 Good evening. You're on the air once again with Patience on the News. And tonight we have a very, very interesting guy. I think he's an interesting guy, plus is an interesting topic. And his name is Peter Dugas. And Peter is a musician. You are a musician, aren't you, Peter? And what do you, I mean, you're a professional musician. You have a band? Yeah, I try to keep these worlds separated, but I'm happy to talk about it. Yeah, well, I think people are interested in the guest too. Not just the topic, but the guest. Yeah, yeah, I've been a working musician for quite some time and a music educator. Yeah, so look, so look, you grew up in Maine. I did. And you attended Brown University. I did, yeah. So you have an Ivy League education and you got your degrees in physics and engineering. Yeah. That's how you become a musician. That's how we become a music teacher. Get your degrees in physics and engineering. And... You're making my mom very proud right now. Well, it's a fact. And then, but you, did you play the piano growing up? I did, yeah, yeah, amongst other instruments, but piano was my main instrument. Other instruments too. Yeah. Like what? Well, I'm fooling around on other things. So I went to Shervers High School and graduated in the 90s and I, you know, it's a small music, it's a small school, small music program. So I, when there was a need for someone to pick up that instrument for this song or something, I would jump on a different instrument, but mostly it was piano these days. And once it was college, it was pretty much just piano. And now you, not only, you teach students, you teach at, you teach at Main College of Art in the music department there. Yep. Where else? I teach, I have a private studio of students and I teach over at the Coles-Francaise du Main at Benfri Port, the French language immersion school. You teach them the piano in French? Sometimes, when they'll allow me to butcher their language. Okay, so while you were majoring in physics and engineering at Brown University, you got interested in climate. That's right. And you had a professor there, I think, who said something to you that, as I read your reaction, you said, you freaked out. Yeah. Yeah, I was doing a summer internship and doing data entry between two years at school towards the end. And I was in the physics department. Physics. Yep. And I was doing data entry for a professor who was doing climate research. This is, you know, 30 years ago. So I was, there was just the kind of scientific community had been jailing for some time around the consensus that global warming had been happening. By then it was the science, well, you could argue it was 100 years old, but it was really a growing concern in the past 10, 20 years. And at that point, we were really crunching the numbers on it. This was around the time of the Kyoto Accords, which was like an early move towards trying to do something about it that had the... To create an international treaty on climate control. Exactly, right. So that, you know, and I just remember having a conversation kind of really looking at, you know, letting my imagination get involved into what these numbers were actually saying and what it meant, not only for the world, but for humanity. You know, this was the first time when we went from, oh, you know, we should do something to save the earth to we should do something to save us. And that's when I was talking to my professor and he was saying, you know, taking the very scientific demeanor of like removing himself from the situation and saying, yeah, what a funny creature man, humanity is to deliberately, you know, go in this direction when we know it's causing serious threats to our future existence. So was it more alarming than that? For me, it was very alarming. I knew, it was probably the moment I realized I didn't need to be a research scientist because I couldn't separate, you know, it was, you know, you need to be doing something more about this than just, I mean, I understood the need for what he was doing, which was putting up peer-reviewed research, but I needed to, you know, I kind of had floated around since then and, you know, had a career or a couple of careers, but I always had in my mind that this was something that we were gonna have to deal with more and more as I got older and as the years went on. And this professor that you were working with, he had no doubt what was gonna happen to the earth, right? No, I mean, well, he knew what was happening at that time. Yeah. And he knew where the direction was going. Now, there's a lot of reasons to be very hopeful about what happened in the past. Well, it goes in, depending on the data, you can look, there's completely sympathetic data, our data that establishes that we are in a worse spot by far than we were then about where the trajectory is. And we were 30 years ago. 30 years ago, I can get into that a bit, but there's also a lot of reasons for hope now where the prices, for instance, just within the past five years on renewable power and a lot of things that can kind of, we can wean ourselves off from what's really causing the problem, which is there's nearly no... Okay, but if we did nothing, if we weren't focused on renewables and we weren't constructing renewable power sources, the news wouldn't be good, I assume. No, no. It's already not great, but we have a lot of power within ourselves still. There's concerted efforts to make us... There are a lot of different issues where you read about it, the more you've become an armchair expert in different things, you'll feel less nervous about. Climate is not one of those. Climate is probably the exception to the rule where I feel like, however, I would say that there's really good reasons to be optimistic about the trajectory we can still take because even there's a lot of powerful forces wanting us to throw up our hands and saying, it's too late, it's too much, it's too tough on the economy, which is all, I think, deceitful, but I think you can all... But there is a lot of reasons to be hopeful and particularly, we have a lot more power in our hands than a lot of people will realize, especially, ironically enough, in our state of Maine. So all right, say you're hopeful, you're gonna do some optimism in this thing, we're making some progress and replacing fossil fuel generation with renewable generation, that's all well and good, but I wanna establish now whether this climate change thing is a real problem because I know people, I was talking to a friend of mine not long ago, he's a dentist and he said, yeah, but we need to drill, we need more fossil fuels, we got a problem and I said, well, what about climate change? That'll