggest crisis is on water and potable water, and the fact that we have a million children and people dying each year from lack of sanitary ...

Dalton: Clean drinking water.

Wheeler: Clean drinking water. Right, exactly. I think that is a huge crisis. If we spent a fraction of what we're spending on climate change to provide those people with safe drinking water. We'd be saving a million lives a year. that is a crisis today.

Dalton: Right. Andrew Wheeler. Thanks for your time today.

Wheeler: Thank you.

ANNOUNCER: You’re listening to a Climate One. Coming up, we’ll hear more of my conversations with Albert Cheung and Mary Nichols.

Mary Nichols: Some people have predicted that the cost of EVs is going to fall dramatically and they're making very bullish statements about the future of electric vehicles. I hope that they're correct.

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

ANNOUNCER: Climate One continues now with more of my interview with Mary Nichols. She’s Chair of the California Air Resources Board, a position she’s held since Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed her in 2007. I began by asking about the negotiations between California and the federal government over auto emissions standards.

Mary Nichols: The federal government, although they invited us several times to come to Washington to talk has taken the position that we are just one stakeholder and therefore they couldn't possibly, you know, just negotiate with us. The difficulty that the political appointees have is that President Trump announced and was quoted widely after he met with the auto executives telling then Administrator Pruitt and Secretary Chao from DOT that he wanted to go and negotiate with California. So as with many things that happen with this administration there appeared to be two different narratives, at least, and maybe more about what's really going on.

Greg Dalton: So where is this headed, is it headed to a deal, is it headed to court?

Mary Nichols: At the moment I would have to say it’s headed to court just in the sense that we haven't seen any sign that the administration is planning to pull back from the very extreme proposal they put out. Senator Carper from Delaware who is the ranking Democrat in the Senate on environment cited some information which I believe he was privy to that says that the final regulation when it comes out is not going to be for zero improvement it's going to be something closer to half a percent a year as opposed to the 5% a year that was called for under the current role. So that way they could say they still had something about regulation it just won't be anything like what was originally on the books.

Greg Dalton: Does the change from Jerry Brown to Governor Newsom have an impact on this poker game played with the Trump administration?

Mary Nichols: Well, inevitably bringing in a new personality is gonna have an impact, but so far every indication I've seen is that the new governor, Governor Newsom is, if anything, even more committed to maintaining California's cutting edge when it comes to clean technologies, advanced environmental principles. He is steering us in the direction of adding more effort to work with the transportation planners with the cities land-use authorities to try to focus on urban planning and to find ways to reduce the need to drive and the amount of driving in urban areas, including by building more housing in the urban areas. So he sees these issues as very much connected, which of course they are but they tend to fall into different camps when it comes to different agencies. So I'm looking forward to seeing a lot more activity and frankly interacting more with colleagues in other parts of the administration on these issues.

Greg Dalton: We’re here at a conference where a lot of auto companies are present from Audi, which you’ve busted and Porsche, etc. They’re saying there’s gonna be what 50% EVs something in 20 years. What are you gathering from this automakers here today?

Mary Nichols: Well some people, including Bloomberg themselves have predicted that the cost of EVs is going to fall dramatically and they're making very, very bullish statements about the future of electric vehicles. I hope that they're correct. I don't think it's inevitable that this is going to happen and I don't think the major obstacle is the car companies themselves. I think they are designing and producing very attractive vehicles. There are really a couple of limiting factors. One is the batteries themselves. We still need breakthroughs in battery technology so that we can have a much longer lived battery and more easily rechargeable and easily disposable. There’s just gonna have to be some continuing improvement in the quality of the batteries. And then the other is in the charging infrastructure that people don't want to invest at least in many instances unless they're pretty sure that they know where and how they're going to be able to charge. And people who have, you know, the ability to do that at home are certainly the first adopters but that's not even half of the public that we need to be getting to. So finding ways not only to bring these cars to communities where people tend to live in apartments but also to figure out how they're going to charge at work how the services that provide ridesharing, ride hailing are going to become electric. These are all still issues that need to be addressed.

ANNOUNCER: Mary Nichols is Chair of the California Air Resources Board. You’re listening to Climate One, and a series conversations recorded at a recent conference on the future of personal mobility, organized by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Let’s turn now to my conversation with Albert Cheung, Head of Global Analysis at Bloomberg’s new energy unit. I began by asking Albert about an audience survey showing that consumers and technology – not policy – are driving the auto industry toward electric mobility.

Albert Cheung: I think the drive towards electric mobility is coming from a number of different directions. I definitely think technology is a really important factor. If you look at the cost of lithium-ion batteries they’ve come down in price by 85% since 2010. That's a phenomenal cost-reduction and that's making electric vehicles more and more economic. In fact, there are many countries today where on the total cost of energy basis it’s actually better to own an EV already today. Regulation is also playing an important role. I think what's really happening is the technology is changing but regulations is creating the environment where companies can invest for the long time to develop that technology and drive change in the markets. I would argue that on the consumer side we've yet to really see whether consumers are really gonna adapt electric vehicles on a mass-market scale. You know we’re hitting the low single digits of percentage in terms of sales being electric in most of the major auto markets around the world. And that’s, you know, I don’t want to do that down I think that’s phenomenal growth over the last several years but I think there is still a question mark about how consumers perceive electric vehicles. And I think the next few years are gonna be really exciting as the number of electric vehicle models on the market increases to see just how quickly they get adopted.

Greg Dalton: When will a person be able to go to an auto dealer online or in an auto mall and find an electric car at the same price as a gasoline car?

Albert Cheung: So we reckon that by 2024 is when you'll start seeing electric vehicles on the market that are equivalently priced to an internal combustion engine vehicle. And that's for, you know, your more expensive larger vehicles and then in later years towards sort of 2026, ‘28 you'll see electric vehicles being cost competitive on an upfront basis essentially in every vehicle class in U.S. and Europe. And that’s really exciting because that means that a consumer can walk into a showroom and they’ll have the choice of an EV or an internal combustion engine vehicle and the EV will be cheaper. And that is when we’ll really see electric vehicles takeoff in my opinion.

Greg Dalton: We’ve seen Chinese imports into the United States and Europe for just about everything. Not so much for automobiles yet but do you think there’s gonna be some as an economy grows, you know, as Japan grew as Korea grew we suddenly saw auto imports from those developed countries. What about import of Chinese automobiles into the United States and what would that look like?

Albert Cheung: I think the first thing to say about China is that it is really the powerhouse that’s driving EV development globally at the moment. It’s by far the biggest passenger EV market in the world today. You got about 7% of all cars in China being sold in the last quarter of 2018 were electric and pretty much all of the electric buses in the world are in China, it’s something like 99% of the world’s electric buses are in China. Now because of that, you know, that huge concentration in China, what's happening is there are a number of companies that are really getting to scale very quickly in terms of building up the manufacturing and putting in place the supply chain for electrification. And I suspect that puts Chinese companies in a really strong position compared to some of the foreign manufacturers. Now, whether that means that we’re all gonna be driving Chinese cars in the future, I find that a little bit harder to see because I do think that, you know, the U.S. and European manufacturers have a chance to build up the same expertise the similar scale and they have historical advantages relating to brand and so on. But I think that for the moment China is very much in the lead.

Greg Dalton: With this move to electric, what are the oil companies, what’s their future? Are they concerned about these countries and companies moving away from their core product to something that is made by local utilities?

Albert Cheung: The oil and gas companies are essentially on the two sides of the Atlantic you’re seeing two very different strategies from the oil and gas companies. On the European side, companies like Shell and Total, BP and so on they’re actually investing significant amounts of capital into what they're calling new energies which essentially power and renewables and electric vehicles. In the U.S. your Exxon, your Chevron they’re taking a bit more of a wait-and-see attitude. They’re not necessarily throwing money at new energy just yet, although they are still putting money into R&D but it is really the European automakers that have really bought into it. With that said, it’s still a minor part of the business. So if you look at Shell which is considered one of the leaders in this, they have an annual cap ex budget of somewhere around 25 billion they’re putting about 1 to 2 billion of that into new energies. So it's far from --

Greg Dalton: Cap ex being their capital expenditures that they basically invest in the future of their business. So it's what, 1/24th, okay.

Albert Cheung: Yeah, that's right. So the rest of that capital expenditure will be going into things like exploration, production refineries and so on and so forth in the traditional businesses. But, you know, $1-2 billion of that is going into new energies and they seem to be serious about making this into a real business that in the long run it's supposed to generate returns.

Greg Dalton: We've seen this before they get into renewables they get out, you know, Chevron had a new energy ventures putting rooftop solar on schools, etc. good news CEO comes in it get sold. They don't really commit to the long-term. Is this time any different?

Albert Cheung: You know one thing that’s different at least right now as we sit here is that even with the recovery in oil prices since a few years ago that doesn't seem to have dented the enthusiasm for investments in new energy. So that's one small signpost that I think is worth taking note of. I think the bigger question is whether the oil majors particularly the European ones who’ve been aggressive is whether they can actually generate the kind of returns they used to seeing in the coal business in the new energy businesses. The power and utility space is competitive the margins are typically lower, you know, oil and gas, especially the expiration in production part of the value chain is a high risk and high reward business. Power and utilities is generally quite the opposite. So I think the big question is can they ever get to a point where shareholders look at the power and utilities or the new energy part of the business and see that as something that’s really gonna generate returns or is it always gonna be a sort of a two-speed business. I think we’re gonna have to wait a few years to see that.

Greg Dalton: Dieselgate was a big scandal in Europe and the United States. What lasting impact of that have on the auto industry? VW pledged billions of dollars to invest in electric cars, they’re building out a charging network in the United States as part of their penalty. Is that just going through the motions because they got busted or it’s a real change in the auto industry that came out of dieselgate? It wasn't just VW, lots of other automakers were implicated in faking their emissions reports.

Albert Cheung: The diesel scandal really, really changed the balance of power in the auto industry. Suddenly the political capital particularly the German automakers held was really greatly diminished. And I think it's partly as a result of that that regulators and policymakers have been able to come back in, you know, not only issue, fines and frankly force VW to invest in charging infrastructure but also to be more aggressive about their targets for vehicle electrification for transportation emissions and so on. I think that without the diesel scandal we wouldn’t have seen such concerted reaction particularly in terms of the emissions reduction piece. And that’s where we’re gonna see the rubber hit the road when it comes to manufacturing it’s really committing to EV manufacturing over the next few years.

Greg Dalton: Other big events this year both Uber and Lyft planning additional public offerings of stocks. We know here in San Francisco that Uber and Lyft have increased congestion and slowed down traffic times and yet investors are valuing them at astronomical you know, tens of billions of dollars for evaluation. How are the IPOs of Uber and Lyft gonna impact this new mobility market?

Albert Cheung: I’m probably not gonna comment on the IPOs in particular. I think when it comes to new mobility services there’s a kind of techno optimist view that autonomy and sharing are gonna solve congestion and solve local air pollution and you know, name an urban problem it’s gonna solve it. I think we need to be really careful because we can see that Uber and Lyft increase the number of vehicles on the road. We can see that they displace, you know, the types of journeys that they displace, on not only car journeys private car journeys, they also displace things like walking and they displace bus rides and transit rides as well. So I think we need to be really careful to consider the impacts of these new technologies and make sure that they’re harnessed in the right way. These services have the ability to reduce the cost of personal mobility and also increased access to mobility. So think of people who maybe have a disability and don’t have the ability to drive or for whatever reason on the car owners. There are clear benefits to these technologies in terms of cost in terms of access and so on. And that’s the bet that these investors are making is that mobility can be opened up and made cheaper, more accessible. That doesn't mean that there wouldn’t be a tragedy of the commons and I think that's what we’re thinking about when it comes to congestion when it comes to local air-quality. Just because things get cheaper and better doesn't mean that all of the outcomes are gonna be really good. And I think from a sort of local city policymaking perspective that’s gonna get a lot more scrutiny over the next few years.

Greg Dalton: As we wrap up, you know, there’s about a billion cars on the planet today. Projections are for like 2 billion cars people living in larger, more dense cities. What is that world look like with 2 billion cars is that a happy place?

Albert Cheung: I’m optimistic at heart. I think the world can be a happy place. I'm actually you know, despite my warnings about policymakers needs to be careful about the outcomes of these technologies. At the end of the day I'm optimistic that technology can help solve a lot of the problems that we face. So when we think about climate change, I look at the incredible improvements in technology and renewable energy and storage over the last few years. And it’s very difficult to predict what the next thing will be that surprises us, but I do think that if there's one thing we're good at as humans it's kind of innovating and engineering new solutions to problems. And so I'm excited to see what the next years bring.

ANNOUNCER: Albert Cheung, Head of Global Analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. This is Climate One. Coming up, I talk to the CEO of the Climate Group, Helen Clarkson, about getting some of the world’s biggest companies to commit to renewable energy.

Helen Clarkson: If as a company you make a 90% commitment, that's great, but everyone in the company then sort of thinks that they’re probably in the 10%. So within the company this hundred percent has this real signaling thing that no, this is all of us.

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

ANNOUNCER: You’re listening to Climate One. Helen Clarkson is CEO of the Climate Group, which works to accelerate climate action by bringing together networks of businesses and governments that shift global markets and policies. We began our conversation at a somewhat unlikely place: the 2019 Super Bowl.

Greg Dalton: One of the ads that caught attention was Budweiser with amber waves of grain and horse-drawn wagon going through a field. And the point was renewable energy, Budweiser brewed with 100% renewable energy that’s part of the RE100 program that you’re involved with. Tell us about why companies are doing that.

Helen Clarkson: Yes. And the RE100 is a commitment by big corporations to hundred percent renewable electricity and they’re doing that for lots of different reasons. We put out a report at the end of last year we sort of dug in to some of those reasons. A lot of it is about climate leadership but also it’s about cost savings it’s about long term understanding of where your electricity is coming from, we’re finding that. The key there is making this a hundred percent commitment. If as a company you make a 90% commitment, that's great it would be quite a good thing to do but everyone in the company, then sort of thinks that they’re probably in the 10%. So within the company this hundred percent has this real signaling thing that no, this is all of us. You have to get the CEO to sign off when you’re gonna make a hundred percent commitment. So this start then to drive innovation and what we’re seeing when we look at how our members are doing is that they are starting to innovate and actually hit lots of their targets earlier. And I think this, you know, the ad that you saw AB InBev are big --

Greg Dalton: That’s the owner of Budweiser.

Helen Clarkson: -- that’s the owner. So Anheuser-Busch InBev they have the commitment and they realize they were looking at the energy mix and realize that they could credibly claim that Budweiser is powered by 100% renewable energy. And I think they see that they’re looking at can they use that to market to consumers and use it as a way to really tell a story about renewable electricity. Because I think a lot of renewable energy can seem a bit kind of distant or people really, you know, don’t understand or maybe don’t like the idea of wind turbines or whatever but they’ve got a really iconic American brand that’s showing that you can do this it makes business sense and it’s good for the planet and for their consumers as well. So it comes together and I think you see that sort of advertising we saw last night is pretty new and exciting to see.

Greg Dalton: Some of these companies pledge to go hundred percent but they don't say when. So time is critical here so it’s easy to say yeah, I’m gonna lose weight but when, right. So how important is when during the tenure of the current CEO or someday.

Helen Clarkson: One that’s really interesting I think as I said 100% is a bit that really drives the change. And I have say when I joined as chief executive of The Climate Group I was really, I was coming in as sort of, you know, good poke around what’s happening and I thought why some of these end dates quite far out there are a couple of companies that are very ambitious. But actually when you think into this kind of signaling effect and what the 100% means you realize that's the bit that’s critical because it does drive these changes in behavior and it sends a signal within the company. And I think it’s really telling that within RE100 companies are meeting that goals much earlier than they thought they could. So actually the critical bit is making this big commitment and then as a company looking and putting the pathway in place. And that starts to then get the company to different cost drivers and the how and that tends to drive the change earlier. So we’re not completely relaxed on the when, but some of the dates are late the one we’d like but actually the companies are moving a bit faster.

Greg Dalton: Some of them are using renewable energy credits with some people would say smoke and mirrors not really sure that, you know, real change is happening. It’s kind of like buying an offset somewhere you’re not really sure that it’s additional that it’s happening. So how confident are you that those doing it through renewable energy credits are actually creating new demand and new supply?

Helen Clarkson: I think there’s a couple of bits to that. So we are really interested in the kind of quality and quantity you might want to capture that in one way. And we’re working with the members to move and make sure that we don’t do the whole hundred percent commitment through certificates for the reasons you set out but also because this has to be about new clean energy on the grid. And what we’re more finding is that companies are doing new energy and using recs to close the gap. And what we want over time is that the use of that will shrink and we want members to do it. So I think at the moment where we are in the energy transition that was fine and then as we move every time we’ll expect to see that shrinking down and make sure the amount of energy that comes on to the grid grows. As you say demand is the keyword this is about an aggregated demand signal. And if you add the energy demand to all the companies in RE100 together you get demand the size of a country 23rd biggest country. So that starts to be a really important demand signal to the markets. And that’s the critical bit of this aggregated action and I think that we’ll see then that getting the signal both to the utility providers but also to new sort of decentralized energy coming off the grid as well.

