Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap
Mother Nature Doesn’t Give a Crap - She really doesn’t. She could care less about our timelines or our targets. She’ll happily continue throwing hurricanes, burning forests and melting her ice caps. Unless we do something. Join us as we tackle the climate crisis though interviews with leaders in the environmental movement and experts in the field. Each episode will explore the policies, technology and human factors that will help you understand this global crisis and what you can do to help solve it. Mother Nature Doesn’t Give a Crap, so we have to.
Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap
Why Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap
In our premiere episode, Host Geoff Sheffrin provides an overview of the climate crisis and what’s being done, or not done, to address its growing impact on people around the world. He’ll give a sneak peak on what you can expect from future episodes, including innovative technology that seems more like science fiction, and discuss his Three Big Fixes: Technology, Leadership and Money.
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/
Peter Reynolds 00:09
Hi, and welcome to the first episode of Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap with Geoff Sheffrin. I'm your moderator, Peter Reynolds. Geoff, you're a Professional Engineer with degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering and over 20 years experience. You're a busy guy. What made you decide "I want to start a podcast?".
Geoff Sheffrin 00:30
Well, interesting thought. I think I got in, in entranced in environmental issues, probably years back. You know, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring book is up behind me. And I probably first read that. And it was very important that that time, but it wasn't climate change. And I would say in the last decade or more, as climate change is starting to develop from global warming into climate change into what I now call a climate crisis. No, I'm saying there's just not enough happening in order to get us out of this problem. But let me explain a little bit more of the background of that. This crisis, in my opinion is real, you could deny it all you like. But if you go back and check the facts and figures, we're now at over 97% of the global scientific community, and the global scientific reports, they say human activity is the cause. Look at the extreme weather events right now. Atmospheric temperature is now up by 1.2 degrees Celsius. That doesn't sound like much, but I'll explain more in a second. The oceans have warmed by 0.7 degrees Celsius, that sounds even more trivial, but it's not. And whilst it doesn't sound like much, these two events shift the jet streams. The jet streams are what goes around the globe at high level, and they carry the weather patterns. And that's what drives what goes on in terms of how we receive weather. What's happening with global warming is, the ice caps are melting. With the ice caps melting both in the Arctic, and the Antarctic, and Greenland, we're also releasing ice that is centuries old, and we're releasing methane with that, which is adding to our global warming problems. Right. So that's one of the issues, we've also got this whole ocean warming thing, it's moving species around, so we're getting species shifting, we're getting all of these events, which are causing more and more extreme weather events. That's our problem. And my view is, in the whole of our globe, the whole planet, if it doesn't come from Mother Nature, if it's not naturally occurring, in somewhere, somehow an engineer has been involved in making what we have today. And if you look around you, wherever inside outside, wherever you go, there is nothing that hasn't been engineered to be part of our society. So my view is, if anybody can fix the problems, is engineers. So I'm trying to reach out mostly to the engineering community. But I also want to reach out to everybody because this is everybody's problem. My view is we need to fix the cause, not the effect. Long story, short question.
Peter Reynolds 03:23
And how does the title come into play? Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap.
Geoff Sheffrin 03:29
Well, may I say originally, I wanted to say Mother Nature doesn't give an s h i t. But I'm told that in spite of these popular platforms, you know, they weren't taking an expleitive in the title. But they'll hammer around in your privacy, and they'll data mine and all sorts of crap. But I can't put an expletive... Nevermind, is now crap, because crap seems to be more acceptable than s h i t. I'm sorry. For those with sensitive ears, but that's just the way it is. It's...I've got to have a title that catches attention.
Peter Reynolds 04:04
And I know you've talked Geoff, about this idea that, humans and politicians, we all, have our targets, 2025, 2030, 204, but Mother Nature really doesn't care about our timelines.
Geoff Sheffrin 04:22
Well, let me talk about that for a second. It's a good intro for me. Thank you. My view is, as I originally said, Mother Nature doesn't give a C R A P now. The point is, she doesn't have a calendar. She's not on Outlook. She doesn't go to the COP conferences. She has no idea that we have net zero 2050s in mind. Because when you look at what's going on in terms of extreme weather events, we're going to be too late. My view is, my prediction is by 2030, we will have screwed up the planet sufficiently that we're going to be in dire straits. 2030. We don't have long. So I'm trying to find ways of stirring things up, make things happen.