have to wait, that'll have to wait. If it's a problem, he said, if it's a problem, that'll have to wait. So a lot of people don't believe that it's a problem, don't believe that you're working on anything that's that important. Well, it sounds like your friend, the dentist, also feels like it may be a problem, but there's other problems to be concerned with too, like probably expensive gas prices and heating all the other stuff. So and I'm totally sympathetic of the last thing I want is to establish or to feed the perceived dichotomy between the folks who have the affluence or the ability or concern or to be worried about this problem, which 30 years ago I kind of came face to face with as an existential problem for humanity. I don't want it to be something that's, only for the folks who have the ability to kind of think about it or who are worried about it or the time and means to dig into it versus the folks who are worried about paying paycheck to paycheck. All that's gonna do, feeding that dichotomy, which doesn't need to be there with the right policy choices. You're saying it's not a problem that my guy says, I wanna drill. I want us to get more and more fossil fuel production. It's wrong to reduce fossil fuel production. You say that doesn't concern you? Well, there's always gonna be folks out there saying that and I would actually probably ask some questions if I were the dentist chair and I didn't have drill in my mouth, so I could ask a question. I would ask probably, we'll try to drill in to no pun intended to drill down on exactly what was the concern. Was it the price of gas, the price of fuel? Let's say it's the price of gas and the price of fuel. That's simple. Right, so if you're susceptible to those changes and that's really, there's a lot of reasons. This is a tough time for a lot of folks and I don't wanna, there doesn't need to be that dichotomy fed where we have to think about this. Right now, we're stumbling and fits and starts to kind of a renewable future. We've made great progress, but right now it's the affluent folks who can afford the electric vehicles or can afford the solar farm share or can afford to retrofit their house with better insulation or whatever it might be. And the other folks are trying to figure out a way to. You look at this as some dichotomy up in the, the atmosphere. I'm talking about a policy choice. I'm talking about the Congress saying, we're gonna pass a law to make sure you can drill and get as much fossil fuel out of the ground as we possibly can so that it will immediately rate, we think, the prices, the gas price and the home heating oil price. So I'm talking about a real thing, so policy. So you're not against that policy? Well, no, I would be. I think it's also, I think it's foolhardy to jump into those policies when you actually look at the math of how long it takes before you permit a new gas or oil or coal well to go to market. It takes long enough that these. But how come, why can't you say it's wrong? It's wrong to say that. That's short-sighted. It's gonna, because we have a planet, you know, somebody who's less careful than you would say, we got a planet that's burning up. We got all of these things. We got seas that are rising. We got all kinds of changes in our society as the result of this. And we cannot, that's going in the wrong direction if we expand the production of fossil fuels. Why can't you say that? I couldn't very well say that, but I don't wanna, I wanna try to also, you know, there are so many lines, it's such a complicated problem and it's as the US Defense Department has called it, it is a threat multiplier. Anything that causes susceptibility for our national defense gets multiplied by the growing concern about climate, or by climate changing. For instance, climate refugees is gonna be a problem we're gonna continue to have to deal with for a long time. What's a climate refugee? Refugee? I don't, sir, I know what a refugee is. What's a climate refugee? Well, I mean, I think Europe has been on the forefront of climate policy because they've been seeing so many folks coming from North Africa and Syria and other problem spots in the world, which a lot of those things, it's very hard to, you know, it's a myriad of problems, but a lot of those were coming from famines, stricken places where it's no longer very easy to create food for themselves. So they're leaving those poverty-stricken places. Africa is on the brunt, if you read some of these climatologists like Catherine Hayhoe's research, they, you know, historically they're responsible for less than 1% of US, sorry, of global carbon emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, and yet they have the majority of the deaths associated with it from famines and droughts. From famine? Famines and droughts and other reasons, yeah. So is the droughts accelerating? If we look at it historically, is droughts accelerating and becoming more severe in Africa? Right, and other parts of the world. Right, I'm just asking you, don't say you're right, Harold, because that's a question. That's a simple yes. Yeah, I think the science is certain of that. I mean, it's hard to say that any one particular drought is, you know, but we know that each one is made much more probabilistically likely to happen because of what we're doing to the atmosphere. So to put it in perspective. So you're saying there are governments in Europe that absolutely believe that this is leading and will in the future lead to more refugees coming to Europe in order to eat? Right, exactly. I mean, to survive. To survive. And when that happens, when that gets exacerbated and it starts multiplying, it destabilizes societies. It destabilizes democracies, as could be argued in some places. So, you know, that's something that is getting a lot of attention and that's what the folks from the Defense Department and much smarter than me are thinking about that is one of the problems that they're worried about. That, you know, the threat multiplier that I was talking about before. But we can also point, what I would say to you getting back to your dentist, I would get back to the point about like, well, we can find policies around the world that both, you know, a lot of people think about this as being like, you're asking me to sacrifice my lifestyle. You're asking me to spend more money on something and thinking about it purely as the consumer end of things on the demand side of the economic equation. Instead of the supply side, which is where a lot of this has come from. And there's a lot of great policies out there that we have our favorites within the group that I volunteer with that look both for the