Greg Dalton: Cleaning up electricity is easier than some of the heavy industry airlines and shipping. Where are they in terms of moving towards cleaner sources of fuel? Airlines and shipping are thought to be kind of some of the last ones to make the change.

Helen Clarkson: Yeah and I’ve seen some research that shows as we move out towards 2050 those will be the kind of legacy sectors the last to move. We’re not doing lots of work with them at the moment but what’s interesting is that one of our other campaigns the EP100 is a doubling of energy productivity. So we picked energy productivity as a measure, you know, it’s another way of looking at efficiency it’s about doubling the amount of economic output per unit of energy. And what we’re finding with that is that heavy industry companies are joining out so we have three or four really large cement companies and that has made that commitment. And if you look at cement and the emissions you’ve got sort of two sources they’ve got the CO2 in the finished product and then the use of energy in the pricing. EP100 looks at that second block which is the kind of easiest tackle bit. And so seeing the leading companies in the heavy industry sectors they know they’ve got a license to operate issue. And so they’re starting to say okay look, we don’t quite know yet we’re doing the innovation, we’re doing the work on figuring out how to sort out the CO2 in the finished products but in the meantime we will really make a commitment on energy efficiency. And I think that sort of model where they’re tackling one portion of their emissions really, really seriously while they go into the innovation which they just don't have a solution yet to that second piece. When you look at all these 2050 or 2070 models that come out you can see that we've got to get right down and we’ll probably only left with -- we need to only be left with aviation and cement in those models as being heavy emitting. Aviation I think is behind us to do with the fuel density and I saw something that said that, you know, yes you could use I think it was hydrogen or something to fly a plane safety issues aside, but the way to the fuel you would need to power a 747 would mean the only person on board would be the pilot. So that’s not really something that’s feasible. So that's what the aviation sector is figuring out and we’re already starting to see electrification of, you know, short goal I think that started to become feasible. And so again innovation happening now and I think that's what then pushes the urgency of things like RE100 where we've got the solutions where there are things on the market we’ve got to do all of that as soon as possible because there’s some really nasty challenges out there that’s gonna take a couple of decades to sort out.

Greg Dalton: There’s also EV, electric vehicle 100, Bank of America some other companies, you know, encouraging their employees to adopt electric vehicles the port of New York and New Jersey. So tell us about adoption trying to push EV adoption faster.

Helen Clarkson: Yeah. So EV100 has two aspects to the commitment again it’s a corporate commitment both on the fleet and on the charging and the fleet at least an owned and the charging is infrastructure for staff and customers. And the companies in there can make one of those commitments or all four we have to work with them to see what makes sense and, you know, if they only got one side they can’t just pick charging and call it, it has to make sense. The biggest company in there is LeasePlan, they have 1.8 million vehicles they’re the biggest leasing company and they’re committed to all 1.8 million being EVs by 2030. So again it’s a demand signal on electric vehicles, aggregated amount is the phrase. You mentioned the Port of New York, and what we did was last year the Global Climate Action Summit in California in September we were looking at what are the big commitments that we can bring to that and how can we continue to push more companies to commit and others. And so we worked with C40 cities they have something called the green and healthy streets commitment which is about electric buses. And then we also secretariat for something called the Under2 Coalition which is state and regional governments and we went to them and said look, let's make it a commitment that mirrors EV100. So what we did was pull all of those three things together to show for the summit in California this large aggregates demand signal from states, cities, businesses, regions and over 60 committed in the run-up. And so what we had was an ability on stage to talk directly to the automotive industry and say, look the demand is here we need to moving much, much more quickly. And Mayor Garcetti stood on stage and said, if you buy --

Greg Dalton: Mayor of Los Angeles.

Helen Clarkson: Mayor of Los Angeles, yeah. If you make them, we will buy them. Which is that was the point is to say we’re gonna use our procurement power we’ve got purchasing power there is demand, come on. And the Climate Group is a nonprofit our mission is all about accelerating climate action this is what we want to do. These markets are moving already but it’s really about accelerating and moving the pace on.

Greg Dalton: Is Paris still relevant for companies now that U.S. is out and some companies are sagging off their commitments, is Paris is the heat off?

Helen Clarkson: No. So the interesting thing is the U.S. isn’t technically out yet. It’s got its one elbow out the door. I think that what we saw in the run-up to that announcement was a lot of companies who are doing interesting things on climate but didn't like to talk about it very much. Actually coming out and saying, first were saying to the president, please don’t do this what we want is certainty in the market and Paris gives us certainty. It sets the direction we know where we’re going and it might be a bit inconvenient because there’s some gonna be some additional cost but at least we’re all facing the same thing. So that level playing field. And so post the announcement of the pullout we saw the We’re Still In coalition were growing and it's over I think 2,000 members now. So it’s a huge movement. And I think businesses because they think a lot of these businesses think globally so for the bigs of the Fortune 500 or whatever that we work with they’re looking globally and for the rest of the world Paris is still alive and well. And it’s interesting the U.S. they still turn up at the COP each year.

Greg Dalton: The U.N. Climate Summit.

Helen Clarkson: The U.N. Climate Summit, yeah, and as I said technically not out yet, November 20 --

Greg Dalton: The day after the next presidential election.

Helen Clarkson: Exactly. So we’ll see what happens. But so far we haven't seen companies slacking off as a result. I think what’s gonna be interesting is if that does happen if there’s a change of heart or another reason why the U.S. stays in is how does that combine with the election of the new Brazilian president is actually probably worst for Paris let’s say at the moment U.S. dropping out because of the, you know, the Amazon rainforest being such a critical part of delivering a 1.5 degree pathway, we need the Amazon rainforest there. So actually at the moment I’m more worried about that than the U.S.

Greg Dalton: Lot of the climate conversations is up in our heads and I now ask people to sort of at the heart level questions. Lot of people who talk about working in climate sometimes talk about the hope police or the idea that we have to say, you’re supposed to say you're optimistic even if you're not because that's what sells people don’t like live in despair. So I wonder how you wrestle with that in terms of keeping yourself optimistic even when you look at the data and it's pretty dark.

Helen Clarkson: Yeah. I remember saying work once, well of course none of us could come in in the morning if we weren’t optimistic. And then a colleague who I spent a lot said, oh, no I managed to come I’m not worried but I managed to come in. You know, I think different people respond to different things. I lean towards optimism I think that, yeah, the moment things feel pretty bleak but I think tipping points can come quickly and I think that we’re just seeing conversation change now with what’s happening on Australia what happened, you know, some of they’re having right now that’s --

Greg Dalton: Australia is, you know, massive rains, storms as well as scorching heat.

Helen Clarkson: They've had something, I was listening to a story the other day about this sort of wipeouts of fish, mass kills they call them because the temperature was reaching over 47 centigrade I don’t know if that’s in Fahrenheit.

Greg Dalton: Over 110 Fahrenheit.

Helen Clarkson: Yeah, every day. And they said they’ve been only getting two days lot of summer and it had been two weeks suddenly like that. And Australia has been one of these countries a bit like Canada which really kind of flip-flops around on climate but you can see public opinion there really, really changing. And I think those who’s been working with us a long time were hoping we wouldn’t get to this stage before people really realize that we have a point, you know, but humans are a bit like that. But I think that, you know, we do have a lot of the technologies it is about deployment, it is about getting things to scale, it’s about really being ambitious about that pace. And I think as we see more of these things and that is gonna help move things in public consciousness. Now we’ve also got kids coming up that putting on a lot of pressure upwards yes, you know, a 16-year old protesting she hasn't -- you know, this amazing girl from Sweden Greta Thunberg she’s kicked off a lot of strikes in Sweden. There are similar strikes happening from students they’re not going to school in Belgium. That sort of youth movement I think is interesting and it’s easy to be cynical and think yeah but they’re not in the boardrooms, but you know the kids if you put them in boardrooms and I think they are really getting that message out there that we are squandering their future and that seems to be gaining some traction. And I think last year we saw how quickly some message have been given for longtime can drop something about plastics well you just saw this shift it’s been going on a long time in the environmental movement about plastic, plastic, plastic and trying to get the message. And then we saw this tipping point, particularly with the big David Attenborough documentary which went around the world images, social media was very helpful, that image of the turtle with a straw, and suddenly people thinking what can I do about it, oh, we have this solution. So I think we're ready for similar things to move on climate and I think the next maybe five years all gonna feel quite messy but I think we then gonna start to see real tipping point.

Greg Dalton: The whole plastic paper straw thing happened very quickly. Perhaps a trivial example, but it flipped pretty quickly culturally that cultural change.

Helen Clarkson: Yeah. And I think once people start to see that you can make changes on that where, oh my life didn't get worse despite, you know, this sort of idea that I’m gonna adopt green practices and it's not like wearing a hairshirt, oh this is quite easy to do. I’m hopeful that that sort of -- another one is electric vehicles. They are more expensive at the moment but, you know, within EV100, LeasePlan, huge leasing company is pushing them out so people start striving a bit more and certain companies giving incentives for them to use them. People who use EVs who like cars like driving them better they have --

Greg Dalton: More sexy, it’s more fun they’re faster.

Helen Clarkson: Torque apparently is the word. I think that’s something to do with getting out of a traffic light quickly, isn’t it? I don’t know, I’m a cyclist.

Greg Dalton: It’s the acceleration or thrill.

Helen Clarkson: Yeah, let’s call it a thrill. So when they drive them really, really like them, you know, it’s amazing you never have to go, you know, hardly have to go and refuel if you got hybrid. The maintenance costs are much, much lower. So as people start to use these things and see oh this isn’t a kind of, you know, hairshirt and lentils agenda it’s exciting cleaner ways of doing things. And I think the other thing that’s really hitting now is air pollution. People are really just experiencing that every day of their lives. And we’re saying, you know, I come from London and the air quality there is really bad. We’ve got an office in -- we have two offices in Delhi and Beijing and there’s weeks where our staff can barely come to work or, you know, having illnesses because of the air quality. And I think people are starting to realize this isn’t a corporate social responsibility thing it’s actually about creating a better future and that’s really hitting home I think.

ANNOUNCER: Helen Clarkson, CEO of the Climate Group, speaking with me at the recent Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference on the future of personal mobility.

You can subscribe to Climate One wherever you get your podcasts.

Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. 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 and Justin Norton. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch edit the show. The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy. I’m Greg Dalton. Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

The Hidden Health Hazards of Climate Change

Otto Pilot — Fri, 11 May 2018 00:01:00 +0000

The Hidden Health Hazards of Climate Change

05/10/2018

Climate change isn’t just an environmental problem – it’s also a health hazard. Air pollution and changing weather patterns give rise to heat-related illnesses, asthma and allergic disorders. Hurricanes and other disasters leave hospitals scrambling to save patients without power and resources. According to the Centers for Disease Control, insect-borne diseases have tripled in the United States in recent years – and warmer weather is largely to blame. Jonathan Patz, of the Global Health Institute calls climate change “one of the most important public health challenges of our times.”

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

We know that climate change is endangering our planet. What might not be so obvious is that it’s also endangering our health.

Jonathan Patz: Heat waves, air pollution, infectious diseases, and our health depends on adequate food and water supplies. Climate change threatens each of these areas and that's why it's a big issue.

Announcer: Warmer temperatures have given rise to mosquito populations, bringing diseases like Zika and dengue fever out of the tropics.

Su Rynard: For North Americans really don't let it sink in. How the world is changing…there are no borders or walls that can protect us from mosquito borne illness and this type of disease.

Announcer: The hidden health hazards of climate change. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: As climate change threatens our planet, it’s also endangering our health. How can we protect ourselves?

Welcome to Climate One, hosted by Greg Dalton.

Climate change isn’t just an environmental problem – it’s also a health hazard. Air pollution and changing weather patterns give rise to heat-related illnesses, asthma and allergic disorders. Disasters like Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Irma leave hospitals scrambling to save patients without power and resources. According to the Centers for Disease Control, insect-borne diseases have tripled in the United States in recent years – and warmer weather is largely to blame.

Later in the program, we’ll hear how hospitals and the healthcare industry are dealing with these climate change-related challenges.

And we’ll hear from a triathlete who survived a case of West Nile Virus – but isn’t convinced about climate change.

But first, Jonathan Patz is director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He spoke with Greg Dalton about why he believes climate change is the major health crisis of our time.

Greg Dalton: So when people think about climate change. They often think of polar bears, smokestacks, tailpipes. How is climate a personal and public health concern?

Jonathan Patz: Well, you know, there are many health issues that are sensitive to climate anything from heat waves to ground-level ozone to mosquito borne diseases. And there are so many ways that climate change can affect our health through these direct temperature or precipitation events to indirect events that it's a big problem. If I went through the full list of exposures it’s one of the reasons that I've picked it as one of the most important public health challenges of our times because, you know, heat waves, air pollution, infectious diseases, especially vector-borne and water-borne diseases and our health depends on adequate food and water supplies. Climate change threatens each of these areas and that's why it's a big issue.

Greg Dalton: What's the biggest health impact today that Americans are feeling and I know it’s often difficult to attribute a particular disease or weather event all to climate, climate is an amplifier. But what is the biggest health effect today in the United States from climate change?

Jonathan Patz: Well in the United States, even in our single country it depends where you live, what the main threat would be. So people that live in the Midwest certainly heat waves are a huge issue. But if you live in a coastal area like in Louisiana, the combination of sea level rise and stronger storm surges from stronger hurricanes, those would be the risk. So there is a regional texture to the risks, it’s hard to pick out one risk as being the number one risk for the United States. But aspects of heat waves and also air pollution, particulate air pollution kills more than 60,000 Americans every year. So that's a big topic. And then if you live in a place that has a vulnerability to mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever or Zika virus in the Southern United States. These are climate sensitive diseases and there is a risk of those diseases in those localities.

Greg Dalton: Who’s doing a good job getting prepared for these things? Is it cities and states on the front lines in the southern United States, you know, who's really out front connecting climate risk and public health?

Jonathan Patz: Well the CDC actually has a program it's called the BRACE program, which stands for Building Resilience Against Climate Effects. So there are several states now that have funding from the CDC for climate change adaptation and building resilience. Cities on their own are doing a great job as far as climate change mitigation. And even though things are stalling out at the federal level, cities are moving forward very much so as far as both climate adaptation, but especially climate change mitigation which means burning less fossil fuel, having smart transportation and urban design and trying to get off of coal-fired power plants. That's something that's, you know, moving forward.

And I'll say that the market is automatically beginning to push dirty energy out. I think that if you talk to investor that just wants to make money and may not really care about environmental concerns. People are not investing in dirty coal anymore. So that sort of automatically happening and that's a good thing that that's happening.

Greg Dalton: Another powerful constituency we often hear about in climate conversations are insurance companies. They were among the first to come forward with very sophisticated data about property losses from rising seas, from severe weather, amplified by climate change. Where are the health insurers, you mentioned healthcare, health in the United States, a lot of people immediately think about their insurance. Are they have a voice in this conversation the health insurers?

Jonathan Patz: That’s a great question. I know that the healthcare sector is getting involved with green hospitals and healthcare without Harm. Kaiser Permanente is taking a leadership role in this. So there is a lot of attention to not continuing to fuel the problem by having inefficient buildings so there’s this green hospitals movement. I don't really know about the health insurance. I think when you think about the enormous number of health effects and risks from climate change but also the incredible number of health benefits from climate change policy. I think it’ll be a great idea for the health insurance companies to come on board with this.

Greg Dalton: Mental health doesn't get a lot of attention. But you think about the dramatic increase in severe weather events people losing their homes, whether it's wildfires in northern California, super storm Sandy some years ago. Whether it's hurricane Harvey, or Irma or Maria. There’s a lot of people who are still suffering trauma long after the news has moved on. What can you say about the mental health aspect of the volatile climate and its impact it's having on the United States?

Jonathan Patz: Yeah the mental health issue, it's an important issue. It’s one that's been overlooked a little bit too much because it's certainly large and concerning; anything from posttraumatic stress syndrome following storms and disasters to simple stress and concern from, you know, the prospects for the future. I think there are a few studies coming out on this. There are also some interesting studies on green space in cities where you can see green space is not only a good thing to reduce the urban heat island effect, you know. The intensifying of a heat wave from black asphalt roads and concrete buildings.

But green space has been shown to be extremely important as far as reducing stress and for benefiting mental health. So there are some intersections there between interventions at adapting to climate change, and reducing mental health problems. But, yeah, definitely a big topic there.

Greg Dalton: What can an individual do to think about healthcare as a climate issue?

Jonathan Patz: Well the first thing is of course to be aware that climate change truly is a public health issue. Something that affects our own health and it's not simply something that affects the polar bears and biodiversity and very important environmental effects, these are important. But I think too often people overlook the fact that indeed there are so many pathways through which climate can affect their health. As we mentioned the heat waves, air quality. There are studies that show that ragweed pollen increases with warmer temperature and CO2.

Greg Dalton: So you're saying people's allergies could get worse with climate change, is that what you’re saying?

Jonathan Patz: Oh yes, there's a study from the National Academy of Sciences, proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that shows that ragweed pollen season is increasing across the United States, especially in the northern latitudes. And that's in relation to warmer temperatures and higher CO2 levels. So, you know, that's a high concern, especially for children with asthma. But across the globe concerns about malnutrition and there’s some studies showing that by mid-century because of extreme temperatures we could see a doubling in the number of people at risk for malnutrition going from, you know, 900 million to doubling that. So that's quite significant major concern. So, that, these are, you know, a very diverse way that climate affects our health.

