 Hey, welcome to my lunch hour, Stan, the energy man here, Stan Osman from Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, part of D-bed in the state of Hawaii, trying to get Hawaii moving forward in clean transportation. So thanks to my show today, that may be apparent right now, that I don't have a guest with me today. That's one of the trials and tribulations of being a host here. If you don't corral that guest real early and they panic out on you on Thursday, sometimes you have to just go in alone. But I think I have some words for you this week and I'll make this a little bit different show, different kind of show, but hang with me to the end. I'm gonna try and pull it all together for you and give you maybe something more to think about than you normally think about during your lunch hour and your work week. I'm wearing my Pearl Harbor aloha shirt this week because this was a commemoration of the 75th year since the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. And as a military guy, I tend to look at a lot of things from military lands and I also translate as an energy guy, a lot of things and transpose energy onto a lot of military activities. And that's kind of what I'm gonna do today. I wanna look at the activities that we commemorated this week, putting them in perspective, especially in terms of energy. So I'll start off by saying that, first of all, less than 10% of the American population has any military background at all. And unfortunate because I spent 35 years in the military and that's a really, really rare opportunity to spend that much time focused on the military and doing military work. So the experience that I have is actually pretty broad and pretty deep. It goes to the Pentagon, it goes to commanding units, it goes to combat operations, it goes to US Pacific Command. I've had the opportunity to do a lot of different things. And because of those things, I kind of have a pretty interesting perspective on a lot of the economic impacts and energy impacts that affect our world today. So let's look back just for a few seconds on the attack of Pearl Harbor 75 years ago. You know, the US military understood that there was a lot going on in the world. Europe was in turmoil, Hitler was pretty much rampaging through Europe, but Japan was also rampaging through Asia. They were in China, they were in Southeast Asia. They were basically trying to secure energy. That's what we talk about on the show, energy. But they also had a new piece of technology that really hadn't been exposed yet, used in combat. And that was the aircraft carrier. And the aircraft carrier uses a lot of energy, but it allowed Japan to project power a quarter of the way around the world and basically dealt a surprise to the United States military. So after that attack on Pearl Harbor, it was a pretty big shock to the US military that that much devastation can happen. And they took note of this technology. It wasn't that the US didn't have a technology, we had aircraft carriers as well. In fact, it's fortunate that that day, our aircraft carriers weren't there, they weren't in Pearl Harbor. But the Japanese needed energy. That's what they went to war about. If you look at history, you'll see that Japan attacked the United States and Pearl Harbor specifically because they needed to secure energy in the Pacific. And when we told them we wouldn't sell them any more oil and any more energy, they looked for a way to secure it in the Pacific Rim themselves by taking over island nations and nations like Indonesia and Malaysia and Brunei that have the energy resources that they could control. So that was the impetus of their attack and also the means of their attack. They had energy. They made it all the way to Hawaii. They attacked Pearl Harbor and the rest is history. But there's three aspects to their attack that basically had an effect much longer in the war to their detriment. And those three things were, first of all, that those carriers that the US did have were not in port. And so the US had the ability to project that power back to Japan a lot quicker than they anticipated. Number two, the dry docks in Pearl Harbor weren't as severely damaged as they could have been. And so therefore a lot of the damage to the ships in Pearl Harbor were repaired because the dry docks were there and the shipyard facilities were able to repair the fleet. But the most critical, absolutely the most critical factor that they ended the attack with was they never attacked their fleet's reserves of oil and their energy source. So when it came to retaliating or exporting our power, or extending our power back into the Pacific, the one thing that allowed us to do that was we had our oil and our energy here in Hawaii that we could put on the ships and project the power back into the Pacific to confront the Japanese probably much sooner than they expected. So it all focuses around energy. And it's important for us to look at history as we review the future. We all know the rest of the history of World War II, how devastating it was, how much carnage there was, how many lives were lost in both Europe and the Pacific. And we all learned the lesson that war is not the kind of thing that you wanna have going on on your planet for your civilization. And so we've tried to find ways to avoid conflict, but in reality we haven't. We still have conflicts over energy. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, we've kind of focused on oil and coal for our energy sources. And much to the dismay of many folks who are really into clean environment, we're gonna be straddled with coal and oil as energy sources for a long time to come. They're gonna be around for a while. But that's no excuse for us not to start moving away from carbon-based fuels and burning, basically burning a valuable resource. And we should be looking at the technologies that we have today to expand our economy and build a better economy and create more jobs by using the renewable energies that we have the technology to harness now and put them into play. So the one thing that really kind of hampered the assumption of these better technologies, these better energy technologies was just the lack of the ability to store energy. If you think back on some of my past shows, I've actually shown a picture of the very first Porsche that was ever made. It wasn't a gasoline-powered Porsche. It was an electric Porsche. So why is it that so many of the electric cars that started the transportation sector just fell by the wayside and we ended up with internal combustion engines that use gasoline or alcohol or diesel? And the answer is energy storage, clean energy storage. Battery technology back at the turn of the century in the turn of the 20th century just was not technologically advanced enough to store electric energy and give you the transportation range or speed that people demanded. I mean, you could literally in those days drive a horse and buggy farther and faster than you could in an electric car. So what was the advantage of an electric car even though it was very powerful and could have had energy go much further and much faster. It couldn't compete with a horse and buggy but an internal combustion could even with less efficiency because you could store energy and you could store it and transport it easily if you stored it in gasoline or diesel. So that's where the problem came in. We didn't have a way to store energy efficiently but we do today. We have batteries today and there are battery vehicles that are very efficient and very good. Some have safety issues with flammability. We have to worry about the cleanliness of the mining operations and the assembly operations and the disposal operations. But that's where we've talked in the past about cradle to grave considerations for different technologies. But if we really, really want to we will overcome those challenges with batteries but there's other ways to do it as well. So let's talk a little bit about energy as a threat again. I said before that energy is still a threat in our theater, in our Pacific theater specifically and also in the Middle East as you see on the news. I think if you ask Admiral Harris, the commander of US Paycom about the things that keep him up at night near the top of that list will be some of the issues going on every day and you'll see him in the newspaper if you look on the Spratly Islands and what China calls the South China Sea I'll let you know that the rest of Southeast Asia calls it the East Sea because they don't even want to give China credit for being in that sea, let alone naming it after them. So if you look at the tensions between Taiwan and China, Vietnam and China, the Philippines and China, Japan and China, they all center around energy and they all center around oil energy and you go why is that? Well, these little islands, China doesn't want them because they're a tactical location that they need to do some military operation. When you have a piece of territory in the middle of the ocean and you can claim it as yours, you own a 200 mile economic zone around that island that gives you access to the resources there and the resources they want are oil. So all the countries in that nation are looking at the oil reserves in that region and in that 200 mile zone and they all want it. They all want it because they all need energy. So one of the biggest threats to security in the whole Pacific Rim is due to energy and it's the energy surrounding those islands. So that's one of the big things that I'd like to focus on today. If we really want to get past the threat of war around the world, but particularly in this theater and not repeat the problems that we had in World War II with Japan attacking us for lack of energy, then let's start looking at better ways to do our energy. We're coming up quickly on a break here. I'd like to take a quick break and we'll be back in a couple seconds and advance this thought a little bit further. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii exploring the world we live in, recognizing the changes around us and looking into the future of our lives together in these islands. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Hi, I'm Jay Fidel. That's Ted Ralston. You know, Ted is the host of Where the Road Leads. It shows every Friday from 4 to 5 p.m. It's about technology. It's about how people collaborating and solve problems with modern technology. It's where the road leads. We all know that. We should all be listening. Join us there, 4 to 5 p.m. every Friday. Now, what about that do you agree with? All of it. I knew we'd say that, Aloha. Say Aloha. Aloha. Good. Hello, and Aloha. My name is Raya Salter, and I am the host of Power of Hawaii, where Hawaii comes together to figure out how we're going to work towards a clean and renewable energy future. We have exciting conversations with all kinds of stakeholders, everyone who needs to come together to talk about renewable energy, be they engineers, advocates, lawyers, utility executives, musicians or artists to see how we can come together to make a renewable future. Tuesdays at 1 p.m. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man here on Friday. Two days after the commemoration of the attack on Pearl Harbor here in Hawaii. Back when Hawaii was a territory. So as we learn through history, and just a quick recap, there's a lot that revolves around energy today, and a lot of threats that still exist as we, I wouldn't want to say fight over energy, but try and stake claims to territories and land masses and undersea masses that have oil, the kind of energy that we tend to use most of today. But why do we do that? We talked a little bit before the break about using battery technology and maybe why it wasn't used initially, but the technologies come a long ways. Why are we still stuck using oil and internal combustion engines that are so inefficient when we have so many other choices? But today, I think presents an opportunity, especially right now with the change of administrations in the United States. If we take advantage of the opportunities we have for growth and more jobs and things like that, then we could take advantage of a shift in our energy policies and then be a shift away from oil and away from coal. Not that we would stop using oil and coal. Trust me, those are gonna be used for many years to come. There's no threat to coal miners. There's no threat to oil rigors. There's gonna be a need for oil and there's gonna be a need for coal for a long time to come. But we shouldn't be burning the coal and we shouldn't be burning the oil. We should be using those assets for other durable goods and things that we need and we should start looking at shifting our transportation sector and much of our grid sector to renewable energy, better energy storage, and cleaner energy. You know, there's not a country on this planet that lacks sunlight. I mean, you may have some cloudy days and you may have some cold climates that in their winter are dark all night and dark all day, like in Alaska in the wintertime. You don't get much sunlight, but where you don't have sunlight, you usually have wind. And in many places, you have water. You have water flowing freely and you don't have to build a dam nowadays to collect the energy from moving water. You can actually put turbines inside a stream and the fish can swim right by the turbines and still generate electricity without having to damage the environment. So why don't we start by building infrastructure in the United States and take the lead and start building an economy and building jobs, doing things with renewable energy to move ourselves forward. Now here in Hawaii, we have a unique opportunity. We have the opportunity to get off of imported fossil fuel, but many places on the mainland US, they already have hydroelectric power. They already have Texas, I believe, has 20% of their power generated by wind. Let's keep expanding those things and let's save the oil and the coal that we do harvest out of our terrestrial resources and do something else with them for manufacturing and control that. Because actually every country in today's time and with today's technology can produce their own energy off of sunlight, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric. There are so many ways, so many renewable ways to make electricity that virtually every country on the earth and every island nation in the Pacific can make their own energy, store it and use it. And if you could do that, you wouldn't have the Spratly Island disputes in the South China Sea. You wouldn't have people in the Middle East fighting over oil. You wouldn't have terrorists using oil revenues to support their operations. You would be creating more vivid economies and more thriving economies and better societies if we tried to move ourselves away from oil dependency and more to oil independent and renewable dependency where everybody has a stake in that game. The sunlight and the wind, hydroelectric, they don't have borders. You could find streams that run certain times of the year, but for the most part, there's no borders. There's certainly no borders in my favorite area, which is hydrogen. Every country has hydrogen. And if you could perform the storage with hydrogen, there's no reason that you couldn't be totally renewable in any country on the space of this earth. And maybe that should be our goal. I read a lot of books on energy and one of the books I read was called Lives Per Gallon. In that book, there's actually a quote that I've heard paraphrased several times and I don't have a quote written down, so I'll be paraphrasing it. But it basically says that we're gonna be on oil for a long time, but we didn't move out of the stone age because we ran out of stones and we're not gonna run out of oils. So we shouldn't just hesitate from moving out of the oil age just because we think we're gonna run out of oil. Let's move forward with the technology we have, the clean technology, and make this planet a better place to live and make our economies better by moving out of the oil dependency mode now and start looking at renewable energy. So let's talk a little bit about what we're trying to do now to get people to move that way. We're having massive discussions on climate change and how mankind is changing the climate and there's this big, I call it the taste great, less filling argument which is a zero-sum game argument on energy. It doesn't matter. The dinosaurs weren't killed by human beings. Climate changes, whether it's man made or not. So let's skip that argument altogether, quit trying to force people to do things with carbon credits and everything else and just commit ourselves to an economic move forward to change into a cleaner and better economy using renewable energy. That should be our impetus, not threatening people with ice caps going away and glaciers melting. That may or may not happen no matter what we do, particularly what we do in America because America has very little impact on the overall global climate compared to other bigger industrial countries coming up like India, China, many, many other countries. But we should lead the way. America should lead the way in clean energy and if we wanna really take a leadership role on this planet, which I think we should, we should be leading the way to clean energy. Not because we can't make our own oil and coal and find our own energy here, but because it's the right thing to do and it's economically the right thing to do to generate our better economy more jobs by going with clean energy. So maybe we should look at back at history and take seriously the lessons that we learned in World War II. And really it's hard for us, especially the average American nowadays, to really understand war and what it's like. It's not as hard for a military person who's been there or who works with it or who studies it pretty heavily. But war is not something that generals like to do and war is not something that's good for any country or any economy. I mean, basically you take assets and you destroy them. That's not good for any economy. So why don't we try and avoid the threat of war by looking at a better way to run our energy? And as a military guy, you know, I take great pride in the fact that, you know, we endeavor to avoid war at every cost. War is not good for the folks in the military, by the way, in case you haven't noticed. It's kind of hazardous. Takes you away from your family for a long time. Not something that military folks like to do, but military people don't go to war because they feel like it. They go to war because they're told to go to war by their political leaders. So our political leaders need to have the fortitude to build a strong military for the United States so that we have the force there to uphold and defend ourselves and not be taken lightly. But that doesn't mean we have to use it. And if we're going to use it, we should use it deliberately and with great purpose to an end and finish what we start. But we shouldn't have to go there. There's really no need for us to go there anymore. But let's build a strong economy, build a strong military, build a strong renewable portfolio and renewable energy storage portfolio that's clean and transportable and helps our economy. Let's build that for the future generations. Let's build that to do our part for a cleaner environment and for climate change in case we do have an impact of some kind. Just make the change and lead the way. I think America was made to lead the way. And I think America has made a huge impact on our world in both World Wars, certainly, in technology revolutions, of course. And I would say, even in industrial and capital expansion and growth, other countries look at the United States and they may give us a hard time. But they're looking at us and really admiring us that we can change in administration the way we recently did during this last election and not have a bloody coup or not have people so distraught that we can't function. And I think that's an amazing thing about America. It's a resilient country. It's got great founding principles. It treats individuals equally under the law. That's the critical part. We're individuals created equally under the law. The law treats everybody whether you're poor or rich the same or that should treat everybody under the law the same. And we should honor that and we should remember that, especially on weeks like this, and start looking at how we can contribute. So let's go forward. Let's look to the future. Let's look to using our clean energy resources, our sunlight, our wind, our hydro. Let's store in batteries the best we can, improve our batteries. Let's store in hydrogen. Let's start converting to cleaner transportation, cleaner electronic grids, learn to complement with energy storage on the grid that can help grid independence and grid stabilization, absorb more of the renewable energy that we have available to us right now. Let's help build our economy, build it back, and let's lead the nation and lead the world in clean energy. I'm gonna wrap it up a little bit short here and I'm gonna call it off because I think you're probably looking at me like, where's this guy going? But I really sincerely mean, there's a lot we should be doing, could be doing and I think the United States should be taking the moral high ground and leading the clean energy revolution in this country and in this world and pushing us forward in clean energy. As the reminders of this week have left us, alternative is just not acceptable. Our militaries today are so capable, I don't think we could go through another full blown war and I think everyone recognized that. So let's take the initiative to clean everything up. Thanks for being with us today. I'll see you next week and next week we actually have a really great guest coming to us from California to talk about what California's doing to take those steps to clean up their environment and clean up and go with more renewable energy in their transportation sector and in their grids. So until next week, Stout Energy Man signing off.