effectiveness of ameliorating the problem, stabilizing the climate, but also being equitable, serving the folks who are, you know, who are in the lower middle income levels. Yeah, but my guy's focused on supply. Sure. I'm saying, you know, if you drill baby drill, we'll have more of this commodity and the price will come down. Right, but that's also, you could, there are smarter ways of doing that that don't threaten the future of humanity and the don't, you know, or later decades. I don't, I think that he's probably missing with all due respect to him, I would say like, there's a missing about exactly through the decades what we're projected to look at and how permanent that will be, how long it takes for carbon emissions to burn out of the atmosphere. What are we looking at? As we speak, the United States emits a trillion pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere, just the United States. And we're no longer the highest emitter where China is now, but we put a trillion pounds into the atmosphere every month. If you were to count, just to get an idea, a trillion is such a big number. If you were to count seconds as pounds, you know, it would take you like 16 and a half minutes to get to a thousand pounds. It would take you like, I think it was three and a half years to get to a million. And, you know, the next order up would be a billion, but a trillion takes you over 32,000 years to get to that number. Okay. So that's how much we're doing in a month. So why should I be concerned about that? Because it's, I mean, it's a trace amount in the atmosphere that keep, well, this continued pollution in the atmosphere. I wish we could see it or smell it or detect it in any ways, but we know that it's putting a big blanket over the, you know, it's throwing off the natural thermal cooling and heating of the atmosphere. And we're seeing its effects everywhere. Well, how will it affect the dentist? It's a good question. I mean, he has property in Maine. He could, I mean, he probably- I want to know, some of the things, people are watching, will this ever affect me or are they just talking about? Well, in Maine, we've already seen it affect our, you know, seasonal fluctuations. We've seen fisheries that have closed or migrated away or have been threatened by it. I talk about in, you know, when I give a presentation, I talk about how when I first married my wife, I married into like two generations, then we had a daughter. We had three generations of New England women who on my mother-in-law's birthday would get main shrimp on New Year's Day, it's her birthday. And we would peel them because you get them half, you know, wholesale and it's half the price. You put them in little baggies and you put them in the freezer and that's your protein for the winter. That's gone. That was nearly a $20 million industry in, you know, 2000 or so. And that's completely gone. I mean, the good news is you can still get main shrimp. The bad news is you have to go to Nova Scotia or you've got to go to Newfoundland to get them. And that's, we can see that happening with lobsters. Could just ask someone from who used to lobster generations ago in Long Island, in Connecticut, in Massachusetts, how their lobster industry is doing. It's gone, isn't it? It's gone, yeah. You know, there's, so. Is that, if we did nothing, is that what would happen in Maine? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's, we have to, a lot of work ahead of us to try to prevent that from happening. I think, you know, it's a big complicated system and we just know that it's basically, even if you weren't 100% sure, you still take an insurance policy out from doing that. And we're not, I think it's, there's a lot of very powerful forces trying to get it to be like, oh, you're asking me to sacrifice my lifestyle or income or my ability to have cheap gas or anything. But we, there's reasons to be optimistic about where not only the, what recently has happened, that we should be thankful for our own state delegation to DC for leading, but we should also be really thankful for what the market forces have done where renewable prices, it's now cheaper in 90% of the world to develop renewable energy than it is new fossil fuel energy. And soon it'll be cheaper in most of the world to switch to the renewable energy than to stay on the existing fossil fuel. Well, isn't that an answer to my dentist? Yeah. You know, if you're really worried about cost, price, then you should be for replacing fossil fuel with renewables. Right. And what are, what are the sources of renewable energy? Well, I mean, there is no perfect energy source. You always have to, we have to kind of... No, but what are they? Oh, sure. What are they? Hydroelectric solar wind title is a form of solar. So hydroelectric solar and wind. And it seems to me, and I'm not much of an expert on this thing, but the fossil fuels, the oil and the gas, you know, the Russians produce it and the Chinese produce it and other people produce it and we produce it. And it's a commodity and it's traded globally. So it's on the global market. So let's use main and renewables. So you say it's hydro, it's wind and it's solar. So the wind is our wind, it's local wind. It has nothing to do with Russia or China. That's right. The sun is the sun we get. Right. Not the sun that shines in Russia or China. Right. And the water for the hydro is in our rivers, not their rivers. Right. It's local. You agree with that? I do, yeah. And it's more controllable and the price is steady and when the wind blows, it doesn't blow expensive or moderately price or cheap, the wind just blows. Right. I mean, there is an intermissive problem where it's just like there will be calm days, there will be cloudy days, but and you know, that's when you have to talk about battery storage and that sort of thing. But a lot of that, we're talking about incentives or how to switch to that, you know, the exist, the energy that's there. If you look at the data, it's, I mean, that's the easy part because the market's doing that already to a great extent as I, you know, as I just said, it's getting cheaper all the time. And the pressure as more and more parts of the world see how fraught the decision is to rely on these, you know, unstable authoritarian regimes for their fossil fuels, whether it be Russia or Saudi Arabia or wherever parts of the world, it makes a lot more sense, as you're saying, to go domestically and harvest what we have. But there is an intermentancy problem and we also have to, so battery has to be a part of it, which is we should also be thankful for some of the things that King Collins, Pingree and Golden have done with like