But at the same time when you think what is causing climate change, it’s burning fossil fuels. And the measures we would take to combat climate change by getting off of fossil fuel in fact, in themselves will have immediate public health benefits. And I personally think this is the health opportunity of the century when you think about the increased trends in chronic disease, especially those related to physical inactivity, poor diet, you know, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and even cancer. If you think about how we are dependent on the automobile and many of us have sedentary lifestyles. In fact, 60% of Americans don't even meet the minimum recommended level of exercise and, you know, obesity rates hit 40% in adults and 18% in children just last year. Well, almost half of car trips are really short trips less than 2 miles. And we've actually done studies ourselves to show that if you could take those short car trips off the road and turn half of them into active transport by bicycle, you could save lives. In our region we save 1,300 lives every year and $8 billion every year in avoided mortality and health costs.

Those are not trivial numbers. These are, you know, if we can build cities for people rather than for just automobiles, it’s a golden opportunity to mitigate climate change from burning less fossil fuel and at the same time improving our health in a major way. And there are plenty of studies looking at electric power and coal-fired power plants, you know, to get to cleaner energy. Recent studies show that if we replace coal-fired power plants with solar electricity to generate power in the United States that would save over 50,000 lives a year.

Greg Dalton: I think a lot of people know those things. And they know that, oh yeah, I mean whether I think a bike ride in winter in Madison, Wisconsin might be a tough sell. But people know that yeah they should walk more, they should exercise more but we don't do it.

Jonathan Patz: Yes, well, this is where I think it’s extremely important to understand that the healthy choice has to be the convenient choice. You know, it’s not a matter -- people don't do what they should do. I don't ride my bike to the University because it's environmentally responsible and it helps my health. I ride my bike because it's the fastest way to get from my house to my office. And that's where urban planners need to come in and we need to be thinking very strategically to design healthy cities. It’s gotta be health by design, not by shaming.

Greg Dalton: What’s some of the biggest surprises that you’ve come across recently, you study this for a long time, climate and health connection. What’s something that’s really surprised you?

Jonathan Patz: Well one thing I was the co-chair for the health report of the first congressionally mandated U.S. national assessment report. This is back in 2000. And I remember at that time and it still holds today that one of the biggest surprises was the safety of our drinking water. And when you think about climate change it's not just about temperature it's extremes of the water cycle. More floods and more droughts.

And our water systems today already are contaminated by heavy rainfall events; they’re called combined sewage overflow events. And already in the United States more than a trillion gallons of sewage contaminated storm water overflows into our lakes and streams every year. So that's a challenge as far as heavy rainfall. Well, the forecast for climate change is we are going to see heavier rainfall events. We’re gonna see more droughts, but when it rains it's going to pour because hot air holds more moisture. So this is I think of concern and it was a surprise when I first looked at it and it continues to be a surprise how vulnerable our water systems are when you think about extremes in climate variability.

Greg Dalton: And how do you talk about all this without sending people reaching for their Prozac?

Jonathan Patz: Well, you know, that's where I say especially in light of the trends in chronic diseases which are ramping up all over the world, that it is a golden opportunity to get to a low carbon economy that from automobiles to dirty coal-fired power plants that, you know, here's an opportunity to have clean energy and clean air and build cities that will allow for safe biking and walking and effective transit rather than promoting sedentary lifestyles through motorized vehicles. That it's a golden opportunity, fantastic opportunity and a large one, considering the size of these epidemics and chronic diseases.

So I tell people that, you know, even if you didn't believe in climate change that to get to low carbon is an amazing health opportunity. And it's something that, you know, you can talk to anybody, nobody's gonna be against safe routes to schools or physically fit children and adults, you know, no one will be against that. I think it's something that we really have a great opportunity here and we should seize that opportunity. You know what they say, you know, every crisis is an opportunity. And I think the global climate crisis is a huge opportunity for public health.

Announcer: That was Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about the health hazards of climate change. Coming up, more about mosquitos – and how a victim of West Nile virus views climate change.

Chuck Yarling: You probably don’t want to hear anything I have to say about changing climate.

Greg Dalton: Sure I do.

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

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One.

[“Mosquito” CLIP]

The 2017 Discovery Channel documentary “Mosquito” traces the path of these disease-bearing insects around the globe.

Su Rynard is the film’s director. She joined Greg Dalton to talk about how warming weather is helping mosquitos live longer, travel farther and infect more people than ever before.

Greg Dalton: One of the most memorable scenes in the film in the program was when you go to Miami and talk with Lindsay who is a pregnant mom and her husband who is quite upset about how they’re living in Miami for fear of getting Zika. Tell us about that scene.

Su Rynard: Well, we had filmed in Recife, Brazil. And we were right in the middle of the Zika epidemic. And I think one of the things that’s interesting about mosquito is that we always think that these are problems that happen elsewhere. So Zika certainly was coming to us through the news and stuff, but I think for North Americans we really don't let it sink in. How the world is changing and how there is no, like there are no borders or walls that can protect us from mosquito borne illness and this type of disease. So certainly in a climate like Florida where they have enormous mosquito populations, huge mosquito populations year round, they’ve got water year-round. It is a tropical climate. There's no reason why those diseases can't get to these communities.

So when we were filming, we were filming right at the time when Zika cases had been found in Miami specifically in the Wynwood neighborhood which Lindsay and Scott Fuhrman live very close to. So we were looking for different people to film with that would talk to us about their experience. And specifically the people who are most vulnerable are the pregnant mothers because of the threat of microcephaly from Zika as a result of the Zika virus.

And it was just really interesting to talk to them because I think they were very candid in their emotional response which was largely to the government which had kind of failed to provide the funding to support the CDC, to support extra initiatives, to educate the public. Again kind of squabbling, you know, over the issue and leaving the people vulnerable and leaving them exposed to the problem.

Greg Dalton: And Scott chokes up at one point and he says, “Look, I’m a father, it's my duty to protect my child and wife.” And he feels very vulnerable that this tiny little mosquito can threaten his unborn baby. And I think that was one of the most compelling moments of the program.

Su Rynard: Yes, yes. Yeah, they were amazing to me. Then I, you know, one thing that’s great about documentary and filming documentaries, you kind of, people let you into their lives. And even though your contact with them is for a short period of time it can be incredibly intense. And we certainly arrived on their doorstep at a very intense moment and I appreciate their openness to talk about the issue.

Greg Dalton: So the Congress, U.S. Congress passed a one point billion-dollar package to do research into Zika to perhaps find a vaccine. What’s the status of that?

Su Rynard: I believe there is research for the vaccine, which is, I mean, maybe it's possible to find a vaccine for Zika, I’m not an expert on vaccines. I know that they’ve been searching for malaria vaccine for about 15 years. Although there is a yellow fever vaccine so some viruses they are able to find vaccines for.

But vaccines are only one solution amongst what you need and, you know, you need a multipronged approach for all of, you know, to prevent all of these. And that even goes back to the subject of your show, which is the climate. I mean climate change is one of the reasons why these mosquito borne diseases are on the rise.

Greg Dalton: And what's the scope, I mean, people think of as Bill Gates says in the program. People think of these diseases as sort of, he doesn’t use this term but Third World problems, you know, Africa, Latin America. So how is climate bringing Zika to the U.S. and how far can it get, can it get up to Canada?

Su Rynard: Yeah, that really depends. I mean well we can talk about Zika but we can also broaden it to talk about some other mosquito borne viruses. So for example, to start, there’s invasive species in the states now which is been there since the 80s called the Asian tiger. And that is a carrier of dengue fever which is a hugely, you know, a disease that’s on the rise, chikungunya and can also transmit Zika. So that mosquito started when it first came to the states it was found in Memphis and in the warmer places and it’s slowly been adapting to the climate and moving north. So part of that is the warmer winters. So prolonged warmer temperatures, you know, such as the winter we just enjoyed make it possible for the mosquito eggs to survive the winter.

So in our film, we filmed with Dr. Laura Harrington, who was really chasing the kind of northern habitat reach of these mosquitoes, which at the time of filming was Long Island and since they've even spread into Ontario. So that doesn't mean the disease is there, but it means if you have an insect that’s a vector that's capable of spreading that disease, all you need is one person to travel to that area that's infected.

All you need is one, you know, one, yeah, you just need to add the infection if the mosquito population is present. So that’s a new danger and it's all, this Asian tiger is all over the United States now, including California. So that's a real problem with these invasive mosquitoes and that’s just one part of it, there’s more.

Greg Dalton: And is Canada getting ready for the march of the dangerous mosquitoes into a place where people rarely associate mosquitoes with a country so far north as Canada?

Su Rynard: Well I think we've definitely got the Asian tiger, you know, is into southern Ontario already. So that's, we’re gonna have to monitor that. And that’s the invasive species that carries, you know, the diseases I just mentioned. We also have West Nile which with weather patterns such as we’ve been having this spring, which is very, very wet. And again, climate change isn’t just, you know, hotter, it’s changing weather patterns and increased for example, increased rainfall, periods of rainfall. So that has certainly increased our mosquito populations enormously this year. So we do have West Nile circulating in where I live in the Toronto area around this year. So that's a concern. So yeah, I mean places that weren’t touched before certainly are being touched.

Greg Dalton: When you were in Miami, Lindsay and Scott talked about not going outside without putting on an armor of bug spray. When you do that, do you use the DEET bug spray or the non-DEET bug spray something that people who go to the outdoor store often ponder whether to go with the strong toxic stuff or the other stuff.

Su Rynard: Well I think if you really don't want to get bitten you have to go with a strong toxic stuff. There is a website, the CDC, Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. website lists what ingredients are actually effective. And this is a kind of consumer beware situation because there's so many products marketed out there. And most of them don't work at all.

But DEET works, picaridin, another ingredient works and there's an oil of lemon eucalyptus I think that works. But I would again recommend that people check the website if they're really looking. And also the thing about insect repellent is, Scott and Lindsay are absolutely right. When there isn't a virus circulating which there was at that time in their neighborhood. They have to protect themselves. They have to put that on every single day, you know, thoroughly and properly so they don't get bitten. I don't think everywhere we have to run out and buy bug spray because if the disease isn’t present in the mosquito population you don't have to, you know, a mosquito bite won't hurt you, you know, you won't get a disease so that's the other part of it.

Greg Dalton: There’s some pretty strong statements in there in the program about wars are nothing compared to mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are the most dangerous animal in the world. I had thought that malaria was on the downslope. Thanks to Bill Gates and others. Is that not the case?

Su Rynard: Yeah, malaria is currently on the down. I mean there's still hundreds of thousands of people who die every year from it, and millions who are affected. But malaria is only one disease. The Zika outbreak is a kind of warning sign. I mean I think that was a wake-up call, especially to North America that these things are present. There’s certainly in Europe, things are changing everywhere things are changing. So I think that just because you’ve had some success reducing one, I mean, major disease, I mean, this has taken years and years of work. There are others that are on the rise. You know, 300 million people a year get dengue fever and chikungunya, these are things that are coming and they’re spreading. And yes, they all sound crazy and foreign and stuff but we better get used to saying them because this is the changing landscape. And this again brings me back to climate. I mean, climate isn't an image of a polar bear on an ice floe, climate is increases in disease like a warmer world, you know, is -- yeah, I mean --

Greg Dalton: It’s more hospitable to disease.

Su Rynard: Yeah, sicker world, yeah, warmer world is a sicker world. And I mean another thing that happens with mosquitoes is they respond to heat. They’re very temperature sensitive. So the lifecycle, if we have prolonged heat. The lifecycle of a mosquito will actually speed up. So if you have more mosquitoes, there's more possibility of spreading disease. And the other part of that is that the virus or the parasite, the lifecycle of that also speeds up.

So you have just increased mosquitoes and increasing parasites and the diseases that they carry and spread. So that's a real danger. And if you're in a drought, you know, like California has been for the last, not last year but prior to that. You might think you're safe but I mean mosquito eggs can live for years like 10 years, you know. So if you have a rainfall that happened 10 years ago and the eggs were laid and you have a drought and then you have a big rainfall again, with these irregular weather patterns. All those eggs that are dormant are going to come to life. So we'll have this intense outbreak of mosquitoes.

So all of the things that are happening now with the planet are going to change everything with mosquitoes and mosquito borne illnesses and, you know, for the mosquito there are many mosquitoes that don't spread diseases that are part of the biomass that are really an important part of a healthy functioning ecosystem and then there's the vector diseases. So I think this is something that we all, the vector, mosquitoes that are vectors of disease. We have to start to learn the differences and learn awareness and it just has to be another thing that we’re thinking about because like the world has changed and it's changed like human impacts have changed the world. And they’ve changed it for the betterment of the mosquito.

Announcer: That was Su Rynard, director of the 2017 documentary “Mosquito.”

In 2012, after an unusually warm and wet season, Texas experienced a West Nile Virus epidemic. Over eighteen hundred people contracted the disease; eighty-nine of them died. One person who survived a run-in with West Nile was triathlete Chuck Yarling.

Yarling began training for triathlons in 1983 at the suggestion of his friend Richard Blakely. A few months later, at the age of 38, he entered his first competition. In 2012, while training in Austin, he suddenly fell ill.

Greg Dalton: Recently you contracted West Nile virus. How did that happen?

Chuck: Well I got bitten by a mosquito sometime. I was training to do my next race, and Richard says that I felt weak and I stop training to recover and I start training again. He seemed to think that I was already bitten. All of a sudden I didn't feel too good on Tuesday. Went to the clinic and they said, “Oh you’re fine. Take some aspirin you’ll be there.” So on Wednesday I got up and I said, “I do not feel good at all. Gonna go back to bed.” I didn’t make it. Fell into a coma on Wednesday morning around 10 AM. Thursday, Richard came to look for me because I didn't show up to happy hour, which I never missed at our favorite restaurant. So he found me and I was 31 hours later he got me in a hospital.

Greg Dalton: So you are in a coma for how long alone?

Chuck: 31 hours.

Greg Dalton: 31 hours at your home there in Austin. Wow. What was the weather like in Austin that year?

Chuck: That was third week of August. So it got pretty warm and I never worried about getting out in the sun or the heat to train, run or bike. Nope, didn't matter to me.

Greg Dalton: And then what happened?

Chuck: Well about 12 days later, I woke up and my first thought was that, “Wait a minute. When am I gonna train again?” I didn't realize what was going on yet. And I looked around there was my sister, a couple of her kids. A tube down my throat. So I was in the rehab for about 30 days. Then I got to two more rehab units and then Richard took me in his house in Buda, I call it my halfway house, in a wheelchair learned how to fix myself and work around the house.

Greg Dalton: Okay. And did they at this point know that it was West Nile; did you get an accurate diagnosis?

Chuck: The doctors knew exactly what it was but they had to take a spinal tap to prove it.

Greg Dalton: And is that something that’s common in Austin, West Nile virus or is that an unusual, how common is that?

Chuck: That's a good question. It started up getting really bad in Dallas prior to August. But in August 2012 it got really bad there and it hit Austin too.

Chuck: Yeah, five people in the hospital same week as me, three died.

Greg Dalton: Were you aware of West Nile virus, you know, outdoor triathlete in Austin at that time was that something that was on your radar?

Chuck: Nah. I don't think about things like that.

Greg Dalton: When did you think about contracting West Nile in Austin, Texas as a possibly connected to the changing climate?

Chuck: You probably don't want to hear anything I have to say about change of climate.

Greg Dalton: Sure I do.

Chuck: If there is such a thing as change of climate, mankind has nothing to do with it.

Greg Dalton: Okay. And you were an engineer in the army, is that right?

Chuck: Well I was a combat engineer but I was basically a clerk typist and a words clerk in Vietnam.

Chuck: When I came back from Vietnam, I finished my engineering degree.

Greg Dalton: So you worked in manufacturing and have a scientific background. And you're not sure the climate is changing?

Chuck: That's correct.

Greg Dalton: And so when you look around and you look at say what happened to Houston, you know, three 500-year floods in a row something like that. You say that's – what do you say to that, the people in Texas who say, “Wow these floods and rain bombs are coming pretty strong. This is something new and different.”

Chuck: That doesn't mean it’s gonna happen at any time in the next 25 years either does it?

Greg Dalton: No, there’s probability. So you're not convinced the climate is changing. So you're not convinced that warming temperatures is increasing the hospitality for mosquitoes carrying Zika, West Nile and other diseases?

Chuck: No I don't. I can draw an argument saying, okay supposedly observations have been made that the Arctic area region has melting ice caps, whatever. But that cannot explain why ice is growing in the Antarctic. Because that doesn’t make sense to me.

Greg Dalton: Right. Well there’s the extent of, there’s something that’s called the extent of sea ice, which is the spread of the sea ice that sort of area. And then there’s how thick and how heavy that ice is. So it’s possible that you could crush up a bunch of ice and put it in a tub and it would spread out. It would look over a broader surface area –

Chuck: But it’s been getting thicker in the Antarctic.

Greg Dalton: Yeah. In some places it’s getting colder. But overall global temperatures are rising but still gets really cold some places. And there’s still low records in some places. But there's a lot more warm records than there are cold records. Yeah, it's snowing and still snowing.

