Hope for the Future

They say hope is not a strategy, and in the face of climate change and its catastrophic impact on our planet, hope can be in short supply. But for every climate denier or fence-sitting politician, there are people, young and old, actively working to combat this crisis. From investments in green energy to advancements in technology, the battle to save Mother Nature is in full force. But is it enough to win the war?

In this special year-end episode, hosts Peter Reynolds and Geoff Sheffrin reflect on the last 11 episodes and what more needs to be done. They are joined by Eddie Dearden, a former chemical engineer in the coal industry. Eddie shares his transition from the fossil fuel industry to sustainable architecture, aiming to make amends for his contribution to carbon emissions. 

Hope may not be a strategy, but it very well may be the fuel we need to power a sustainable future.

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Transcript

PETER REYNOLDS: Hi, I'm Peter Reynolds and welcome to Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap with GEOFF Sheffrin. As we come to the last episode this year, we wanted to talk about hope for the future. Over the last 11 episodes, we've discussed all kinds of catastrophes Mother Nature is experiencing due to climate change, from wildfires and hurricanes to droughts and melting ice caps. It can all seem pretty overwhelming. But we've also shed light on the people, young and old, who are making a difference. People who are on the front lines of the war against climate change. And someone who's a general in that war, or at least a first lieutenant, is professional engineer, climate activist, and shouter from rooftops, GEOFF Sheffrin. GEOFF, how are you doing?

 GEOFF SHEFFRIN: Peter, I'm doing well. As usual, you come up with these superlative introductions, which totally slay me, but never mind. Let's just say I'm doing well, and let's see whether we can continue our message of hope and inspiration for all of the people listening.

PETER REYNOLDS: Absolutely, Geoff. And, you know, I know it's so easy to go down that rabbit hole of doom and gloom, because there's a lot to be doom and gloomy about. But there is hope out there, isn't there?

GEOFF SHEFFRIN: Yes, quite a lot of it. If you read the most recent IEA report from the United Nations, we really are making progress. This is the first time that we're well over a trillion dollars investment in green energy around the world, which is now higher. It's exceeding the fossil investments for the first time ever. So, you know, there is hope there. The point is, my view, we're not moving fast enough. The fossil part of it is not declining the way it needs to in order to get us to net zero. And we'll be talking about not only net zero, but we've got to get past net zero. So yes, there's hope. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of money being poured into it, a lot of good initiatives. But we're not there yet, and we have a long way to go, and we've got to get our political leadership up to speed on this, which is one of the big challenges. As we've said before, give me my budget of $80 trillion and we might start this program working.

PETER REYNOLDS: Well, you've talked about, and we've definitely talked about the three key things. We've talked about the money, which seems to be moving in the right direction. We've talked about technology, the second thing we need, which really seems to be moving forward with a lot of advancements in technology to help fight the climate crisis. And of course, political leadership, which can often be lacking, but we are starting to see some changes there. GEOFF, I'd like to add one more thing. We've mentioned three, I'd like to mention a fourth one, and that's will. People who just have the sheer force of will, the audacity to see something that needs changing and go out and try to change it. And I think our guest really fits that description.

GEOFF SHEFFRIN: Yes, I would agree with you.

PETER REYNOLDS: And that's Eddie Dearden and Eddie is a former chemical engineer in the coal industry who left to co-found Global Energy Network or Global Network Energy Resource, my apologies, a company that specializes in sustainable home design. Eddie, welcome to the podcast.

EDDIE DEARDEN: Thanks for having me on Peter.

PETER REYNOLDS: Great to be here. I think I said Eddie Dreirden as opposed to Eddie Dearden. So my apologies for that. You're not dreary at all, right, Eddie? This is positive.

EDDIE DEARDEN: It's Eddie Dearden and the company is Global Network Agency Resource Incorporated or just simply NARA Inc. Thanks, Eddie. Appreciate that.

PETER REYNOLDS: Eddie, maybe you could start just by telling our audience a little bit about yourself and your journey from being a chemical engineer in the coal industry to co-founding a company that specializes in sustainable home design.

