 This is Stink Tech Hawaii, Community Matters Here. One, ah, there he is, Lou Pudirisi. This is Energy in America, and it's actually energy right here in Hawaii because I have to reveal to you that Lou is here in Hawaii. And he's on a trip, but we're still talking to him remotely because we like to talk to Lou remotely. Lou Pudirisi, welcome back to the show. I'm great, it's great to be here, Jay. I'm very happy to be here because my son is graduating on Saturday from UH Manoa, so. What is he studying? I hope we can find a job soon. Oh, well, send him our way. We can offer him, you know, some contract work on a part-time basis. If you need a Chinese speaker, he'll be good for you. Oh, I see. Oh, it's that kind of degree. So you're in a hotel or you're in the airport? Where are you? I'm out in the beautiful western province of Oahu called Koalina, where thankfully the Chinese money has flowed slow enough that there's no construction. And the prices are still manageable. Prices are still manageable. And the condominium is quite nice. So, OK, I hope to see you while you're here. But today, let's follow our discussion of last week where we, or two weeks ago, where we talked about the climate change assessment report. It was issued by the government, actually, through the White House, where your view of it was that we should not be alarmed. And we should look at it in a sort of moderated way and not take the worst case analysis, but look at other options as well. And this is a kind of continuation of that discussion. Sure, I think one of the things I'd like to get into, I mean, if you think about the discussion last time, really it wasn't that... I don't know if alarm is the word, but that even in the worst case scenario, there was plenty of data to suggest it was a manageable... It might not be an outcome everyone likes, but it's an issue that we do have the resources to manage. I think that was the bottom line of that. What I'd like to do today is sort of, perhaps at the end of the year, it's good to look back and think about not just all the bad news we get every day, but what kind of achievements have been taking place on the environmental side, particularly the U.S., which has done a remarkable job in cleaning up the air. And I think that it's kind of laid the foundation for that we can look to technology to do a lot of things going forward. It has done a very good job to us today. But I think once again, we need to look at the data. Yeah, and as you said before the show began, it's probably better not to run around like your hair was on fire. Right. I mean, as we say, whenever we have a meeting in God we trust, but everyone else has to bring data. That's very good. Well, okay. Now you take a look. Yeah, now there's data and there's data, of course, so you have to tell us where you're getting it from. Absolutely. We publish our data and most of the data comes from the EPA. Okay. All right. And we do have slides, don't we? We do, of course. We always have slides. All right. So the first slide shows a comparison of economic growth and emissions, air emissions, and we'll get into this in a little more detail later, but between 1970 and 2017. And I think what you want to look at this is quite a very interesting picture of U.S. industrial activity and our air quality. So our GDP from 1970 has grown 267 percent. So it's growing. Our national economy has expanded quite a bit. Not everyone has benefited from that expansion, but our vehicle miles traveled, you know, VMT, very popular number. It has increased about 189 percent since 1970. You can see the green line. And our population is up 59 percent. And even our energy consumption since 1970 is up. You can notice a lot of these things are flattening population energy consumption. But aggregate emissions of six common pollutants, these are the so-called criteria. We'll get into them a little bit more in the show. But these are things like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, lead, the kinds of things that EPA controls, not only the emissions of them, but they go around and measure the ambient standard in the atmosphere around your home and in your neighborhood. And so in industrial activities, automobiles, tailpipe emissions, everyone has to meet sort of two things. Communities have to have the ambient standards, which are just measurements of what's in the air. And in addition, new facilities and old facilities as well must also control the amount of emissions which go into the atmosphere. These are the two basic building blocks of how we control and improve the air quality. Can you help me with this figure? It says economic growth and declining emissions from 1970 to 2017. But if I look at the graphics on the right-hand side, I see a line of, as you said, gross domestic product and a line of vehicle miles traveled. Where's the declining emissions? It's the very bottom on aggregate emissions of six common pollutants. And you see here, it's declined by 73%. And we'll get into this in a little more detail. Okay, go ahead. I don't think a lot of people understand that. And actually, there are kind of, this is kind of, you know, if you go back a couple of years ago, I think that there was an interesting statement by Lisa Jackson, the head of EPA. And she said, we're actually at the point in many areas of the country that on a hot day, the only thing I can