Chuck: I’m not disregarding climate change per se. My argument specifically is mankind has nothing to do with it. It cannot have anything to do with it.

My argument is this. Mankind lives on only 31% of the planet and it is obscene for anybody to consider that mankind on 31% can affect weather on the remaining parts of the earth which are all water.

Announcer: Triathlete Chuck Yarling survived a battle with West Nile Virus after being bitten by a mosquito in 2012. Yarling eventually began training again. He just turned seventy-three, and is preparing for his next race.

You're listening to a conversation about climate change and health. This is Climate One. Coming up, we’ll hear how the health care industry is dealing with the new normal.

Jessica Wolff: Clearly hospitals care and they need to care because their operations, you know, business as usual, do harm. And healthcare has a responsibility not to do harm.

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

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. We’ve been hearing about the health care dangers of climate change. What are hospitals doing to address the challenges of disease outbreaks, weather disasters – and their own carbon footprint?

To find out, Greg Dalton spoke with Jessica Wolff, director of the Climate and Health program at Healthcare Without Harm.

Greg Dalton: So what is a climate-smart healthcare system?

Jessica Wolff: Well it’s interesting. People don't think about healthcare when they think about climate. But healthcare makes up 18% of our GDP and there was a study done in 2016 by Dr. Jodi Sherman and Matthew Eckelman, which showed that healthcare actually makes up about 10% of our greenhouse gas emissions in this country. So what that means is that the U.S. healthcare sector if it were a country it would rank ahead of the U.K. and would be the 13th leading country for greenhouse gas emissions.

So with that, we know that climate change has health impacts which a number of your other guests have been talking about. And because hospitals operate in such an energy intensive and use so many products and create so much waste, there actually their contributions to climate change actually end up adversely impacting health. And so this is a sector it's the only industry that has a mission to heal and has pledged to do no harm. So this is a sector that has an opportunity and a responsibility to use its ethical, economic and political influence to advance the transition to a low carbon future that supports healthy people living on a healthy planet and to do that, that's where climate-smart healthcare comes in. And that is about mitigation so healthcare reducing its own carbon footprint. Resilience. So healthcare working to build resilient healthcare facilities and help build resilient communities. And leadership, you know, using that trusted voice to influence policymakers, shift the public discussion to make climate change about health not about polar bears because that's what resonates. And then also to bring their market muscle to help move those markets and really, you know, lead to some disruptions.

Greg Dalton: When this awareness come about? I mean if I think back about when I first kind of connected climate change with healthcare. It was the evacuation of a hospital in New York City during Superstorm Sandy where the power is out and the streets are flooded and literally it's like, you know, patients climbing downstairs because the elevators don't work. And there was that very dramatic evacuation of the, I think it was the NYU Hospital in lower Manhattan. Was it that moment, or what was the awakening moment for the healthcare industry to say hey we got to be part of this?

Jessica Wolff: That's a good question. I mean that was NYU Langone. And NYU Langone did have a seawall to protect its generator. But because of climate changing our projections for flooding and sea level height are off so, you know, they did lose power they did have to evacuate. They had $700 million in research losses alone at NYU. So in terms of building for climate resilience that really was a wake-up call. And we have health systems across the country that are investing and being prepared. I mean Texas Medical Center for Hurricane Allison in 2001 they were manually ventilating patients. They invested in resilience and being prepared and with Hurricane Harvey in 2017, all 23 of their hospitals remained operational. So we’re seeing real benefits.

So hospitals that had been hit by extreme weather or hospitals like Partners HealthCare in Boston, Massachusetts. They've built the Spaulding rehab center which is a glowing example of how to build for resilience considering sea level rise. And that hospital is a rehab hospital right on Boston Harbor. It was the hospital that where the Boston Marathon bombing patients underwent rehabilitation. So I think healthcare -- extreme weather events is one piece but healthcare is on the front lines, not just for extreme weather events as disease prevalence shifts that's also something healthcare will have to manage and have to deal with. And, you know, it's not enough for hospitals to stay open during extreme weather events. Patients have to be able to get there. Their staff has to be able to get there. So hospitals not only need to think about their own climate resilience. They need to think about their communities.

Greg Dalton: And doctors are often leaders are respected members of communities. There’s been some professional advocacy, the American Academy of Pediatrics has come out a few years ago and said that climate is a primary concern for children and children's healthcare, American Medical Association. So how are the healthcare professionals kind of using their respect and muscle to bring attention to climate?

Jessica Wolff: Yes, you make a good point. Many of the medical societies have come out with statements supporting climate change. There's a newer organization called the medical society consortium on climate and health where these societies have come together and have started to do strong advocacy work through that organization. We have at Health Care Without Harm a physician network, a way for physicians to connect and network and access tools, resources, best practices so they can bring them back to their hospitals.

We don't see enough of climate change information in medical schools and residency programs. The physicians who are leaders in this work are going, you know, we work closely with Dr. Amy Collins who is an emergency medicine physician in Massachusetts and she recently spoke to medical students at Mount Sinai, in New York. We hosted an event with U.S. PIRG in Chicago that was, you know, directed at medical students and residents. And recently there was a fellowship created in climate and health science policy at CU Boulder and that's again in the Department of Emergency Medicine. So when you look at clinicians interestingly or physicians, emergency medicine physicians they get this because they’re on the front lines of this. The other group of physicians that’s very active are anesthesiologists because something that's unique to healthcare is that 5% of the emissions from hospitals are typically related to anesthetic gas emissions. So that's a group that is working, you know, to try to reduce those emissions. And there are some solutions and some are relatively easy to implement.

Greg Dalton: Reading your report about the climate-smart healthcare system was the pharmaceutical impact. What is the carbon impact of the pills that are administered or prescribed in hospitals?

Jessica Wolff: Yeah. In the 2016 report by Sherman and Eckelman. They estimate that pharmaceuticals are 10% of the greenhouse gas emissions from healthcare. So, you know, those pharmaceuticals are manufactured and then they are transported. And then they get to the hospital and then they have to, you know, then there's a waste coming out the other side. So from the hospital perspective you want to be pretty careful with inventory because when you have more than you need, then you have to dispose of those and those are, you know, create more impact in terms of waste and greenhouse gas emissions as well.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about hospitals with Jessica Wolff from Health Care Without Harm because hospitals are the big source of emissions. Running a hospital is complicated there's a lot of pressures on cost, insurance, you know, healthcare is a big, I was gonna say controversial industry in undergoing a lot of change. Is being green really a priority when you're trying to saves lives and trying to take care of these people not sure if they can pay their bills, is like recycling and taking care of the waste, is that really a priority?

Jessica Wolff: Well it’s a good question. You know we have, my sister organization, which is our implementation arm is called Practice Greenhealth. And we have 1,200 hospitals that are members of Practice Greenhealth which is really a sustainability healthcare organization. And that's about 20% of the hospitals in this country. So clearly hospitals care and they need to care because their operations, you know, business as usual operations do harm. And healthcare has a responsibility not to do harm.

Now, when you look at margins, hospitals have very low margins, you know, there's many of your guests are from corporate America hospitals if they're lucky have a 2% to 4% margin often they're losing money. So you're right, it's hard and we’re competing for dollars. So when you're trying to do an energy efficiency upgrade, you’re competing for capital potentially with a new MRI or a new fancy surgical robot. So how do you make that case? Well, the reality is when you have a low margin every dollar you save from energy efficiency saves you much more in revenue. So if you have a 4% margin if you save a dollar, it's equivalent to $25 in new revenue coming in. So that's one of the arguments or, you know, rationale we need to make, particularly when you're talking to people who are under pressure for the margins like a CFO or COO of a hospital.

Greg Dalton: Sure. And one we know that hospitals anyone who's ever visited or stayed in the hospital know that the food is usually pretty bad. They’re trying to make you healthy, but they’re not serving you the most healthy food. Probably they want to keep that food cost low. We know that food is a big contributor to greenhouse gases, food waste a really big contributor. So is healthier food and food waste part of what the hospitals are trying to do?

Jessica Wolff: Absolutely. And actually one of our most robust programs at Health Care Without Harm is called our healthy food and healthcare program. And that's looking at nutrition not just through the lens of what you need to be heart healthy what are the vitamins and minerals. But how was the food produced, how was it processed, how was it packed, how was it distributed as well as how it was consumed. And many of our hospitals are making big strides to purchase local food. So we have a hospital University of Vermont Medical Center and they’re procuring over 45% of their food locally. And, you know, they have a rooftop garden they take their food waste to be composted off site and then they buy some of that compost back for their gardens. Boston Medical Center has a rooftop garden and that food goes right to their fresh food pharmacy so physicians write prescriptions for low-income patients to be able to get fresh produce and some of that is grown on site. So there's a lot of innovative solutions.

Hospitals are often the largest employer in the community and they procure and serve a lot of food. They’re feeding their patients, their staff and their visitors so they can make a real difference there.

Greg Dalton: So what can a patient do, you know, shopping for a doctor or considering a hospital, you know, whether the hospital is green probably not on the top of your priority list when you’re looking for someone to take care of you. But what can a patient do to be sensitive to these kinds of changes in the healthcare sector?

Jessica Wolff: That's a very good question. And I think all of us when you are sick, or you have a family member that’s sick you're not worrying if your hospital is powered by renewable energy. You’re worried that they’re gonna take the best care of your mother, that the surgeon that they're seeing has done that procedure a thousand times that you understand what they're saying that they're not gonna have complications. So I don't think it's fair to ask patients to drive this transition. I will also say you don't often have a choice where you go, you know hospitals have been consolidating often there's only one hospital in a region. So for most people they don't always have a choice about a hospital that they go to. But I think when you're not ill to be aware of what hospitals are doing and push on them as a member of the community.

Because what a hospital does dramatically affects the community. If a hospital is burning fossil fuels they’re affecting the local air quality. So you can think about your hospital shifting to renewable energy will have a direct positive effect on asthma on cardiovascular diseases on allergies. So I think making your voice heard if you are a climate champion and encouraging and supporting your hospital to make those changes and celebrating when your hospital does make those changes.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking about building a climate-smart healthcare system, with Jessica Wolff, director of the Climate and Health Program at Healthcare Without Harm.

Greg’s other guests today were Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Su Rynard, director of the documentary “Mosquito,” and West Nile Virus survivor Chuck Yarling.

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.

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Exposed: Dieselgate's Impact on the Auto Industry

Otto Pilot — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 11:01:00 +0000

Exposed: Dieselgate's Impact on the Auto Industry

03/28/2018

Volkswagen’s brazen cheating on air pollution rules rocked an industry with a history of skulduggery. The scandal has now cost the company $30 billion plus jail time for one. Furthering chaos in the auto industry is a Trump administration looking to roll back emissions standards while California and 12 additional states, making up 36% of the auto market, threaten to maintain theirs.

This program was recorded live at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on March 27, 2018

Guests

Alberto Ayala, PhD, MSE

Executive Director, Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District

Edward Niedermeyer

Auto Industry Analyst and Commentator, Autonocast

Margo T. Oge

Former Director, Office of Transportation and Air Quality, U.S. EPA

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

Volkswagen’s brazen cheating on air pollution rules rocked an auto industry with a history of shifty business.

Margaret Oge: Almost every company has cheated. What was different here was the level of cheating, and the fact that they kept on lying.

Announcer: Dieselgate has now cost the company $30 billion plus jail time for one executive. But the scandal has had its silver linings.

Edward Niedermeyer: One of the outcomes of Dieselgate is that the penalties include sort of investments in electric charging infrastructure.

Announcer: Will the newly-energized push toward electric cars expand the market and drive down prices?

Alberto Ayala: Imagine, you know, Super Bowl commercials all over the place with zero emission vehicle instead of pickups. Imagine the response consumers would have.

Announcer: Dieselgate and the future of the auto industry. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: How will Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal impact the rest of the auto industry? Welcome to Climate One – changing the conversation about energy, economy and environment. Climate One conversations – with oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats – are recorded before a live audience, and hosted by Greg Dalton.

I’m Devon Strolovitch. In 2017, Volkswagen pleaded guilty to criminal charges of installing cheating software on nearly 500,000 diesel cars in the United States and 9 million worldwide. The cheating software hid the fact that the VW’s so-called clean diesels actually broke pollution laws. Soot from diesel engines is linked to cancer and other diseases. Six VW executives were indicted on criminal charges and the company agreed to pay more than $4 billion in penalties. It also will pay $15 billion to defrauded drivers. Independent investigations found that many other carmakers including Volvo, Renault, Jeep, Hyundai and Fiat also exceeded pollution limits. VW subsequently announced it will invest $40 billion in robotic and electric cars that emit no tailpipe emissions. This conversation about the scandal and the future of personal mobility is generously sponsored by the ClimateWorks Foundation.

To talk about Dieselgate and its impact, Greg Dalton welcomes three guests. Alberto Ayala was a key California Air Regulator who investigated the VW cheating scandal. He’s now the top air pollution official in Sacramento, California. Edward Niedermeyer is an auto industry analyst and host of the Autonocast podcast. He’s a contributor to Bloomberg View, and has written extensively about Tesla Motors. And Margo Oge is Former Director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at the U.S. EPA. She's now an advisor to the VW board.

Here’s our conversation about the impact of Dieselgate and the future of the auto industry..

Greg Dalton: So Alberto Ayala, let’s begin with you. It’s 2012, California has declared fighting climate change, a major priority. Diesels were thought to be part of the solution better than gasoline, and in many respects, and you started to test cars as a California air regulator. And then things started to look a little fishy, pick up the story there.

Alberto Ayala: That is correct. At the time California was well underway to set up and build a climate agenda that obviously included the biggest source of emissions greenhouse gases and otherwise. And that is a transportation sector, and we identified and realized that because diesels were so efficient they were going to be a low carbon solution for us. But diesels had never been very popular in California or in the U.S. for that matter. And as we began to promote and expect the fraction of diesel cars and the fleet to grow, we quickly realized that we didn't really understand the technology we had not tested it. We have not researched it to the level that we had other technologies like gasoline cars for example. And that was really the beginning of our interest in, you know, bringing the cars in and as I often say just kick the tires. Just trying to get our feet wet trying to understand the technology the way it performs what have you. And just by the mere fact that we started testing as many different types of cars as we could get our hands on, it was that’s when it became clear to us that some cars were not performing the way that we expected them. And that's when things got as you said a little fishy.

Greg Dalton: And then eventually realized that they were kinda gaming the system that the car somehow knew they were on a treadmill. There’s all sorts of things ways the companies did that. Then VW agreed to recall the cars, to fix them. Tell us what happened then.

Alberto Ayala: Well so, you just compressed about three years’ worth of work into a real quick event.

Greg Dalton: Welcome to radio.

Alberto Ayala: It actually took a long time for us to realize that there was cheating going on and I want to make that clear. I mean you said 2012, the agencies did not announce the violation until 2015. And the reason for that is because we spent all that time doing a lot of testing going back and forth with the company. So, you know, it wasn't a trivial issue but to your point at one point in time and in late 2014, the company for other reasons had already planned a recall. And before they can do that they have to get approval from the agencies. And they sold it to us as an opportunity to fix the more recent problem and that makes sense to us. We figured let’s be efficient about it they’re gonna be bringing the cars to fix this completely unrelated problem that will present the opportunity. And it makes sense to us at the time and that's why we approved it.

Greg Dalton: And so there was a recall for VW cars. They come in and what really happens, rather than fixing the problem. What do they really do?

Alberto Ayala: So again if you fast-forward and we look back now we understand what actually happened. At the time we gave the company the okay with the understanding that once they performed the recall and implement it, the fixes that they needed to. We said that's fine but bring us a car to test it again. And that's really when it became apparent that the so-called fix wasn't much of anything other than just more convolution and just, you know, more issues with the cars.

Greg Dalton: So then what ultimately convinces the company to say which is pretty rare, okay we did it you got us.

Alberto Ayala: Well I like to, let me take a step back. I mean California, obviously we've had an opportunity to reflect back in terms of, you know, all the issues have really led us down this path. And I do say with conviction that California has a pretty unique program in place for emissions regulations and compliance. And it’s really that program that allow us to get to the final answer. And the best way to characterize it is after years of work with the company going back and forth, we really put them in a corner where they had no other answer, which was a lie now we know other than just to admit that it was a defeat device. So I do think that it was our perseverance and, you know, there was many of us involve in this process. I want to make that clear. But it really was a point where they just had no other place to turn than to admit the cheating.

Greg Dalton: Margo Oge, you spent 20 some years at the top office in the U.S. EPA investigating, you know, keeping an eye on the industry. How do you look at this scandal compared to other many scandals in the auto industry how does this framed?

Margo Oge: First of all, let me just make a statement because I think it’s very important. As good as Alberto’s former agency car base and my former agency the Environmental Protection Agency, we really did not catch VW. VW cars were introduced back to the U.S. in 2007. The last time we saw a VW car was in the mid-80s. So they came to the U.S. in 2007 along with BMW and Mercedes. At EPA we audit about 15% of the cars and I cannot tell you the formula. There is a formula that we use. I mean VW was selling 50,000 cars, we didn’t test it. So it went from 2007 all the way to 2014, 2015. And I have to say the first credit on this goes to the International Council on Clean Transportation. They took it to Alberto and they took it to EPA. I was gone by then, I left EPA in 2012. So it was because of the ICCT that this case came up. Probably eventually the agencies both at the state level and federal would have picked it up but that has been going on for many years. Now let me say this. My 18 years at the Environmental Protection Agency overseeing the Office of Transportation and Air Quality I was not surprised. I mean everybody almost every company has cheated. From Toyota to GM to Honda. What was different here is the level of cheating. I mean 40% above the standards. And the fact as Alberto said they kept on lying. Let me give you an example. In 2009 under President Clinton, we caught all, all diesel truck manufacturers cheating for a decade. They were improving fuel efficiency and they were cheating on NOx.

