 Hawaii Lucas, host of Hawaii is My Main Land, live streaming Fridays at 3 p.m. on ThinkTechHawaii.com. Next week, Wednesday, June 21st is the 2017 Summer Stolzness, the day with the most hours of sunlight in the whole year. To celebrate, my guest is Stuart Scott, Executive Director of the United Planet Faith and Science Initiative, and a well-known figure in the international climate change orbit. I've asked him to share some of what he's experienced, talking to Pope Francis at the Vatican, at the COP 22 Marrakesh Climate Change Conference, and most recently, Washington D.C.'s March for Science. In particular, what are the latest interventions for dealing with the United States' new Ice Age of Reason? Welcome back, Stuart. Thank you very much, Koeh. I'm very glad to be here again. So you have characteristically logged many miles since I last chatted with you. So that's the contradiction in my existence. Right. You want to just say a word about that? My carbon footprint for the flying I have to do is huge, but I try to subject every decision I make about travel, about flying, to whether or not it's worth the carbon in the long run. The money is secondary whether or not it's worth the carbon. That's beautiful. Okay. So the last trek you did, or that I know about, was the Washington D.C. Science March. Well, that was one part of it. Actually, this is the first time in my life I've made a circuit around the world because I started out going to Southeast Asia and was asked to do a presentation in Helsinki, Finland. So I ended up completing a circuit. So what made that march worth the carbon? Well I was already on the East Coast. I had it in my calendar, the March for Science, and a week later the People's Climate March and I said if I'm anywhere nearby on one of those two weekends I'm going to go. What made it worth going to the climate march? What made it worth the carbon was we currently have an administration, a presidential administration that is either really pretty dumb or feigning ignorance in order to promote economic interests where they will into their own pockets in some cases. So one of the things that we're both big fans of is changing this conversation from climate focusing on the climate to focusing on the economic reality. I love to quote Bill Clinton for a reason other than he intended. He's famous for having said it's the economy, stupid. Well it's the economy, but in the opposite sense that he meant it. He believes in economic growth most of the world. We've been handed economic growth, we'll solve all problems, all boats float, etc. Well there's a possibility that we have already gone too big that the human economy is bigger than the planet we live on can support. So the way I see it we're in an age or a transition that's similar to when Galileo said the earth is round and the Vatican said no the earth is flat or we will agree with us or we will excommunicate you, we're going through another paradigm shift from the earth is infinite to the earth is finite. And it's the same kind of paradigm shift but this time the Vatican's on our side. The Vatican's on our side, you got to speak with the Pope. We have Pope Francis. What did he say? What happened? Tell us. Well I can't tell you how much work it took to get 15 seconds with the Pope. The gentleman who's behind us at that moment is the next president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. I'd like your audience to remember the term ecological economics. We might survive if we have that in place. The woman who came after me was the wife of the ambassador from Argentina to Costa Rica, the most environmental nation on earth perhaps. Costa Rica? Costa Rica is, they are very, very conscious of the environment. They are very good. Butan and Costa Rica, I don't know which I would say is environmentally, now the Pope is from Argentina. So I was going to the Vatican with the next president of the Society for Ecological Economics to try to foster a collaboration between the Holy See and ecological economics. And the woman, as I said, the wife of the ambassador, spoke with me for an hour while we waited for the Pope to show up. And now she's essentially helping try to firm up that marriage, that rapprochement between the Vatican and ecological economics. Okay, so there's another reason Pope Francis was important to you, right? You've been working really hard on this initiative. So let's talk about that a little bit. So he said something, we have a quote from him that- Oh, there we go. Now this is a very short quote out of a document that's called Laudato Si, which is Latin for praised be you. It's the first two words of a prayer attributed to St. Francis, the Pope's namesake. And it's a very interesting document. It's 75 or 80 pages of an indictment of the present economic system, which he calls the technocratic paradigm for trashing humanity and trashing the planet. Wow. Now he doesn't say it that way, that's my Brooklyn slang, but this quote will give you an idea. Given the insatiable and irresponsible growth produced over many decades, we need also to think of containing growth by setting some reasonable limits and even retracing our steps before it's too late. It's all right there. So he is one of three persons or entities who you are proposing for