 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii where community does matter and care about what you have to say. That's kind of the theme of my show today. I've kind of just been expressing a little bit of angst with the gentleman we call my friend what's in charge over here, Jay Fidel, about how frustrating it is to look at government functioning nowadays and having a personal desire to do some of my own construction, you know, but facing permitting in those kind of issues is a really scary and daunting thought for me. So today's show is kind of about some of the things I've run into lately as an observation over the last few years working with government on the inside, working with the federal government outside, having been a former federal civil service employee and a state civil service employee and working with different agencies and trying to get things done with the legislature and with the congressional delegation and some of the things that just kind of frustrate and this isn't meant as a personal thing or a political thing or any particular party thing, it's just some observations I've made. So to start off with what we're really talking about, this is an energy show, so what we're really looking at is what's the role of government in energy. In other words, the government has a lot to cover and their basic charter is to, you know, protect us and to have a legal framework so everything works right, you know, manage our infrastructure and things like that, highways and such, but they do have limits and every once in a while you catch the government kind of overreaching on what they're supposed to be doing and maybe going just a little bit far. But energy is such an important thing in our society today around the world. Energy is a critical component in industry, it's a critical component in international economy. Energy is a huge component in global trade, not just the things you trade, but how you deliver the things you trade. Energy drives national security policy, energy impacts the environment. You know, when you look at all these things, energy is such a huge, huge part of everything we do probably since the beginning of the industrial revolution and what we've been doing in our country and around the world. It's huge. So the government plays a significant role. It can tell you as a former military guy, when we were talking about energy in the Pacific, in the Pacific area of responsibility, we always talked about lines of communication. Well, that may sound like a mob bell kind of thing or AT&T thing, but rust lines of communication meant lines of trade, whether it was oil trading or commodities that are moving on the seas or moving through the air through our theater, they were always important routes to protect. So there's even a military component to energy and government. So what should the government be doing and not be doing? I was going to go into a fairly long discussion about one of the things that happened in our nation that was a good model. And I'll just abbreviate it. I don't want to get into all the details. But for most of the history of our country, tobacco was a big thing. Smoking cigarettes was a big thing. Even when I was young, I mean, smoking cigarettes was a cool thing to do. The movie stars did it. Powerful people did it. Guy smoked cigars all the time as a sign of a status. But nowadays, in today's society, if you're a smoker, you're kind of on the outside. In fact, literally, you're kicked to the curb if you want to go smoking. You can't smoke in government buildings. You can't smoke in restaurants. And even when it came time to places like bars and casinos where kind of smoking went with that culture, even those places have had to change their entire HVAC system, their air conditioning system in their building, all because the government pushed the chain. Now, a lot of us, you know, may feel comfortable and good with that because, you know, if you're not a smoker, it was just kind of a bummer to be exposed to smoke all the time. But if you're a smoker, you're a pariah right now. I mean, I don't feel too sorry for the folks here in Hawaii that have to go outside the beautiful breezy air to smoke. But if you're living in Chicago or Saskatchewan or something, and it's winter, and it's 20 below, and you got to bundle up and put six layers of clothes on to go outside and have a smoke, I mean, you're getting picked on. So what's the right limits for government to really weigh in and make those kind of huge cultural changes in our society? And what should we do and what should we not do? So in the energy, if you want to see us make a big change in energy, there's a lot of things that have to happen. And so what do we see happening today regarding the shift away from fossil fuels? This is not entirely different from the smoking ban scenario. We've tied fossil fuel use to many environmental and health issues, just like we did with smoking. First, we have the lawsuits that are ongoing for oil spills and air pollution and climate change and health issues, you know, and then we have government starting to regulate everything and try and drive us to everything. In the current political climate, we even have things like the Green New Deal and climate change being an existential threat, meaning it could kill us within the next few years if we don't do something drastic, trying to basically push us into making quick decisions, not that we haven't seen this stuff coming for several years. It's been on the track for a long time. But suddenly there's a big push to get it done and get it done right away, and people trying to use the government to push it. The government is stepping in to address the issues of fossil fuel. But doing so, at the same time, if it's not done right, threatens big business, big business, not only in this country, but in the international world and the whole, the whole environment that we live in internationally, the movement of every commodity we consume and everything we do centers around energy. So how should the government drive change? Or is this a consumer role? Did it all be supply and demand? Should it be consumer driven? And the changes that we have? Well, first of all, I think that if the government's going to take a role, it needs to divest itself from industrial lobbying and activist manipulation. I think they're both kind of on the evil side. I hate seeing big business throw millions of dollars at elected