In this episode of "Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap," hosts Peter Reynolds and Captain Crisis (aka Geoff Sheffrin) discuss the progress towards meeting our 2030 carbon reduction goals in the fight against climate change. They revisit past topics such as global conferences, biodiversity, and nuclear power and assess what obstacles still need to be overcome. Despite these obstacles, the episode also highlights positive stories of people taking action worldwide.
Correction: At 3:53 & 25:35 Geoff mistakingly says "parts per billion" instead of "parts per million".
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In this episode of "Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap," hosts Peter Reynolds and Captain Crisis (aka Geoff Sheffrin) discuss the progress towards meeting our 2030 carbon reduction goals in the fight against climate change. They revisit past topics such as global conferences, biodiversity, and nuclear power and assess what obstacles still need to be overcome. Despite these obstacles, the episode also highlights positive stories of people taking action worldwide.
Correction: At 3:53 & 25:35 Geoff mistakingly says "parts per billion" instead of "parts per million".
Subscribe on your favourite podcast app and don’t miss an episode!
Also available on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkTMDHlF8N8lVIWzyPl4yhw?sub_confirmation=1
Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100087081536326
Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mothernature_podcast/
00:00 Peter Reynolds
Hi, I'm Peter Reynolds and welcome to Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap with Geoff Sheffrin. The climate crisis is a complex issue and we've covered a variety of topics on this podcast from global conferences like COP15 and COP27 to biodiversity and the advances in nuclear power. But are we any closer to meeting our 2030 carbon reduction goals? What obstacles do we still have to overcome? And what are some of the positive stories out there about people taking action to fight climate change? And joining me today is someone who, if they were an action figure, they would probably be called Captain Crisis because they're faster than rising climate temperatures, they're stronger than our dependence on oil and gas, and they're able to leap tall arguments with a single fact. Hey Geoff, how you doing?
01:19 Geoff Sheffrin
Oh, with an introduction like that, I'm not sure what to say. But thank you Peter for creative introductions. You always come up with creative introductions.
01:27 Peter Reynolds
I'm doing well. How are you? I'm very well. I'm very well. And I'm excited for this episode because I think, you know, it's sort of we've had five episodes, we've covered a lot of topics, and I think it's sort of time maybe to take stock and review some of the stuff that we've talked about previously and sort of see, you know, what the next steps are. Right. Makes sense. So maybe you could take us back for those people, maybe this is their first episode,
01:59 Geoff Sheffrin
and talk about the reason that we decided to start this podcast in the first place. Well let me cut to the quick by saying, my view is we're all talking about net zeros and we have a lot of 2050s and 2060s, etc. And I'm saying, as is Gutierrez from United Nations saying, 2050 net zeros, too late. I'm pushing 2030. And the reason is that if I look at the climate crisis and global warming, out of the Paris Accord, right, which was in 2015, the Paris Accord had us set a target of one and a half degrees Celsius, we're already at 1.2. We're over halfway through the timeframe and our CO2 emissions are as high now as they've been at any time. The only time they went down was in this past year with the pandemic. Right. But we're in a situation where by 2030, we are going to be in very serious trouble if we don't get our act together. So I'm pushing 2030 because net zero 2030 is to me a reasonable goal, very much a stretch goal. I'm fearful it's unattainable given our global political leadership, but it's a goal we have to strive for. Right. There are other parts attached to that. If I look at 2030, we talk about net zero. And quite frankly, in terms of the climate crisis and Mother Nature and her reaction to what we're doing, 2030 is too late with a net zero. At 2030, if we're not starting to head down to zero zero, in other words, take our 400 plus 450 plus parts per billion in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, if we're not reversing that, we're going to make it. So you can't lock in this temperature difference by 2030 and say, okay, we're here.
03:59 Peter Reynolds
The answer is no, you're not. Well, and I think that's the challenge is this sense of urgency that we have to get out there, that we have to raise that flag. And it's that challenge between inspiring people to get off the couch versus scaring them into putting the covers over their head.
04:22 Geoff Sheffrin
And where is that balance, Geoff? Well, I think what I'd like to do, and we've talked a little bit about this. Today I'm going to try and articulate a lot of the positives that are going on around the world. But very shortly here after, in the very next episode, for those people that don't want to hear the bad side of it and would rather pull the covers over their head, then when we get to episode seven, the next one, don't listen to it because I'm going to be telling you what a shit show we're in.
