 and with me is Brian Barbada. We're the co-founders of the Practical Policy Institute of Hawaii, which is the new organization incorporated in January that we'll talk about during this webcast. Excuse me, I'd like to first of all thank Jay Fidel and staff for having us on. We appreciate the opportunity to share our viewpoint and bring greater awareness to the climate change issue for the people of Hawaii. Brian and I thought we would share the co-hosting, so we'll pass it back and forth four or five times and rather than one host and one person talking the entire time. So I thought I would start, folks probably don't know much about either one of us, start with my background, 52 year resident of Hawaii. My main career was with the Campbell Estate Chief Operating Officer and then CEO and then a trustee for about the next 15 years. Overlapping career as a director with Bank of Hawaii where I chaired the Audit Risk Committee for 14 years and earlier overlapping career as a pilot in the Hawaii Air National Guard. And my final position was commander of the Hawaii Air Guard. So that's a thumbnail on myself. Brian, how about your background? Yeah, my background in Hawaii goes back to the mid-70s when I arrived here and I've worked in a number of positions here since then, but I think most relevant to this arm is my long entrepreneurial history. I've been in I think something like 15 small businesses ranging from petroleum distribution to coffee farming to bottled water. We did solar panel installations, construction. So I've been in a great variety of things. Prior to coming out here, I went to Harvard Business School, was a Navy SEAL and originally lived in San Francisco. So that's pretty much the brief on mine. Well, my interest in climate change got started years ago when I would start kind of collecting and clip articles in the paper and magazines. And then that kind of accelerated about two and a half years ago. There was an article in the Star Advertiser by Professor Richard Brill, I'll hold it up for just a second. And in that article, he talked about the main nature's greenhouse gas, which is water vapor. I knew very little about that and I had a hunch that others didn't either. But in that article, Professor Brill mentioned that in the models that climate scientists are doing, they relegate water vapor to a lesser factor in projecting out the impact of climate change. In fact, he used the words unintentionally misleading. So for a guy like me with a lot of audit committee background, that kind of inspired me to dig deeper, which I've done and collected lots of articles and learned a lot more about water vapor. And climate change in general. A lot of climate change articles, op-eds come from organizations with a vested interest. We're pretty proud of our little institute. There's only a half a dozen of us on the board that we have no vested interest. We have no payroll from anybody with an interest in the matter for the six of us or retirees with time to learn. And what I've realized is that misinformation or omission of information often leads to what I'll call subtle perception of the truth. And that happened as recently and the final straw for me was a op-ed piece as recently as January of this year. And I'll read you the quote from probably a very informed individual to give you an indication of the misleading information that keeps getting repeated. And he said, climate change is largely caused by greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by burning of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas. Those statements are both wrong. They both again, relegate nature's greenhouse gas to practically a minor role. So we think there's a big need for education and that's one of the four aspects of our institute that we hope to educate the public on. So Brian, I know you've studied a lot about the climate change issue and Hawaii's policies. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to share? Well, I got started in this whole thing, mainly because like all of us, I was enamored with the beauty of Hawaii, the landscape of Hawaii, our uniqueness here. And I'm one of these guys who's been and who's in the ocean all the time and has taken advantage of everything that Hawaii has to offer. So when I saw the first windmills go up, which I believe was on Maui, I kind of was very surprised that that would happen in Hawaii. We have a background with the outdoor circle, not allowing billboards and a lot of other things that keep our visual landscape clean. And I was a little bit surprised on that Maui experience to find that a lot of people thought it was pretty neat that we were finding renewable sources of electricity. And I kind of couldn't believe that, but it was a big deal for me. I originally from California and I go way back there, obviously, and I remember the Altamont pass and anybody can go look that up on Google and see what a visual disaster that is and was. There's nothing out there. It's just thousands and thousands of windmills. A lot of them decrepit and falling apart. And it's the kind of thing that I think wakes people up to windmills. And then I was very, very happy recently and a couple of years ago, I guess it is now to see the people of Kahuku sort of rise up and other people rise up in a sort of a not in my backyard response to windmills. So that really began my interest in the whole subject of climate change. Is it gonna be windmills? Is it gonna be solar? What's it gonna be? And I started looking into some of these things and that's when Clinton and I got together and we both had similar general interests and very specific