officials to get things changed. I see that as literally corruption. I've seen it all over the world when I was in the military, I traveled all over and talked to governments on a fairly high level. And you can see the corruption and quite frankly, most of the governments don't even see it in themselves when it's happening. But I've also noticed there's there's activist manipulation. There's activist lobbying that's gotten just as ugly and just as corrupting as as people lobbying for on the industrial side. And you could even add to that. There's religious institutions that are started lobbying and other folks that use money to try and influence legislators and how they make decisions and how they make laws. And I think the first thing the government needs to address is that aspect that whether we call it campaign contribution, campaign, campaign spending reform, we need to address that issue. Because whenever you have a lobbying institution on the industry side on the union side on a religious side or on a just an activist side of maybe an environmental activist group, and they're using money to change the shape of governance, is that really how we should be making laws? He who spends the most money wins? I think not. But there's many noble causes. When I when I talk about activist manipulation, there have been hijacked by greedy lawyers. One case in point is Greenpeace. If you talk to the guy who founded Greenpeace, a really great effort that was made to curb the hunting of whales in the planet. You know, and here we are in the 21st century, and we're thinking we have to kill whales to get oil and stuff for cosmetics and things like that. Greenpeace has founded a great cause, a great, a great effort. The guy who founded it is not even part of it anymore. He was literally pushed out of his own organization, because he was so successful at raising money for a really great cause and doing really great work to inject his views into the political realm. And he was pushed out of his own company. And he's really literally persona non grata in his own company. So even when you have folks that start a great organization, that's meant to do a good thing for nature, a good thing for animals, a good thing for our planet, a good thing for our future. A lot of times it gets hijacked by folks who have alternative motives, like just getting rich. So reasonable solutions and timelines need to be negotiated when we're talking about instituting changes in energy policy. And it needs to be between all affected parties. You can't just have the people with the most money running the narrative and running the charge when it comes to changing laws and changing government policy, especially on things as big as energy. So what we need to do is start to come up with a strategic national plan on where we should be going with energy. And what kind of changes probably need to be made to get there, and then sit down with as many of the parties as we can, and try and work out timelines, because a lot of companies will get very defensive if they feel that their industry is being threatened or their vision, their agenda for their non for profit group is being threatened. And it's really, if you put it on a timeline, everything could be worked out because it gives you time to transition to hire new employees to change your production line to maybe change your model or to watch things shift if it's a non for profit side to see what's realistic. We need to have reasonable solutions and timelines need to be negotiated between all parties. That's something that government has to start doing. We also need to balance the personal rights and the collective rights of everyone concerned. A lot of times, we are only looking at the collective rights. And we're ignoring the fact that this is a republic, which means everybody's treated equal and has an equal say. At the same time, we have other situations where the greater good is being stopped from doing something by a very small group of very vocal people. We have to look at a way to balance, you know, the personal and the collective right and be reasonable. And in Hawaii, we have a word called Kono, and it means to do what's right. Now, even locally, that gets messed up when people think it means don't make anybody mad, or don't upset the cart. Don't don't don't say anything if it's going to make somebody look bad or whatever. No, Kono means do what's right. It's righteous. It may not be the popular thing. It may not be the comfortable thing. It may mean I have to give up something that I like, and not be happy with it. But it's for the greater good of everyone. And it's not something that I need. But it's something that I like that I have to give up. We have to get our head around the concept of what we call Hawaii Pono and make a good balance between what's personal rights and what's collective rights. How do we come to a good compromise in there? We also have to have reasonable legislation that means enacted. Now, I've seen a lot of sausage making done in the state of Hawaii and at the federal level. And I can tell you that, you know, making a law is is a complicated thing. And it's become, I think, unfortunately, too heavily influenced by outside factors. Whether that factor is a union or a special interest group or political campaign funds or all the things that I've talked about earlier. And we need to have some way to monitor how reasonable is legislation that that needs to be enacted? How reasonable make it? We can't just have it by our wall. It has to have some checks and balances and some. So the interesting thing is, and I've seen this happen time and time again, particularly at the local level, you know, we're really interested in having this well balanced, well thought out legislation, as things become laws. We have a couple of mistakes we make once a good law even become law. And the first thing is funding. A lot of people think, wow, we passed this thing into law, we're going to be doing great because we've got this new law now that makes us do this and makes it. Unfortunately, people don't fund it. I mean, people get elected and say, well, I got elected because, you know, I proposed this law, this this bill that became a law, and I was the author of it, and it did this great stuff. But it never gets any funding year after year. So it's basically useless. And we need to, if it's a good law, we need to take that law and put some funding against it. And that