the best act, and I can get into that, but- You don't have to get too complicated. Sure, sure, I won't. But what I would say is there's a real push. If you look at the scientific data, we also need to not only incentivize the virtue, but we have to find some way to do it quickly and move us away, that transition has to be equitable. So it's not just the rich people. Okay, so what are we talking about? As you're saying, we have to come up with a system which reduces demand for this kind of fossil fuel generation, come up with a system that reduces the demand, but is equitable for everybody, including the person who really worries about going to the gas pump and having to pump some $3.50 gas. And heating oil, so what is that system? Well, there's a number of different. When I was in college, those 30 years ago, there was a lot of talk, in fact, George H.W. Bush, so this was before college for me, the first George Bush had gotten very close to putting in a European-style cap and trade system. There had been success phasing out the pollutants that were causing the problems with the ozone layer. Well, should you get to explain to me what cap and trade means? It's a complicated thing, and I don't want to give you... I don't want to complicate, but it puts a value on... Yes, it puts a price on the pollution applied at the source, the polluters, the folks who have been doing the bad things directly, not me going to the gas pump, but the folks who bring it into the market and throw it out of the ground. This is a utility that's generating electricity with coal. Right, or pumping oil out of the ground and... Or coal mining. Or coal mining, or natural gas fractions. Okay, so here's an example, just so we'll be on coal mining. So cap and trade, I own a coal mine. If we had cap and trade, how would that affect me? What would I have to do? So you would then have to... We didn't adopt this, Europe has it, but you would have to have a gradually decreasing... You'd have to stay below a certain threshold of how many emissions you were putting out in the atmosphere of whatever we're doing, this is carbon dioxide in this case. And that would go down every year. And let's say your coal mine, you've gotten really good, you've innovated to a point, it's caused you to figure out a way to innovate so that you're doing better than your neighbor, the next coal mine be. What is that doing better? Doing better, let's... Let fewer emissions... How do I do that? Coal is coal. Coal is coal, but you might have... They're carbon capture, scrubbers, something like that, perhaps. Let's let our imaginations go on that one. Now the coal mine, I would just say, when you take the... There's no scrubbing, when you take the coal out of the mine, it's when you put it in the boiler in the utility to generate electricity that you'd have scrubbers. So I got a coal mine, all I'm doing is extracting this black stuff and shipping it to somebody and charging them for it. Right, so under the cap, getting back to the under the cap and trade thing, what would happen is you would then, if you were to innovate to a point where you had more credits that you could sell, it's like your ability to pollute and it's gonna go down every year, so you better keep innovating to keep ahead of your buddy. And if a natural gas mine comes, or a fracking site comes in and puts that electrical grid because it's so much less carbon emissions per BTU, per the amount of energy that it creates, they're gonna innovate faster than you, it basically puts into the market incentives to get cleaner. And so that's what's happening. Now, that didn't happen. And I think it's actually, there's a number of cases where we got very, very close. One was under, the first time was under George H.W. Bush, the first to George Bush and Bush 41. And that didn't happen. And then in two- It didn't happen because the Congress didn't- And actually, I think from what I understand, what happened within the executive branch, I think it was part of the cabinet's discussion that prevented that from happening. From what I understand. Okay, okay, they convinced Bush not to propose it to Congress. Yep. Okay. James Hansen's book, Storms of My Grandchildren, kind of goes through that story. Anyways, but then it almost happened again in 2009 underneath the first year of Obama's administration. And there's, you know, we would be in a better place environmentally climate-wise had we adopted that. Less worried about the hurricanes and less worried about the flooding, et cetera. And less worried about the lobster and the blueberry harvest and snow or sugar load. Had that happened. In fact, this is one of the, to put it into perspective, in the 30 years since that decision for George H.W. Bush, it's 30 more now, to not put that in place, humanity or humanity has emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in those 30 years than in all of human history till 1992, to put it into perspective. Okay, that's shocking to me. Yeah, but then it almost happened again in 2009 under the first years of Obama administration. There was a very ambitious plan. We actually, and I think there was a potential, you know, it's a fraught discussion because you're talking about basically a stock market or for companies ability to pollute. And that's getting like more valuable as the government ratchets that down. It's a little bit heavy-handed government. There are, while it's not a perfect system. It's not unusual because today, generators of electricity, renewable electricity, get credits, they're tradable. They can be traded, called RECs. Exactly, right. And that's what you're buying when you're buying into a solar farm and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a way to introduce the marketplace as a solution. The problem with it, and I think, you know, we saw a little bit of that when Prime Minister Macron and France tried to put an additional fee on carbon on top of the participating in the EU's, you know, very complicated cap and trade system, was that there was very little installed there to take care of the folks who were just trying to make ends meet, pay their bills, couldn't have, you know, didn't have the extra bandwidth to think about the climate. I mean, you may have been concerned about it, but they've got kids to feed, whatever. And you saw the Gilles Jaune movement, the Yellow Vest movement, if you remember that from four years ago. The protests. The giant protests because of the price, heist and gap. So there are other mechanisms, you know, one of the nice things about the United States taking so long to adopt something like this. And as we speak right now, the US is the last developed