 And thank you for joining us here on likeable science on think tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen, and please you can be with us here on a nice Friday afternoon. With me today in the think tech studios is Richard Wallgrove, a policy director for Blue Planet Foundation. Thanks for being here Richard. Thanks for having me. Great to have you on board here. As regular viewers know, likeable science is all about how science is indeed likeable. Science should not be relegated to ivory towers or stuck away in a corner or should not be viewed as something we're scared of, but should be embraced by everyone because it's a part of everyone's everyday lives. And Richard works with Blue Planet Foundation, and Blue Planet Foundation really makes that come true. They really help us understand how science is part of our food and life, right? That's one of the things we work on. Excellent, excellent. So Richard, you have rather odd background in the sense that you started out to be a scientist, sort of it sounds like you at least got trained as an undergraduate. You did some graduate work in science, you taught science, but... But, yeah, but I mean I love science and I'd say it doesn't start with school. I come from my grandfather was a chemist, my dad was a chemical engineer. I only had one choice when I went to college. It was I would study chemistry. And so I've always loved love science. I taught science, I taught chemistry after I finished my undergraduate degree. I decided to come back, actually came to Hawaii to study chemical oceanography at the University of Hawaii, the best place in the world to study oceanography. Sure. But at some point I decided, yeah, I didn't want to be a scientist. I didn't want to be in the lab all day long. I wanted to go and do something about all this sort of scientific principles I thought about. And so I shifted and I went to law school, which was... And you did very well in law school. You were editor of your law review or something and graduated summa cum laude and... Did all the things you were supposed to do. Indeed, indeed. And so tell me first, what is it that you really sort of are passionate about Blue Planet? That's a long list, but to put it into its shortest format, the reason I'm passionate about the work we do at Blue Planet is that I'm passionate about sustainability. The idea that no matter where we live or what we do or what we enjoy to do with our spare time or our work, that in the long run everything we do has to be sustainable. Anything that reduces a resource faster than that resource is being replenished is something we can't do forever and it leaves the next generation worse off than the current generation. So at Blue Planet our mission is clean energy. We want 100% renewable energy around the world. And so energy is a big part of what we do. It's a big part of any sustainable solution. That's what really makes me passionate about it. At the same time I have to say coming out of graduate school where I studied climate markers, the idea of climate change to me is pretty scary. It's something that we all need to think about in very real terms. And so Blue Planet is actually trying to do something about climate change by changing our whole energy culture. Sure, right. I was going to say that the energy use and climate change are deeply and inextricably linked is indeed our carbon-based fuel economy that has really contributed massively now to the rapidly changing climates. Yeah, so this is great. And the idea of sustainability, of course, is beautifully suited to islands, right? Because on an island, being a small constrained area, you see much more quickly that your supply is limited. There are only X number of trees on an island and only Y amount of water. And you have to shepherd your resources carefully. A big continent that's not nearly as clear. Right, and this is part of why at Blue Planet Foundation, our mission to clear the path for clean energy is a global mission. But our action is pretty much local. We work here in Hawaii because it's our home, but it's also a perfect place to work on this issue. Just as you said, we can draw a box around Hawaii and we know exactly how much energy comes into that box and how much energy goes out of that box. And if the equation doesn't balance, we've got a problem. Yeah, exactly. There's lots of interesting complementary work going on with that now, too. There's a beautiful new EPSCORE project at UH doing the same thing with the groundwater, which actually, they don't know how much groundwater is around. They do know how much they pump out, but they don't know how much really comes in or where it flows and so now they're trying to make sense of all that in a big five-year project. Again, nice parallel to the work you're doing. So one of the things you do, I mean, Blue Planet does a lot of different things while I know they've done light bulb exchange programs and even a refrigerator exchange program they were talking about at one point, but they also get in and do direct education kinds of things. You were telling me a little bit earlier about a student energy summit. So what was that all about? Yeah, so some context. I like alliteration. At Blue Planet, we like alliteration. So we try to break our work up into three buckets. They're all A's. So the three A's for us are advocacy, action, and awareness. So everything we do fits into one of those buckets or more than one of those buckets. The student energy summit we put into our awareness bucket. This is making sure that people understand both