EDDIE DEARDEN: Sure. Yeah, so I studied chemical engineering in Australia at the University of Queensland. Growing up in Australia, obviously I knew next to nothing about climate change. So off I went and studied chemical engineering, which in hindsight I now realize basically was just training for a career in the fossil fuel industry. I have so many friends that are still working in Africa and the States in fossil oil, fossil gas. I had a very successful career, you would say, and I visited fossil coal mines in Mozambique, in Chile, Colombia, of course Australia. I still remember very clearly the day that I quit my career in fossil coal. I sat down and did a little calculation of how many emissions were caused by the coal projects, the 17 coal mines that I'd personally visited. You add up all that carbon dioxide and it amounts to 2% of humanity's historical emissions I figured out an additional calculation at some point, which was that buildings, the construction industry is responsible for 40% of emissions on the demand side. And I figured that coal is responsible for 35 or so percent of emissions on the supply side. So this was how I was going to make my amends. And so I retrained in sustainable architecture, got into sustainable architecture, and now my company leads architectural projects. We call ourselves Sustainable Home Design, though, and we've developed a full sustainable home design formula. And it's just incredibly fulfilling work and I'm really happy that 10 years ago I made the decision to transition my career and now I work in my own community and every day I can see the emissions reductions of my work.

PETER REYNOLDS: I mean, that's an incredible story, Eddie. You know, I mean, I would say congratulations in terms of just having the bravery, you know, to, to, to move on. And, and I can imagine that could be challenging. GEOFF, get your thoughts on this, you know, where you have, you know, young engineers, you know, coming up from, from university, you know, and they have that opportunity for their first job. They're maybe not thinking sustainability or the environmental impact when they're taking that first job.

GEOFF SHEFFRIN: Yeah, I think you're quite right. It's absolutely the way I would have seen it because when I first graduated, I became an industrial engineer working for a large American company over in England. So, you know, lots of useful things that I did, but sustainability was not part of the agenda at that time. And as time went on, you know, it became more and more so. And towards the end of my corporate life, it still wasn't heavily into the agenda, but at least there was a vague recognition of it. And ever since I've been in the consulting field, it's only in the last couple of decades that I got more and more interested. And it's probably the last five years or so that I've ramped things up to the point where they are now. But the young people are much more focused on that these days than they ever were in the past. And I think that is critically useful. And I think we have an awful lot of good-willed, scientifically-based, engineering-based people that are helping push these agendas forward. And they are critical. And the information that we get suggests we're making progress. We're far from where we need to be. My fear is that the global leadership won't get us there quickly enough. But I think we have the biggest ally of all in helping all of us, including the younger generation that's really pushing, And that's Mother Nature. Her two by four is getting larger, and she's now putting a nail into the end of it in order to beat us over the head. And I think if 2023 was bad in terms of droughts, heat waves, wildfires, I think 2024 will be worse. And I think we as a species might start to wake up, the global leadership I'm referring to, we might start to wake up when Mother Nature has wiped out a billion or two. We ramped things up for COVID and she only killed about 7 or 8 million people there because we were on top of it. But we were on top of it. That was the difference. We're not on top of the climate crisis in a leadership sense. We're still doodling around. It's Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns. We're doing well at that.

PETER REYNOLDS: I definitely want to talk more about sustainable design, Eddie, and the work of your company. But I'd like to start where I first learned about you was in a CBC television or radio show that called you a man on a semantic mission. That's what they said. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