Greg Dalton: Nitrous oxide.

Margo Oge: Nitrogen oxide. The first company that we caught because we tested the engine, Cummins engine in our lab. I brought them into our office and they said, well, you know what we really could not read the regulations they are maybe vague. One company after the other all seven of them came in. Within six months the Department of Justice had to deal with them. They polluted one million metric tons of NOx. By the way, we never recover more than 10% of that. The total penalty for this companies all seven of them $1 billion. Why? Because they had made it early on they didn't keep us hanging, we’re not cheating we haven’t done anything, you know, keep on lying. So every company for the most part cheats. And in the U.S. the good news is that we do have strong federal programs in California it’s very strong. So between California and EPA, we enforce those laws. In Europe they have never had an enforcement case against the car company until the Dieselgate broke.

Greg Dalton: Because the regulators are pretty cozy with the companies?

Margo Oge: Because this are national companies. So basically what happened Mercedes for example, I'm not picking on Mercedes, could be any of these companies, goes to Portugal and they asked a private company to certify their cars. And they pay them. They don’t pay EPA, they don’t pay California in the U.S. So the company in Portugal gives them a certificate. Then Mercedes takes it and can introduce their cars in any country in Europe. No penalties, no enforcement until now after the Dieselgate that things have changed.

Greg Dalton: After the scandal broke Philip Forbes became a moderator of a form on Facebook with 4,000 owners. Here is he’s talking about his ownership of a VW.

[Start Clip]

Philip Forbes: I own a 2013 Volkswagen Passat TDI six-speed manual. I got a job that I knew was gonna involve a lot of driving about 50,000 miles a year. And the day after I started I went and bought this car mainly it was just purely financial. I wanted to save money. My environmental concern was more the nonrenewable resource of fossil fuels, you know, in my mind, this was a vehicle that would consume less of that resource. And so that was a good thing. My car is one of I believe the number is 12,000 or fewer out of the almost 500,000 in total. There will never be a fix available for my model. Honestly, this hasn't really impacted my views on Volkswagen I know they’re far from the first company who has done this, obviously it’s wrong. But I'm going to keep driving the car. At this point they would give me about $11,000, you know, I'm driving 50,000 miles a year. I've driven this car over 1000 miles between fuel stops before that's insane. I mean if I had $11,000 but not this car today, I have no idea what I would replace it with. So, you know, I’ll keep driving it.

[End Clip]

Greg Dalton: That’s Philip Forbes, a VW owner in Hollister, California. Edward Niedermeyer, your take on his comments like hey, I need this car it hasn’t changed my view on VW. What’s the lesson of this scandal?

Edward Niedermeyer: Well, there’s a saying, I really like the saying which is your mileage may vary, right. And this is something I think everybody has ever owned a car knows, right. You get the window sticker which comes out of the testing that the regulators do. And that's sort of a baseline that you kind of hope to achieve and some cars are better at hitting that and some are not. And actually a lot of it has to do with how you drive the car. How aggressively you accelerate. And certainly in this country we don't really think or talk or teach people about how to drive more efficiently. It's not really part of our discourse around cars, right. So the challenges with catching cheating really comes down to this issue, right. The regulatory system is set up to be an even playing field that’s why we test in labs. We can control the variables, right. And as a result, once you get them out, cars out into the real world, there’s gonna be variation from that because the conditions vary, a head wind, a tail wind, things like that. And so I think people are very used to sort of seeing some variance. And I think the car companies, that’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to catch this kind of cheating is because people just expect these variations exist, and rightly so, because, you know, the real world is very chaotic and variable. And also, you know, consumers are quite conservative, they get used to certain things and they want to keep doing them that way. And, you know, things like, you know, time between gas stations, you know, stop for fuel. That's actually really important it’s actually a really big challenge when you start think about the new technologies that are coming down the road that will hopefully replace some of these more polluting ones. You know, new technology is hard to develop but I think when you compare that to changing people's behavior, it’s actually easier. Changing people's behavior is one of the hardest things to do. So I think that’s something that's really important to keep in mind as we think about sort of the future and how we move past some of these issues.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about Dieselgate and the future of personal mobility. Coming up, Greg Dalton asks about the scandal’s impact on other auto industry issues like emissions, electrification, and automation.

Edward Niedermeyer: It's making people question, the public is questioning this paradigm of the automobile that we haven't question for century now.

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

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about Dieselgate and the future of the auto industry with Alberto Ayala, the California Air Regulator who investigated the VW cheating scandal. Edward Niedermeyer, an auto industry analysts and host of the Autonocast podcast. And Margo Oge, Former Director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at the U.S. EPA.

Here’s your host, Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Edward Niedermeyer, let’s talk about how this will affect the electrification. Electric cars have been around, well the first ones were like 1900 some of the earliest cars in Detroit the Detroit electric was a ladies car. So tell us how this will affect the move toward electrification broadly. Is this gonna be, you know, how it’s gonna be?

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah. Well I think there's two factors that have really sort of changed the conversation around electric cars. And one of them is clearly Dieselgate and the other one I think is Tesla Motors and what they've done. Very different sort of aspects of the issue and I think between them they sort of illustrate the challenges of our current system and the promises of the future. You know, even before Tesla when Tesla was still a tiny, tiny, tiny little started making very few little, you know, Roadsters that were very expensive and very few ever made. Carlos Ghosn, who was the CEO at the time of Nissan and Renault, two giant global car companies, invested billions of dollars.

Greg Dalton: $5 billion.

Edward Niedermeyer: About $5 billion, yeah. And they did that in order to build a global capacity plants in the United States, in Japan and in Europe to build 500,000 affordable electric cars every year. That was a historic gamble by a car company. It’s one that frustratingly, very few people know about and understand. And unfortunately, how that played out is that, you know, they invested in the capacity about 500,000 cars a year and cumulatively since the Nissan Leaf debut in 2011 I think they just recently crossed about the 300,000 unit mark. And that’s cumulatively, right. So they wanted to sell 500,000 cars a year and cumulatively they only sold 300,000. In the auto industry it's a capital-intensive and low margin business. And what that means is that overcapacity is what kills car companies, right. Having the capacity to build more cars than people are willing to buy. And so the entire industry, right looked at this experiment this grand experiment that Carlos Ghosn initiated and they concluded that, you know, yeah, there's a lot of talk a lot of excitement in some circles about electric cars. But man, when you look at the dollars and cents, when you look at the business it just isn't happening. And so I think that what happened since then is Tesla has become this global phenomenon, right and Dieselgate has really open people's eyes about issues around this. And luckily and I think it's really fantastic that one of the outcomes of Dieselgate is that the penalties include sort of investments in electric charging infrastructure. And so I think it’s really great that this, you know, really terrible situation has been turned into an opportunity to build a better future and we need to have this be a teachable moment and a moment to really think about this transition and hopefully that's what’s happening.

Greg Dalton: Margo Oge, so EVs have been sort of heralded by environmentalist and they gonna hype for some time. They haven’t really met expectations. Looking at the Nissan example, you know, isn’t that a cautionary tale of saying this EV transition may not happen as fast as a lot of greenies in California would like it to happen.

Margo Oge: I would say that it's happening pretty fast. I mean if you compare the amount of time that it took Toyota Prius to reach the cutting levels of EVs, there’s no comparison. So basically what is happening right now is Tesla no question about has been on the face of the tradition on OEMs I mean they’re challenging.

Greg Dalton: OEMs automakers.

Margo Oge: Yeah, the traditional car manufacturers. Sorry about the jargon. The traditional car manufacturers. So let us have the, you know, Detroit and the Germans said, oh my god people who drive Tesla cars they love it. And the Tesla owners are not greenies by the way. I live in McLean, Virginia and I'm driving a Volt. So I was in a car wash and the guy in front of me was driving an expensive Tesla. So I went by, you know, we were waiting both of us for our car. And I say, you know, why are we driving this car and I was hoping that he was gonna say I’m an environmentalist, you know, and I love this car. He said, “I used to have a Ferrari and I drive this because it’s better than a Ferrari and it’s more powerful and I love the technology.” So Tesla was I think the catalyst. The second catalyst is the ZEV mandate here in California. I think California –

Greg Dalton: Zero emission vehicle.

Margo Oge: Zero emission vehicle mandate that California has been fighting. I mean, you know, they failed back in the 90s, you know, they went backwards. But now, that's the time and having the California experiment here is what happens then for the experiment in China. Because the Chinese said, well wait a moment, you know, we should have something similar because we can never really, if you think about it the internal combustion engine has been refined over hundred years. The emission control systems and so forth, you know, 20,000 parts, we’re gonna do an electric car. And for them it’s not just an environmental issue if you think about it. It is an economic issue and industrial issue. So the ZEV mandate from California went to China. And right now all these companies are global companies, GM has more profits from China than U.S. So all these companies are investing because of Tesla and because of China. The other thing that we have to think about set aside the greenies and I'm one of them is that the cost of batteries have come down over 70% the last seven years. So the expectation by many experts is that by 2022 maybe 2023 timeframe overall cost of owning an electric car will be the same as owning an internal combustion engine. And by the way, it's more fun to drive than a gasoline car.

Greg Dalton: That's for sure.

Margo Oge: Am I right?

Greg Dalton: The immediate torque of electric is different.

Margo Oge: So my view is that the future is here, it’s coming, it’s all about electric.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us we’re talking about the Dieselgate scandal and the future of electric cars. I’m Greg Dalton. My guests are Margo Oge, Former Regulator at the U.S. EPA. Edward Niedermeyer, host of the Autonocast podcast and Alberto Ayala, an air pollution regulator in California. Alberto, let's ask you, there's a documentary on Netflix it’s really good called the Dirty Money series. Alex Gibney is the producer. He did things on Enron, Lance Armstrong. He seems to like cheating a lot, catching cheaters. And so we have VW, Armstrong and Enron. There is a point in there where you talk about something called the midterm review. So explain what that is and the importance of this check in on the CAFE standards.

Alberto Ayala: So you want to get political now huh? So California has unique authority under the Federal Clean Air Act to set its own standards and that has to do with the history of air pollution in our state. California set its own standards for cars emission standards that back in 2012 as I’ve mentioned before that were pretty far-reaching. They applied all the way out to model year 2025. We had never done that before. Typically you set standards by say every four, five years. Because that's basically the best that you can project technology development, which is really what you're trying to do with the emission standards. Force better technology that emits lower and lower emissions. The automakers agreed to the standards that at the time the Obama administration got California, the federal agencies and the automakers to say let’s work together, let’s implement the standards. But the caveat was because they are so far-reaching we need to do a check-in midway. And that became known as the midterm review and that is really meant to be an examination of whether we got the standards right or not. And if the answer is not, do we need to make adjustments. That happened in California already. And it actually happened at EPA under the previous administration. And both agencies said we got it right. Nothing has changed relative to the way that we predicted the technology to develop. We are seeing great acceleration of the EV technology for a number of reasons both policies, regulations as well as a lot of investments that California is making to promote the technology. And of course with the change in administration I think is pretty well understood that EPA is the current EPA is on a mission to rollback a lot of the regulatory standards have been put in place and, you know, the question is on the table now as to whether the midterm review has already been completed in California and not the Federal level is basically going to be thrown out and something else is gonna come out of the current federal government.

Margo Oge: By the way, this is something that the car companies that negotiated with the Obama administration to set the standards as soon as the elections happen they went to the Trump administration. They said, you know what we need some changes.

Greg Dalton: They were the first industry after the election –

Margo Oge: They were the first industry to go there. So of course the Trump administration says, you mean that we’re gonna lose billion jobs because of the standards? That’s what they said, lying, million jobs would be lost. When we know exactly the opposite. The new standards have encouraged the development of new jobs.

Greg Dalton: And new technologies.

Margo Oge: And new technologies. The other thing that we know is that the other agency and it’s called NHTSA, the National Highway Safety Administration. We have all these acronyms in Washington, who is a safety agency by the way. Doesn’t have the experience of the Environmental Protection Agency or California to set the emission standards is taking the lead under the Trump administration. And what we had seen as a result of leaking documents that Bloomberg, is playing out is that they’re thinking to rollover the standards as much as 40% from 2025.

Greg Dalton: Big rollback.

Margo Oge: Big rollback. So now the car companies are caught in this big dilemma because as we know, 12 states along with California are gonna sue. And I can tell you because I was at EPA, you know, leading the effort for 2012. And after I left they spent another $30 million plus the California effort that the record is so strong that at the end of the day this administration is going to lose. But what’s gonna happen is there’s gonna be a huge uncertainty. So if I’m GM and I’m planning to invest, I'm doing the thinking today. What am I gonna invest for the next five years. These companies are not gonna be able to make any investments.

Greg Dalton: But they have to know that if they are the ones who are advocating for the rollback. If they were really hurt by the uncertainty they wouldn't advocate for that rollback.

Margo Oge: You know what, you know, privately with these companies many of them are telling me is that so what you are looking for, they were looking for some flexibilities. So in Greek we’re saying, if you are asking the devil to dance with you and you get into the dance, you’d be afraid what you’re gonna come out of the dance and that's what's happening. These companies, the majority of them are not looking for major rollovers. And they want a national program, they want California to be part of it. The last thing that they want is California and 12 other states that represent what almost 36% of the market, car market to have a different standard. That’s a disaster for these companies. So that's the chaos of the Trump administration and the chaos of the automotive industry that we're experiencing right now.

Greg Dalton: Edward Niedermeyer, let's talk about autonomous connected electric cars all the rage these days, robotic cars. Perhaps some setback after a person was killed in Arizona recently, Uber has stopped their testing. But how is autonomous gonna put some wind in the sales of electric cars or will it?

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah so like what Tesla's on electric cars I think autonomous cars are creating a lot of excitement and interest in cars. I think we sort of we've had this paradigm, right of the automobile for a century now. And I think in this country in particular, you know, automobiles we associate them with freedom and I think with electric cars purely on their own, the fact that you do have to stop and charge and you don't have that, you know, stop, fill it with gas, go that is the real issue. Because it bumps up against again, these, you know, century of values that have been sort of inculcated. So electric has been on the rise and certainly in the public imagination I think autonomous cars now are really sort of throwing gas on that fire. And I think that that's good because it's making people question, the public is questioning this paradigm that we haven't question for a century. And so I think that that’s inevitably going to lead people to sort of look for new technologies, look at new ways of getting around and maybe that might be not even using cars. So because these technologies have been sort of emerging together, there's this very strong assumption that they all sort of fit together really conveniently. I don't think that's necessarily the case and just the most simple way to explain that is that autonomous cars are extremely expensive. The sensors, the software, the processing all of it insanely expensive each individual car. Now, you know, the solution to that is to share them, right. Is to have shared mobility, taxis essentially, robo-taxis. But still in order to make that business model work, which by the way nobody has yet, what the companies who are closest to a business model in that space say is that utilization is a key. And that's one of the problem that it solves, right. You know, the privately owned cars that we have now spent 90% plus of their life sitting not being used which is extremely wasteful, an environmental problem in and of itself. And so now this is taking us to another extreme where in order to make these vehicles profitable including the immense investment just involved in the software plus the sensors and the build materials and the car itself. These vehicles need to be utilized 90%, 95%, 98% as close to hundred percent as you possibly can just to make the business model work, at least in the short to medium-term. And there's challenge there with pure electric plug-in cars, right because you have to stop that vehicle and it has to not move and sit there for say, you know, 30 minutes at a minimum at this point, given current technology for every couple hundred miles depending on the range of the vehicle. So that’s an issue. But I think the sort of promise there is that even if these vehicles are hybrids or plug-in hybrids which don’t have some of those downsides of downtime and sort of the lower utilization as a result, you know, shared mobility has the promise of reducing overall the number of cars. Now that’s a big challenge for the industry because they are interestingly built on scale so it’s gonna be a very tough transition for them to navigate. And I think that if you just look back a few years ago, the bailout of automakers shows sort of how fragile even though you see, they’re making billions of profits right now, it’s a very cyclical business and this transition as if and when it accelerates could create real, real difficult transitions. But there is a lot of promise there again to you do bump up a little bit and sort of having to change consumer behavior, but I think already with things like Uber and Lyft that behavior is already starting to change, people are starting to understand that shared mobility can actually be incredibly convenient, especially where parking is so difficult where congestion is so bad. So I'm excited about autonomous technology, but I think there are also challenges and it's easy to get carried away with the promise and I think we have to be prepared for a long and difficult and unfortunately, some tragedy along the way too.

Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about Dieselgate and the future of personal mobility. This is Climate One. Coming up, Greg Dalton asks about some of the broader impact of the Volkwagen scandal.

Margo Oge: Dieselgate has a huge impact beyond what happened in the U.S. to get cities and states realizing that the air pollution that they are facing comes from diesel cars.