interests of our own and I decided to start this Institute. I would add again, I think Clint may have already mentioned it that we don't want to be cast as climate deniers. We're absolutely committed to the idea that there is such a thing as climate change. The Institute is a very, very important institution that is for Hawaii. It's kind of about what is Hawaii's role in this thing and what do the policies that the legislature is pursuing mean for Hawaii. One of the things that we think is missing is people kind of looking at the other side of things. There are always trade-offs in everything we do and there are trade-offs in responses to climate change. So those are some of the things we're looking at and that was pretty much the way I got into it. And if you could bring up the slide please about our purpose. I think that probably says it all. Those are the four elements of our mission. You can read them on the screen. I won't read them back to you, but we are committed to investigating things that are unique to Hawaii. We're not really interested in the global issues, the country issues. We're interested in responding to Hawaii. So that's why I'm in it. And Clint, what are your other thoughts about the climate system? Well, Brian, I totally agree with you. Climate change is happening. It's obvious to all of us and agree with you that we're not deniersed. But the real question is how much of climate change is already there caused by nature versus caused by man? Climate change happened well before the industrial revolution, well before we burned the first gallon of gas or burned any natural gas. But what I found, as I mentioned before, is that people just don't understand the basic science of climate change. A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk to a lunch group, a civic group, well-educated, and I made sure there's a piece of paper and a pencil for everybody in attendance. They're about 30 there. So I asked them the question, please put down the number one greenhouse gas. So I gave them some time to respond. And then I asked, how many put CO2? A little bit less than half. And then I asked, how many put methane? And that was pretty much the rest of them. And I said, well, how many of you put water vapor? Not a single one. So that kind of confirmed what I had learned anecdotally talking to various groups after tennis or after golf, that nobody understands the role of water vapor. It's humidity, we know it as a relative humidity, but it's a significant percentage of the atmosphere. On a 85 degree day, 70% humidity in Honolulu, 2% of the atmosphere. So you have that on the one hand. And so let's look at CO2 on the other hand. The second question I asked is, please put down the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere. And after some time, I asked for responses, how many 5% plus you hands went up? How much more than 1% almost all of the rest? How much less than 1% a few hands? And I asked how many of you feel that CO2 comprises less than one 10th of 1%? Again, not a single hand went up. The measurement of CO2 in the atmosphere that everybody seems to accept has been done over at Honolulu on a big island for the last 64 years. In the recent measurements, about 415 parts per million. Most press releases on this relate it to 4,000 years ago. But I would relate it though to what percentage of the atmosphere, 415 parts per million is less than 4100s of 1%. And two thirds of that was in existence before the industrial revolution. So we're only talking about our growth of 130 parts per million being CO2. So we have these huge differences. There's lots more to it that we hope to cover in a future show about how the atmosphere heats up, the infrared spectrum and so forth. Not enough time to get into that here. But the point is, as I mentioned earlier, there's a huge need for education in this whole arena. Right back to you. I know we've set that 100% renewable energy goal by 2045 for our state. And you've learned a lot about the concerns and elements of that goal. Yeah, again, the visual blight was the first thing that drove me. And so one of the things I wanted to look at is what are the scenarios where we might end up in 2045? I think if people look at the energy office report, they do one at the end of each year. There's a new one out right now. And you look at other documents, it can be a little confusing because every island reports different renewables. Some of them are very significant on other islands like Kauai, a lot of hydro, a lot of biomass, various things on other islands. But when you boil it down, the one that needs to get the most attention is Oahu. And I don't mean that to diminish the neighbor islands at all, but the fact of the matter is that this is where most of the people are and where most of the electricity is produced. So I started looking at the whole subject in terms of Oahu. And particularly with respect to the future of the mix of wind and solar. I would say parenthetically that anyone who's talking about some of these other options like biomass and solar and a geothermal, for example, on Oahu, it's just sort of irrelevant. Those are not gonna be big players on the island of Oahu like they might be in other places. So it comes down to solar and wind and it's a very difficult thing to try to estimate what that mix might be in the future. But I think we're at a point now where there are a lot of doubts being cast about wind. And I feel good about that. Senator Rivera from the North Shore is a friend of ours and we've talked to him a bit about wind. Of course, he's very against it being pushed in rural areas like his