say is you shouldn't go outside because the air could kill you. And meanwhile, we have a separate study done by Stephen Hayward at the American Enterprise Institute said that one of the largest public policy success stories is the dramatic improvement of our nation's air quality. Now, everyone has an active arm. And I think that a big issue at EPA is they have a hard time accepting their success often because I think they're concerned people. And so, well, if we succeed in this, we don't need to give you any more money to do more. But I mean, I'm not sure what, why, you know, I think a lot of the treatment around the public, you know, public perception and government officials on environment is that we really can't tell the public that we're making a lot of progress because they might lose their enthusiasm for doing some of the things we wanted to. So let's get a little more detail in this. Let's look at the next slide, which is, I think this is more about just a picture, right? And I think this is something people forget. Right. If you go to Pittsburgh, California, which actually, I mean, in 19, well, this is Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Yeah. You can see the difference in, you know, particulates in the atmosphere, as we say, in 1940, as compared to 2017. Now, we're going to show some data that supports this, but anyone who says the air hasn't gotten clean is just crazy. This is where we have unbridled emissions of particulates from coal-fired plants, steel mills, cement manufacturing facilities. Well, what I get is that Pittsburgh is in the middle of the steel belt. Pittsburgh, you know, had a tremendous amount of steel production back in the 40s. It was the center of steel production in the country. And on the right-hand side picture, that's really beautiful, clean air. On the other hand, there's not so much steel production in Pittsburgh anymore. The Chinese are making the steel. So I would agree. Right. Part of this is, of course, the change of the industrial structure of the United States. There's no doubt about that. But we also have widespread implementation of emission control technologies. I mean, I'm going to show you some data at the end of this along the Gulf Coast, right? Where we have massive tetrachemical facilities. And I think you'll be quite surprised what it shows about the nature of air quality, even in that region. So it would be, it's a legitimate point, but we can't discount the huge role of emission control technology. And emission control technology, which has been possible because of our prosperity, but also because of advancing technology. Well, we're pretty good at this stuff. We forget that we're pretty good at it. All right, let's go to, we talked before, it's called Figure 3A. There's a 3B, but I'm not showing it to you because we don't have enough time. But in Figure 3A, these are ambient concentrations of pollutants from 1970, 1990 to 2017. Same period of time. It's the same period of time as the other chart you showed us. Right. And what I want to point out, there's a couple of things about this chart. And you can go to the EPA website and dig this data up yourself. It's quite easy. And they have pretty good measure. Now, if you look at the legend at the bottom, one thing a lot of people don't understand about pollution is that it depends how you measure it. And some standards require that you meet a certain ambient concentration over a period of time. And that period of time could be one hour, eight hours, one year. So the standards are not, they're not just one year standard. You have to meet these standards in even shorter periods of time. And if you think about it, you can violate, you can meet the standard all year, but still violate several times during the year for just an hour. And EPA measures all that. And that's why this very kind of spaghetti-looking chart has so many lines in it. So if you go to the bottom, you see PB, three months. So that's a concentration of lead on average over a three-month period. But carbon monoxide is over an eight-hour period. Nitrogen oxide is an annual number, but there's also data here on nitrogen oxide over a one-hour period, right? O3, which is ozone, which is a precursor to smog. They do that in an eight-hour period. And then the infamous PM 2.5. Now, a particulate matter of 2.5 microns or less. Now, PM 2.5 is the basic criteria pollutant, which is affiliated most with breathing problems with bad air quality. Over 75% of the measured health benefits of air quality control is reductions in PM 2.5. The most expensive regulation in the federal government. Most people don't understand this. There's lots of other things. There's PM 10 and, of course, the 10 microns and then sulfur dioxide. And what I want you to see from this table is you can see that, yes, the lead, you can see lead, the red line. They don't measure all the time, but it came just, you know, lead concentrations are practically zero. We got rid of lead and gasoline, right? But also our PM 2.5 is way down. The only thing that seems to have flattened out a bit is ozone. You know, the green line there, you can see it's sort of flat. But most of these are moving nitrogen oxides are, they have come down, they've sort of flattened out. But they are at substantial below the level, below the national ambient air quality standards, right? So we have this lower