nation to put some form of carbon price on pollution. And it's not only the last, it hasn't even happened yet in the United States. Yeah, we haven't, not yet. We're the last, we're the only developed nation without it. I mean, there are, outside of the world of developed nations, this is according to the WTO, who's developed and who's not, right? So there's, but we're the last ones to join the club and the pressure to do that is gonna increase. However, there's, if you were to just have that cap and trade system, it doesn't really deal with those folks who are on the bottom level, if it's just prices, you know, if I'm running that coal company or the natural gas or the, or the, or Shell Oil or something, and I'm just getting hit with a bigger, bigger price all the time, I'm just gonna pass that down to the consumer and it's gonna hit the gas pump or the number two heating oil for your home or the electrical bill as we're seeing. Right, a lot of people won't like that. Exactly. So you get a better idea. Is there a better idea? Yes, so the idea that has been adopted in Canada that we're very excited about is called, well, they call it carbon fee and dividend, which is actually similar to a car, it's a carbon price with a different mechanism and it's passed in, first in British Columbia for seven years. We have good data about how that province did before it became the default policy under Prime Minister Trudeau for all of Canada. There are places if you have- So if I lived in Canada, how would that affect me? So here's what happened in- And I buy home heating oil and I buy gasoline, okay, so how did it affect me? So here's what happens. It's the same kind of thing we were talking about in Europe where, but instead of it being a stock market where the price is established and it's actually a gradually increasing price, a proportional to the amount of pollution. So coal gets hit the hardest because it's the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, less for oil and less still for natural gas because it's, you know, but if we were to grab a gradually increasing price on that, that again would hurt folks on the middle and lower income levels. But what they did in Canada is have it not go to the government coffers, but go into a separate escrow account. Okay, so the extra money. So okay, I'm burning coal in my house. My coal bill's going up because the coal producers are having to pay into this fund and they're charging me for it when they sell it. They got to recover it because their stockholders want them to have a return. Right. So that's where the dividend is so important. So the dividend, which is, if, you know, dividend is a fancy economics word that I like to call it instead cashback carbon pricing. All that money gets returned as an equal dividend check for every man, woman and child in that country. They get a check from the government? They get a check from the government. Up until July of this past year, 2022, it was buried in their taxes because that's the cheapest way for the government to put it, give it back to them. However. But the people don't realize it. Exactly, right. So they're just seeing the price of gas was going up nominally. It still was popular even though it did, it did, it came, it was kind of a centerpiece of two national elections, Trudeau's election and then reelection. Yeah. And yet, and it failed, I mean, it succeeded. So it's still established. But what they wanted to do is make it more transparent. So they have a quarterly payment check in hand sent in the mail or Venmo injection into your bank account paid for on the backs of the legacy polluters that have been putting that stuff in the atmosphere. And in the research shows, you may think, well, what is good is that? It's just gonna, I'm just gonna take that dividend check and put, you know, I could take that money and then put it as a down payment on the next gas guzzler, you know, Hummer or whatever it might be. But it's really does move consumers. That would be a foolish thing to do economically because you knew the price of gas was gonna go up or whatever it might be. But it really moves less about the consumer, the, as it does the supply side. The folks who are much more sensitive to slight price fluctuations, the ups and downs of the market, when they know that the gas prices are, sorry, the fuel that they're using is gonna get gradually more expensive year after year after year if they stay on this system, they will be much more incentivized to innovate or perish to their, you know, at the hands of their competitors who figured it out. So even if I still took my dividend check and just kept on doing the same thing, buying gas with it, pretty soon it's gonna be, you know, the car market that I'm going to buy a replacement for my car when it inevitably dies is gonna be much more efficient or maybe it'll be electric or maybe the heat pumps will be much more cheap because the whole, the economics of scale will be working the favor of incentives. So it really affects less about the consumer. It does a bit, but it's more about the small businesses or big businesses that are working in that direction. So we're talking a little bit about, you know, coal producers and oil producers and gas producers, but the, all the big, several big American automobile manufacturers are saying, we're done in 15 years with a gasoline engine, all we're gonna produce is electric vehicles. So I'm a person who sees these trends and says, this is what's gonna happen in the world. All cars ultimately will be electric. They won't be consuming gasoline. So the real issue is electricity. We need a lot of it. If we're gonna take the gasoline engines out and power all of these cars all over the world with electricity, we need a lot of electricity. And so back to renewable power and hydro wind and solar, we're gonna need a lot more of it and we have to move it around. You're right, sir, exactly right. Yeah, you put your finger on it perfectly, Mr. Pages, because what you've got is... You can call me Harold. Okay, I'll call you Harold. If you actually look at some of the models out there and my favorite is, if anyone's watching and wants to poke around, N-roads, E-N-R-O-A-D-S, which is a great free model to poke around and try to put your own climate policy in place. But if you were to just incentivize electric vehicles, it actually, and just do that policy, it would actually make globally a bigger demand on coal. It actually has a small, it goes from expecting 3.6 degrees centigrade by the end of the century, 2100 to 3.4. It's like barely a trace. So what you're saying is it would require more coal. Because we're just looking for