or you're part of the group proposing for the Nobel Prize in Sustainable Development. Okay. Now you just made the mistake that I have to explain to people a lot. It's a Nobel Peace Prize. I'm promoting a particular Nobel Peace Prize and the Pope is one of the three nominees. Now it's a Peace Prize that's themed for sustainable development just as the 2007 Prize that went to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in that case it was themed for climate. This one is themed for sustainable development, but it is not a new prize. It would take a huge, huge... Okay. All right. Okay. It's a new prize. Okay. So one of three. So we have the Pope and who else do we have? Okay. Well, you can nominate up to three individuals or organizations to share a Peace Prize. The organization, the Club of Rome is the first nominee and the Club of Rome is a think tank, shall we say, of concerned individuals, individuals who've been concerned for decades about the unsustainable directions of humanity. And they sponsored a study that came out of MIT, it was published in 1972 called The Limits to Growth, which is bedrock. It is the foundation of the sustainability movement. If you look at the scholarly literature, most of it goes back to cite that document. So the Club of Rome had the foresight and wisdom to commission that report, The Limits to Growth. It's still a classic in its field. It's the most published, the most printed environmental title to date. Wow. And there's a new one. You showed... Yes. Well, there was the 1972 version and then they updated it in 2003 to see how the modeling they did was tracking reality. And it was still remarkably robust modeling, so our reality is tracking what they predicted. And that study showed human population peaking and declining, in some cases radically, toward the center of this century, the current century. Peaking and declining. Okay. So that is pointing towards a reverse of growth. We've got a problem. Yes. Basically, either we're going to control our limiting growth, our coming in line with the limits of the planet, or we're going to say, hell no, we can burn all the fossil fuels, we can dig up all, we can fish up the... And in that case, we end up with a population collapse. So if we want to stabilize an even-off population... Population collapse due to... Well, a combination. Climate change, resource constrictions, and what happens if we really do start running out of some critical resources? Like water. Like fresh water, like what happens if we kill off the oceans? We are sending the oceans into a hypoxic state that is without oxygen. Well documented that we are increasing the acidity and the reefs around the ocean are dying. I heard on a talk show from KHPR yesterday that by 2050, 8 or 99% of all the reefs on earth will be in a state of bleaching many years in a row. That kills them. 2050. 98% will be dying from the bleaching effect. The Great Barrier Reef is collapsing now because they have three extreme bleaching events in a row. So what happens if we lose the fish in the ocean? Yeah. So your effort here, I think we have a picture of the three Nobel nominees. Yes, there we go. So what's the... Let me give the most important member of that trio, if I may. The gentleman in the middle, Dr. Herman Daley. He was a World Bank senior economist for eight years, quit in frustration because the World Bank just did not get at the time. He was in charge of their environmentally sustainable development department. But the World Bank did not at that time get the fact that their investment was not sustainable. So we have a slide of Dr. Daley with a quote from him. There we go. There is something fundamentally wrong with treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation. And in his view, that's what we've been doing for decades, perhaps for so long. That really struck me. That is quite a powerful statement. Now he is credited as being the father of ecological economics. And again, for my part, ecological economics is what we need to shift to if we're going to survive. We should be requiring that it be taught in business schools, in undergraduate curricula, alongside of perhaps the standard growth economics. Now it's interesting, when you see the word economics in the paper or hear it on the radio, they're talking about neoclassical growth economics. But the neoclassical or the growth modifier has dropped out because after 100 years of it being pretty much the only thing taught, it's like, why call it so many words? Let's just call it economics. So we assume it's become the paradigm. Everyone thinks we have to grow, grow forever. We've got a problem. Poverty? Solution? Not when you're running out of resources, and I don't mean just the hard resources. I mean the air resource, that is when we're overwhelming the waste sink of the atmosphere with CO2, heating up the planet, acidifying the oceans, et cetera. So the ecological economics is, that's the same idea as natural capitalism, basically RMI. And I've read that, or of course I've read it. They're related. They're related. But it's basically fixing the way we calculate it. No. No. Okay. And that's the distinction. That's the distinction. There are three kinds of economics I lecture about. One is the one we've got, which is