funding is important. And I want to get, you know, we're going to take a quick break now. But when we come back, I want to talk about some of the things we have to look at when it comes to if you have a good law, how to really make it work in your government and get to the point you need, especially in energy. Thanks to our think tech underwriters and grand tours, the Atherton Family Foundation, Carol Monli and the friends of think tech, the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, collateral analytics, the Cook Foundation, Dwayne Kurisu, the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners, Hawaii Energy, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, Hawaiian Electric Company, Integrated Security Technologies, Gailin Ho of BAE Systems, Kamehameha Schools, MW Group, the Shidler Family Foundation, the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust, Volo Foundation, Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. Hey, welcome back to Stand Energy Man, and we're on the politically charged topic as is appropriate for this season, the Thanksgiving and Christmas season to talk about politics, right? I'd rather be talking about football. Anyway, one of the things that we just finished bringing up was how important it is to enact good laws that are well written, well balanced, well thought out in terms of timelines and actually actually carrying out the law. The other thing is we have a lot of laws on the books that aren't even applicable anymore. They're irrelevant. They get in the way and we don't notice them until something comes up in a court case or something and somebody points out how stupid they are or they use it as a loophole to get out of something. We also have a problem where the courts just unilaterally decide whether it's because the prisons are overcrowded or whatever if they're just not going to enforce any laws where the governor or the mayor of a city tells his law enforcement agencies we're just not going to do these arrests anymore because we don't have room in the prisons or my personal plan is we should have too many of this race or that race or a rich or whoever getting hit by this law we're just not going to enforce it anymore. Well, if we're not going to enforce it it shouldn't be a law. One of my personal pet peeves is anything doing with the Second Amendment where we scream we don't have enough gun laws, we don't have enough gun laws but then you look at these big cities where the gun crime is rampant and they've got people being arrested hourly for gun violations and then the courts give them a slap on the wrist sentence when it's a mandatory 10 years in prison for a felon in possession or whatever that's supposed to be tacked on to whatever the crime was that they committed and they're blowing off the laws that we have in place. My position in this whole discussion whether it's for energy or anything else is if you have a law in the book that you're not enforcing then get rid of it just get it off the books and quit playing games because then it starts to become it's good for some people and it ain't good for other people. That's one of the huge mistakes that happens when we do have laws come on the books that just aren't good laws. The next piece is we talked about funding. Part of that funding in government institutions is it establishes the need for manpower and we need to establish again just like the timelines that we put into the laws to get things accomplished. When we develop manpower requirements for a law we make sure that the manpower matches the timeline and the rhythm of that law. In other words maybe at the first part of instituting an energy policy you don't need a whole lot of manpower but you need some good policy guidance and that can be done with a small shop. But as you institute the law it comes with a lot of inspections and approvals at building code boards and fire marshals and health health boards and things like that. But if you don't fund the manpower at these boards what happens is you slow down your processes not by hours or days but by months and months and in some cases in energy I've seen it for hydrogen stations go into years. Two, three, four years to get something built because the organizations that are in charge of taking care of the standards and the policies aren't funded properly and aren't organized properly. When the government passes a law they need to put the manpower and the funding in there and pay attention to it. Most of our legislators when they get finished passing these laws and they get down to budget issues the budget issues get overrun by pet projects and stuff. We don't really look at what the intent is of especially older laws that need to be changed. So as an example how many cities do we have now or you have a building department that's been set by you know whatever the ceiling is for that that department in their organization and all of a sudden you have a hundred percent increase on the number of building permits come rolling in. For example we had a big volcano on the Big Island a year ago and right after the volcano there was a surge in building permits for people rebuilding their houses or moving and building new houses in other locations. Did the building department grow on the Big Island? No it didn't. So what happened? People are waiting weeks and months and I'm gonna bet some of them are gonna be years to get building permit. The government isn't flexible like most good companies are that can be agile and make changes as they need to. We need to build that agility into a government but government agility is literally an oxymoron. We need to be able to build maybe like Tiger teams within a county or state government that can roll in and help auditing or help permitting or help on the fire marshal thing or we should be able to contract other states that maybe aren't as busy and have two or three of their fire marshals come over and help us do permitting or a couple of their building inspectors come over and help us do building inspection and pay them a decent wage and some and put them in accommodations over here and help us get through some surges so that our businesses can keep going forward at a reasonable and a predictable pace. Otherwise our laws are just killing. There are some things that you don't want to do in government that I see all the time and this is not just with people in government it has to do with the people that tend to go down