EDDIE DEARDEN: Absolutely. It really goes with what GEOFF was just saying there about mitigation. Mitigation being, you know, trying to survive in an increasingly hostile climate. And so my personal experience of that was the heat dome of 2021 in the Pacific Northwest of America. So It was this heat dome of catastrophic proportions. It killed 600 people in Vancouver City, most of whom died within their own homes. And so where I live in Whistler, the temperature reached 44 degrees Celsius. The previous record high temperature was 36 degrees Celsius. I have a thermal imaging camera and I could see surfaces everywhere were above 70 degrees Celsius. It was just outrageously hot. Many people in Whistler had to move out of their homes into air-conditioned hotels or sleep in their basements. My house was 30 degrees plus at midnight and I had a very small child and you're supposed to cool down at night and it was really scary. Buoyed by this, I just, you know, over the subsequent months, I was like, no, you know, I thought we had a long time to solve the climate crisis. But, you know, now I realize how dangerous this literally lethal heatwave has just struck my province. I'm going to, you know, in buildings in British Columbia, all the emissions come from natural gas. So I, you know, came into work and started telling my clients what I thought I was supposed to say, don't use natural gas. And given my background as a fossil chemical engineer, they just started saying the most ridiculous stuff back to me. I still remember those very early responses. I'd be like, don't use natural gas. And they'd say like, oh, but it's green, it's good, or it's natural, it comes from under the ground. And I'm like, what are you guys talking about? So pretty quickly, actually, I discovered this other term, fossil gas. And I took a deep, deep dive into the semantics. I'm like, no, this gas isn't natural. They use hydraulic fracturing to get it out of the ground, which is where they drill down and blow the frack out of the ground with a host of poisonous chemicals, poisons the groundwater. The gas comes up. It has to be processed. It's full of sulfur and arsenic and lead and even radon, like the equipment they use to process the gas that comes out of the ground, literally becomes radioactive. They don't get all of it out. The gas that arrives at people's homes has still got benzene, which I was quite familiar with benzene because I learned all about the fossil oil industry and engineering, and benzene's a very, it's a known carcinogen. Oh my goodness, it just goes on and it's not natural. It's fossil. Fossil means carbon that was sequestered from the terrestrial earth above the ground and was covered by silt. over the course of millions of years, and that's carbon that has been taken out of the biosphere. Whether it's fossil coal, fossil oil, or fossil gas, you're digging that carbon up and burning it, and it's the reintroduction of that fossil carbon to the atmosphere. that's causing the climate crisis. So it was quite a simple leap for me, just to say this is semantically fossil gas. I started using fossil gas with all my clients. I'd say, don't use fossil gas. And they'd say, duh, obviously I'm not using that. So we had great success, you know, like 95% of our clients took our advice not to use fossil gas. And then as a result of that, I was like, wow, this is really effective. I'm just going to circle back to this misunderstanding around the term natural gas. And so I developed a citizen science experiment. I took a voice recorder and I went up to 10 strangers around, you know, the experiment was basically, I would go up to someone who I'd never met before. in a public place and just ask them, do you know what natural gas is? And I'd let them respond, I'd prompt them, I'd do everything I could to just be like, come on, tell me what it is. And I found that six of those 10 people could not identify that natural gas was a fossil fuel. Three or four of them said things like, yeah, it's green, it's good. One of them was like, it's been a long time since I did science class. So, you know, these people have no idea what natural gas is. They're not making the connection that it's a fossil fuel. The term natural is inspiring all sorts of wonderful ideas of nature in their head. And meanwhile, they've been subjected to this targeted advertising greenwashing campaign by all the fossil gas companies in North America, really. So, yeah, fossil gas.

PETER REYNOLDS: What has been the reaction, because I know you were speaking with the mayor of Whistler and trying to reach out. What has been the reaction?

EDDIE DEARDEN: You know, there's many layers to it. You just need to say fossil gas as much as you can. It's such a beautiful word, fossil gas. And I find one out of 10 people, it just clicks with them instantly. And the first time they hear it, I'm never saying the term natural gas ever again. Then there's the other five out of 10 people, they're open to it. They're like, wow. And then a week later, they'll come around. And then there's the other four, I'm hoping is the minority, but people are digging their heels, like the Honorable Mayor Jack Crompton of Whistler. And he's like, no, we're definitely not using the term fossil gas and just continues to call it natural gas. So I don't want to say it's all, you know, the older generation that refused to open their minds to it, but definitely, you know, it was a couple of older councillors that were really spearheading the resistive push in Whistler.

PETER REYNOLDS: Well, it's different. It's something new that, that can't be good.