the urgency of our energy situation and our addiction to fossil fuels and then making sure folks understand the solutions that are out there and the sort of the changes that are making Hawaii a leader in this realm. So that educational or awareness work happens at every level. Everybody, myself included, I think it has room to be educated. The student energy summit focuses on students, a very traditional educational group. And our idea is let's bring in students from across the entire state, all of whom will have a different perspective, a different background. Let's bring them all into one place for a day or two days. And let's do a day on energy. Let's see what the students know about energy. Let's teach them what we think we know about energy. And then the event or the summit ends with a really intensive session on engineering and so design thinking. And we get the students to give us their best ideas on energy solutions. I think we have a photo up on the background here. There they are. Showing all the students, very enthusiastic. Excellent. Yeah, that's great. And a huge crowd there. How many students, roughly? Last year we had, I think, around 120 students. We're looking to grow it this year. Last year was the first year. It was our first inaugural student summit. And then this year maybe we'll grow it a bit more. We're going from one day last year to a two-day curriculum this year. So yeah, it was such a success. I learned so much from having the students there that it's a program we're definitely going to continue. Yeah, now the students are always wonderful. They'll ask you some seemingly innocent questions. It's like, oh, good point. Questions and solutions. After the student energy summit, we do a design challenge where if any student has attended the summit, they're eligible to go and gather up a team back in their community and come up with their best energy solution, submit it to us. And last year a group of, I think, five students from Kauai submitted to us a solution on how to use duckweed, an invasive species. As an energy source, they were the winners. They got a scholarship that they got to share amongst themselves. So yeah, the students ask great questions and they also have great ideas. Yeah, yeah. It's wonderful. They're not often as constrained as I'm thinking. They have not learned what can't be done yet. And it sounds like some of the blue planet leadership has that same issue. I think that's accurate. The goal of this 100% renewables in Hawaii by 2045, that's an audacious goal. There are lots of ways to look at that. So yes, I think it feels audacious. On the other hand, 2045 is a long way away. We'd like that to happen much sooner. And that legal target so far is just electricity. We also have our transportation piece to think about. So I would like to set some truly audacious goals irrespective of what the law says. I think we can get to this sustainable energy system sooner rather than later. And there's wonderful new technologies evolving all the time about this. The folks at University of Illinois in Chicago just have developed this artificial leaf, basically, that takes sunlight and some fairly simple compounds and produces essentially a liquid fuel from it. And does it at about 10% efficiency, which is double what plants do. So that's tremendous. It's a tricky area to keep up with in terms of the solutions side of things. The basic science is happening at a breakneck pace and that's becoming engineering at a breakneck pace. And then it's being implemented through policy solutions and things at a breakneck pace. It's exciting to see what disruptions in the next three, eight, ten years we'll see in the energy space. Yes, exactly. I mean, just the whole shift in cars moving to electric-based cars now and just at a phenomenally rapid rate. But let's talk about this idea that the islands should be in the lead at this. It seems, in a sense, islands, it's a very traditional idea, right? Islands have always been sustainable. I mean, for eons and eons, all these islands basically had to be sustainable. They had no choice. They either self-sustained or they died out in populations. But we now have hundreds of years, well, a couple hundred years of history of them, of them being essentially having sort of this constant input of material, energy, et cetera. So we're breaking, sort of trying to break a sort of habit in a sense, right? I think that there are lots of reasons why islands are the right place to lead this energy transformation. I mean, one of them, going back to climate change, is that there are many islands around the globe that are today feeling the impacts of climate change more than perhaps somewhere in the middle of a continent. Their report came out earlier this year about islands and the Solomon Islands that are actually disappearing because of the high wash of the waves and sea level rise. So islands are the head of this, because they have to be, is one reason, because they're just sort of good places to be able to measure what the problem is and come up with solutions on a scale that makes sense. And then there's the history, I think you're right. I think that there is a... Certainly we feel it here in Hawaii and talking to folks from other islands, like all the folks that are here this week we know there is a sort of, I think, a community sense that sustainability is an important thing because of our geographical barriers. Exactly, exactly. The Hawaiians saying the island is the canoe, the canoe is the island, that recognition that we're all in this little