reduction. And we're going to get into show what that means for the country as a whole in a second. Basically, we have very good technology out there. K-O pipe emissions and in so-called industrial facilities to control these emissions to capture them and dispose of them in different ways. Well, that certainly sounds like what you said it was going to sound like. Good news for Christmas in this season. Good news for Christmas. Yeah, good news for Christmas. On the other hand, when we come back from this break, Lou, let's see what the implications are. And let's see if that really affects, you know, by the scientific analysis climate change. Clearly, these charts show there's been either a reduction or a flatlining of, you know, of new emissions into the atmosphere. On the other hand, what does that mean? And how does that affect our lives together on this planet going forward? Ooh, exciting questions. We'll have this short break. We'll come right back. That's Lou Pulirisi. He's the CEO of E-Princk. And he's in Honolulu right now, which is a real treat. We'll be right back. We believe freedom is all of these and more regardless of your ability. DiveHeart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, DiveHeart has helped children, adults, and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. DiveHeart has helped them transition to their new normal. Search DiveHeart.org and share our mission with others. And in the process, help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in their lives. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host on Think Tech Hawaii of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m., I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments, and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Island. We're back. We're live. We're Lou Pulirisi, CEO of E-Princk. He's here in Honolulu. We're on Energy in America and we're talking about good news in the environment for Christmas. So Lou, you had some more charts. You wanted to show us. Yes, let's go to figure four. And these show you the concentrations. This is weighted by population, which we won't spend a lot of time explaining, but concentrations of p.m. 2.5. Now, if you go to Beijing or Nanjing, every cab driver knows what the concentrations of p.m. 2.5 are. It's something they pay a lot of attention to. Environmental awareness. This is not a climate issue. This is an issue of particulates in the atmosphere. And I think that was enough. 22 just flew over. Okay, so if you look here, and there's been some very interesting writing in the Atlantic about India, like the worst polluted country in the world. And you can see this concentration of p.m. 2.5, which is for India, which is the top line, right? It's just off the charts. It's even worse than China. Globally, it's quite bad. Where is the U.S. on this trend? Our levels are down at 10 or below. Okay, 10 or below is the level the World Health Organization skates as the most healthier. And we have it. We have it in the U.S. And we burn, you know, we still burn a lot of coal. We still have a lot of industrial activity. But we have very good air control. Very good air quality, mission control technology in this country. And our prosperity is one of the reasons we have that. Now, there are other countries below us, isn't it? It's just that they're not shown on this chart. Okay, yeah. Maybe Sweden and some Iceland and some other northern European country where they're just a bunch of reindeer running around. It's possible that they're better than us. I think they are. But once you get down to 10, that's pretty low. That's pretty low. And I'll show you a heat map of that in a second. Okay, now if you go to Figure 5. Figure 5 shows what's called on-site air releases of pollutants. Now, notice this is broken up into two categories. Fugitive air emissions, right? And this is really inside baseball stuff for air pollution people. And stack air emissions. So stack air emissions are emissions that come out of a power plant like a utility or a cement plant or a steel facility. Any industrial facility has a stack. And up that stack goes all these criteria pollutants. And then there's so-called fugitive air emissions where we're not exactly sure where they're coming from. Automobiles, re-entrained road dust, could just be naturally formed ozone. And as you can see the U.S. at the site, we have done a very good job of continuing to reduce through 2015 our on-site releases. So there's a million pounds of criteria pollutants. So it includes CO2. And then let's move to our final slide. Okay, before we go there, can you explain the difference between the dark blue and the light blue? Right, the dark blue is stuff that goes up a smoke step. But the light blue is everything else like maybe a dry cleaner or automobile or what they call fugitive air emissions. Even some naturally occurring ozone occurs in the desert, right? They're called fugitive because you can't control them at the source. Another thing is non-source emissions, right? We sort of know that most of that's automobiles, but there's other stuff out there. Well, that seems to be pretty steady on this chart, but the, what is it, the stack? 2015, yeah, but you're coming down to a low level for the country. You've gotten down to a low level. There are levels in which you can't drive it any lower, unless you want to just live in a cave. Okay, okay. Go ahead. Now we go to the last one. Figure six shows the average populated weighted exposure to PM 2.5 in 2015. And this is measured in micrograms per cubic meter, right? And one of the things I think is very interesting about this table is this is the data from the World Health Organization, 2018. You can see the green is 10 or less, right? This is the most healthy, the World Health Organization takes up, this is healthy air. This is very good air, right? And you can see the Europe and Canada are pretty good. I think what's interesting about this are well-meaning and often lecturing us, European partners on how bad we are with the environment. If you will notice, PM 2.5 numbers don't even come close to the US. I mean, they're better than China and parts of Africa and the Middle East, but we're our whole country at an annual rate, sitting under 2.0, under 10 micrograms. This is really interesting. Yes, even along the Gulf Coast of the United States, there's a little bit of pocket there in California, but if you look how green it is on the southern Gulf Coast of the United States, and we have massive facilities there, a petrochemical plant and refineries, and we're able to control that with our technology. Very important. You need to spend money on technology. I think that the term population weighted has to be explained to understand this chart. So this just means you need to also adjust it for the density of the population, and what percentage of the population is in the highly polluted air. So if you're going to do a big average number for the year, and so the US has a big land map, so we're not as densely populated as some other countries, so the number of people who are subjected to bad air is much smaller than in Delhi, where not only do they have bad air, they have a lot of people. So I think it's a kind of adjusted per capita basis, but I'm happy to send you the thousand-page WHO report. Just take me through the analysis by which Africa, which has very few people relative to, I guess, Europe, why Africa is all on the darker side. So Africa is burning lots of biomass, like wood, dung, and if you want to generate a lot of particulates in the atmosphere, you cook on an open fire or on using cow dung, or very primitive forms of power generation, or even cooking. So this is adding to your P and 2.5. They also have a lot of very small dust in those areas having to do with the natural phenomenon in parts of the world. And why is Siberia up at, what is it, 11 to 15? Siberia looks healthy, but why is it not completely green? Because there are big nickel plants, and Russia is an industrial country. Many people forget, even in Siberia, there's a lot of petroleum development, and there are no emission controls in Russia, really, to speak. Very, very interesting. You can see China, Asia is suffering a lot from this, and also the U.S. is benefiting not just from our technology, but the growth in natural gas, and natural gas combustion has no particular to speak of. It's very limited. Okay, look at a world map like that, it's very interesting. Right, right. And I don't think you can crosswalk from this to CO2 control, necessarily, but it is important to recognize that when we put our best people on something, and we put our technology to work, it can deliver. I do think the CO2 problem is a little tougher. It's more expensive, it may take a lot longer, but I don't see any real obstacle for us eventually bringing CO2 emissions and addressing the consequences of CO2. CO2 does not lend itself as easily to emission control. It requires, in some cases, very costly alternatives, but as shown in France, people are not really yet willing to pay for it. That's a whole other phenomenon worth talking about. What? Okay, so we have emissions through technology, emissions can be held or reduced, and we have demonstrated that, you have demonstrated that on these charts from the EPA, but how does that affect the temperature rise we have had over the extraordinary rise over the past year or two, how is it going to affect that rise in the years to come? First, I would not be... If you're talking about the climate record of the U.S., I'm very reluctant to draw any big conclusions from two years worth of data, even a hundred years worth of data. Yes, climate is a real problem. I agree that it's a real problem, but I also believe that you need prosperity and economic growth to deal with climate, because it's an expensive problem. And that we need to get a little less hysterical about it and a little more practical about how we're going to proceed. And the first thing we need to do is agree where's the low-hanging truth and go after that. But I have a feeling that the political debate over climate is either if you're either with me to get rid of all fossil fuels and to move into a cave, or you're not. And that's the fight we need to have. Actually, I don't think that's the fight we need to have. And part of the problem is the debate is kind of concentrated in the public's mind by these extremists, right? You can't be a luke warmer and get very tall. But you know what I'm getting, Lou? I'm getting the fact that we had a show yesterday on the carbon tax. It might considerably be adopted in Hawaii, but it hasn't been adopted anywhere else in the U.S. and it hasn't been adopted in Europe. Well, it has been adopted in