Peter Reynolds 05:11
And that's interesting that, in targeting, the general public, but engineers as well, because they've created the products in the industries that are causing the problem. They're the ones to fix it.
Geoff Sheffrin 05:24
Yes. And I think it's, it's a bit unfair to say engineers are causing the problem. We just don't know what in economics have driven us for the last 150 years, since somebody invented the steam engine, and shoveled coal to fire it. Right. So 150 years later, we just developed society, from all the technical attributes that it now has, and we're in a situation where it's now got to the point where it's about to be totally out of control. The big factor in this out of control is what we're dealing with is not reversible. When I say it's not reversible, you can reverse it. But you try and get all the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that we've created.
Peter Reynolds 06:10
And you can't refreeze the polar ice caps.
Geoff Sheffrin 06:13
You got it. And Mother Nature isn't going to say, Oh, they fixed the problem. Good. Let's turn off the problems that she's causing. That ain't gonna happen. It'll take decades, probably a few centuries before we get rid of all this crap.
Peter Reynolds 06:29
So, obviously, the climate change and global warming. Of course, you touched on that that sort of misnomer of global warming, where it's really a case of climate change, because our world and environment is so complex. But it can seem overwhelming. I think, for myself, full disclosure. I mean, I'm a video producer by trade. So I'm very new to this topic. And probably like many out there, my connection to solving the climate crisis is recycling and taking out my green bin. So perhaps you can talk a little bit about some of the key issues that are happening around the world. And just to kind of bring us up to speed.
Geoff Sheffrin 07:19
All right, well, let's talk a little bit about where the latest disasters appear to be taking us. Some key current data on the topic, which I don't hold myself out as an expert on this topic. But I am a student of it, I look at an awful lot of stuff. And I have a very small select list of what I consider to be viable data sources, which are well researched and highly creditable. So that's what I work with. So my view in this regard is we've got some key data, in terms of various things that we have that agreed, you know, whether it's hydro, or nuclear, or, you know, other things, etc. There's a variety of things that are happening. And I'm a teeny bit off topic of the moment. So let me just switch around a note, if I may, because...
Peter Reynolds 08:08
That's what our first episode is about, Geoff, you know, we're figuring it out.
Geoff Sheffrin 08:12
We are figuring it out, because I need to figure it out. Oh dear, you might want to edit this piece out later, Peter. But then. So here are some of the issues that are really currently getting us to where we are and why I have such a high level of concern. We have all of these extreme weather events. When I look at the research, the extreme weather events are not happening more frequently. But they are happening with much more severity. You look at the floods in Pakistan. They are unprecedented. They started in June. They haven't gone away yet. Right? Almost one point, sorry. 100. Get it right. 1800 people have been killed. 330 million people have been displaced ,1/3 of the country was flooded. Can you imagine that? Right. If I go to South America, this floods happening in Venezuela and Colombia. I go to China. China's having floods. Europe had some floods this summer. Right. The other side of the equation we're getting droughts. BC right at the moment, a large swath of BC is in serious drought and has been for months. They don't know where they're going to get enough water from to do things to live day to day lives. BC is in a bad shape. Africa is in the same shape when it comes to drought. China, on the one side, China's got floods. On the other side, China's got droughts. Australia. We're getting droughts there. You look at more local stuff. The recent two hurricanes, Fiona and Ian. Both are more severe than we've experienced previously. They are the very worst we've had. But what I'm seeing is, the severity of these is ramping up up all the time. This is Mother Nature saying, I don't give a shit, you guys can't get this fixed, I'll fix it for you. And the best way she can fix it, is wipe out a billion or two of our population. Sorry, that sounds a bit nasty, doesn't it?
Peter Reynolds 10:13
No, I think, I sometimes think straight talk is what we need. You know? It's interesting to me that when we talk about the climate crisis, when things happen slowly, it's the old story of the frog in the pot of water. And with something like COVID that happened immediately, that the whole world was shut down. That was like boiling water. We tossed the frog in and it jumped out, we reacted, we spent the money, to find a treatment and the whole world pulled together. But the climate crisis is just like, a pot of lukewarm water that's slowly being boiled. We don't notice it. We notice it a little bit, but then we adjust. Two things. Two stories I read recently. One was with Fiona. The government was looking to put money into designing homes that could withstand stronger hurricanes.
Geoff Sheffrin 11:24
It drives me crazy, but go on.