boat together. And basically, of course, Blue Planet's global looks as, basically, the globe is just a slightly bigger canoe. We only have one planet. Our planet is an island in itself. Yeah, exactly. And this idea of sustainability in terms of energy, I mean, it fits very neatly with the work I'm doing in terms of water. And these islands are, again, low islands particularly are facing increasing water crises because as the sea level rises, their freshwater lenses get narrower and smaller as they get overwashed by the king tides. Their freshwater lens, again, gets ruined by the saline. As climate changes and the droughts get longer, they need to gather more rainwater ahead of time and store it better and treat it better. So I see a tremendous parallel there. And I think we can see that parallel both on the problem side and the solution side if we want. I think sort of very traditionally in that context, somebody might say, well, we can desalinate water. That happens today. That's a technology that exists. It's very energy intensive. It would be very, very expensive to do here in our current energy paradigm desalination on a large scale. On the solutions side of things, I mean, integrating energy and water is a whole lot of sense. Around the world there's pumped hydro. This is a way of storing energy. Rather than having one big reservoir, you've got two, one at a high elevation and one at a low elevation. And you can use that to store your energy, store your renewable energy and make your whole energy system work. So making all of that fit together, that's what sustainability means. Yeah. We've got a little spin-off project that I have. I have high school students in Majro now building passive solar stills to dump in six or eight gallons of seawater in the morning and get about a half a gallon of fresh water out at the end of the day. You know, it's not huge, but it may be the difference between life and death at some point for somebody in that kind of situation. Every family's set up ten of these and they're cheap and easy to make. You could really get a substantial amount of drinking water and needs taken care of for an extended family. And using an essentially inexhaustible and free supply of energy, the sun. Right. You know, that's, of course, that the beauty of shifting to more and more solar stuff is solar energy is particularly in the tropics, but everywhere really is abundant and free. And it's more a question of figuring out the right technologies to capture and use it efficiently, store it efficiently, switch it into a form that's storeable and usable for your transportation needs, for your heating needs, for whatever your special need is. Yeah. Well, excellent. We are going to have to take a quick break at this point, but we'll be right back talking to Richard Wallsgrove, the Policy Director for Blue Planet Foundation. And I'm Ethan Allen, your host here on Lackable Science. We'll be right back. I pity the fool who ain't watching this show at 12 o'clock on Friday afternoon. Stan, the energy man, watch it. I'm Jay Fiedel and I'm the host of Research in Manoa Mondays from 12 to 1 on thinktecawaii.com. Take a look at us and learn about geophysics, learn about planetology, learn about the ocean and earth sciences at UH Manoa. You'll really enjoy it. So come around. We'll see you then. Aloha, I'm Kirsten Baumgart, Turner, host of Sustainable Hawaii. Thanks for watching ThinkTech this summer. We have a lot of terrific shows of great importance, and I hope you'll watch my show too every Tuesday at noon. As we address sustainability issues for Hawaii, they're really pertinent as the World Conservation Congress approaches in September and the World Youth Congress that's focusing on sustainability next year as well. Have a great summer and tune in at noon every Tuesday. And you're back here on Lackable Science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here on ThinkTech Hawaii. Thanks for coming back and joining us. With me today on ThinkTech Studios is Richard Wallsgrove, the Policy Director for Blue Planet Foundation. Thanks again for being here, Richard. Richard and I were talking about all the great stuff that Blue Planet is doing around energy and really driving the energy dialogue forward, driving the energy changes and energy evolution here in Hawaii forward and even probably beyond Hawaii. And one of the challenges to this as I see it is how you communicate this. I mean, as you sort of said, it's a very simple message on some levels, but it's complicated because you have to get a bunch of people on board, a bunch of different audiences, everything from those students in the energy summit to the parents, the general public, to policy makers, political leaders, scientists, people who are invested in the status quo in the energy business. It must take a little bit of fine tuning your message. Fine tuning or maybe, I mean, it's not narrowing though, it's making sure that all messages are coming across in multiple channels and these are issues that everybody cares about. Energy isn't something that any one person can say, no, I don't care about energy. So I think in part, the challenge is communicating in ways that everybody can understand and relate to that matters to their personal experience. So that means when we're talking to scientists, we have to give them charts and hard data and numbers and when we're talking to a four-year-old, we have to make sure we're giving them something that relates to a four-year-old that they can relate to. A year or two ago, we created a series of cartoons, the