one or two places in Europe, but not much. And so what I get, I mean, forget about sea level rise for a moment. Just about climate change in general. Not that much has happened, because we haven't, we meaning the people who are concerned about it, whether they were alarmist or not so alarmist, we haven't been able to convince government to do anything much. So it's not like government is pouring money on this. It's not anywhere in the world, it's not. And so what you have is whatever the situation is, whatever these numbers are, whatever the emissions are, whatever the temperature is, whatever the report says, whether it's alarmist or not, we haven't really done anything. So I can understand when the scientists come around and say, oh, you guys, this is so scary. In part, they are saying, and the National Assessment is saying, you know, you should be a little alarmist because if you were a little alarmist, then maybe you'll take a little action. That's the problem. But there is a problem, right? So if you go around, I mean, one of the interesting things on this air pollution story is that if you fix air pollution in Beijing, Nanjing, and Delhi, and Hanoi, and in Myanmar, if you fix air pollution there, you're going to do something for carbon. It may not be, you're going to do something for carbon because they're related, in a sense. Because they're driven by coal. They're driven by huge amounts of coal use. But there's other issues, water, air quality, water. And so the discussion nobody wants to have, which is, okay, what is the most cost-effective thing society should do in order to improve its environment? Where should it spend its money? Is that something that we're going to do? It's a hard question. Yeah, so someone needs to say, you know, we should stop all this other stuff and just go for climate 100%. Well, people like clean water too. People like that they want control and people like low electricity price. Yeah. I mean, you put a carbon tax, you put a carbon tax, and I mean, if you think about petroleum, and we've talked about this before, most of the petroleum barrel, 80% is going into transportation fuels and transportation fuels worldwide, except in a few isolated places in the Middle East. Are taxed at anywhere from 50 to $250 a ton, right? They just call them excise taxes. But they're doing that now. So the real question is, what are you going to do about coal? That's my view. What are you going to do about coal? Are you going to have a program that's slowly reduced? Because that's where the real return is. All this nonsense people are doing in Hawaii that get rid of a little bit of fuel oil. And it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It's not yielding anything to the global environment, right? It's too small. Yeah, it's too small and it's ridiculous. It'd be better to donate that money to get rid of a coal-fired power plant in China. Well, this raises a huge question, which we've skirted you and me in our discussions. And we will not have enough time to talk about it now. Maybe the next time we can get together. And that is, how do you develop governance on this? If you leave it to a voluntary federation of some states, but not others, some countries, but not others, to take action, and you have no way of coordinating it, no way of saying you should do this, that, and the other thing in these priorities. You know, I hesitate to say, we have lots of trouble taking any action if we're not coordinated. And right now, there's no global way to coordinate it. COP 24, completely voluntary. And it's vulnerable, you know, to political and geopolitical whims and other issues. So I say, if you want to take action, we have to have a better structure, call it a governmental structure, a global governmental structure to fix this stuff. We're all government. I don't think that world government's going to go over well in Washington, but it's not going to happen. I'm raising the point. But we do need it. You're absolutely right. You have a quote-quote free-rider problem. Yeah. Right? I mean, you know, why you could do everything? You'd go 100% renewable, and all you'll have done is spend a ton of money and done nothing. If nobody else comes along. Everybody's got to work on this. It's got to be a global solution to a global problem. It's got to be a global problem. I agree. I agree. Anyway, so, you know, I think we should discuss this soon. I'm one of our next programs. In the meantime, while you're here, Lou, I want to direct your attention to the clean air. It's pretty much all around you. I'm enjoying it. I hope you enjoy it. I'll see you in my window. And for that matter, the clean water. And we still have the right thing here. Thank you. And when you look up and look at the lights on the ceiling, they're on. We do have electricity. And if you look around to the rooms, you'll see a lot of the whole tank. They'll just give you a light. Do you want to see the view out my window? I'll show you. Sure, OK. Oh, beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah, life in Kapolei. Thank you for sharing, Lou. That's Lou Puliarisi having a wonderful time here in Hawaii, enjoying himself in the days before Christmas. Thank you for bringing these Christmas treats to us. This data that suggests our environment is OK through technology. Thank you so much, Lou. Hope to talk to you soon. Thank you. Bye.