EDDIE DEARDEN: Sometimes you have to let it do a little, I guess.

PETER REYNOLDS: No, it, uh, GEOFF, what are your thoughts on, on this idea of, you know, again, it might be semantics, but it is also greenwashing.

GEOFF SHEFFRIN: Well, if you don't use the term the way Eddie has described it, then yes, natural gas is a nice term for greenwashing. And as Eddie points out, 90% of the population don't have a clue that it is actually the least offensive from a carbon generation viewpoint of the three. Oil is worse. Coal is much worse. But gas is right there as well. You know, gas is about 200 times as bad as the energy we can generate from wind, solar, hydro, or nuclear. And so, you know, I happen to say I am a piece of the older generation, but I got on board with the climate activism stuff and so on, you know, many years ago. And as you know, I've been ranting and raving about it much more so in the last two or three years, including the podcast, because whilst OSPI was walking me down the path, you know, we need to get everybody engaged. And I find, you know, when I look at our network, Peter, we actually, we have access to over 7,000 people on our podcast now. I'm trying to find ways of engaging that more. This is very useful for Eddie in many respects, but it's also useful for you and me and what we're trying to message by way of the climate crisis. Fossil is fossil. I don't care how you greenwash it and dress it up. The alliance out in Alberta, the Pathways Alliance, they do a wonderful job of marketing their approach to things. and they're talking about carbon sequestering at source, great. But carbon sequestering at source tackles less than 10% of the CO2 pollution problem that the use of the material generates in the marketplace. So yeah, okay, with carbon sequestering, yeah, you're carbon sequestering this piece. What about the rest of it? So yeah, that's the sort of stuff that gets me upset, annoyed, ranting and raving, whatever you want to call it.

EDDIE DEARDEN: You've touched on another thing there, GEOFF, that the fossil fuel industry, the greenwashing, absolutely. I mean, on a fundamental thermodynamics basis, carbon capture is just, that's just destroying energy, all that. But to bring back to the semantics, I really think these companies have Um, with respect to the term natural gas and the greenwashing, they've been very clever, you know, like they're, they're doing a lot of lobbying and that, you know, there's a Twitter account in British Columbia that shows you that fossil gas companies are like literally talking to provincial politicians every, you know, like every week, every, like multiple times a week. And, um, you know, you're like, oh, that you instinctively know that's kind of bad. But, you know, through this semantic discovery, I've kind of discovered, like, one of the things that they've done is that they've embedded natural gas, the greenwashing term, into multiple pieces of provincial legislation. So, and I have the It's just so blatant in this one piece of legislation. It's called the Carbon Tax Act of British Columbia. And like many pieces of legislation in BC, it has a definitions section. And they have here a definition for natural gas, means natural gas, whether or not the natural gas, A, occurs naturally or results from processing, or B, contains gas liquids. So they have legally dismantled the term natural. It's natural. So here's what, you know, as a chemical engineer, I'm like, okay, wait, so you blow the frack out of the ground, you get all the raw gas, natural gas. You get natural gas out of the ground, you put it into a petroleum refinery, and out the end, you still get natural gas. It's just like, well, all of a sudden, you're like, well, natural gas is exactly as ridiculous a term as natural gasoline, natural jet fuel, natural bunker oil in an international ship.

GEOFF SHEFFRIN: Absolutely. That's a good point.

PETER REYNOLDS: Eddie, I'd love to, uh, to shift gears and have you put on your current hat as it were, and, and talk to us, um, a little bit about sustainable design, uh, for those who maybe don't know what sustainable design is and sort of why it's important in today's world.