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

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about Dieselgate and the future of the auto industry with Alberto Ayala, the California Air Regulator who investigated the VW cheating scandal. Edward Niedermeyer, host of the Autonocast podcast and a contributor to Bloomberg View. And Margo Oge, Former Director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at the U.S. EPA.

Here’s Greg.

Greg Dalton: Edward Niedermeyer, your take on how this will affect, you know, global carbon emissions. The point here, the point Climate One has talked about how to reduce carbon pollution and get that down. Transportation is a big sector. The CAFE fuel efficiency standards are one of the big underpinnings of the Paris climate accord. The U.S. getting in there now that seems like that's being chopped.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah. For what it’s worth, we have a situation right now on this country where trucks and SUVs are selling at record numbers. I mean we are selling 17 million cars a year that alone is kind of a staggering number. And the percentage of those that are trucks and SUVs is also staggering. I think that is where the car companies are coming from when they’re sort of looking for flexibility or hoping to maybe push California away from its strong position. And again, you know, the courts have sided with California's right to set its own rule and the fear of this patchwork of regulation is very real. And having two separate standards in the U.S. is worse than having a higher standard as far as every automakers are concerned, there's no doubt about that. But basically what they see is the political movement going one way towards greater efficiency and more incentives for electric cars and things like that. But the market just isn't moving in that direction yet. It is slowly with electric cars that market is growing, but it's still tiny, it’s single digits at best. And meanwhile trucks and SUVs are selling like crazy. So there is, it’s important to keep that context in mind because at the end of the day, you know, we have to come to compromises and we have to sort of live with the world we have to some extent as we, you know, as we try and change it. And, you know, again like I said earlier, you know, changing people's behavior is really the hard part. Setting policy, dropping the technology again all difficult things too but really changing people's behavior is quite difficult. And I think when you think about Tesla, right, it’s not just an environmental thing. A lot of Tesla’s power comes out of the fact that it comes from Silicon Valley which I think you know the rest of the U.S. and the rest of the world has seen Silicon Valley of the last, you know, five, ten years even of course longer than that. But really accelerating its ability to transform our world. And I think people associate Tesla with that really transformative power of new technologies are developed here in California. Unfortunately, I think that that can give a little bit of the wrong impression. Because I think there’s been this belief that they are going to be able to transform the auto industry and the market for cars as rapidly and as completely as we’ve seen the iPhone transform how we communicate and, you know, use, you know, taxis and a million other things. I would caution, you know, people who hold that belief because the fundamentals of the car industry again being capital-intensive and low margin make it extremely difficult business. This is why Tesla doesn't have a viable business. You have to get to enormous scale for your tiny little margins to add up to enough profits to, you know, cover the cost of investing in the technology, but also in the factories. And it's a very difficult business and there are million ways to fail at it. And so I think we need to kind of have some realistic patients about this transition. A, consumer behavior changes slowly. B, sort of the auto industry is fundamentally set up to change slowly. I may be wrong about that but I think it's important to at least consider some of those factors when we think about the future of the automobile.

Greg Dalton: So Margo Oge, the idea there that Tesla is not gonna transform the auto industry as many people would wish. It loses a lot of money they're having trouble scaling their cars, they’re having manufacturing problems. It's not as easy as software.

Margo Oge: Well, let me say this. After the Dieselgate, VW by the way, which was the only company as late as 2014 that was not investing on electrification of fuel cells. The only company.

Greg Dalton: VW.

Margo Oge: VW. They had a religion when it comes to diesel. Diesel was everything for them. So starting 2015, VW has made huge commitments like electrification of the $90 billion that the industry totally is gonna spend on electrification, 40 billion comes from VW. So Tesla was there showing the way but Tesla is not the only way. You have a company like VW which still is the number one company, 600,000 employees that is committed to this point I cannot speak for them what’s gonna happen next year or the year after. But right now I can tell you with a lot of certainty that they're serious about electrification and they’re making the investments. So looking at the economics of electrification that soon, in the next five years, electric cars will be as cost-effective as diesel cars on the internal combustion engine. The fact that in Europe, in Germany, Stuttgart, the house of Mercedes, Munich, where BMW is. The highest court in Germany said that the cities can ban diesel. You can imagine the chill factor that is going down the spinal of these companies. So setting Tesla aside, Dieselgate has a huge impact beyond what happened in the U.S. in Europe and other countries. To get cities and states realizing that the air pollution that they are facing comes from diesel cars. London, Paris, they’re talking about banning diesel even India even California. But actually, what is happening in Germany, one of this most powerful companies are to ban diesel cars I think is a big, big win for electrification.

Greg Dalton: Alberto Ayala, there’s also move to ban gasoline cars in California and China those places. Some people think that that's just cheap talk because that's proclamations that sound good by politicians who won't be around when those days come. What’s your take on the move to ban the sale of gasoline cars in California or anywhere else?

Alberto Ayala: Yeah, thank you for bringing that out because I think it’s an important clarification. What we’re talking about is not just diesel, it’s gasoline cars. And really, you know, I've been around in the business for 25 years and 17 of those I was at the Air Resources Board so done a lot of testing. All combustion is bad let’s just say that. It doesn't matter whether it is natural gas, gasoline, you know, bio this or bio that or diesel.

Greg Dalton: One thing humans have been good at for five thousand –

Alberto Ayala: If we’re really trying to get to our climate goals and kind of bringing it back to your point I’m over trying to talk about here. We really have to entertain the idea that, you know, fossil fuels need to stay in the ground. And luckily, we have technology that I think can step in and essentially provide an alternative. The genius of Tesla is that they proved for the first time ever that you could have a superior product in terms of a car that exceeded your expectations and it just happened to be a zero emission vehicle, just happened to be electric. You know, I spent most of my professional life dealing with the automakers and with all due respect the dinosaurs in Detroit just didn't have the mindset to be able to embrace the change that was needed. So the point about Tesla is I don't know who’s gonna be the leading company in the auto industry in the future. You could have big players like Apple all of a sudden bringing you a car. So who knows. But I think what Tesla has shown is that the electric vehicle, now I wanna be very clear, batteries and fuel cells are both electric, is a product that is superior and you don’t have to settle for anything anymore is actually a better product than a combustion engine. And the carmakers know that and, you know, I think to Edward’s point about, you know, and people want pickup trucks and what have you, I mean, clearly, the carmakers influence what the consumers buy. They spend billions of dollars in marketing. Imagine if they spent a fraction of that, you know, Super Bowl commercials all over the place with zero emission vehicle instead of pickups, imagine the response that the consumer would have. So again to, you know, back to your point. I think what we have seen is Tesla and the cheating scandal and certainly the resolution of California got because not only did we uncover the cheating but we resolved the problem. I think those are important catalysts for the transition of the sector.

Greg Dalton: We’re gonna go to our lightning round for our guests here. We’re talking with Climate One with Edward Niedermeyer, Margo Oge and Alberto Ayala. We’re gonna ask you some quick questions for quick answers. True or false. First for Edward Niedermeyer, regulations sometimes serve automakers more than the public?

Edward Niedermeyer: Oh absolutely.

Margo Oge: That should be my question. I’m the regulator. Former.

Greg Dalton: Margo Oge, your question is regulations should also serve industry by providing clarity and certainty?

Margo Oge: Absolutely and they do.

Greg Dalton: Margo Oge, Dieselgate is the biggest scandal in an industry known for scandals?

Margo Oge: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Alberto Ayala, this story is a triumph of the auto geeks?

Alberto Ayala: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Okay. This is Association. I'm gonna mention something and you’re gonna give me your first thing that pops into your mind with complete disregard or filtering or anything what people might think about it. So, Margo Oge, using monkeys to test human health effects of car exhaust.

Margo Oge: Nazi, Germany. I'm just reading a book by the way. So that’s what it is.

Greg Dalton: Edward Niedermeyer. Elon Musk.

Edward Niedermeyer: My book when it eventually comes out please buy it.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: One salesman to another. Okay.

Edward Niedermeyer: It’s too complicated a topic to boil down to one true word, yeah.

Greg Dalton: Alberto Ayala. Former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn.

Alberto Ayala: Crook.

[Laughter]

You said unfiltered.

Greg Dalton: Edward Niedermeyer. Hydrogen powered cars.

Edward Niedermeyer: I think that the success of battery electric cars has really unfortunately sort of been presented as coming at the expense of hydrogen. I think it’s not mutually exclusive.

Greg Dalton: Alberto Ayala. Congestion pricing.

Alberto Ayala: Good.

Greg Dalton: Last one. Margo Oge. Elon Musk’s Hyperloop.

Margo Oge: I love it.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Okay. That ends our lightning round. Let’s give them a round for getting through that.

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: We’re gonna go to audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Hi, I’m Bob Morgan and formally a business executive with Hughes and got dragged into the auto industry after General Motors bought Hughes understanding what a dinosaur operation they are. My question is on the market aspects of EVs as the market transitions, younger people are not buying cars, they’re moving to central cities they’re riding Uber. Will that accelerate this market even quicker than what's happening now?

Greg Dalton: Margo Oge, you wrote a book Driving the Future.

Margo Oge: Let me say, and I may disagree a little bit with some of my panel members.

Greg Dalton: Good.

Margo Oge: I’m really optimistic about the new future personal mobility. If you think about the last hundred years we have seen very incremental changes in, you know, your cars. The cars are safer, they are cleaner but they’re still four wheels, there is a driver, internal combustion. But the last seven years, I mean we have seen a revolution. And it may not happen as fast as some think, but it's happening. And you are absolutely right, we have congestion, we’re gonna add another 2 billion people. More and more people are moving to urban environments and young people don't want to own cars. So what you’re gonna see, I mean you’re seeing the major car companies by the way, calling themselves, even Toyota, I just heard Mr. Toyota, calling Toyota as a mobility company. They’re not calling themselves as a car manufacture because they are seeing the trend. And the trend especially for urban environments is shared autonomous and it has to be electric because it’s gonna be the most cost-effective way to go to the future of mobility. So the trend that we’re talking about, the trends that we’re talking about here is happening. I mean, you know, yes they got an accident with autonomous but there are many more accidents with people driving. But we’re gonna see this what I call CASE the connected autonomous electric shared vehicles happening. And it’s happening pretty fast. And the companies are scared the car companies all of them are investing. From the smaller one to the larger one. And Silicon Valley has been a fantastic catalyst. But now it’s happening in Michigan and Detroit. So it’s all happening. And I would be the first to get this autonomous car when it comes to Washington DC where I live.

Greg Dalton: Edward Niedermeyer, let’s talk before we close about China. Big driver there, huge growing car market. A lot of the car companies are looking to that for the future. We’ve been talking about kind of California, Europe a little bit. Let’s talk about China and where they are in terms of, you know, building out there cities and their infrastructure are they betting on gas, are they betting on electric?

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah. So China has been since the 90’s trying to build its own auto industry. They see it as a strategic part of their economy. And you know, given their governmental hand in the economy they really want to been kind of incentivize it. They’ve been trying for a long time to do that by partnering Chinese automakers with the established global majors that has been sort of a mixed, there's been mix success there. And I think what they’ve seen now in the last decade or two is that there's these technological transition coming in the auto industry and they see that as an opportunity to sort of reboot their experiment and their attempt to become a strategic player in the global auto industry. And so that unwind their incentives with this revolution or this wave of change. And so I think if you want to look for reasons be optimistic about that, you know, China is now the biggest market for cars and for electric cars in particular. And I think their incentives are very much aligned will continue to build on that and they have immense regulatory and all kinds powers in order to be able to continue to incentivize it. There are some reasons for concern with some sort of the gaming of some of those incentives. So it’s not all, you know, rosy but I think that that’s going to be a powerhouse in the future. And also the supply chain for batteries is all there. So I think we’re gonna see China, I think China is natural that they’re gonna be a leader in the auto industry. I think them seeing and grasping this opportunity is going to also bring electric cars along with them.

Greg Dalton: Margo Oge, some people would say if China builds its cities, China is urbanizing rapidly 300 million people move into the middle-class another 300 million people behind them. If they build their cities and their lives around personal ownership of cars or even shared cars, cars are the problem. We've been talking here about cars and you wrote a book I recommend Driving the Future but isn't car centric future a problem in itself?

Margo Oge: Yes it is. And that's why our hope is that share future mobility will be part of the solution. You know major cities in China, the Uber type of service are somewhat different than what we have in the U.S. which is basically connect people from one public transportation system to another back common to work. And the more that we see that happening I think it's gonna help. The other thing we have to realize that in China and major cities now having a new car you have to go through a lot to resist that you cannot get a car. One out of ten cars can be in an internal combustion engine that has to be electric. So China is moving in many different ways to minimize the amount of cars on the road and to force people to electric and share public transport.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking about Dieselgate and the future of personal mobility with Alberto Ayala, the California Air Regulator who investigated the VW cheating scandal. Edward Niedermeyer, sn auto industry analyst and host of the Autonocast podcast. And Margo Oge, Former Director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at the U.S. EPA, and now an advisor to the VW board.

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

Oppressive Heat: Climate Change and Civil Rights

Otto Pilot — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 00:01:00 +0000

Oppressive Heat: Climate Change and Civil Rights

11/01/2017

Communities of color often live closest to factories and refineries that spew toxic pollution. That’s one reason why polls show more African Americans and Latinos say climate is a serious concern than whites.

Ingrid Brostrom, Assistant Director, Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment
Rev. Dr. Gerald Durley, Pastor Emeritus, Providence Missionary Baptist Church of Atlanta, GA
Mystic, Musician, Bay Area Coordinator, Hip Hop Caucus

This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, CA on October 31, 2017.

Guests

Ingrid Brostrom

Assistant Director, Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment

Rev. Dr. Gerald Durley

Board Member, Interfaith Power and Light

Mystic

Hip Hop Artist and Educator

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

When it comes to the impacts of climate change, minorities and economically disadvantaged communities usually suffer the most. .

Ingrid Brostrom: They are getting the double whammy of being physically impacted by the local pollution, but they’re also gonna be impacted first and worst by climate and they’re gonna be less resilient.

Announcer: Which makes climate disruption more than just an environmental issue.

Mystic: Climate change was always part of the platform in terms of connecting it to civil rights and to human rights and to social justice.

Announcer: And just like in the civil rights movement, churches are getting involved to make the moral case for climate action.

Gerald Durley: The environmentalists, the conservationists cannot keep this in their own little bailiwick, in their own silo. This is big.

Announcer: Civil rights and climate change. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: How does climate change connect with voting, education, and other civil rights? 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.

What comes to mind when you think of global warming? A polar bear, or maybe a melting glacier? If you’re Hispanic or African-American, you might think of a child with asthma worsened by a coal plant near your home. People of color often live closest to the large sources of carbon pollution that are hurting their personal health and the health of the planet. On today’s show we look at climate disruption through the lens of civil rights, with three guests on the frontlines.

Reverend Gerald Durley worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights Movement. He’s pastor emeritus of Providence Missionary Baptist Church of Atlanta, and he’s also on the board of Interfaith Power & Light, a religious response to climate change. Mandolyn Wind Ludlum, better known by her stage name Mystic, is an American hip-hop artist and activist. And Ingrid Brostrom is Assistant Director of the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, an advocacy organization.

Here’s our conversation about oppressive heat -- climate change and civil rights.

Greg Dalton: Reverend Durley, let’s begin with you. You were in the National Mall, 1963 when Dr. King gave his famous speech and you went back 50 years later. How do you see civil rights and climate change as connected?

Gerald Durley: First of all let me thank Climate One for this very important discussion at this time. It’s so important because in any movement there has to be a period of time where we get all of the facts together so it’s not considered fake news. But we can come together and understand how important this is. In 1963, that was my senior year in college and we were concerned about the civil and human rights of all individuals. And we fought a good fight I thought and then 50 something years later it’s still the civil and human rights that everyone should have the right to clean air, toxic free water and these kinds of efforts. So we see the analogies between what we were fighting for then and what we've got to fight for now. It is a right of everybody that we have access to these kinds of area. So we see it now and particularly in the faith community we were beginning to now organize around this. And if we can organize by bringing people to another level of awareness, then we can move to the strategy session. That’s the foundation of any movement.

Greg Dalton: Mystic, you grew up with a mother who’s an environmental advocate and activist, and how did you come to this I guess you couldn't escape it because you grew up with it coming to the climate connection.

Mystic: Yeah, I mean I grew up with my mother here for a long time in San Francisco. She was an activist and advocate. Worked with farmworkers in the Central Valley in the 80s she worked with folks coming from Nicaragua and Guatemala around asylum. So she was just like always dedicated to people and the world and the environment. And as time has progressed as we have learned more knowledge, as we have gained more facts about what climate change means not only around the world, but in the communities that are most impacted, which are traditionally more impoverished and are traditionally folks of color. That, you know, I can't escape getting the information shared with me and it can be as simple as if I had air freshener in my house that she would explain to me what the toxins were. She would explain to me that I should go buy one where I can put my own essential oils on them and therefore it's healthier for my house and healthier for me. So it was kind of there in something that I was interested in but when I began working with the Hip Hop Caucus which is national and growing international human rights and civil rights and social justice organization started by Reverend Lennox Yearwood over 10 years ago. Climate change was always part of the platform in terms of connecting it to civil rights and to human rights and to social justice. And so to have the opportunity to travel to other places, you know, has pushed me in that direction as somebody who really I know it can be a kind of flag world to say global citizen but as somebody who works with children and loves children all around the world to know that millions of children are being impacted by climate change and will continue to be so. That’s what drives me to advocate in this area.