04:50 Peter Reynolds
Well, I think that's important. I realize that we have to be positive because if you only tell the negative stories, that is not going to inspire people. The young people out there, people becoming engineers, people wanting to look for solutions. If they're hearing that, well, it's too late, what's the point? But still, I think we need a reality check of what actually needs to be done. And personally, I'm looking forward to that episode. But speaking of positive things, I thought we'd go back a little bit and cover some of the topics that we've talked about in the past. And maybe start with something like SMRs, so small modular reactors. And I thought that was very interesting, this idea of rather than spending the billions of dollars that it takes to build a large nuclear reactor, that we can actually build small mobile ones that can go in remote communities and provide them with energy independence.
06:00 Geoff Sheffrin
So can you talk a little bit about that and where we are and the future of it? Actually, they're not technically mobile, they're merely transportable because they're small. So you can build them in a factory somewhere. If it were here in Canada, you build them in a factory somewhere in Toronto, Windsor, somewhere else in the country, and you ship them up to remote communities, set them up and get them functioning. Just a small correction point, I would never advocate not building large nuclear. We just do not have enough global electrical capacity. We have to invest in everything that is green and sustainable. And large nuclear as well as small modular reactors is all part of that package. So just moving that aside because we may come to that piece later. But on SMRs, there's a lot going on in the world. I can't remember the exact numbers, but I think we have at least 11 or 13 different designs of this type of reactor going on around the world. There's a lot of companies developing these things. We only have one small one operating as a standalone SMR, and that happens to be in Russia. But there's a lot of them around because what are nuclear submarines driven by? They're driven by a very small version of an SMR. They have nuclear reactors on them. So that piece of technology has been around a while. But getting them into a scalable size because we're looking at about something that's maybe a third the power output of a large nuclear reactor. And it's modular, it's portable. Portable transportable is perhaps more correct. So we have the ability to make these things. Right now, I think we're in a great position here in Ontario. OPG at Darlington, with the help of the federal and the provincial governments, have put a chunk of money into it. And they're currently they've just got through the early phases of the permitting process to build an SMR up in Darlington. Right. And in our previous SMR episode, we had Dave Tindal on. He's the engineering lead on that project. And he gave us some excellent background in terms of that and the necessity of it. So SMRs are one of many green tools that we have to get on with.
08:09 Peter Reynolds
We just don't have enough of them yet. Yeah. And I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, you know, we have to look at all solutions. And this can be the challenge where you can have individuals who want to focus solely on wind and solar and they want to exclude some of these other options. But I think we need all of them. If we're going to solve this, there's not one solution.
08:40 Geoff Sheffrin
It has to be many solutions. There isn't one. I mean, if I take just the analogy with solar, to make solar work for the globe, for the planet, I'd have to cover an area that's bigger than the Sahara Desert. And then I've got to figure out if I've done that in the Sahara Desert because I've got lots of sunshine, how the hell am I going to transport the electricity around the world? You know, these are not utopian solutions. Every bit of it, whether it's hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, you know, hydrogen fuel, all of these things are a piece of what we have to do to get ourselves off the carbon generation process that we've locked ourselves into for the last 200 years now.
09:17 Peter Reynolds
And I think it's important, you know, this idea of telling it like it is and giving the, you know, the honest truth because ultimately we want to get off, you know, we want to get off fossil fuels. But it's sort of like saying we're going to ban cars tomorrow. It's just not possible. We have to wean ourselves. But it's a question of the oil and gas industry wants that weaning to be a much slower process than, you know, the environmental movement.
09:55 Geoff Sheffrin
And where is that balance? Well, to my mind, the fossil fuel industry is, I hate to be critical of them, but they're being quite my optic about this. And I think self-serving when I look at the profits that some of the larger fossil fuel companies made this past year, like in the tens of billions of dollars, this is profit and not as much as could have been as was reinvested in green and advancing. So I'm a little bit disappointed in that. But fossil fuel is fossil fuel and the people are going to be exploiting it. I mean, look what's happening now in China. They're building more coal fired power plants. My God, unfortunately, that's one of the worst decisions we can possibly make on the planet. But another way of looking at it is they probably don't have a choice because they can't get nuclear reactors up fast enough. They don't have enough hydrogen dams without flooding too much of their landmass for agricultural purposes. You know, you need something of everything. But you can't just rely on fossil fuels. You've got to have a hard-nosed program to get off coal first, oil second, natural gas third. You're never going to eliminate natural gas. You're never going to totally eliminate oil because you need them for chemical reasons. But you can eliminate oil once you've sorted out how you want to make steel and iron and things like that. Because at the moment, we use a lot of coal in those industries. But running power for domestic use of coal at the moment, unfortunately, is totally a wrong choice. But politically and expediently, it's probably the only choice that some countries have at the moment.
11:30 Peter Reynolds
Well, and you talk about that, this idea that we need, you know, the sort of three solutions, the technology, the money and the political will. And we have the technology because we can see all the innovation happening. The money is there because we found it for COVID.
11:51 Geoff Sheffrin
So if we needed to find the money, we would find it. So it looks like it's just… But we'd only find it if it became… Listen, I'll come to that in a minute. But we'll only find the money if it's a bloody disaster. We won't find it otherwise.
12:03 Peter Reynolds
But it is a disaster, Geoff. It's just slow, slow…
12:07 Geoff Sheffrin
Let me talk about the money for a moment. One of the pieces of good news, Bloomberg reported just recently that last year, with very first year, that globally green technology investment topped $1 trillion. That's the first time ever that because of that level. That's a big positive. My only problem with that is, as I've said in one of the previous podcasts, I want $40 trillion as a down payment to get this problem fixed. And then I need another 40 at least to get us through all of the stuff we need to do. $80 trillion. That's an awful lot of money. That's almost the equivalent of global GDP. That's an incredible amount of money. But then if I go back to COVID, the numbers vary a little bit. You've heard me talk about this before. I've had low estimates of COVID globally cost us $18 trillion. High estimates are $24-25 trillion. Nobody had a piggy bank for that. We made it happen because the government's collectively said, this is a crisis, a collective crisis. Make it happen. So when Mother Nature gets bitchy enough and beats us over the head much more vigorously, we might start to realize and say, $40 trillion, we better figure out how to do this.
13:14 Peter Reynolds
Exactly. It's the analogy I like to use, Geoff, about the frog in the boiling water. And that is exactly what's happening. With COVID, the water was boiling already. And that frog felt that pain. And we threw money at it. We turned out vaccines in record time, things that would have been considered impossible. But because global warming is that slow boil and what happens is that when a problem happens, I know you love this, coming up with mitigation. That's your favorite word, I know. And adaption is my other favorite hate word. But it's true because we correct and we correct without looking at the whole reason these things are happening, because it's easier, it's politically more expedient. But if only we would, I mean, we don't want that to happen, of course, but you're right that if it kicked our ass in a big way, we would find the money, we would find the solution.
14:32 Geoff Sheffrin
As you said earlier, we've got the science, right? We've got the technology. It's all available to us. There are some bits of technology which are in such early stages, they won't be here in time. But they're on the horizon as well. So can we make the money happen? We'll make it happen if there's a real, real crisis that has started to wipe out a few billion of the population, then we'll act. The trouble is leadership. And I've previously in podcasts split that into two parts. One is technological leadership. One of the reasons I've engaged in my OSPE program on their climate crisis task force is because I want engineers engaged because engineers got us here, not deliberately, it evolved because this is what society is about. But we're the ones, the engineers in this world, are the ones that can reverse this. There's about five million engineers in the world. Okay, so let's roll up our sleeves and figure out how to make this fix happen.
15:28 Peter Reynolds
Okay, we need a bit of money to do that, but let's get on with it. OSPE, of course, is the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers. Thank you.
15:36 Geoff Sheffrin
And I was just going to ask you about your thoughts on them taking on this initiative. Well, I think OSPE is doing a good job. And I've been working with them now on a volunteer basis for quite a while. And I think what's important, because OSPE is an advocacy arm of the professional engineers, 20,000 in Ontario, 86,000 in Ontario in terms of professionals. And we've got about 170,000 across the country, right? And globally, it's four and a half million professional engineers. So we're trying to reach out, and OSPE is the advocacy arm to do that. So what they do, which I think is critically important, we're trying to find ways of stimulating the political leadership in moving these programs forward. This is critical because we have the technology, we have enough engineers, we don't yet have enough money, but we need the political leadership. And the political will only comes when Mother Nature beats us overhead with a two by four, and the population starts screaming that the politicians aren't stepping up. That's when we'll start seeing some change. My fear is it'll be 2030 before we even got to the point we were talking about that.
16:45 Peter Reynolds
Too late. Well, and it's making that connection between the right thing to do and something that's going to have a direct impact on your life or your business. And I think that's sometimes where the government falls short, making that connection. We often say, sort of in the area of disability, when we talk about accessibility, it's the right thing to do to make your business accessible. But businesses say, well, that's great. I don't have time. But when you show them the business case that having your place accessible to persons with disabilities will bring their families there as well, will raise your profile in the community. When they see it in the bottom line, all of a sudden they step up. And I often think that there's that disconnect between, you know, we take out our recycling, we take out our green bin, we use our own bag, we bring our own straw to Starbucks. But what is the connection between that and our actual lives? And how is that benefiting us as opposed to just, it's the right thing to do for the planet. And I think more needs to be done to make that connection.
18:00 Geoff Sheffrin
Yeah, I agree. I mean, all of those things are appropriate, but they're all just small pieces of a vastly bigger picture and a vastly more complex puzzle. And we have to move all of the elements forward.
18:12 Peter Reynolds
And it's confusing, Geoff. I was just in doing research for this episode. You know, you hear these words pop up and I was looking, you know, green versus clean versus renewable. They get used interchangeably. Well, this we're saying is green. But wait, no, this is clean energy, but it's not green energy. And this is renewable energy, but it's not clean. And just, you know, the idea being that solar and wind, they're both green, clean and renewable. And hydro is renewable, but people don't see it necessarily as green because there are environmental impacts. And nuclear is clean energy, but it's not renewable. So we're doing a podcast.
18:58 Geoff Sheffrin
Yeah, I would take exception to some of those things. I mean, if I look at them, wind and solar are given a green and clean bill of health and a renewable bill of health. But the renewable piece is a bit of a misnomer because a windmill, you know, a wind turbine, it has a life of 30, 35 years, right? A solar panel doesn't last forever either. And they all have cradle to grave cost and CO2 emission implications. So they're not virtuously green from concept to completion. So, you know, it's easy to get fooled into thinking, yeah, I've got green, clean and renewable. If I look at the reactor, the nuclear process, I would argue that it is totally renewable. It is as renewable as a wind turbine or as a solar panel, because at the end of 30, 35 years with the right design, and we're seeing that now, we've refurbished Darlington here in Ontario. Darlington is effectively now been given another lease of life. Bruce Power, it's I think the second biggest nuclear power plant in the world. It's going through a 10-year program to upgrade its reactors. So those reactors, as each of them gets done, hasn't done a 30 year of life. So renewable, it's as renewable as a wind turbine. So, you know, those sort of things are happening. And if I'm looking to some of the other attributes, if I look at the hydro dam, for example, the only detriment to a hydro dam is at the time of construction. Two things. One, we flood a tremendous landmass, which is bad for agriculture, bad for the population, bad for the species. But once it's up and running, the only other thing we've created is we've consumed and generate a lot of carbon dioxide in its construction. Cement and steel are both heavy carbon generators. But once it's up, renewable, we have hydro dams that are 100 years old and still working beautifully.
21:01 Peter Reynolds
So, you know, we have to invest in these long term solutions. That is really interesting, Geoff, because it never even occurred to me this idea. When I think of a wind turbine or think of a solar panel, you do think of it as forever. There it is spinning. But you're absolutely right. And when you think of nuclear reactors, well, we have to mine uranium. So clearly that's not renewable. But if you balance, I'm trying, you know, I can't do the math in my head right now. I'm sure one of our viewers or listeners can do the math. But this idea of if you took the amount of power generated by a nuclear reactor and looked at the amount of uranium that needed to be mined and the carbon footprint for that, and then we took this equal amount of wind turbines to generate that same amount of energy and how much needed to be mined to create the metals and the resources required. And what was that footprint? That's really interesting.
22:05 Geoff Sheffrin
We never effectively measure cradle to grave cost. And that's one of the things I advocate regularly. Look at the cradle to grave cost implications. What are all the resources you need to make it? What's the carbon footprint of that? What's your carbon footprint of it in use? How long does that last? How do you get rid of it at the end? And what's the carbon footprint implication there? That to me is the critical thing. And nuclear, to my mind, gets as clean a bill of health as the others in that process. Wind turbines. Right at the moment, wind turbine blades are landfill, disposable. It's only in the last couple of years, and we have one of them here in Toronto, we have companies that have now started to manufacture wind turbine blades, the great big fan blades, that are recyclable. This is the sort of stuff we have to work on.
22:53 Peter Reynolds
So speaking of new technology and innovation, two things I want to touch on with you was real carbon capturing and sequestering. And it's something that I'd never heard of, but I wanted to ask you sort of what is it and how will it have an impact on the climate crisis?
23:13 Geoff Sheffrin
Well, I think this is a very useful feature. Now, we're already hearing bits of it from the fossil fuel industry in Alberta. They've got a $16 billion program underway where they're actually looking to sequester carbon from the production of oil from the oil wells. That's a very worthy initiative. My only problem with it is, of course, I now sell the oil, ship it abroad, I burn it, and whilst I may have cured a bit of the front end carbon generation, the consumption of the fossil fuel in energy is just going to add to the carbon anyway. So that's an aside. But if I look at sequestering, there are now companies, and there's one out in British Columbia and maybe a couple of others here across Canada, who can actually take carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into stone. So the carbon that's there can be sequestered, gathered, and processed so it becomes totally locked. It's a little bit like what is a tree? A tree is nothing more than a carbon capture source, right? It picks up the carbon out of the atmosphere, and in its process, it generates oxygen. Where does the carbon get stored? In the trunk. It's part of the growing process. This is no different. Here we've got a machine technology that takes that same sort of process, but locks it into a stone, which we can bury or probably even use ornamentally eventually. I don't know. But you know, that to me is the green side of sequestering. Why do we need that? Because when we get to 2030, and if we get to 2030 with a net zero, we'll have 450 parts per billion of CO2 in the atmosphere, and all we've done is locked in the shit show that we've got now. If we don't reverse that, we're not going anywhere. We've got to also then reverse that after 2030. How does that reversal take place? You pull the bloody carbon out of the atmosphere, and you got to do sequestering.
25:09 Peter Reynolds
How far are we along on that technology?
25:12 Geoff Sheffrin
There's some very good technologies out there, and they just need money and scaling. The technology is there. The BC plant, as far as I know, does a good job. I've not researched it, not looked at the details, but the reports, the few reports I've read, speaks very positively of it.
25:28 Peter Reynolds
And I guess the idea is not to fall into the trap of, well, you know, we can just go and do things as we've normally been doing them, because we're pulling that carbon out of the atmosphere.
25:41 Geoff Sheffrin
And that's the trouble. That's the trouble. There's so many parts of our industry and our infrastructure and our populace that thinks, oh yeah, I'm carbon neutral. Well, you're not carbon neutral unless you stop generating carbon.
25:55 Peter Reynolds
That's something that kind of messed with me a little bit when they would talk about political solutions or things like the carbon tax or the sort of carbon credits that people could sell to other industries. So I have a very small carbon footprint, so I can take that and sell it to someone with a high carbon footprint to bring down their carbon footprint on paper. I don't know, it seemed to be very much like changing the deck chairs on the Titanic.
26:35 Geoff Sheffrin
Yeah, to me, it's nice window dressing, but it doesn't solve the problem. All we're doing is playing with the effect. And I keep advocating, if you're going to fix this problem, you've really got to look at the cause and you've got to fix causes. Playing with the effects, adaption, mitigation, yeah, okay, that keeps us going for a little while, but that's not the answer. If you don't get to the fundamentals of fixing the causes, we're not going to get there.
27:00 Peter Reynolds Talk a little bit about Canada and Canada's sort of role in the world when it comes to combating climate change. Are we a leader? Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe some lessons we can learn from other places around the world?
27:19 Geoff Sheffrin
Well, are we a leader? I wouldn't say we're a leader, but we're not a laggard either. There are many, many places around the world that are worse off than we are. When I look at it in a global situation, Canada, from an environmental contamination effect viewpoint, is about 4% of the planet. That's pretty small. And because I work with OSPE and I focus then on the Ontario side of it, I'm dealing with 1% of the global problem. But you know, playing and working and finding ways to fix 1% is fine, particularly if we can create that 1% and actually get technology out of it, which we can export and persuade others to use. And it supports our business trying to make that sort of thing work. Canada, I don't think, has a remarkable record. The debacle we had over the carbon tax in the early days was inappropriate because when you look around the world, those places that have made carbon tax work, it does what it's supposed to do. It creates a disincentive to people using fossils. That's what it was designed for. And all the economists will tell you, sorry, all the vast majority of the economists will tell you, it hasn't done a bad job in that regard. Is it a utopian solution? No. It's just a piece of many, many in the jigsaw puzzle that we have to work with to try and adapt and modify and optimize.
28:40 Peter Reynolds
And when I look at a lot of these agreements when they're signed by countries, whether it's at COP or, you know, different conferences, you often hear this phrase, committed to. And, you know, we're committed to reducing emissions. We're committed to. And that phrase, boy, that, you know, is kind of like a get out of jail free card because you're not, you're committed to, but you're not actually making a commitment. And you- Show me the metrics. Show me the teeth. Yeah, show me the teeth. Show me that there's actually, that this is going to get done. And I think about, you know, places around the world that you and I've talked about. And I think about, for example, you know, example like Norway, where their EV infrastructure, their electric vehicle infrastructure, you know, now 80% of cars sold are electric. Whereas that's like 5% in the US and Canada. But they made a commitment to say- That's correct. We are going to provide subsidies to encourage people to buy electric cars. And we are going to put in that infrastructure. And yes, there was a cost associated with it, but, you know, they actually did something.
30:00 Geoff Sheffrin
Yeah, they did. And they too have their interesting challenges because whilst they have a well-developed grid in many respects, a lot of their electricity comes from hydroelectric power. And what's interesting about Norway is an awful lot of the electric power is up in the north end of the country. And most of the population is down the south end of the country. And over the last couple of years, they've had occurrences of droughts when the hydroelectric systems could not generate sufficient to maintain everything they needed. Plus, they didn't have the transmission capability to handle all of the transmission down to the south. So they weren't in quite utopian state, but nonetheless, they were way ahead of most of the rest of the world in that context. So, you know, I mean, there is no utopian solution anywhere. Some of the Scandinavian countries clearly have done better than others. And I think as a country ourselves and in general, we need to look at everybody's solutions and find ways of making sure that we're investing our money in the best solutions that we have available to us.
31:04 Peter Reynolds
Yeah. And it can be cultural because you'll have countries in Europe, I think of the Netherlands, for example, which has always been bike obsessed. And so, you know, them making that leap to changing from, you know, a car based economy, you know, where cars are so, so everyone's addicted to cars to focusing more on bicycles and electric vehicles. That's a much easier sell than in Canada and the US where we have to cover so much, such greater distances.
31:35 Geoff Sheffrin
Yeah, that's also a very important part of it. I mean, geography doesn't work in Canada's favor. I mean, you know, 8,000 kilometers across in a 200 kilometer wide band is where over 90% of the population lives. And that's not exactly an easy commute. And the US in its own way is somewhat better because it's not as large as Canada as a landmass, but at least the population is all over the place to a large degree. So, you know, it's a different proposition. Each country has its own challenges and opportunities, there's no doubt.
32:03 Peter Reynolds
So, sweeping changes obviously need to be made and we need to have teeth, you know, to enforce them. And obviously that can seem overwhelming for the average person or even a young person. So, would you agree that everybody has their part to play even if it's small, that small can lead to big?
32:22 Geoff Sheffrin
Yeah, I agree. I think everybody has their part to play. I mean, I still drive my car largely because, you know, a silly point. I was looking at hydrogen vehicles the other day. Great. If I got a hydrogen car here, from what I can see, the only place I can fill it up is Montreal. Well, that ain't going to work. By the time I burned a tank of hydrogen up, you know, I'll be empty by the time I get back to Toronto. So, you know, solutions are, you know, they're looking at it at a much smaller scale. I've reduced the frequency of my dishwasher use by changing how I use things in the kitchen. My house is now fully equipped with either fluorescents or LEDs. The couple of places where I have incandescents is like a cellar I have downstairs where I go into, you know, twice a month for five minutes. And all of these things are tiny little bits by myself, irrelevant. But if enough of us do all of these little things, it starts to add up. And that's really what it's about. If we can get the things added up and the mother in age gets angry enough and we put some money into it, we can make this happen. We can fix this problem. You know, we have what we need to do it. We just need political leadership, the money, and let's get on with it.
33:35 Peter Reynolds
Well, I often think that shame is a great motivator. Better than doing the right thing. You know, if you think of things like, the government always said if you had your dog in the park, you know, and it went to the bathroom, pick up after your pet. It's the right thing to do. And nobody gave a shit, if I can, no pun intended. Put it in the vernacular, yeah. But it wasn't until there was this switch where you get the stink eye from people if your dog went to the bathroom and you didn't pick it up. And it's suddenly that shame of, oh yeah, no, no, I have to pick up after my pet. That suddenly now everybody picks up after their pet. And the difference in a park from the time I was 10 till the time my son was 10 is like night and day. And I think that same thing really needs to, and it is happening slowly. I know my son, who's 14, is much more aware of the environment. I can imagine. Much more, if I unwrap that plastic and put it in the garbage, he's going to say, yo, recycling. Or when I have friends over, they ask me, where's the green bin? And so you better have a green bin when they ask you. Because if you say, no, I don't have a green bin. So that's where the world has to go to where we buy electric cars because they're great for the environment. But if you pull up the company picnic in your gas guzzler, that is really, I think, how ultimately what's going to happen is it's kind of going to shame us into being good to the planet.
35:28 Geoff Sheffrin
Yeah, I think that'll happen on an individual basis more and more. But we're going to need some other incentives or stimulus to make that work. We're not there yet. And there's a lot of positives. I mean, as you know, I've been looking at this for a long time. By the way, you see over my shoulder the Rachel Carlson Silent Spring book. And I think I mentioned before, I probably started reading that in the late 80s, although she published it in the early 1960s. But a small little detour on that. It's very I'm rereading the book at the moment. And it's not about DDT and about, you know, she was on about all of the pesticides and organicides that we were creating, which was having a detrimental effect on all sorts of species and on human health generally. I could almost take that book and instead of putting in those chemicals, just put in the word CO2.
36:20 Peter Reynolds
I'm in the same position. And so that's where we are now. We've got to change. We've got to change how we think. Absolutely. Absolutely. So speaking of positive stories and ways to sort of inspire, a couple of stories jumped out at me, which I thought is kind of really interesting. And again, these are individuals who are coming up with ideas that have a real impact on their community or the potential to do so. And one story, it's out of Lebanon, and it's a gentleman, his name is Tufek Hamdan, and he invented a commercial oven that basically allows bakeries to cook their bread through the power of the sun. And it's absolutely amazing. We'll put the link in the description because the video, it's pretty incredible. They had an economic crisis in Lebanon, and the price of diesel was going through the roof. And they were saying that the number was the average bakery uses 10 tons of diesel per month. And the costs were astronomical. So they were raising the prices of their food and the local people couldn't afford it. So he invented this process that allows them to totally come off diesel, much cheaper for the bakers. They can lower the prices so the locals can actually afford to buy this food. So it was solving an energy crisis, so they're becoming energy independent and less dependent on oil. It was solving an economic crisis because these bakers were able to make money, and it was solving food insecurity. So this one gentleman coming up with this idea, this is the kind of thing that we need
38:11 Geoff Sheffrin
from young people today. And the second, go ahead. No, no, no, no, no, no, please. Well, I'm merely going to say, you must remember back to your school days when you would take a magnifying glass and look out for the sunshine and you then focus the magnifying glass so you got a concentrated spot of heat and you would burn a piece of paper with that. I mean, to many respects, what he's done is capitalized on the same sort of thing. It's the heat from the sun. And he's found a way of marshalling it into an oven process, which gives him enough temperature so he can bake. It won't be the oven temperature you might have had before. The bake cycle might be a lot longer. I'm sure by having a look at the video, I get a better feel for it. But just perfect. This is human creativity doing its best.