North Shore. And I think that sentiment probably is shared by a lot of people, but they just haven't seen it yet. So visualization of these things is a bit of a problem. It's the same thing with solar. And I believe that what this all boils down to is wind probably is pretty much not going anywhere, but solar is and solar will be proliferated all over in order to get to these 2045 goals. We're not very far there as we stand right now. So when you go out and you see some of the utility solar farms and the rooftop solar around and it's not particularly noticeable. So it doesn't seem like a big deal. But the installed capacity of solar at the end of 2020, I don't have it right here for 21 yet, was only about 16% of the current demand. Current demand is about 10 gigawatts. It's a huge number. And I'm not gonna bore all you people with gigawatts and megawatts and megawatt hours and gigawatt hours. It can get a little mind-boggling. I've had to wade through it myself, but right now solar is not much. When you start looking at how big it would really have to get by 2045 for us to have 100% renewable supply from solar, it's literally millions and millions of panels. We have one farm right now, Kalei Loa, 500,000 panels in Kalei Loa produces 49 megawatt hours or 49 megawatts of capacity. So it's a huge subject and one of these days the Institute hopes to develop some visuals on this so people can see just what the visual scenarios might look like. The other thing about solar, wind and some of the others, but particularly solar and wind, is they are intermittent suppliers of electricity. When the wind blows, they generate electricity. When the sun shines, they generate electricity. That doesn't happen all the time, so they're intermittent. And Hawaiian Electric has struggled with that for quite a while now because to have intermittent power doesn't really displace the fossil fuel power that we're all looking to displace. So how do you fix that? Well, in the last few years, the white night of batteries has come running in to save the day. And now that's how we're converting intermittent power to what they call firm power. That's a very important concept and we're going to be looking very hard at battery capacity, how much backup we really have in battery capacity, whether for the people of Hawaii, it replicates the capabilities of a fossil fuel power plant. It can, but it takes a lot of batteries and it's a bigger subject than anybody's really focused on for now. So, and I think the other thing about 100% renewables that people have to remember is that by 2045, the state is expecting to have all the cars converted to electric vehicles. That's a huge load on the requirements for electricity, as is the rail, art. Both of those things have to be accounted for in the 2045 demand. The 2022 demand is 10, what did I say? 10 gigawatt hours, I get confused myself. And the 2045 demand is gonna be probably 30, 40, maybe 50% more than that based on these things. So the whole issue of electric vehicles and electric vehicle chargers is all wrapped up in this 100% 2045 renewable economy, which in closing, I'll say is pretty much arbitrary. 100% is a nice round number, but I don't think anybody's ever done any real science on why it should be 100%. I don't know that we're gonna really investigate that. We'll take it at face value, but we are gonna try to analyze what that means to the people of Hawaii in terms of the development of these sources. So Clint, one of the things that I've just touched on and I know you're an expert in is land use. What, where are we going with land use and renewables? I'll comment on that, but I'd like to add one thought, Brian, to your mentioning batteries. There's currently the first major industrial battery project under construction out at Kapolei. It will provide, once it's fully charged in one day, 565 megawatts of power. So to relate that to a typical day's usage on Oahu, that's about 2.5%. That facility cost some $200 million. So picture of the cloudy days, like we had December 5th, 6th, January 2nd, 3rd, where we have to draw down those batteries. That's not enough, that $200 million plant won't even last us till 10 o'clock in the morning. So is it gonna take 20 more of those battery installations and $4 billion of investment? It'll have to be paid back by the ratepayers. So we've had a lot of discussion around that issue. So sorry for having on there, Brian, but yeah, let's talk about land use. The current land use by Hawaiian Nut Creek is minimal. The Kahi Power Plant, YAL Power Plant, some fuel storage at Campbell Industrial Park, very low. But if we're gonna add something like 800 megawatts of capacity of solar industrial farms, and it's something like five acres per megawatt, that's gonna require as much as 4,000 acres. That's a huge amount of land. And as Brian mentioned, the conversion to electric vehicles, perhaps another 600 megawatts of capacity, another 3,000 acres. So the point of this, and these are just round numbers to make the point, is that they're gonna run into competing policies. We all know that the cost of housing in Hawaii is the highest or right next to the highest in the nation. Are we gonna take all of this land out of possible circulation for residential development? Are we gonna take all of this land out of agricultural use? We have a lot of goals to become closer to self-sufficiency. So clearly we need a lot of further analysis on the land use trade-offs of setting this glorious sounding 100% goal, that there's a lot of implications to it and a lot of considerations that need a lot for the discussion. Brian, next item on our