blue planetiers we call them. So this is a way of communicating the issues that I talk about in legal terms or scientific terms, the issues that policy wonks can discuss in very great detail that nobody else understands and we put into a cartoon with the hope that everybody can look at it and relate to it. So there is a lot of thought that goes into that messaging. We have to think about how do we message the problem. Climate change, I used the word scary earlier and when I said climate change is scary, I actually caught myself almost and said, well, that's not quite the right message. It's lots of things. It's urgent, it's global. To me, it's a little bit scary. It's not scary because I think we can't deal with it, but it's scary because it's a problem unlike any problem we faced before. But that might not be the best way to talk about climate change. We might want to express climate change as this grand opportunity for us as a globe to come together and to solve an issue that's bigger than all of us. That might actually capture a bigger audience than the scary message. So yeah, lots of work and thinking goes into that. Yeah, so the whole issue of framing an issue and how you sort of put it in a different frame and as you say, it has to work for the person who you're talking to and for their sort of status quo where they are at that moment, what's their core values as it were. So for people, for instance, I would think one of your sort of toughest sellers would be people, for instance, in the petroleum industry and in the shipping industry is where this is their livelihood, right there. The generations they've been bringing the fuel out here, putting it into a thing, burning it and distributing it. And they, I mean, speaking of being scary, what Blue Planet is proposing, it probably is very scary to some of them because it's literally threatening their livelihoods. Certainly. I mean, on any problem, any change, there's going to be an entrenched status quo. And so the issue of framing for the entrenched status quo is important. I think I have a unique perspective on that because my father works in the oil industry or worked in the oil industry before he retired. So I understand the way he looks at the issue and I've heard I had a lifetime of sort of indoctrination and so I try to think about that when I talk to those folks. This issue in particular, if we are advocating for the end of the use of oil as an energy source, we have to talk openly and honestly and frankly with folks whose living comes from the oil industry. We're trying to hide it, trying to fix everything with framing in that sense and that way wouldn't really work. So there's, I think, a fair amount of collaboration and trying to use, trying to pick language and framing that we both can agree upon. That's the role of a lawyer lots of times. People ask me, what do you actually do if you're a lawyer? I don't sue people. But there's a lot of this work of how do we go and collaborate with somebody and find out what the right path forward for everybody is. Right, helping people understand a shared interest, a common way forward that's going to be a win-win solution, right? So the people involved in the energy industry now can see they can be moving into new vistas of the energy industry, right? And new markets and new ways of handling things. Yeah, about one piece of their life may be sort of going by the wayside, new vistas are opening up for them, right? Inevitably. I mean, that's how history happens. Right, that's how you get advancement. And it's certainly an uncomfortable process for some. And there are people too who have very, what do I want to say, almost fatalistic views of climate change. And to sort of say, well, it's the way it is. And the temperature is rising, the sea level is rising, and so will we. What do you say to such people? Sometimes that is a matter of talking enough to understand where our fundamental differences are. We can agree to disagree on issues. That's fine, that's inevitable if we're talking about an issue that affects everybody. Talking to somebody who really has that fatalistic view of climate change, I think it's particularly hard because my perspective on climate change came from when I was studying as a scientist. And so to me, it comes from spreadsheets and numbers. And it doesn't work for everybody to take them into my spreadsheets and my numbers as an issue of credibility there. There may be an issue of just understanding. So I have to very carefully for myself steer away from the things that drew me into it. And the same problem, the same issue I look at, well, why is that a fatalistic view? What is it about that person's political background educational background, philosophy on life that has led them that fatalistic view? And maybe we can have some discussions about those kind of core components. It's tricky, it is tricky. Because the whole issue is very complex. People don't realize how much energy we're using, what that sort of energy mix really is. And I think we actually have, when your slides talks a little bit about this, maybe you can walk us through this briefly. Yeah, I mean, getting back to numbers that excite me, this is a project, this is a collaboration actually between Blue Planet Foundation and Hawaiian Electric. And it's a project we call Island Pulse. If we can think about energy in our island, our energy consumption goes up every day. It's actually highest now, it's maybe about eight o'clock at night, sometimes between six and nine at night. And it drops again in the middle of the night. And so that's the pulse of our energy system. And so we realize that this isn't something people saw. We see the weather report every day. We know what happens with the temperature over the course of the day and the week. We don't see how much energy the islands are using. So Hawaiian Electric allowed now for the first time ever, you allow this data to come out behind the firewall of how do you operate the utility, and let's make it available for the public. And even better, Hawaiian Electric gave us information about where that energy is coming from. So not just how much do we use and how does that change over the course of the day, but at noon now, we have a fair chunk coming from solar power. If you look carefully throughout the course of the whole day, we have a lot of energy coming from coal. That surprises people. So going back to your question about how do you talk to people where you don't have a shared view on climate change, well, something like that can actually open the dialogue. A lot of people don't realize we have coal here in Hawaii. Well, you know, we don't dig it out of the ground. So why is there coal in Hawaii is a question I get. So tools like that can be very, very useful just because they give everybody a little bit of a better shared understanding of what the situation is, which can only help as we're talking about what the situation should be. Right. It's one of the things I often thought that scientists typically don't get very good training in the whole end of the communication end of things. They often, science drives people into these narrower specialties, and they learn to talk better and better to people who think just like them, and assets have been often to lose touch and lose communication tools or skills for a broader audience. And it's clearly avoided that trap. This is a fascinating issue to me, and it may take us off topic and you can steer us back on. But I realized that when I was in graduate school, I realized that the path of a scientist is specialization and much narrower and narrower focus. And the true scientific sort of leaders are folks who can talk about things that only three or four other people on earth understand. Literally, I mean three or four people on earth might really get the details of some obscure quantum mechanics. Then I went to law school and I think it flips on its head. I think in law school we learn about specific subjects, but if you look at the great legal thinkers of our society, they're people who see the big picture, they see everything and they can talk about issues that cross from environmental issues, legal issues, and financial issues. And so I thought it was fascinating that sort of leading lawyers of the day were generalists and leading scientists of the day were specialists and maybe there's something in that dichotomy that tells us about those fields and who goes into them and why and what we can do to change them. Yeah, yeah, because it's necessary certainly to get these scientific areas shared effectively so that people understand why scientists are doing what they're doing, how they're doing it, what they can tell, what's the hype, what's the sort of rumors about it that are not based in fact and hopefully what the real story is and get a much better sense. So it is really critical, I suspect, it's sort of the same thing in law, you know. So then let me sort of wrap this up by asking you if you had advice for a student today who's interested in the field of energy, what would you say, how would you urge them to sort of actualize their dream if they want to do something meaningful and significant in energy? Alan Dershowitz, the law professor at Harvard always tells students that the advice they get from him is worth what they pay for it, which is nothing. So with that caveat, I think the advice I would give to a student is two-fold. The first is energy is a rapidly changing field. There are opportunities of all sorts and I think, you know, if you were thinking, man, I missed it because I couldn't go work for Google in 1999. Today is the day that you could work on energy issues that become as big as that. So that's the first is a message of hope. The second is I think that you're right to identify a communications gap. It's not just scientists, it's engineers. I think I suffer from this in my own work. You know, I'm a policy geek now and I don't always talk in ways that everybody understands. So I think irrespective of what field that student is in, I think perfecting their communication skills, learning how to be better communicators can help no matter what field they're going to but on this energy issue which can be divisive and can cross-cut so many different sectors, that might be the most valuable skill of all. Excellent. Yeah, good point. I hadn't thought of that. That's certainly very insightful that as you get these issues that are more and more contentious, the need for better and better communication keeps growing. To avoid the divisiveness, avoid the contention, help people find the shared pathways of the common interests, the core values that underline and you know, I just rather than send this our separate ways. Very true. Super, super. Well, this has been a wonderful talk here. I've so much enjoyed learning more about Blue Planet, learning more about communication skills here and I look forward to further conversations perhaps down the road. Thanks so much, Ethan. Ethan Allen here as your host on likeable science. I've been talking to Richard Wallsgrove, the policy director for Blue Planet. Aloha.