dysfunctional. In the model of the economic system we have, the earth is not there. And there's environmental economics, which says if you price natural capital in dollars or in pounds or euros, and let the market, the invisible hand of the market work things out, everything will be fine. And I say that is called weak sustainability. There are contradictions involved in that. Then there's ecological economics, which is known as strong sustainability, which says that you cannot apply a metric of money to everything. There are decisions that need to be made on a qualitative basis, on ethical bases and on ecological bases. How do you value the last herd of elephants? That's a good place for us to take a little pause. Hey, Aloha. This is Andrew from Integrated Security Technologies out here on behalf of PSA and your Cyber Security Committee. I got through Denver. I thought I'd give you a quick update on what we're doing heading into convention. I hope you all get down there in October. If you haven't gotten into tier zero yet and worked on that material, I encourage you to do so. But I can tell you that our committee is moving on through tiers one through five. And we've got some great new tools to help you sort of gauge yourself and help you with your policies and your implementations through tiers one and two. I'll be presenting that material down there at convention, so please come on down. And in the meantime, if there's any particular issues that you're having, feel free to send them to the committee. We've got a great group of folks working there. And if you've got some people on your team that are more interested in this, feel free to have them call us up and maybe they can join our committee and help out a little bit. So thanks a lot. I look forward to seeing you there. Aloha. Welcome back to Hawaii is my mainland. I'm Kaui Lucas. This is Think Tech Hawaii. With me today celebrating the solstice is Stuart Scott. And we were just talking about the economic theory of evolutionary, no, ecological economics. Ecological economics. So which could save us? I think if that was in place instead of what we've got, we would be in a much better position. So it's finding ways to make that message as loud as it possibly can be. Right. We've got into the university curricula trying to get policy makers to go along with some of the major recommendations from ecological economics. If we had more time, I'd give just a couple of them. But that's why I'm packaging the Pope with the founder of ecological economics with the club of Rome for having created, sustained and preaching about sustainability. So that's our path forward. So you gave me a couple of videos. Let's have a look at the first one. We'll go to the climate now. A slide that Sir Brian was referring to and it's worth going through this a little bit. Jim Hayward made a point at a meeting recently that actually we should always start with this side because there's a question of why are we doing this? Why are we doing this research? This is why. This is the latest projections from the international panel of climate change. And the alarming thing, which against Sir Brian Hyatt, is that these two scenarios actually explicitly include negative emissions technologies. So there is geoengineering of the flavor of carbon dioxide removal in the best case scenarios. The very, very alarming thing for us is that we are on this path here. That's AR 8.5. We are a slap bang on this trajectory. And that puts us in a very, very different place in our children's or our grandchildren's lifetimes. OK. Well, that was a sobering little clip there. If I can emphasize the point and simplify the two lower lines for what is being talked about at the UN climate negotiations, but they're fictitious to a great extent because they are couched on the assumption of a technology that we don't yet have, and we're not even freely allowing researchers to research. That is, we have to pull a huge amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to maintain this two-degree goal, this two-degree guideline, or guardrail they call it. And we don't have that technology. So basically, nations are disingenuously negotiating a treaty that they can't pull off because they don't have the technology on which they're negotiating that it might happen. And what he points to is that we are a flat band, he says, on the high trajectory, which predicts four degrees centigrade, about seven or eight degrees Fahrenheit, global average temperature rise by the end of this century, and it doesn't just stop there. That's catastrophic. That's catastrophic. Well, that's also 70 years from now. But it doesn't go 99, boom. It's increasing. Okay. All right. I'm trying to... Okay. Right. All right. So we have to start somewhere. Yes. Now, if we can show the second clip, that'll help a bit. If we have a look at what this temperature change actually is realized by 2019, this is what it looks like in a geographical pattern. Now, I would say that there's some very interesting things here. Look at the scale. What you're seeing here is results from the Hadley Center model, which is a reputable climate model. The ice cap's gone up by 20 degrees. Okay. Bear that in mind. New York's gone up by eight. Okay. The Amazon's gone up by eight, and the