EDDIE DEARDEN: Right, yeah. I always say that sustainability is a journey, because that's really what it has been for us. I started my company, Nara Inc. Sustainable Home Design, in 2016. And back then, what sustainability was all about for me was passive house. I'm going to design the most energy efficient buildings possible. And as a result, there's a house that we designed in 2017 that I just I cover my eyes because I've subsequently learned that despite being very high energy performance, it was all of the insulation products in that entire house were made out of fossil foam insulation with extremely high emissions. So despite having low operational emissions, that house probably had such high upfront emissions of construction that it'll take a hundred years to pay that off on the operational savings. So yeah, but despite that, definitely passive house is number one. Everything has to be adaptation and mitigation. Otherwise, you call anything otherwise would be maladaptive. So low energy passive house designs, super insulated, super airtight, no thermal bridges, heat recovery, ventilation, and then the modern technological advance is add a heat pump, to have super efficient heating and cooling, and the record heat waves like the BC heat dome show that we're going to need cooling to survive the record heat waves of the future. And we've got to get that from green sources. Yeah, exactly. So that's all electric buildings is what we think we figured out. And then it's on the energy supplier, or unless you generate renewables on site, to make sure that you've got the greenest possible supply of energy. So fossil gas is a complete no-no. doubly so because we have in our contract with any new client a couple of clauses that say we told you not to use fossil gas, it's unhealthy and we believe it'll be cut off in the years ahead. So our stance as a company is if any of our clients like those early 2021 clients decide to use fossil gas against our recommendation that you cannot sue us in the future if Eddie turns out right and they just shut down the fossil gas supply to your town. So yeah, we take it very seriously.

PETER REYNOLDS: We've talked about, again, in terms of Passive House and people building a new house and making some positive choices for the environment. What about the person who's currently in an older home or even perhaps that person who's living in an apartment and wants to make a difference, wants to have an impact? Can you offer some suggestions on what they can do?

EDDIE DEARDEN: Absolutely. That's called retrofitting for a climate emergency, basically. Almost every house has to be retrofitted to be survivable, because when the heat dome 2.0 and 3.0 come, you know, it's people are going to die in their house. You need to shelter from these heat waves somewhere. So your house needs to be built to a near passive, not necessarily passive house certified, but just generally following the principles built to a very low energy. Otherwise it will be impossible to cool. You know, having in some sort of off grid resilient solar, renewable energy on site, plus a battery. You need a battery. If you don't have a battery, you can have solar panels on the roof, but you won't be able to power your house during a heatwave. So these are all things that could be retrofitted. You can retrofit the insulation. You can definitely do fuel switching. So if you've got fossil gas in your house, you can rip that bad boy out and put it in a heat pump. It's going to be That's going to reduce your energy, reduce your greenhouse gases, and then it's going to provide resiliency because now you've got cooling in a heatwave. So that's adaptation and mitigation going hand-in-hand. I'm more on the residential small scale, four stories or less, but I understand that retrofitting towers is a very trendy thing to do. Retrofitting and renovating and making use of any existing structure is, in general, very climate friendly, because you just save a huge amount of materials. But yeah, retrofitting towers, because a lot of the fatalities during the heat wave in Vancouver were in towers. It's kind of interesting, I think in a lot of cases they can even just go up the outside of the tower and add insulation and often the decks are big thermal bridges so you see these retrofits of towers and they'll chop off all the decks as part of it because that'll make it much less heat loss and again that at least gives you the capability of cooling it. Whether big or small, retrofitting for the climate emergency, giving thought to how much temperatures may rise in your area, and then reducing the energy demand, getting off fossil fuel heating systems, and then looking far, far ahead, you're like, well, maybe the most likely time for the electrical grid to go down is during the record heatwave when everyone switches on their air conditioning all of a sudden and potentially overloads the power grid. So if you've got solar panels on your roof, You got a battery in your garage and then you actually need to, it's very straightforward, but you just need to do it the right way is you call it like a resiliency circuit. So that's like you make sure that your heat pump, you know, maybe you have a cool room in your house, whatever it is like. You know, if you've got a jacuzzi, your jacuzzi is not on the resiliency circuit so that if the worst happens and suddenly you're in a catastrophic heat wave, you can just turn off everything in your house and your solar panels and battery will keep your house cool. I had a thought to share with you, Peter. I love the name of your podcast, Mother Nature. My daughter's always talking about Mother Nature. I've come up with a… I think you call it a philosophy of government? People talk about capitalism, communism, socialism, whatever. I did some research and I came up with what I think is the, you know, a good system that we could maybe transition to in the years ahead. I call it ecocentric futurism. It's based on sort of indigenous knowledge and, you know, because we're fortunate we've got the local indigenous people, the Lilwaru to the north and the Squamish to the south here in Whistler. And just everything I read and engage with indigenous cultures is how they, and I even see this in the, you know, the band councils. Unlike our local municipal government here in Whistler, the Lilwat people are like making decisions for like 100, 200 years into the future in their planning. And so ecocentric futurism, taking mother nature, you know, taking plant-based nature solutions, and then applying to sort of the indigenous perspective of seven generations. And it just quite simply comes to your ecocentric futurism. You just try and figure out what that term means and use that as, that's what I use as my guiding principle.