Greg Dalton: Thank you. Ingrid Brostrom, there’s a perception that the environmental people who care about our climate change are coastal, Caucasian, et cetera. So tell us what your organization is trying to address that hasn't been addressed by sort of the broader environmental groups, bigger environmental groups.

Ingrid Brostrom: Yeah. And I think that perception is actually very wrong. When you do polling you actually see that people of color, poll the highest on the need to address climate change and address it quickly. And it makes sense because certain communities are impacted by the same toxic facilities that are causing global warming and climate change. And so, you know, we are working directly with communities in California Central Valley. So a lot of farmworking communities it’s impacted by pesticide applications, it’s impacted by fracking operations, refineries of course all of the biggest freeways go right through the Central Valley. And so they’re inundated with both local pollutants from all these facilities and sources as well as carbon. And so they are getting the double whammy of being physically impacted by the local pollution, but they’re also gonna be impacted first and worst by climate and they’re gonna be less resilient. They’re gonna have less money to leave the area they’re gonna have less money for air-conditioning and other ways of that other communities can be more resilient. We’r

Greg Dalton: Jose Gurrola is the 23-year-old mayor of Arvin, an agricultural town in California Central Valley and that town suffers from some of the poorest air in the country. In 2007 the EPA noted the community has some of the highest levels of smog pollution in the United States. Let’s listen to the Mayor.

[Start Clip]

Jose Gurrola: Arvin is a small agricultural community population just over 21,000. About 95% Hispanic and the rest divided between Muslim-American population, African-Americans and Caucasians. Low-income community. We passed resolution in support of the Paris climate agreement. I believe we’re the only city in the county, and possibly in the Central Valley to do so. In my first term, there was a pipeline leak that was leaking gas and about 20 of my neighbors on my street were evacuated for more than eight months because this contamination was in the soil. It was in their homes and during that time I try to adopt a temporary moratorium on oil and gas operations, which include fracking. And if this happened in an affluent area in Bakersfield, it would be making the front page of the newspaper every day, but it wasn't. And a large percentage of the people living within one mile of a fracking are people of color. You know, these things are structural and institutional it’s environmental racism. I am fully aware that I'm trying to operate in the system that was meant to keep my community oppressed and keeping people from participating in local government as well. I've decided to speak out rather than just, you know, as a 24-year-old just I can just keep quiet and play nice.

[End Clip]

Greg Dalton: That’s Jose Gurrola mayor of Arvin, California. Reverend Durley, he said pretty strong things there that it’s intentional oppression where fossil fuel and the way that our economy works to provide energy.

Gerald Durley: First of all, I was so pleased to hear from the mayor at that age group. We used to talk about passing the torch on and what do we say to our young people and I'm convinced the torch is never passed on, you take the torch and you move ahead. No one passes it because we like power. We like to have privileged positions and in a capitalist society, it’s about the money. We always say follow the dollar. So consequently it is -- he used the term environmental racism. And we look at the toxic waste often fracking in the Midwest, but there is a certain kind of and particularly when we bring the faith aspect into it. When I would talk to many of the and I’ll just said many of the white evangelicals throughout they would constantly hold on to that this is created by God, not realizing these were man-made situations. But they did it because many of the people in the congregations were owning these companies. So when they own the companies it was profit over people. So consequently, we've got to go back and if you say that they said let's start off, let's oppress people in this area because they're Latino or black. I think they follow the dollar terms of replacing toxic waste dumps because of the land where they get the land at a certain amount and those kinds of laws that were passed. And so when you put those two things together the profit motive a lot of time it override the racist thing. I mean the cotton plantation was around money. So when you really go back and look at it, it has not changed over the years. That's what now we've got to look at the human life and what it really means in terms of just going after the dollar.

Greg Dalton: So those fossil fuel refineries plants are placed in places where the land is cheaper. The people have less power to out to fight back.

Gerald Durley: Fight as far as legislation is concerned. Plus you understand that many times people have said while on people of color and particularly in African-American community and Latino community. Why aren’t they are more involved. But you have to understand one thing, people move from a psychological point of survival. And when you've got police brutality when you got rent when you got poor education, when you've got unemployment those issues that are very bread-and-butter issues is not a matter of people are not concerned about the environment. They've got other pressing issues. And so as long as you can keep that in front of people you can do the land, you can put different kinds of programs around them, they just don't know. And I think that is why this is so important now I know in 40 states Interfaith Power & Light is really trying to work with the base of people to bring them to a level of understanding what is actually going on. I had no idea about this eight years ago. And I consider myself fairly knowledgeable, but I have --

Greg Dalton: Highly educated man but the climate was not on your radar.

Gerald Durley: It was not on my radar. A lady, she came up to me and said this is very important and I didn't pay any attention to her. But she joined the church and so I started listening to her. And she said I wanna introduce you to my husband. Her name was Jane Fonda. Her husband was Ted Turner. So I said you’ve got my ear. But it wasn’t about polar bear so much as it maybe I could get a grant from these people.

Greg Dalton: Follow the money, right.

Gerald Durley: Yeah, follow the money. But then as I begin to get in and look at the devastation in particular those that I was called to serve, I begin to understand the importance of what it is that we have to do. Then I begin to see that there is no incongruence between faith and science and begin to connect the dots and allow people. Because people, when they find out that this is a despairing situation they will make the appropriate decision. So I got tired of so many major white who’s talking about minorities rather than talking with minorities and finding out what's going on in the rivers here North Carolina, South Carolina when suddenly it went down after Katrina with Jim Wallace and to look at those issues. Then it became then we've got to have that coordinating kind of understanding as to where we go. So is the deliberate effort to say we’re going to just disenfranchise people of color in these areas. I don't think that so much as evolved from following the dollar.

Greg Dalton: Let’s pick up on that Mystic, I mean environmental organizations know they have a diversity problem, they try. Where do they fall short? Do they not listen enough why is it so hard to bridge that gap?

Mystic: I think one of the most basic level it’s about who deems certain kind of knowledge worthy, right. And who deems the sanctity the quality, the purpose of lives differently. And so it’s one thing as a, you know, a primarily way, you know, environmental justice organizations to try to come to communities of color and show up and say well we have things to tell you, right. And we have all the answers for you and these are what the solutions are without ever taking the opportunities to say how is this impacting you and your family and your community. What would you like to see the solutions be and to start to talk about not just that we in communities of color need for the policy to change, but that we also need to be engaged. There’s a lot of money in climate change mitigation, right, and adaptation as we create more renewable energy sources. You know how about in communities that are most deeply impacted that there are educational programs to train people to build solar panels to install solar panels to really be engaged in. So I think it can be very well meaning but when you think about structural hierarchies and if the perception is that white folks are the leader within this movement and have that higher level of power and you don't help lift people up, right, not speak on behalf of people or poor people. But bring them to the table to speak for themselves to shape what the conversation is. And not just the conversation but what those solutions are that need to come. So I think that there has been a lot of outreach but I think the failure is also like you come to tell us things, you don't come to ask us how we’re organizing or what we want to do or what we want to see and what we want the future to be.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about civil rights and climate change. You can subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org. Greg Dalton will continue his conversation in just a moment.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about climate disruption and civil rights with Reverend Gerald Durley, pastor emeritus of Providence Missionary Baptist Church of Atlanta. Hip-hop artist and activist, Mystic. And Ingrid Brostrom, Assistant Director of Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment,

Here’s your host, Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Ingrid Brostrom, I wanna talk about the courts. Some scientists believe that dispensing facts about climate change and atmospheric carbon isn't really getting through to people and they're looking to the courts to do some things that the federal government has not done just as civil rights a lot of important things happened in the courts. Tell us what's happening in the courts on climate.

Ingrid Brostrom: Well the courts have not been friendly thus far. I mean there is a series of cases, you know, basically trying to hold companies liable for the climate change they are causing and actual damage to communities and they all failed. The courts were basically punting and putting it back on the federal government and saying this is who’s gonna regulate these climate pollutants, not us. So we've had a series of failures on that front. But there is a renewed energy and focus on a different type of litigation and that's really recognizing that governments in general hold natural resources and trust. And the atmosphere can be seen as a natural resource that’s very important for our future generations and the ability of them to live. And so we've actually seen some progress in this new legal theory, and I believe next year there’ll be more litigation on that front. There are right now in the world over 700 different climate cases. The U.S. is the home of the vast majority of those cases and so definitely litigators both here and internationally are trying to figure out different legal theories that we can test in the courts. And so we'll see what happens. Me, personally, I haven't had a great deal of faith in the court system divorced from other political and organizing avenues my organization in particular, we organize, is a biggest part of what we do is we organize communities and we do policy work and we also litigate. But the court system itself is designed to remove issues from the hands of the communities that are impacted and putting it on elite attorneys and their different legal theories. When the environmental justice communities, the communities of color that are so impacted by climate and by toxicities when we asked for support to make sure that we do not allow pollution trading as the way to implement that law, it fell on deaf ears. So it continues to be a really big divide and not not, I don't think the way we’re actually gonna solve our problems. So it really does have to be we have to be getting more voters we need to be changing the decision-makers. We need to be organizing the residents. We need to be changing the laws in Sacramento and Washington and let’s have a court case. So that’s where I think we’re gonna get those victories and it’s not gonna be the courts by themselves.

Greg Dalton: So explain what pollution trading is and why it's so controversial among certain communities.

Ingrid Brostrom: Yup, I mean pollution training is what it sounds like. It really is the ability to buy and sell pollution rather than reducing it at the source. And why it's so important for environmental justice communities and communities of color is if you look at carbon in isolation then perhaps it doesn't matter whether reductions are happening. But when you recognize that carbon is never emitted by itself, it always emitted alongside very toxic air pollution that directly impacts people living next door. Then, instead of reducing the pollution on site and instead you buy it from somewhere else then location really matters. You're not getting the pollution reductions that these communities really need right now they're being impacted on a daily basis.

Greg Dalton: So that’s for U.S. power company for example, can save some trees in Brazil, but still keep polluting in Mississippi or Alabama or Louisiana, et cetera. So they can clean up somewhere far away and still be dirty at home because it's cheaper to do that. Mystic you're working on voter registration, voter engagement with the Hip Hop Caucus. During the 2016 election 60% of eligible voters in this country voted. That’s up a little bit from 59% in 2012 down a little bit from 2008 when the exuberance of Barack Obama drove a lot of people to the polls. Why don't more people vote what can be done to get more people engaged out to vote. If they don't think it matters the last election ought to show that elections matter.

Mystic: I think on the most basic level, it's frustrating when you vote and you don't get what you voted for, right or you vote, but then the election is stolen, right. I’m a little bit older, so I'm like I voted in elections where that's not how it was supposed to turn out. That there was so much kind of a systemic approach to excluding people from being able to vote because they had been incarcerated or you know, whatever it may have been removing people from roles. And so I think there’s the frustration there but when we talk about bringing more folks to the table to vote and especially at the caucus we’re very interested in civic engagement among young people, right. As somebody who advocates for children and works with children and youth and like I firmly believe that children and youth are leaders, right.

Greg Dalton: But you think locally too is a better place. If you’re disaffected with national go local.

Mystic: Absolutely. Absolutely vote local.

Greg Dalton: Because they’re it matters.

Mystic: And we’re not partisan at the Hip Hop Caucus. So we’re not about telling you who to vote for or what to vote for. It's about get the knowledge understands who the people are who are running for these positions and what that impact is on your community. Who funds them, and so in that sense what's happening locally like your school board, you know, in your attorneys. But then of course your mayor and your governor may be voting for the president doesn't seem like it has the largest impact. Although I believe after this current administration that there is no way that we are going to be able to go back. I mean, I would hope that we will not go back to a point in a position where we say it does not matter to vote, but it's like let's engage more young people to push that through to lead it and let's force people who are currently in power who we’ve put in those positions to actually do what they said they were gonna do.

Gerald Durley: To hold them accountable.

Mystic: Yeah, to hold them accountable. And help transform communities driven by community solutions.

Greg Dalton: Reverend Durley you know some people who voted for Barack Obama who thought he was gonna change things, but he didn't.

Gerald Durley: I think he changed a lot of things. And that’s indicative of why somebody is trying to change things back.

Greg Dalton: Right, right.

Gerald Durley: He must have changed something, if you have to change it back, he must have changed something. If he want us trying to make it great again, it was never great for me.

Greg Dalton: Certainly trying very hard to. We’re talking about climate change and civil rights with Reverend Gerald Durley from Interfaith Power & Light, and the hip-hop activist and artist Mystic as well as Ingrid Brostrom for the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment. I'm Greg Dalton. Reverend Durley, I’d like to ask you about scripture. You work a lot with people from different religious traditions and a lot of time you talk with the evangelicals and others but some people point to Genesis which says, be fruitful and multiply and that human should fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky.

Gerald Durley: Yeah. You’re talking about Genesis the second chapter, the book of Genesis. And even when you look into the Jewish, the Talmud and the Torah they all have opening beginnings of creation. And when you look at the even the Jewish liturgy talks about the stewardship in the beginning the book Genesis means the book of beginning. So consequently from our particular faith we see that God created a perfectly balanced ecological world where plants and animals and bees could come together. And he took the humankind to work with that to be the stewards of that. But now we as human beings we’re treating the planet like rent-a-car. We take it for granted, you know, it's something that we’ve take that privilege mentality. So we've got to go back and look what we've done because of our own greed over profit and greed of profitable people we’ve thrown that balance off and that's just what we see when the oceans warm up when the acidity of the oceans are so intense, when sharks don't even know which way to swim when salmon are not swimming upstream. We have done that but we can come back and justify it and say well maybe this is what God is doing. But God says I will give it to you take care of it. You have clean water, pristine water you have clean air, the birds, you’ll have enough to eat. The Indians understood the Native Americans in terms when they were hunting they care for balance but we now we move far beyond that. So the Scriptures on all for this, Islamic faith the Jewish faith speaks to that effect in a number of scriptures. And even the Christian tradition we have what we call the green Bible now where it demonstrates throughout the Bible where God speaks to the point of the mountains and the trees and the babbling brooks and what we're to do. But we’ve becoming inured to that and closed our ears to that and going our own ways and now we’re suffering. There’s always a consequence when you break a rule. He gave us a rule to follow. And the same thing in science, if you break a scientific rule you pay the consequences. If you stick a fork into an electric socket --

Greg Dalton: It doesn't turn out so well.

Gerald Durley: No. In the same thing with this it will breaking certain inalienable rights that have been given to us to do and we’ve abdicated our responsibility to take care of what was given to us to take care of.

Greg Dalton: You also work with this interfaith group that deals with congregations, mosques, there's not many areas where, you know, Christians and Muslims get along or agree these days but climate is one of them.

Gerald Durley: One of those issues. And in fact, when we went to Turkey not too long ago, Imam Plemon El-Amin in the Blue Mosque he was teaching from the Quran about climate change and Rabbi Ron Segal from Atlanta from the Temple there he and Peter Berg [ph] were teaching from the Quran. And then in emphasis I taught from the New Testament perspective and it’s interesting when we came back out of those three groups, and we got on a bus and people asked who are you all, we said we’re interfaith group. And some of the people that’s riding on the same bus we've got to get away from riding on the same bus as being shocking and ride on the same bus because we got common goals in this.

Greg Dalton: Reverend Gerald Durley is a retired Baptist pastor from Atlanta. I'm Greg Dalton. We’re talking about climate change and civil rights. Mystic, I’d like to ask you about Reverend Durley said earlier that climate is seen as something abstract and faraway. Music traditionally has played a very powerful role in movements, you know, anthems, et cetera. Tell us how you're trying to connect your music, your hip-hop music with getting people to get out and vote care about climate to reach them in a way as Reverend Durley says in the gut rather than parts per million, which is kind of abstract science.

Mystic: Right. I mean music is unifying, right. It’s not even just the hip-hop is unifying but hip-hop is unifying around the world and sometimes it's not explicitly saying it in the art, but it's the fact that through your art you’re helping to facilitate the space where people come together and they’re exchanging and then you can use your platform to kind of facilitate a conversation. As an artist, I’m not somebody who believes that like when I get up on stage to perform that I'm talking at you, right. As far as I'm concerned it's an exchange.

Greg Dalton: You’re not Bono, yeah.