electricity, right? Because people are just looking for electricity. However, if we accelerate the conversion from fossil fuel to renewables, then what you said is not true. Exactly, exactly. So we do have to talk about other complimentary policies like, we have to talk about really a big effort nationally and internationally to upgrade our grid so we can handle this capacity, but that means jobs. And if you have the economic system working in this way where we're actually doing what markets are good at, a price on the extra now, the price on what we don't wanna have in the system anymore, meaning the greenhouse gas emissions, then businesses and consumers alike are moving in that direction. But the great thing about what you're talking about, the fee and dividend, the Canadian carbon cashback thing, cashback carbon pricing, is that it does both things at the same time. It works across the entire economy to incentivize the good stuff, the renewables and the battery storage and all that stuff. But it also disincentivizes the bad stuff because we can't just have it be one or the other. It's gotta be both at the same time so that, yes, because just coal is always gonna have a market share unless we do something about it. That's why we have to put this price in place. Yeah, you gotta discourage people from buying electricity that's generated with coal. Right, right. Well, we have a lot of work to do with the grid in order to, for instance, so. Well, what are you talking about upgrading the grid? Well, I don't understand that. Yeah. What does it mean upgrading the grid? What does that mean? It's a big complicated subject. Is the grid, are we talking about the wires I see on towers, transmission lines and things? Is that what we, when we're talking about the grid? A lot of it, yeah. So, from what I understand, and I'm no expert on this, you know, any one of these little things you can talk about, you could really dig in deep. But we're talking about what the grid can maintain right now and we developed that a long time ago. You know, this is packed. Again, we're talking about all these transmission lines. Transmission lines. Big ones, small ones, you know, as a whole connection. Because this is what people see when they drive it. Exactly, exactly. So, when we're talking about that, yes, what was recently passed that we and our volunteers were working very hard to get across the finish line with the Inflation Reduction Act, which record breaking climate provisions within that, the upper limits of what we would expect to save in emissions reductions is 40%. Our treaty within Paris Protocol was, the big treaty that all the government signed, said we get to 50% by 2030. This gets us to 40% if we can upgrade the grid. If we can't update the grid, it's, we may not only get to like 20%. So, we have a limit, there's a limiting factor just because we are relying on a very old system that it needs a lot of work for if we're gonna bring in all these local sources of energy from heat, solar. We need more of it. We need more transmission capacity. Yeah, right. Okay, well, we just had a referendum in Maine a couple of years ago about a transmission line. The new part that is, most of it is existing. It's been there for a while, but the add-on was what, 53 miles or something? It was up between Jackman and the Canadian border. So it would have meant taking down some trees to put the transmission line, very unpopular. They defeated it. So that doesn't give me much hope. Right, I mean, we have to be careful, and then I have to be careful also about, you know, that's a complicated situation because there's competing narratives about exactly how clean that energy is. And hydro power coming from Quebec, there's competing documentation about that. What is that about hydro power? Well, that's what we were talking about. But why is hydro power in Quebec not totally clean? Well, I mean, I have to keep a 30,000 look if you look at this, but I would say that one narrative says this is pre-existing. They have dams with the holes there, with the turbines ready to go in. They just don't have enough customers, or they have more capacity than they know how to deal with it. What does that have to do with it's not totally clean? So if they're saying it's not totally clean because this perhaps would incentivize them to flood more acreage up there. Oh, they're being cleaned, they're flooding some Indian lands that aren't flooded. Right, there are carbon costs to that. There will be emissions created because of taking a living forest that actually sequesters carbon and flooding it. It's a complication. It's very complicated. Yeah, it's so complicated when you raise all these things, nothing can be done. Well, that's the thing that we don't want to get to. Well, you know, I'm listening to this and all of the complications echo like this. Right. It's too complicated, forget it. We're all going to die. We're all going to burn up or be flooded or whatever. Right, but you've got to think about this. It's also, how complicated is it for electrical grid, which we need in order for us to fully harvest the greenhouse gas emissions savings that we just passed versus putting in a new oil or gas line? You know, FERC is the only place that you have to go through for... FERC, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C. Okay, they regulate all electricity generation sales, et cetera, okay. So you have one, if I understand it correctly, and you would know better than me, but if you have one regulatory means to kind of do an interstate gas or oil line, whereas an electrical grid has to go through each of the states, municipal, or like a statewide people. Yeah, so that makes it hard. So it's very difficult. It's just not an even playing field. Okay. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, but so where are we? We've been talking now for a while. So I say, this is too complicated, nothing can happen. We're done. So this is... We're toast. No, we're not. And in fact, I think... But that's why these little... We have to be wary of nimbism and stuff. And also we have to be wary of the perfect being the enemy of the very good, right? So we know something has to be done. We know we have to act fast in order to avert catastrophe. I think 97% of the scientific documentation says that this is us and it's a problem and it could mean very bad thing. Well, it could mean our extinction if we go in the wrong direction for sure. So we need to do this and I need to kind of, as a volunteer for Citizens Climate Lobby, we're focused on things that work for people and for the environment. And that's why we're taking this 30,000 view look of everything and saying, if we just look at what markets are good at, which is figuring, incentivizing innovation, then this is, it's worked in Europe, it's worked in the UK, it's working in Canada where they've put a price on carbon. We, you know, and we already have the capacity to do this, we're going in this direction, we just need to accelerate it. So this would actually move and because the United States is such a strong economy, we would reap a lot of advantages from participating in this. And I think that's the big thing. Now, we also focus on smaller things, you know, like regulatory permitting reform and that kind of thing, but this carbon, cashback carbon pricing or carbon fee and dividend as the UN governmental panel on climate change, the IPCC has stated multiple times, is a quote unquote necessary condition for stabilizing the climate. With this, it's not sufficient. We don't, this isn't all we need to do, but this is, the biggest thing is to put this, to price the carbon emissions that are coming out. Okay, so that's the focus of your citizen's lobby. Right, among, yeah. For climate change. Okay, that's the focus. And that will, if you can get that enacted by the Congress, then other good things will happen as a result of that. Because the market forces will be adjusted in such a way that it will incentivize more renewable investment in renewable power. And more important, and I think it was really important for states like Maine, which has a lot of folks in, you know, in land folks, if you actually look at the economic models of what that dividend check does, that monthly cash-in-hand dividend check paid for on the backs of the polluters that actually creates a lot of benefits for low-income and middle-income folks. You know, if you can actually, we've broken it down into maps for each different state. And if you look at Maine, you know, yes, there will be benefits along the coast, but it's actually benefiting more of, you know, higher percentage of households will be net benefiters. 95% of households under 60% income level and lower are net benefiters because it's the folks who are paying for most of that, you know, well, it's only people paying for it directly are the folks who are actually pulling the fossil fuel out of the ground and bringing it into the market. But the folks who are paying for it are the folks who are like, you know, Jeff Bezos taking a space shot into outer space for a tourist flight or folks, you know, on private jets. What do you mean the people that are paying for it? Like, Jeff Bezos taking a space shot? Well, because they're gonna be the ones they consume, they have a huge carbon footprint. Oh, you're talking about, okay, all the pollution from going up to the moon. Or having a private jet or having six, you know, vacation homes or whatever it might be. I mean, and so, and also those folks have the best means to decarbonize their lifestyle because of their affluence. So they can, you know, switch to the heat pumps or invest in some insulation or get a plug-in hybrid or whatever it might be. So it actually, and that just brings the problem down, but there's more money to go back because the dividend check is equal. There's no means test, so it's very difficult to gain. And the government can't touch it for other uses because part of the law has mandated that this has to be paid out in full so that by the end of the month it's got $0.00 and 0 cents. You can't grab that money for some other use. All right, this is all very complicated, all right? So we understand the general proposition that, you know, if something costs more, you switch to something else. So, but none of this what you're talking about. Well, first of all, I do wanna go back to one thing. You twice used the word extinction. So I wanted people watching this program to know that you're talking about something very, very important to them. Even more important than whether gasoline is 395 a gallon or 330 a gallon is extinction. You really mean that, extinction? It's a possibility. It's not outside of the realm of possibility. I mean, that's what, if you want a good scare, you could read some of the, you know, most of the popular books on the subject, on the climate crisis, because they know scaring people leads to people throwing up their hands and inaction, which is the last thing we need. They stay optimistic. I actually feel like there's lots of reasons to be optimistic because of where the markets are going and where the global consensus is going. But it is a possibility. But 30 years ago when the professor of Brown told you about this, he said something about extinction, didn't he? He did, yeah. What did he say? Well, he's, I mean, we looked at the data and where this was going and he's told me, you know, as a good scientist, removing his feelings from looking at the data said, I was panicked about what I saw and he was saying, this is, you know, what a funny species humanity is to willfully and knowingly push themselves off the brink like this. Destroy their world. Right. I mean, it's, the whole point of, you know, saving the planet is one thing. I'm not, the planet, that's a, I don't like how that just discussed it. Saving us is what we're trying to do. Well, you seem to get energized by that and what he said and what you found out and by the facts as you found them, you got energized, look at, you're a volunteer, you do this all of, you're working all the time on this and so it must be serious business. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, yeah, it's scary, but I don't want to harp on that because there's still so much we can do. I understand you don't, I understand you don't, but certain points have to be made. We have, yes, I'm glad you're making it. I just don't want to live there because I know folks are motivated more from hope, especially when the hope is not only for the fact that we still have so much power in our hands to move in the right direction and in a way that actually helps folks who are struggling to make ends meet. One thing about human beings, Peter, is they don't get to hope unless they think there's a problem. Right, there certainly is a problem. If they think life is wonderful and there's no problem, then they don't have to hope for anything. Right, when I do my presentation and I use that MIT climate policy simulator called En-Roads, I make sure that everybody either has a chilled bottle of wine in the fridge or a well-worn rosary beads in their pocket because they all need them to go through exactly what this means. It's no joke, it's scary business, but there's, it does, you know, power. Oh, we understand you're optimistic. We understand. Power is knowledge. The