Amazon's obviously a sensitive area for, because it's really acting as the lungs of the planet. It's often referred to as its ability to photosynthesize and take up carbon dioxide. So this is what that four to five degree temperature increase looks like, and this is where we're heading unless we do anything. So Stuart, are there a lot of people having this discussion? One that we're having about what actually needs to happen is you're going to these various events. What are you hearing? Not nearly enough people. Again, there's the in front of the mainstream media sound bites, which are all going along with what I call a fiction, that we can fix this problem by little tweaks here and there, and we can still consume oil. Oh, there's a carbon budget. We still have some oil we can consume without destabilizing. I think that's disingenuous, like I say, because we have a carbon budget if we had a way of vacuuming CO2 out of the air, which we don't. So people who have my view, there's an increasing number of people. In fact, I think I saw an article this morning that eight out of 10 people feel that we're on worldwide from several 8,000 people who were polled worldwide say that they believe we're on a catastrophic climate path. So it's more urgent than governments are saying. And that's because for a government to admit that it is more serious than they have here to for admitted means people will have to say, well, why don't you fix it? And the answer to that is, of course, we fixing it is not congruent with keeping growing economies, growing GDP, everybody growing. And if we're thinking in terms of two or four or six year election cycles, that's really hard to do. Well, it's election cycles. What about carbon sequestration? I mean, is that a myth? Well, that's the geoengineering that we don't have down yet. It's like clean coal. It's a very pretty word, but there is no scaled up working carbon sequestration project other than the Amazon or forests. But those are under fire, figuratively speaking and literally speaking. Nature knows how to do it. And if we reduce human population either well, then nature will hopefully take over again and sequester carbon in natural processes. OK, so these carbon balancing, carbon credits. It's all, like I say, it's all part of this neoclassical economic ruse that we can fix everything if we can keep doing what we're doing, pumping out CO2 in New York and London as long as we pay some other nation to plant more trees. No. No? No. Because we're pumping out CO2 much faster than we can plant trees, and they take a while from planting before they're really absorbing a lot of carbon. And then the agreements that are there allow you to harvest them in 20 years and burn them as fuel. So it's really a shell game, the way I see it. And how about methane? That's the thing that we all have our own personal nightmares. That's my personal nightmare. I call that the gun going off. It's going off in the Arctic, both on land and in the Arctic Sea. There's a huge amount of methane that's stored in the Arctic tundra, the permafrost, and in the sub-sea mud that's been frozen also for years, for centuries. Methane hydrates methane, clathrates. And because we are reducing the Arctic ice pack, and it's peeling back year after year from the land earlier and earlier, the mud in the very shallow East Siberian Arctic shelf is warming just enough, still cold, but it's warming just enough that this methane hydrate is no longer stable. And we're seeing an outbreak of venting of methane from the Arctic. And people say, well, why don't you catch it? It's a fuel. Burn it. That's what they frack for. Why don't we catch it out of the Arctic? Because it's being emitted over far too wide an area in very hostile conditions. So it's one that, to me, our fate may be sealed. But if not, then we have to do everything possible to reduce, as we can, our emitting of carbon dioxide and our emitting of methane from the fracking, which is improperly vented into the atmosphere. We have to do everything we can. And the current administration in Washington, DC, is doing everything it can to go in the opposite direction. The silver lining in what's going on in DC in my book is that Donald Trump's administration is producing so much pushback by the rest of the world, and by his own, the states in the United States, that he's actually pushing us faster than we would otherwise be going. Really. Well, that's awesome. Yes. OK. It's an opportunity. It's an opportunity for everyone who's got it straight to organize and capitalize on that momentum. Well, in our last minute, what a great place to wind things up, Stuart. What do you think? Well, if I could replace Trump, I'd do it in a heartbeat, but like I said, there's some hope there. I would like to ask your listeners, your viewers, to go to np4sd.org, Nobel Prize for Sustainable Development.org. Anyone in the world can do an endorsement of the prize, but there are millions of qualified nominators around the world who are unaware that they're qualified to nominate for the Peace Prize. A huge number of academic professors, emeritus professors, associate professors can nominate for the Peace Prize, but are unaware of it. Thank you, Stuart. Thank you, Kelly. Not cheery, but wonderful. Do the best we can.