PETER REYNOLDS: That's fantastic. Eddie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

EDDIE DEARDEN: Eddie, thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

PETER REYNOLDS: GEOFF, any final thoughts or takeaways of your own?

GEOFF SHEFFRIN: No, I think Eddie's covered a lot of points. And, you know, I think it's totally consistent with our theme of trying to push the narrative and seeing how much more we can get people engaged on this, whether it's domestically or industrially, whether it's me through the OSPI Climate Crisis Task Force. or you and me through the podcast, bringing in people like Eddie to wave the flag. We've had Matthew Meiringer on nuclear. We've had Dave Tindall from the Darlington Power Station for small modular reactors and so on. We're pushing all of the buttons because In the final analysis, the big picture requires more sustainable energy, whether that is wind, solar, hydroelectric, or nuclear. Eventually, it is decades away yet, we will have fusion. And when fusion comes, that will be utopian. But right now, we've got to double the size of the grid. We've got to increase its sustainability. And part of what I'm pushing on the Climate Crisis Task Force is we need to engage the indigenous community more. So it's an initiative that I've now launched on the Climate Crisis Task Force, because we've got to persuade the provincial government to do that. So, you know, this task force, Eddie, is a little bit blinkered because it's Ontario, because it's the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, but it doesn't matter. What we do is developable and is also marketable from an economic development viewpoint for Ontario and therefore we can spread it more widely into the world. SMRs were one of the early users of that and we've gone from one that's currently in progress to another three that are about to be done. So, you know, the people may be anti-nuclear in some areas, but even that's dying down. So my view, Peter, in a summary is we are doing all the right things. We haven't yet turned the corner. We are certainly better equipped now than we were a year or two back in terms of sustainability and doing the things that will get us to the future. We just still have far too much of the fossildom around the globe. And, you know, when you look at China still building coal fired power plants, and so many jurisdictions, including a couple here in Canada, that still mine coal for sale, you know, when we just got to get off, we've got to get off all fossil fuels, we won't get off all of them. You know, we do need oil for many, many things beyond just the heating applications, we need it for lubrications and chemicals, right? We certainly do not need coal for anything. And it's the first one we have to get off. And so, until we see some global leadership, making that happen, and then global leadership in terms of the green side of the equation, circumventing and overpowering the fossil side of the equation, that's when we start making real progress. Meanwhile, I come back to my usual premise. Mother Nature doesn't give a crap and she's going to keep beating us over the head. And my only fear is my hope that it'll get so much worse that we'll actually wake up and do something about it.

PETER REYNOLDS: Well, GEOFF, thank you very much. And I think this is a fantastic last episode for the year to really kind of summarize a lot of the stuff we've been talking about, but also looking to the future and looking at hope. And there is a lot of hope out there. So once again, thank you to Eddie for joining us and GEOFF for being here. And of course, thank you to our audience. As we say every episode without you, there'd be no reason to be here. So please be sure to like, subscribe, share with those people in your life that might not be aware of these things. And yes, and of course, leave a comment because we might not agree on everything and sometimes we might not agree on anything, but we love hearing from you. Because it's this kind of debate that's going to move the climate crisis issue forward and eventually get it solved. So for my guests and GEOFF, I'm Peter Reynolds. You've been listening to Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap, and we'll see you next time.