knowledge is power. We understand your focus on the positive. So, look, so what you're doing with this carbon pricing thing is going to Congress and saying, you gotta enact this. We have to have a law. Right. And we have a lot of people in Congress who play to the lowest common denominator, what they think. I don't want anybody's gas price to go up because they'll be mad at me. In fact, we saw it here in the most recent election, the whole focus of the opposition to Governor Mills by the other side was inflation. What is she doing about inflation? Gas prices, look at gas prices, blaming her. Right. Okay, so the politicians, of course she had nothing to do with it, it's all global, she had nothing to do with it, but that doesn't make any difference whether she had anything to do with it. It was a good thing to hit her with because people get upset about it. And the politicians saying these things know that if the voters think you have anything to do with increasing the price of gas at the gas pump, you're toast politically. And these people are not heroes in Congress. They're not very brave people. All they care about is getting reelected. So when you go and tell them, you ought to get behind this program and it is gonna increase some prices, but they'll get a dividend check. So here's, so there's a bunch, you brought up so many things I could talk about. We should be very thankful, Maine, if you actually do the numbers, if it was just talking about what Maine is leading the nation with what's going on in a bipartisan fashion, by the way, in Augusta from Governor Mills's leadership, but also some Republicans that are working towards moving Maine quickly to a renewable future. So how do we make, and that's wonderful, but we need to extrapolate that and make it a national and international trend. And the nice thing is that even though Maine has such a very small amount of greenhouse gas emissions, if you do the math, we are responsible for less than 0.3% of U.S. carbon emissions, tiny little fraction. But we're the only state with both of our senators on what's called the Bipartisan Senate Climate Solutions Caucus, working towards these solutions. When we meet with them, they are very great, I mean, that's what we have a great relationship with all four of our national delegations to D.C. And we understand there's some points where it's very difficult to ask for a carbon price when inflation is very high in June when we were down in D.C. There are other points where it's a little bit easier as inflation eases, or as, you know, and what we've recently passed, not only with the Inflation Reduction Act, but also with the Infrastructure Bill and the CHIPS Act and other climate provisions that have happened, and may happen in the lame duck session, that's gonna make that sensitivity to those carbon prices a lot less in the future. And on top of that, so the dividend checks help working folks, and we're seeing that in Canada, that's the carrot, on top of that is the stick, and that's what's gonna get a lot more attention in the coming years Harold. The EU and the UK who are super motivated to decarbonize their economies, especially with what's going on in Ukraine right now, but you know, what are they gonna do? Go move from Putin's oil to Saudi Arabia's oil, it's like not much better, right? They want to quickly decarbonize, so they're increasing their carbon price to move their economy faster away and incentivize the move to renewables. And they're getting good economic growth from it, but if they were to just do that and not insulate themselves somehow from cheap imports, where it's not where it's, where they can freely pollute like the United States, then that's gonna jeopardize their economy. Like where imports from a place where they can freely pollute like the United States? Like Belarus and Russia and Saudi Arabia and the United States, yeah. Yeah, Belarus, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Yeah. Among a few others. We're the last developed nation, as I said, without a carbon price. However, so what they- And I'm gonna say to these people here, and we're all the citizens of that country. Yeah, and it's a representative of democracy and we can anyhow, the when, starting January 1st of 2023, the EU and the UK are going to start levying or at least calculating the carbon tariffs, they call them carbon border adjustment mechanism, but it's tariffs levied on imports coming from countries that don't price their carbon. Like coming from the United States. Right. Or price carbon, but not at a sufficient level, not nearly as high as the EU and the UK does, like China. And the point needs to be made, as I hear you, that if we did have carbon pricing in this country, then the tariff wouldn't be put on that export. That's right. And the money that they would be collecting for a tariff would actually be collected by the government in this country and sent back to the taxpayers. Exactly. So, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. And so if, when that happens, the United States actually, surprisingly, even though we've politically not gotten, we were, from what I understand, from the recent negotiations with the reconciliation bill, we were one vote shy from getting a carbon price included. That vote was Mr. Manchin. I'm not sure. Well, I've known when Mr. Manchin was a 40, he represents coal companies. And two things, he represents coal companies and he wishes to continue getting reelected. Well. That's one of the two things. Relects them being a big part of it. But we've got to wrap this up. Okay. Well, down the last minute. Okay, but we did get a methane price included in that bill, which is not getting much press. And that shows that Congress realizes it works. In the United States in the future, if we were to adopt that carbon fee, we would have a competitive advantage against our competitors in China, where it's three times more carbon-intensive to create their goods on average. India, where it's like 3.8, and Russia, which is more than four times as carbon-intensive to build their goods. So the United States, it makes so much sense for business to join it, and it makes less and less incentives to continue to drag our heels. It's an inevitability. So that's the good news. So our delegation is for this. So write our senators and our congresspeople and tell them, you heard this and you're for it. You want your carbon dividend. You want your carbon dividend. Well, thank you very much for coming. Thank you. I find this very interesting and shocking. And I'm, you're, you know, doing a good job and you're a volunteer, and we honor you for it. I appreciate it. Appreciate it. So...