Mystic: I can’t do it without. You know, I can’t do it without you. And it's an exchange of energy that happens. But so through that music look if you can get young folks to come out if you can get communities to come out, you can disseminate all kind of information. You can facilitate all kinds of conversations with the folks who come out. And so at the caucus like really bringing artists to some of them may have a much, you know, larger kind of level of success than I've had. If it’s somebody like T.I. or what have you, but when they start to use those platforms to talk about climate change and to talk about why they personally started to believe that it was important and that we needed to look at it, but also not separating that from like why we need to look at police brutality and why we need to look at broader systemic inequalities and other areas of social justice that young folks gravitate to that and they also see somebody who looks like them, right. Most hip-hop artists we are artist of color that has changed over time, and there are some more white artists. But it’s like you see somebody who looks like you who comes from your community who again is not using the parts per billion although I found that young people are very interested in that kind of information. As an educator it’s like when you put that there and they start to look at it, you can tell the difference in those numbers. It's not so abstract that they can't connect to it. So yeah the music brings the folks together and then the message spreads. But I think art is crucial in any movement, right. I think that like you can’t have a revolution without art. You can’t have a change without art. When we start to quash art, when we start to quash the role of artists using their platform and their voices to advocate and to amplify voices in the community, like when we start to quash it, we have a problem, right. I think that we’re turning into a society that we don't we never envisioned our society becoming. But if we remain quiet then those are the things that start to happen. So I'm like the more artists the better and the merrier and a hip-hop artist can get on a record and like say something that maybe you, people in this room or people listening on the podcast may not necessarily support. But if you have a conversation and you sit down with them you will find the people that you have these perceptions about are some of the brightest folks that you have talked to and again have these beautiful powerful ideas. And so yeah art, art and change I mean when have they not been connected. As somebody who studied anthropology when we look back, we look back and start to look at the reflections of what was happening within society and changes we can see it. And so art has always reflected that and as we’ve recorded audio I mean it's like and I’ll close up here but as long as people have been --

Gerald Durley: You’re not excited, are you?

Mystic: -- as long as people have been oppressed, people have been resisting. And as long as we have been challenging artist have been using our platforms and our art to contribute to that change and to pursue justice.

Gerald Durley: I just want to say in the faith community we call that a response, you know, call and response. We’re trying to call and response. And when you’re moving people you said, now you know what I’m talking about, amen, somebody.

Mystic: Right, amen.

Gerald Durley: See, see, that’s the response. You reach down because we’re interacting do you believe what I’m saying makes a lot of sense. I think somebody agrees with me. Am I right about it? You see that, that’s call and response. And that’s in the musical world, but in the faith world when we’re sitting there can you imagine selling heaven and nobody knows where it is. But we sell it and it gets down into the gut into the mind into the spirit. Then you get people that hook into it and Dr. King said once when we’re in Chicago in ‘66 or ’67. And some reporters had stopped him to talk to ask him some questions in Cicero, Illinois. And we were excited we had caught the momentum of the movement and we kept marching. And Dr. King said something that's always stayed with me when I think about movement development. He said “I cannot answer anymore of your questions. I've got to go catch my people.” If we're not catching our people we don't have a movement. So we gotta put it so they’re moving ahead, whether we get stifled get stopped we get tired and we quit. That’s the key, that’s why that young mayor excited me. He’s caught the movement and he's moving ahead of many of us. It’s call and response and you watch your audience and you pull in somebody sitting there. The person sitting there with those glasses are you with me tonight? Look at that. And that’s how you get and then pretty soon they take ownership. They take ownership. The environmentalists, the conservationists cannot keep this in their own little bailiwick, in their own silo. This is big, but if I don't believe I’m a part of it it’s just another passing fancy and will change in another few years this will pass by. But we've got a critical nexus moment this is a Kairos moment to pull all of that together. And I guess that's what excites me at this point.Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about civil rights and environmental justice. This is Climate One. You can check out our podcast at our website: climate one dot org. Greg Dalton will be back with his guests in just a moment.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about civil rights and environmental justice with Reverend Gerald Durley, pastor emeritus of Providence Missionary Baptist Church of Atlanta. Hip-hop artist and activist, Mystic. And Ingrid Brostrom, Assistant Director of Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment,

Here’s Greg.

Greg Dalton: I’d like to go to our lightning round and ask each of our guests. First, the true or false and then an association question. So first true or false and then I’ll mention a brief noun and ask them for the first thing that pops into your mind unfiltered. So here is some fun. So Mystic, true or false. Hip-hop has a misogyny problem?

Mystic: True.

Greg Dalton: Reverend Durley, environment is not a relevant term to many Americans?

Gerald Durley: True.

Greg Dalton: Ingrid Brostrom, environmental justice advocates sometimes obstructs progress by making the perfect the enemy of the good?

Ingrid Brostrom: False.

Greg Dalton: Also for Ingrid Brostrom. Some environmental groups help corporations green wash?

Ingrid Brostrom: I hope not.

Greg Dalton: Okay. Reverend Durley, true or false. Conservationists are often smart and dull as dirt?

Gerald Durley: Oh you had my quote.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: I got that from you, yeah.

Gerald Durley: Yeah, I thought so, yeah.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: I stole it but you can have it back.

Gerald Durley: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. That’s true. I mean you go to these meetings after meetings and at the end of the meeting they decide where they gonna meet again and discuss the same thing. You can educate anyone here about climate change and fracking and oceans and all this but it’s dull. And they're competing with the housewives of America and that's a tough act to follow.

Greg Dalton: I’m gonna mention the association part of our lightning round here at Climate One. I’m gonna mention a phrase or a noun and you will mention the first thing that comes to your mind. Mystic. Taking a knee.

Mystic: Tired of dying by being killed and fighting for justice. (0:46:08)

Greg Dalton: Ingrid Brostrom. Polar bears.

Ingrid Brostrom: Important. But so are people.

Greg Dalton: Mystic. Yes we can.

Mystic: Yes, we can. “Si, se puede,” right. Like yes, yes, yes. But I’m an educator, right. So I’m one of those let’s do yes create your environments for yes.

Greg Dalton: Reverend Durley. Tesla.

Gerald Durley: Wave of the future.

Greg Dalton: Mystic. Flint, Michigan.

Mystic: Black children matter and Flint, Michigan still doesn't have clean water without lead.

Greg Dalton: And neither do some schools in Oakland, California. Ingrid Brostrom. Fracking.

Ingrid Brostrom: It’s a dying industry that still doing a lot of harm.

Greg Dalton: Last one. Reverend Durley. Donald Trump.

Gerald Durley: A catalyst who will make America look at itself.

Greg Dalton: Let’s give them a round for getting through that. (0:48:00)

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: That’s one one the best Donald Trump answer I’ve heard.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Mystic, let's talk about job creation, green jobs have been out there for quite a while. They haven't quite materialized to the extent that many people hoped when Van Jones first coined the term maybe first I heard it 10 years ago. So is there wealth creation opportunity happening or is that kind of been an elusive goal?

Mystic: In some ways I think it has been an elusive goal thus far, right. But I think that part of the path forward mandates that that must be a part of the approach moving forward. You can’t come to our communities and ask us to help solve a solution when other people are benefiting and not provide avenues where it's not asking for a handout, right. It's saying we are part of the solution. We too deserve to be part of this process and the solution.

Greg Dalton: Reverend Durley, you go to a lot of historically black colleges. What do you say to young people who are charting their career how to be part of this trend?

Gerald Durley: Yeah, I’ve had to shift, you know, I was Dean at two universities before one is school of medicine in Clark there in Atlanta and with the Hip Hop Caucus travel to 10 of the historically black college and universities. And would tell them now look at environmental engineering, don't talk about hopefully I can come up one day and put up solar panels and build windmills, own the company. Investing in the company, these are the kinds of things. This is what makes us come to this country move. So getting a new level of mentality and then the green just goes. Right now, when I went to Germany and different places, I didn’t see green jobs because there were many jobs. But when I went to the solar they had all this and it was only one person operating everything. Lot of people had lost their jobs when they came in. And so a lot of the people I’ve talked to, wait a minute, unless you really can be that one person who’s chosen to run the solar farm, you're out of work. So we’ve got to now as Mystic is saying with the business group, with the politician, see that we can move at another level. Now that's going to mean a new level of higher education to get into that. So then we’ve got to break down working with educators to understand that as we open the doors of opportunity to educate people so that they will be ready for this new influx of jobs. Otherwise it was the same old same old, a lot of people didn't get on the computer train early and they lost out to technology. The coal miners, they didn't get on it. So now the coal miners will never come back again. So now they've got to reboot themselves in another way. And I think that that's when the job really manifest themselves in reality.

Greg Dalton: Reverend Durley, a lot of environmental activism targets oil and fossil fuel companies as the villains and yet they sell a product that we all burn and use for our lifestyles everybody listening to this today use fossil fuels today. Are we complicit is it, you know, do we need to, you know, we complicit in this or is it simply that fossil fuel companies are evil and we've been passive victims of this?

Gerald Durley: Well certainly as long as we continue to burn fossil fuel and all this we are complicit. But the companies are going to do what they think that they can get away with to make money. I never thought growing up with outdoor toilet and poor, the oldest of eight, I said when I finally made enough money I was going to buy me a decent car and I didn't care what it meant. And I made enough money and I bought me a S550 Mercedes. And I said, now look at me I finally made it. And then as I start thinking about the environment and polluting all this, now I drive a hybrid. Now the company is now moving toward automated cars, autonomous driving car. They’re moving toward more electric cars. So we used to do a thing called boycott. If they don't do it, let’s not buy from that product. So I think when the public starts saying we’re not gonna buy all those large automobiles, we’re not gonna do that. Then I think that we’ll find the industry beginning to cut back on many of the atrocities that they've placed upon us. But as long as we continue to be you use the term complicit, why should they change.

Greg Dalton: We’re gonna go to our audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Hi. My name is Daisy Pestiline, question for Ingrid but others feel free to pipe in. Many people’s analysis of the failure to really achieve strong climate protections would be that the environmental movement just doesn't know how to get and take power. And I’ve heard and seen among both the activist community and the funding community in the last maybe five years more concerned about this and trying to figure out how we build infrastructure to actually support the movement. What would you say are some of the pieces that are missing right now that we need to actually be a powerful movement that can exert political influence and when?

Ingrid Brostrom: I mean I think the first piece is alignment. There is a tremendous amount of differences of opinion in and amongst the environmental justice movement. And so until we get on the same page, recognizing the magnitude of the problem it's gonna be hard to move forward. I think another criticism of the more of the mainstream environmental movement is its focus on litigation rather than power building. You know, the environmental movement helped create the laws that we are relying today, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and it was designed to be more of an elitist movement with the ability to understand these laws, exclude real broad public participation, but then the ability to go to court. And so we need to kind of dismantle that and recognize absolutely that until we change the power dynamics that have led to the situation we are in today we’re not gonna win. And that's why, you know, a lot of the environmental justice organizations focused very locally on building power as one of the very key things that we do. And that, you know, power is that change. And so, yes, I definitely think that we need to move to more organizing, more voter drives, more policy work and definitely that alignment piece.

Greg Dalton: Next question. Welcome.

Female Participant: Reverend Durley, we often think of climate change as an economic issue and a public health issue but it seems like we don’t pay enough attention to the mental health aspect of it. As we deal with more devastating, you know, fires and natural disasters, loss of life, property, jobs. It’s hard for communities to cope with that. Are there any lessons from your training as a psychologist and also as a reverend as a pastor in how we can make sure that our communities are resilient and can cope with the mental health stressors of climate change?

Gerald Durley: When I went to Ferguson, Illinois after the shooting have taken place and several other shootings and the environment -- so we combined two kinds of environment. One is just the racist kind of environment that's there in terms of education in terms of unemployment those kinds of things. And then if you take anybody, anyone in this room and you put them into a confined area and the temperature, I often say where and during the winter we heat the outside and during the summer we cool the outside because the houses are not insulated and so you’ve got people that's like that. So we have to deal with the psychological kinds of pressures the mental pressure that occurs. So when we talk about what this really means to you in terms of depression which leads towards a suicide. When we talk about the gap between the images that are being portrayed and the reality of what we face from a psychological mental aspect, that's what we have to deal with and then deal with the loss. Like when I was over in Burke County a few weeks ago they said to me, so a few children are born deformed, so a few people die. At least we're working. So I had to look at what does that mean. And so some of them turned on me so I had to sit back and say that's right, you do have jobs but what is the expense of your doing that. So then we had to look at what do I give up. Do I give up making some money here or do I give up the well-being of this community and we work with this company to make it whole.

Greg Dalton: Next question. Welcome.

Female Participant: Hi, my name is Mary and my question is for all three of you. The connection between the environment and social justice isn’t apparent to all people. So what has been a challenge that you’ve encountered in communicating the connection between sustainability and social justice and how did you overcome it?

Greg Dalton: Reverend Durley, have you encountered people in the South or elsewhere who just say I don’t get the connection.

Gerald Durley: Between.

Greg Dalton: Sustainability and other social justice issues. Whether it’s incarceration or whatever it might be.

Gerald Durley: No. I don't think -- and the reason and I think what Mystic was saying is that the connection is not made because when you are involved with five or six other priorities you don't make the connection between climate. Climate is just, it’s warm out here today or there are torrential rains. But it doesn't connect to poor education, it doesn't connect to those and that's what we're doing now as I said earlier, organizing. I remember when in 1960 many black people say, why are we fighting to vote, we can make it, we’ve got our own businesses. They didn't realize that that was a constitutional right that it already been there. When we talk about affirmative action and all the fear, we've got to understand that affirmative action was really laws that had already been on the books. And a congressman got up one day and said let's affirm those actions. Let's do what was right. So consequently when people don't know ignorance breeds fear and fear breeds a kind of constipation of action. So right now you got people that are saying well maybe, maybe not. But when we can bring them to a level of awareness I don't care how poor a family might be or how destitute. When they hear justice issues when they know this is just not right and they get it, then they become a part of how do we bring forth this change. And I think we’re getting to that point now in America and what people are beginning to realize that now this is really destroying us mentally, physically, financially, every kind of way. And I’m pleased that this is it’s coming to that point. I mean I’m getting to that point now and I can articulate it even much more now because as it’s been said, climate change is not a hoax. It is real. And it’s not real for the future, it’s real for right now. And that's what's going to really generate the kind of gut feelings to make people rally around now. When we went in New York 400,000 people in the street and what the women did after the election out in the street that’s what it started to happen now. And I guess it’s infectious now.

Greg Dalton: We have to end but I wanna end by asking each of you quickly. What gives you hope, Ingrid. What gives you hope?

Ingrid Brostrom: Actually it’s the mayor of Arvin, Jose Gurrola is somebody that a lot of our groups help support and got him elected in the reddest part of the state, the most conservative part of the state, the most oil dominated part of the state. And we have an anti-fracking mayor and that gives me hope.

Greg Dalton: Mystic.

Mystic: Children and youth are my hope, my passion. On the hardest day whatever happens in the world if I get to spend time with children, I am reminded of why we do this work. Why the work is necessary, why it is mandatory and just like especially when you’re with the kindergartners and the first and the second graders like you know, they give you hugs and they’ve just got these big eyes and they think some things are just so hard about life, but it's like because their friend didn't share their yogurt with them, right. And so it just reminds me they are my hope.

Greg Dalton: Reverend Durley, what gives you hope?

Gerald Durley: I guess my hope -- I’m 75 years old now. And at my age to think back in 1963, August 28th the front line when we were marching there in Washington and we saw all colors, all faith. And I see a sense of that occurring again now 50 something years later where people are coming together across faith lines, across racial lines, across the sexual gender lines, across colors. And I see that and I see the young people who with the level of social media they’re much more open to discuss my grandson and the young people are doing this, much more so that then than we did. And I think that that gives me a lot of hope to see them that they're open up and the fear factor is not in them. I think that they would take the leadership to help those of us who are somewhat reticent in breaking down these barriers. And I think that gives me hope.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking about climate change and civil rights with Reverend Gerald Durley, pastor emeritus of Providence Missionary Baptist Church of Atlanta. Mandolyn Wind Ludlum, better known as hip-hop artist and activist Mystic. And Ingrid Brostrom, Assistant Director of Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment.

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 is the producer. The audio engineer is William Blum. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch are the editors. 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.

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Artificial Intelligence, Real Climate Impacts

Talk Isn’t Cheap: The Power of Conversation

Busted: The Newest Emission Cheaters

Ben Santer: 2023 Schneider Award Winner

Rebecca Solnit on Why It’s Not Too Late

Is This a Joke? Comedy and Climate Communication

What’s in My Air?

What’s in My Air?

Guests

Davida Herzl

Kendra Pinto

Gavin McCormick

Artificial Intelligence, Real Climate Impacts

Killer Combination: Climate, Health and Poverty

Breaking Through: A Year of Climate Conversations

Polluting and Providing: The Dirty Energy Dilemma

Prosperity and Paradox: A Conversation with Arlie Hochschild and Eliza Griswold

The Hidden Health Hazards of Climate Change

Concussions, Cigarettes and Climate

Oppressive Heat: Climate Change and Civil Rights

Cow Poop and Compost: Digesting the Methane Menace

Cow Poop and Compost: Digesting the Methane Menace

Guests

Michael Boccadoro

J Jordan

Neil Edgar

Monique Figueirado

Allen Williams

Mark Kurlansky and Anna Lappé: Plate to Planet

Artificial Intelligence, Real Climate Impacts

Busted: The Newest Emission Cheaters

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

Ken Burns, Rosalyn LaPier and The American Buffalo

Cory Booker: Taking on Big Ag & Going Big on Climate

Climate Smart Agriculture with Secretary Tom Vilsack

Revisiting The Enablers: The Firms Behind Fossil Fuel Falsehoods

Hot Cities, Methane Leakers and the Catholic Church

Hot Cities, Methane Leakers and the Catholic Church

Guests

Ariane Middel

Molly Burhans