Peter Reynolds 11:30
And then they were saying, for example, oh, when it comes to our farming? Well, it's just going to move north. And soon, we'll be growing strawberries, in Manitoba. And we have to adjust our economics to account for that. Well, that really does seem to be putting a bandaid and not looking at the real problem.
Geoff Sheffrin 11:57
I agree. That's all we're doing. Remember where we are. We are not addressing the root causes. We are looking at the problems. They're regional. They are incremental. We'll do this. We'll adapt. We'll fix that. Move on. No, it just doesn't happen. It's not happening quickly enough. And we'll pay the price for that very soon.
Peter Reynolds 12:21
You talked about, I know we've talked about this idea of the three things. To start to address this issue. Can you talk about that?
Geoff Sheffrin 12:32
Yeah, this is an oversimplification. From my point of view. What I've said is, there's only three big picture things that we need. One is technology. Two is leadership. And three is money. If I start off with technology, we already have an incredible amount of global green technology. It's just not well enough developed, it's not widely enough spread to sustain us. Right. I go off on a tangent for that for a second. The global energy consumption, global energy consumption right now is approximately 170,000 terawatt hours. That's 170, with 15 zeros tacked on the end of it. That's an incredible amount of energy. That's the globe. The electrical capacity that we have in the globe is around 35,000 terawatt hours, you will notice that by total energy, and what I can do electrically is almost five to one apart. Well, there's only piece of good news is a chunk of my higher number is from fossil fuels, with coal being the worst offender. If I generate one gigawatt of power, which is about the size of one nuclear generator, not a nuclear power station, one nuclear generator, I generate one gigawatt. If I do that, from a nuclear generator, I develop about four tonnes of CO2, delivering that gigawatt. If I do it from a coal powered fire station, I deliver about 860 tons of CO2. More than 200 times as much. The other bad thing about it is what I'm doing it from coal, over half of the energy that I burn in order to generate heat for electricity generation goes up the stack as CO2, it doesn't deliver anything for us. So coal is the least efficient energy source for electricity. Oil, gas, a little less so. But they're by no means good solutions. We've got to get off this stuff. Right. So that talks a bit about the technology. We have the technology we have wind, we have solar, we have hydro, we have nuclear, and we have all sorts of technologies. We just don't have enough of it. We've never had enough of it. We've got to have a grid to distribute it all in each part of the world. It's not happening just yet. We're too far away. So let me talk about money for a moment. That's a really interesting question. because at one stage a little while ago, I'm saying, Yeah, we probably need $20 or $30 trillion. Well, I now think my starting number starting number is $40 trillion. Let's put this into perspective. There have been two events in the last 100 years that have spent trillions of dollars. One of them was World War Two, when we marshal our resources, spent the money, Canada build, I think 1300 fighter planes, we built almost 1000 warships, and just an incredible feat for a small country. I bet it was part of the overall picture. Money was poured into it, we had a leadership it was being done. The second one has only just happened. It's the pandemic. And you mentioned it earlier in our outset here, that we stepped up when it became a problem. And that's exactly what we need to do. The pandemic, and I've gone through some financial resources for that, you know, the World Bank, international accounting agencies, etc. They don't all agree, but they're saying, 12-15 trillion, maybe as much as $24 trillion was spent on the pandemic. Well, where did that money come from? Well, nobody has a piggy bank with that sort of money in it. And so what happens is the World Government said, We got to fix this. So they released bonds and treasuries and this than the other, and the money was made available. And we did it. Why? Because it was a freaking crisis. So everybody stepped up. We're not at a crisis yet. I think we're at a crisis. But our political leaders don't think we're in a crisis, which is why we're not putting money of any real significance into the climate crisis. It's not happening. And I think we need $40 trillion to get that going. Let's put the money aside. Let's talk about leadership. I would break the leadership into two parts. One is technical leadership. I look around the globe. You know, we have over 97% of the scientists agree it's human activity. And it's getting us here. We have engineers, there's 20,000 engineers in OSPE. There's over 80,000 engineers in Ontario. There's over 160,000 engineers in Canada. US probably got 300,000 Professional Engineers, and that's just on this continent. Around the world. I've got a few million. So I've got the resources to do that. For technical leadership. You can make that happen. What we don't have is political leadership.