list of topic to discuss is adapting, back over to you. Yeah, one of the things I think people need to think about is that this is a very long-term proposition. We're not gonna fall off the end of the earth in 2040, 2050, 2060. It is insidious and it's a very long-term proposition which we will be able to solve incrementally. And adaptation is one of those incremental solutions. A lot of places in the world are thinking about that right now. There have been some apocalyptic scenarios of flooding and weather changes, extreme weather changes. They may all come to pass. They're gonna come to pass and we will watch them and we will need to have strategies for making sure they don't become too disruptive or damaging to life and property. But I think for people to think that we have to do things today that there's this paranoia of the end of the world is coming is a little misplaced. For one thing, when you look at forecasts of anything to do with climate change, whether it's temperature, sea level rise, weather, whatever, you always, in 100% of the cases, you find a range, a range of outcomes. And some of them can be very dramatic. In the case of sea level rise, we've got one chart that shows a range of 10 inches to 20 feet. That's kind of a crazy range. And you have to ask yourself, so where in there are the probabilities? What's the likely scenario? What are the downsides of picking one versus the other? And if you're somebody who wants to be a paranoid about it, you'll pick 20 feet and scream that the sky is falling. We don't think it's going to be like that. We think there are more time is needed to record more data. I think a lot of people agree with that. It's very interesting that a lot of these charts start from today at basically zero. All the lines are together today. And all of a sudden they rapidly diverge over the next 30, 40 years. That's all forecasting. And it's a very complicated science, climate science. There may be a lot of experts that agree on a lot of things, but they don't all agree on the same things. So we have to ask ourselves, how much do we want to respond to these kinds of forecasts? Which ones do we want to respond to? And how much time can we take to kind of make sure that we're right before we do things that are damaging to our basic lifestyles and environment? And I think one of the things that is a bit risky with this, and I'll just close with this. I did have a company that distributed fuel products. We're just a trucking company that buys from the big refinery and then sends it off to other people. But I know a little bit about petroleum business and distribution. And I know a little bit about the refining business. I think this effort to, in some cases, actually make fossil fuels illegal and to risk shutting down the refinery without a proper assessment of its strategic importance are a little misguided. We need to realize that fossil fuels are going to be here for a long time. That's a whole other subject we'll get into someday. I think you'll find it very interesting if you tune back in, but the refinery and fossil fuels are not just going to disappear. They are huge, they are part of modern life. We really cannot live without them. It's not just gasoline and jet fuel. It's everything. As you turn yourself 360 degrees wherever you are watching this, you will not be able to find one thing in your view that is not heavily dependent on the production of fossil fuels and use of fossil fuels. So I'll end with that. We'll do it again next time and probably devote a whole program to that transition. So Clint, we don't have a lot more time. We've got some closing thoughts. Certainly, hopefully we've conveyed what the Practical Policy Institute of Hawaii is about. We're brand new, we intend to make our presence known through a website. We're so new, don't even have that yet. Quote under construction, as you've seen. We'll be testifying and have been at the legislature and tend to do so at the city council. We've had a couple of off heads. We hope to do more webinars like this, position papers to our community leaders, social media continue the presentations to lunch groups, clubs, associations and so forth. Our primary goal is education of the public. But equally important, perhaps even more so, is that our policy makers, the legislature and the city and county of Honolulu need to make fully informed decisions. There's a lot they can do, policies, taxation, establishing priorities, incentives, subsidies and so forth. And yes, we intend to call some of the, what we think is exaggerated projections that are included in models. We think critical informed judgment and scientific methodological fact-checking is important. There's an interesting letter to the editor not too long ago that if you start with the assumption that the more deviant the facts, the more improbable the projections is always a good place to begin to hunt for veracity. So that's what we intend to do. In the words of Representative Chris Lee, that was in the Scientific American not too long ago. He said that the 100% renewable goal in 2045 was set and this is the exact quote, without doing the due diligence to figure out how this will be achieved. We think there's a lot more work to a lot more due diligence that needs to be done. And we think it's under time, it's time to undertake that due diligence. So again, thank you to Jay Fidel and the Think Tech Hawaii team for having us. We hope to be a regular voice on this webcast or at least participate frequently. I think that's our time limit. Thank you again for tuning in and aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.