38:57 Peter Reynolds
And I also love it when these ideas come up that seem obvious to your point with the magnifying glass. Well, of course, we could use the sun. But it took somebody to actually put something together on an industrial scale that allowed people to make it work. So it's amazing. And the other story is, and this happened back in 2013, which I thought was fantastic. So Elif Belagin from Turkey won the 2013 Science and Action Award for developing a chemical process to turn banana peels into resistant bioplastic. Right. And it all came from this idea where they were looking at a banana and thinking, it's the perfect, it's its own packaging. Is it possible that that could be packaging for other items? Is it perhaps the perfect packaging for everything? And so developed this chemical process. And these are the kind of ideas that get that really get me excited. Yeah, absolutely. Because it starts off as somebody who's, you know, 16 and in a science fair. And yet those are the ideas that I think are going to ultimately help us get off fossil fuels,
40:24 Geoff Sheffrin
and make the difference. It's that independent creativity and sometimes forced by necessity. But nonetheless, it's that creativity and that spark of initiative, which will, there's so much of that available that, you know, that's all part of the good news story of things that are happening.
40:39 Peter Reynolds
It's amazing. As we're sort of wrapping things up, Geoff, is there anything you'd like to add, something that we've left out?
40:49 Geoff Sheffrin
I'm not sure. Let me just have a quick look at my notes. Obviously, I'd like to finish with my usual phrase at some point very soon. We talked about the silent spring and now I think we've covered a lot of things. I think we touched on green hydrogen a little bit. I just want to say one thing more about that because I don't think we touched on it. The reason for green hydrogen, it's the only one that doesn't use a fossil fuel in some form or another to generate. I mean, the blue turquoise grays, they all have different types of technology, which one way or another doesn't get rid of the carbon problem. The reason that green works is because it works from electrolysis. And the problem with electrolysis is it happens to be the most expensive way of generating hydrogen. The other processes are less costly. Why? Because to split oxygen from hydrogen, which comes from water, because those are the two elements in water, I get about eight times as much oxygen out of it as I do hydrogen, but it cost me about one and a half times more than the most expensive fossil fuel process. And the best place to have it is if I've got a nuclear reactor somewhere, nuclear reactor are perfect base loads. Ontario has over half of our power comes from that sort of base load. Those base loads aren't fully utilized at night. That's the time when you have an electrolyzer standing near there and you feed surface electricity to the electrolyzer because you have it available. It's not going anywhere. It's not doing anything. And you generate hydrogen. And by the way, the byproduct is also oxygen, which is also useful.
42:19 Peter Reynolds
Well, I love that because this idea of using multiple technologies together to create yet another renewable resource. Yeah, absolutely. No, that's fascinating. That's fascinating. Yeah, so I guess we've covered a lot of topics today and I hope we've provided that balance between leaping off the couch and throwing the covers over your head.
42:48 Geoff Sheffrin
Well, I think we've dropped on the positive side. As I say, for the next podcast, I will introduce it as being a disaster show. So you will have the chance of getting the introduction and deciding covers over the head. I'm going on the couch. I'm gone. Your choice. And what is your message for our audience out there, Geoff? What is my message usually, right? It's, you know, movers make things happen. Everybody else is a spectator. Spectators sit on the couch. So go out there and be a mover, make things happen. Even though it's only recycling a plastic bag into your green bin, it's just another teeny little piece of what ultimately has to be a global movement. So go do it.
43:26 Peter Reynolds
Well, thank you so much, Geoff, for sharing your passion and your expertise. And thank you to our audience for joining us. It's been an amazing journey. As always, you can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to a video version on YouTube. So don't forget to like, subscribe and leave a comment. We read them all. And your comments is what helps generate the content for this podcast. And together we can make a difference. You're right. Peter, thank you so much. So for myself and Captain Crisis, you've been listening to Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap, and we'll see you next time.