Geoff Sheffrin 17:22
We've had the Paris Accord. 1.5 degrees. We'll get to that in a few minutes. We've had the last COP in Glasgow, COP26 as Greta Thunberg, we delivered a few things out of COP26. None of them had teeth, as Greta Thunberg would put it, blah, blah, blah. And I'm afraid she's quite right. COP27 is coming up next month, I see a whole lot more, groveling and asking, and debating and hot air. But I'd be highly surprised if you get teeth coming out of that. So from my point of view, we have the technology. If we absolutely forced to we can find ways of making the money available. We can provide the technical leadership, we just don't have the political will. Whether that's from an authoritarian country, or a liberal democracy, it ain't happening.
Peter Reynolds 18:17
Why is that Geoff?
Geoff Sheffrin 18:18
I think two things, because it's really that, to me, it's the geopolitical issues. If I oversimplify, you've got two types of leaders in the world, there are the autocrats who dictate by their rule. And climate change is somewhere on their agenda. But it really isn't important to them because it's about serving their needs. Right? You look at the liberal democracies, and many of them are into four and five year election cycles. So climate is important if it's hurting their population, and affecting their voters. Otherwise, climate is assumed. It was a problem, okay, we'll fixed the owners here. Ian's here. Let's do something. And when that goes away, we fix the problem, we start to adapt. It's gone away again. That's the problem. Five year cycles, short termism.
Peter Reynolds 19:14
Short termism. You know, that's a, that's a great term, because I think you're right, it's very much the sort of the horses blinders, unless it's directly in front of us. We're not reacting to it. I wanted to touch, we've talked a little bit, and or I should say a lot about what's wrong. And so, what's right? Can you point to anything that's happening around the world or leaders around the world who are doing something, who are moving in the right direction?
Geoff Sheffrin 19:50
Well, I've tried to do a bit of research on what I call climate activism leadership at high levels around the world. And I came up with it blank. There are some that are much better than others. If I go back to where Merkel was, before she decided to shut down nuclear reactors, which was a dumb decision. And I looked for people like Arden in New Zealand, and I looked for the... I forgotten the name of the lady that's in charge in Taiwan. You know, there are some leaders around the world who are, you have it on their agenda much higher than others. I look at people like Bolsonaro, etc. He's too busy burning up the Amazon, he doesn't give a shit. We have lots of those around the world. So we're just going nowhere when it comes to that, in my opinion. And that, to me is the disaster that we're facing.
Peter Reynolds 20:40
So what would you say the average person can do? The average engineer can do I mean, as I mentioned, before, I recycle, I have a green bin, I have a rain barrel, though, it's all stuffed with leaves. So probably more part of the problem than the solution. But for those people listening, what is something that they can do to start this process to move in the right direction.
Geoff Sheffrin 21:08
On an incremental and personal level, there's anything we do is a tiny little piece in the right direction. But it isn't going to fix the problem, because all we're doing is mitigating our contribution and whether we buy an EV, or whether we're recycling, or as you say, the rain barrel, or we've installed a heat pump, or we've put some solar panels on our roof for power. All of these things help now individually, individually, that's not going to make a lot of difference. But if I can get a billion people around the world doing it, suddenly I've got some substance. And my thinking is, engineers are part of developing and building the solutions. Some of them are in fossil industries, some of them are deniers, but an awful lot of engineers are on the page of saying, we've got to do something. And they are the people that can get involved and do more. Because the technologies are out there. We have nuclear, we have solar, we have wind, we have hydro, in various forms. We have all sorts of things that are available to us. They're underdeveloped, and not overly distributed sufficiently so we can actually make use of them globally.
Peter Reynolds 22:18
Geoff, you mentioned OSPE, before the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, can you talk a little bit about your work with them, and how this relates to your activism,
Geoff Sheffrin 22:29
I actually it's a piece that I was already moving down my more high profile climate activism path. When OSPE approached me for a couple of ENG talks late last year. And I did one on strategy and one on corporate culture. I wrote a book on that, but that's another subject. So I did a couple of those. And at the end of it, I thought, why don't I talk to them and see if they actually want some blogs from me about the climate crisis. So I started writing a couple of blogs for them. And a few of them sit on the OSPE portal. And also, I'm delighted to say on two occasions, they came back to me, the voice is their magazine. I was asked to provide a letter to the editor about the climate crisis. In two separate editions, I did that, it sits on page four, the two most recent additions that OSPE put out there. So that to me is another piece of it. Then OSPE had me do a podcast. And we did a podcast for them on exactly this topic. It also sits on the OSPE portal. So as I go forward, I'm say to myself. I know this is a vehicle. I know the engineers are critical. I'd like to reach humankind, particularly the global leadership where the biggest problem is, and we got to move on things. But that's really what's got me started. And what's got me into this is, as I said at the outset, we have a crisis. We're going to be in disaster shape before the end of this decade. And I'm just trying to wave the flag. You can deny all you like, but when it hits you personally in your backyard, because it's just rip the roof off your house and flooded your basement. Maybe you will be thinking differently if you were a denier.
Peter Reynolds 24:13
And it's interesting because this idea of... I like to think of people... like there's going to be the climate deniers, people who who don't believe in climate change. And of course, there's going to be the activists and people like yourself, who are out there, waving the flag. Tell me if you agree with this, that I think probably the majority of people fall somewhere in the middle, where they're not a Climate Denier. They're a Climate Don't Take it So Seriously, or I Have Other Priorities.
Geoff Sheffrin 24:50
I would agree. And when you look at what's going on in the US at the moment and up here in Canada, we've got inflation, we've got economic issues. We've got personal issues in that context. I agree, it's not high enough. I bet you if I was living in BC, there'd be a whole lot more people on my page, because they've had several months of extreme drought. If I was living in Pakistan, it may not have a vast array of more highly educated people. But nonetheless, they are living the consequences of a climate disaster. Unprecedented in their standards. So, to me, that's how things will change. Because you're right, the vast majority of people will be in the middle. And if it doesn't hit us personally, why did the pandemic get so much attention, because it was starting to hit us personally, it was killing my grandmother, it was killing here, it was killing our hospitals. You know, it was an absolute horror show. The good news is, we have the scientific knowledge for over a decade, to deliver mRNA vaccines. Technology which hadn't really been exploited. So in one year, we turned around a five year cycle of delivering vaccines. There is no vaccine for climate change. The only vaccine is fix the friggin problem, fix the cause.
Peter Reynolds 26:14
Getting back to what you're saying, we talked about people being in the middle and, and priorities. And this is something I know that comes up in my own family, when we talk about what more we can do for the environment. But we're also feeling the pinch from the economy. And with grocery prices going through the roof, being environmentally conscious is expensive. My son, for example, would love for us to get a Tesla. And I would love to have a Tesla too. But to buy an electric vehicle... to even buy environmentally friendly products, at the grocery store, cleaning products, they're more expensive. So I think there are those people that are sort of in that boat where they'd like to be more environmentally friendly, but they're feeling the pinch.
Geoff Sheffrin 27:14
Yep. Unfortunately, that's not going away. We will eventually have no choice. It's gonna hurt us in the pocketbook. You have two choices. Either Mother Nature wipes out hundreds of millions of us because the climate disaster has struck so broadly, that it's wiping out chunks of population. Right? In order to fix that. We got to spend money. It ain't gonna go away. I'm afraid I'm on that page, too. But I know because I'm in this business, so to speak. I say to myself, yeah, it's part of the price I gotta pay. Pay the money.
Peter Reynolds 27:58
So as we're coming to the end of this episode, what can people expect from future episodes? What kind of topics or people are going to talk to?
Geoff Sheffrin 28:06
Let me talk another thing for a moment? I think one of the questions we might just want to talk about is, where do we start? If we had $40 trillion? Where do we start?
Peter Reynolds 28:17
Okay, so we win the lottery, Geoff, and you win $40 trillion. What's job number one?
Geoff Sheffrin 28:26
Okay. Well, I would immediately ramp up SMR small modular reactors. There's too many designs of those around. These are small modular nuclear reactors. SMR they're called. We have one going in Darlington through OPG. Right. And it's the Hitachi version. It's one of 11 different designs being developed by 24 different countries. There's only one operational SMR in the world. It's in Russia, a small one. They need to be rapidly extended. We've got to get much more solar, we've got to get much more wind, and we've got to get much more hydro. And my suggestion is hydro from hydroelectric dams is great. Providing you have enough water and no droughts for feed the upstream so it runs. But you can also do what's called pump storage and run of the river. Pump storage uses wasted electricity, pumps the water up at night. During the day when you have high demand, water floods down. And within a matter of seconds, you've got a high level of power output, which feeds feeds into the grid immediately. The other is run of the river. You have small waterfalls. You like the best example of run of the river is Niagara Falls. It is one of the biggest run of the rivers, certainly one of the biggest we have here in Canada. That's a run of the river. All the water upstream, even if it slows down a little bit through droughts or shortages upstream, it's still going to flow down, a couple 100 feet of a waterfall. It drives generators. And so those are the sorts of things which are going to move us forward. But the other thing is, we've got to get off coal. Quickly. I mentioned earlier the amount of inefficiency we have with coal. Right now, China is one of the biggest developers of nuclear power systems. There's about 440 in the world, in the globe, 440 nuclear generators, in about 170 nuclear power stations. China has about 50, on the books that they're building and planning. Globally, we have about 150, that we're building and planning. It's nowhere near enough. But it's a big step forward. And if you like nuclear or not, and I hate the prospect of nuclear waste, by the way, that's where SMRs can be useful, because some of them actually use spent fuel. Either way.
Peter Reynolds 30:47
This is an entire episode, Geoff, and I'm looking forward to that conversation, for sure, for sure.
Geoff Sheffrin 30:52
But well, the nuclear one we're going to have to talk about. So you know, we've got these sort of things happening, but we've got to get off coal, we've got to find ways because coal is what is killing us. And I mentioned earlier about the CO2. The death rates from coal, per gigawatts of power generated is about one person in 33 years from nuclear. And it's about 300 people a year from coal. And I think I may have my year wrong. I think it's a shorter timeframe than that. But coal through breathing issues it's killed as many, many, many more people than nuclear power does. So nuclear has the rap, cold doesn't get reported. He goes, Oh, that person died of bronchitis or, you know, some some breathing disease. Yeah, just normal. Didn't happen. Didn't hear nothing. Nothing was reporting. Nuclear accident? Problem. Then everybody's attention gets that. So we have to get off coal quickly.
Geoff Sheffrin 30:54
And so the idea is with that 40 trillion, step one is getting the technology and getting the alternative energy sources in place to replace things like coal.
Geoff Sheffrin 32:08
Yeah. Can I tease you with one of the very most recent that I've come across? If you install solar panels on the entire Sahara Desert, the whole Sahara Desert, it can generate just about enough electricity to feed the whole world. But how the hell do you get all that electricity out of the Sahara Desert over to China or Australia, South America. Rather difficult. But here's an intriguing thought. If I can put the solar panels up in space. First of all, I have unimpeded sunshine. And I can geo position them, so they're always getting sunshine. And even though the world rotates, I can take that solar energy, turn it into microwave radiation, beam it down to collectors stations on the ground, and distributed into the global grid. That work is just starting. The first one, supposed to be developing two gigawatts. It's quite a few years away. Two gigawatts. $16 billion, is the current budget. Two gigawatts is like two nuclear power stations, two nuclear generators, not power stations. So, if you want to think about forward thinking technology, it's there. You look at fusion, another piece of technology. Fusion now has been developed sustainably for five seconds. Fusion? Five seconds? What's the bloody point? That is humongous. Five seconds of containing a fission reaction, which is what the sun does, with millions of degrees Celsius temperature, which melts just about everything on the planet, but be able to contain that for five seconds to develop power from it as a heat from heat source? That's humongous. The future, the Holy Grail, we're gonna see that by 2030. Same as we won't see the microwave power projection from solar panels in space by 2030. We got all the freaking technology. But you need need to get on with it.
Peter Reynolds 34:10
Well, I think that's a great place to end because we started talking about engineers. And we finished talking about engineers and yeah, the importance that they're going to play in basically getting this climate crisis under control. Geoff, I want to thank you so much for your expertise and insights.
Geoff Sheffrin 34:36
Can I have one small point?
Peter Reynolds 34:38
You know what, Geoff, this is your podcast, you can have as many points as you want.
Geoff Sheffrin 34:42
Just one more. My view is, we've got to act. Don't wait. And my closing comment would be for to all engineers and everybody that's no longer a denier. Movers make things happen. Everyone else is a spectator. So go out there and be a mover. Thank you, Peter. I appreciate your generosity and hosting this podcast.
Peter Reynolds 35:05
Well, listen, Geoff, thank you very much. And for those out there, we thank you for tuning in to this podcast, Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap. And Geoff Sheffrin is a professional engineer, that he is the co owner of OBK Technology and a principal at SEI. And we would actually like to hear from you out there. Because your energy, your questions, what interests you, is really what's going to drive this podcast. So if you're listening, please subscribe. Leave a review, you're going to be able to find us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. So please connect with us. We absolutely would love to hear from you. I'm your host, Peter Reynolds. More your moderator really? So let's call me the moderator and let's call Geoff the host. So I'm your moderator, Peter Reynolds. You've been listening to Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap and we'll see you next time.