and make their voice heard at the legislature which unfortunately is not enough regular citizens and usually people that have an extra grind or a special interest to support. What you don't want to do is you don't want to pit players against each other in the courts or in the legislative process. Recently I've seen some non-for-profit organizations kind of pulling for what they think is a really good environmental cause like everybody should have a water, a solar water heater on their house and it sounds really good and the solar industry in Hawaii has been hurt by some Hawaiian electric policies and you see regulations that keep them from connecting their solar panels to the grid those solar solar installations have dropped off and now they're trying to help the industry by making you have to put a solar water heater on your house. What if a solar water heater isn't the right option? What if I don't want a solar water heater on my house? Is the government now going to start telling me that I have to spend thousands of dollars on a piece of equipment that I don't want that I don't like and we're just got to be okay with that. We can't keep pitting players against each other we can't hit the gas company and electric company against each other we can't start pitting special interest groups against each other in law if you see yourself doing that it's probably a bad law you need to back off and consider what you're really doing. You can't build government functions that never die and with budgets that never stop growing and worst of all with manpower that keeps building. We have laws and organizations within every state and even some of our locally regulated monopolies where they just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and their operating costs get higher and higher and guess who gets to pay that? The taxpayers, the ratepayers, not good. You can't just let organizations keep growing at the pace of hey it seems like a good idea and we're funded for that 20 years ago we need to grow it or build it or whatever. We should make everybody have to justify their organization and we have to be able to readjust and rebalance our cities and our state governments and their manpower where they're best utilized. If that requires retraining it requires retraining and that should be something the unions are there to support not to sit there and bash. You can't be decisions on class or social status. Laws must be fair to everyone and as soon as you start putting it's like oh well these folks got an advantage and these folks don't. We can't do that. We have to take care of the folks that were impacted negatively first. That's a rabbit hole you got to be really careful with. I mean you have to be fair. You have to be the law from the beginning has to be balanced but you can't sit there and put the burden on one group or another group without making every effort to balance it first. That's something I've seen happen over and over again in our state that just really bothers me. If laws are not being enforced they need to be repealed and that doesn't happen either. We can't let the courts decide to ignore laws. Another thing I've noticed is that non-elected bureaucratic executive branches. In other words where systems are set up state and local at least here in Hawaii they're very similar on the state side as they are to the federal side. You have a legislative branch an executive branch and a judicial branch. So the legislature makes the laws and passes the budget and funds everything and the executive branch controls all of the functions in the city or the state government. So you have the Department of Land and Natural Resources, the Department of Health, Department of Education, Department of Business and Economic Development and Tourism. You have different cabinet level executive branches that work directly for the governor and they are the bulk of the workforce in the state government. The legislature just has their staff and some things like that on the sheriffs that take care of securing their buildings but all of the other the building maintenance and everything that's done by folks in the executive branch. And we happen to have a bad habit at least here in Hawaii of growing and growing and growing. The members of our executive branch and not putting any restrictions on them. They don't have any mandatory retirement. They can just keep working or maybe not working if they're not needed and their jobs are still there because the law says it's there and they're not really working and but we don't can't get rid of them. You know that's not right either. So the executive branch used to have a better handle on their manpower and we can't let a non-elected executive branch start running the government because our government is supposed to be of buying for the people. It's supposed to be based on the vote. That's really the critical piece here. We can't have elected bureaucracies running everything and ignoring the will of the people otherwise our of buying for the people is meaningless in our government. So I had a whole bunch of examples here that I wanted to go through but I'm not going to go through all of them and I've actually talked about some of them. We have to put in a nutshell. We have to look at how we make our laws. Make sure that they follow a logical timeline. We can't rush into certain technologies or to meet certain goals because we desire it. We can't tell everybody to drive an electric car by next week because the car manufacturers can't make enough electric cars to get you to drive one by next week and we can't have enough electric infrastructure to charge your car by next week. So why make a law where we're trying to force everybody to do something that we just can't do. That's kind of it in a nutshell. We have to pass reasonable laws. We have to have a government that's flexible enough and agile enough to move to grow and to shrink where it needs to when it needs to in order to be profitable and not a big sink on tax dollars. And we have a long ways to go on this so I hate to get political on everybody but in my business of energy I've just seen it too too often that great energy bills and great energy initiatives die by the wayside because we've ignored some of the things that I've just talked about today. Thanks for putting up with my tirade and we'll see you next week on Tuesday. Stand the energy man here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha.