 Okay, we're back. We're live on a Friday morning. It's the 10 o'clock block and we have a special special guest Mike Tamor He is a retired Henry Ford technical fellow. That means he spent a lot of time at the Ford company And he is now an adjunct professor Namely in innovation at ASU Arizona State University. Welcome to the show Mike. It's great to have you here. Thanks for having me So let's talk about let's talk about your reason for being here in Hawaii And what you have to say what you have had to say at East West Center just this week Well, there's sort of two two parts of the trip part one is that Arizona State University is trying to deepen its relationships with the University of Hawaii in a variety of areas but one of the key areas is around sustainability climate change both combating climate change and Adaptation and resiliency for some of the unavoidable effects of climate change that are already in the books The there's a there's quite a variety of subjects that are being discussed but I was asked to come along because transportation is viewed as a particular challenge and that's sort of my My wheelhouse Research on sustainable transportation for if if you want to call research on hybrid electric vehicles research on sustainable transportation That I've been doing it since 1994 PS you know Mike is Mike develops 70 patents for the Ford Motor Company, which is saying something And he's a physics guy is a PhD in physics. So I mean that's that's special You know, it's like it's like you don't get any more scientific than a PhD in physics So nice to see you here So from the point of view of you know a physics person can understand the universe better Don't you think or pretend to Well your slides and your talk at East West Center really started out with You know a discussion of how the world was doing in terms of climate change Can you talk about that part of your remarks? Well, I mean I for all of these discussions possibly including this one I I work on it sort of a three-part theme That's basically trying to drive toward the idea that we need a simple overarching Policy with you know with force of law and real teeth To get us where we pretty much everybody agrees we want to be the problem is that There's sort of two two wings of the climate discussion There's one wing of the climate discussion that for lack of a better word I call the hedgehog contingent so that hedgehogs can be cute and hedgehogs hedgehogs can be prickly But one way or another they rely or fall back on a variety of positions Ranging from you know, the science is completely bogus and it's just a power play and we should ignore the whole thing to Well, maybe the science is real, but There's nothing we can do about it or the science is real But even if we did something about it nobody else will and then there's the really depression depressing one, which is You know, it's all too late anyway, so just forget it Yeah, and then there's another contingent that I refer to as the warriors that not warrior within a warrior warriors with an A Who take the position that everybody knows that the climate imperative means the remaking of society So this is our opportunity to remake society the way we think it should be in Both of those leads a paralysis the people who want to be convinced that we should do nothing Will sort of gravitate toward the hedgehogs and the people who don't want their life turned upside down They want to live the way we live. They want to have the choices and Privileges and the pleasures that we have now don't want to go the direction that the warriors go so there's this large group in the middle and To me that large group in the middle They get it. They know climate change is very threatening. What they want to know is How much it's going to cost to do something about it and will they really get? What was promised for that amount of money reasonable questions, right? When you go to the store to buy something you want to know what you're getting and what you're gonna pay for it Sure, right, but there are lots of people who tell you what you get You know the perfect planet, but they won't tell you what you pay for And there's lots of people who tell you what you might have to pay and like there's contingent to like carbon taxes and things like that But if you just do something simplistic like that or have big fuel economy standards or something like that You have no clue what it's going to cost no rational person will sign up for that deal So my work has been to try to bring it close bring those two polls closer together to answer those questions Right, at least then you can't be exact. We're talking about 50 years from now, right? I can't tell you what the world is going to be like 50 years from now Right, or what what people will invent or what people change and technology changes and for that matter the climate changes, right? So so what we have to do is kind of get it all into a kind of a box that's small enough that people will say Okay, I'm comfortable. We'll go. Can we get there? Yeah, I believe so. You actually had a number of GDP if you if we redirected x percent of GDP we could do this. Can you talk about your analysis on that? well Yeah, I mean I there are actually very sophisticated Studies of the exact same question trying to come up with a number for what the cost is However, as soon as the study gets extremely sophisticated you lose everybody Yeah, right. So my goal and a lot of the work I've done even earlier on in my career was to it was to figure out how to Convert a complicated technical concept Into something simple enough to make it intuitive so somebody who's not an expert will get the intuition right and make good decisions Yes, that's been a lot of my career. So that's what I've been doing. So the idea has been to say Let's take technologies in which we're really quite confident and Then deploy them in a rational order, you know Do the cheap stuff first and the expensive stuff last and just say what does it cost to get? Fossil carbon out of all aspects of the economy It's but it's good We're gonna have to sacrifice to do that and the question is well how a deep is the sacrifice It comes out to be amazingly small that for example if you don't mind not Real numbers but just kind of some way to think about it numbers is that for the US economy as a whole and Hawaii is a little bit different The US economy as a whole the co2 emissions break up roughly into three equal size groups. There's making electricity There's moving people and stuff around and then there's kind of a basket of other stuff, which is called residential industrial commercial Okay, interesting and they're roughly equal and they're roughly And it depends on the state why he's way out of whack on that balance because so much Oil is used to make electricity, which is why is the only state that does that? Yeah and then Hawaii is so dependent on air transportation that the For capita jet fuel consumption in Hawaii is off the charts So that balance between those three is a little different in Hawaii But my work has been on the nation as a whole but some of the ideas translate To Hawaii and so then you just Dividing conquer think about these three things separately, right? So you Electricity is just one product and then transportation There's sort of personal transportation and freight and air, you know a few products So we have to address them separately right and find a plan for each one They do connect up and I'll hopefully be able to explain that in a second And then of course the most complicated basket is the third one which has got you know Your own cooking stove at home and as bakeries somebody who makes you know has to cure plastic because they make toys You know, there's just the thousands of little applications that you that you have to pick up Um, but if you just kind of go through those in order Electricity is actually pretty easy and this is the part that's You know quite shocking is that you know at the at the place where it's generated Green electricity is now cheaper than carbon-based electricity That doesn't mean it's cheaper once it reaches your meter at home Because in order to use that electricity all the delivery system has to be rebuilt the grid has to be re-engineered And so there's a big capital investment there So you get this wonderful irony that because solar power is so cheap electricity gets more expensive Which gives a lot of people a headache But you just you just have to be able to explain once you make the investment into the grid I mean I know it has to be refreshed from time to time But once you make the investment into the grid, um, you amortize that so that's that's not your You know your per day per megawatt kind of calculation Right, but I mean the the the depreciation on all that hardware does show up in the electric So it will push it up Some but just and the grid has to be rebuilt Anyway, the u.s. Electric system was basically matured in the 50s And there's a lot of antique stuff out there We cannot assume that there's no cost involved in continuing the you know the the existing paradigm Exactly. I mean you're going if you're going to replace this stuff anyway Replacing it with something different is very is a different undertaking than starting From nothing. You have to do it. So so that's happening Transportation is tougher and transportation is a problem because right now All of our transportation modes take all their energy with them And this is part of trying to make things intuitive That when you go to move an airplane someplace or drive in a car You take a huge amount of energy with you And and you just you carry it around And you have to have it in dense forms and fly the plane right and so, you know liquid hydrocarbons is sort of the ultimate transportation that means jet fuel jet fuel gasoline Uh, well jet fuel is similar to kerosene diesel fuel Right those are sort of the ultimate transportation fuels. Yeah So you have to look at how what the application is before you say, oh, I can take the fossil fuel out of that So in my work Three broad classifications come out One is aviation And aviation lives and dies by that energy density. So it doesn't matter where it came from Uh aviation is going to need Liquid hydrocarbons fuel always going to need it will all and pull some other invention That's beyond innovation some amazing new invention. We don't have now right the anti-gravity Okay, which would be wonderful never say never but in terms of making a plan Where you're confident of the cost and confident to the outcome you can't make stuff up All right, so you say we we must have a lot of liquid hydrocarbon fuel for aviation for things like trucking It's you want energy density but it it's not as um demanding As doesn't have to be that dense, right? So if you had a dip fuel that was a dense Half as dense or a third as dense You could probably get away with it for trucking and then one of the really interesting things about trucking is that at least on the mainland the preponderance of the fuel that goes into Trucking actually is going into very few of the trucks sort of a 80 20 80 percent of the fuel is going into 20 percent of the trucks because The you know the box trucks that you see driving around town delivering from Best Buy A Plot There's many many of them, but they don't go very far in a day Right and they spend a lot of time sitting while people put things in and out of talking about transcontinental trucks Right that do thousands of class 8 semi trucks as a minority of the trucks But they're out on the road pounding away at full power, you know 14 16 hours a day And so that's where most of the fuel goes now Highway trucking is ripe for electrification. There are several different ways you can do that So I so I imagine that when it comes to freight There is a big but not a complete electrification opportunity And then when you get down to passenger cars, which you know passenger cars light trucks The stuff we all drive which today is a little bit more than half of transportation co2 You have you could probably electrify When I did the this the actual published work a few years ago. I said 70 percent of that And I think now I really should raise that to 80 85 maybe 90 percent of it This is work that you published while you were with Ford, right because you you retired only 2017. That's not too long ago Yes, yeah, so When it comes to cars and light trucks The the um You know most users the vast majority of users could be very comfortable with a range It's a pretty big range. You need at least 200 miles of all-weather range, right? So 200 miles of all-weather range Is like 300 350 miles on the window sticker Okay, that's bigger than EVs are today, but not much bigger. Yeah, we're getting there. We're getting there We're getting there in terms of the show too because this is the point where we take a break Mike Mike Tamors at Arizona State University an innovation professor would be right back after this break We're going to talk more about how you implement some of these policies that he's coming to We'll be right back Hi, I'm rusty Komori host of beyond the lines on think tech Hawaii My show is based on my book also titled beyond the lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence leadership And finding greatness I interview guests who are successful in business sports and life Which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness Join me every monday as we go beyond the lines at 11 a.m. Aloha Hey, loha, my name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of security matters Hawaii airing every wednesday here on think tech Hawaii live from the studios. I'll bring you guests. I'll bring you information About the things in security that matter to keeping you safe your co-workers safe your family safe to keep our community safe We want to teach you about those things in our industry that you know may be a little outside of your experience So please join me because security matters. Aloha Okay, we're back. We're live with Mike Tamor. He's a professor a professor in innovation if you will at our state Arizona State University and he's here to talk about climate change and and how that May I use the term intersection how that intersects with various technologies and and Planning points going forward. So you talk about transportation. I didn't hear you mention hydrogen Did you mean to do that? Actually, we'll get to it in a moment. Okay So so when I said that 80 or 85 percent of light duty transportation Can be electrified there's some leftover there are people who do things where they need to drive very long distances Very frequently or they simply don't have access to the ability to charge at home and Even today many homes would not be well equipped to charge an electric vehicle But this is a long-term project we're talking about Isn't Hawaii a good place a good laboratory for this because there are some homes and the utility is trying to build charging stations and here tell there are other other Entrance into the marketplace that would like to build charging stations So we're getting there. We're thinking about it. Anyway, well the electric vehicle paradigm Really depends on charging at home Right, otherwise it gets to be very expensive Some some of the solar installers are giving you packages Where you get you get panels to charge your house and to run your house But also to charge your car, and I think that's going to become more popular, don't you? Oh, yes, yeah, and and whether those are Disconnected from the grid or just managed by the electric company that all Remains to be seen but but the but the the major point though is that even in the light duty transportation And remember we said some of the heavy duty there are applications that need another fuel Right now hydrogen is a pretty good candidate for that other fuel So this is something that I referred to when I was at Ford is the hydrogen squeeze Okay, okay that we start Um, we start electrifying a lot of heavy-duty trucking But we can't use hydrogen aviation Because it's not dense enough. There are some very special applications that can use it But just for regular commercial aviation. It looks not very promising Again, never say never. Yeah, right But um, there are applications that are sort of in between where hydrogen could really serve very well So there's places where hydrogen can't go And there's a places where electricity keeps doing better and better as the batteries get cheaper and cheaper So that's why I'm saying hydrogen gets squeezed, but it's not squeezed to nothing Where you want zero emissions and you want a fuel that you can make out of electricity And you need to pack more energy than you can in a battery But you don't need what hydrocarbon does Hydrogen has a role so Um, well one of the things we've been talking about on this trip is city buses A city bus has to pull out of its yard and spend maybe 20 hours on the road And uh, you'd really like it to be quiet and you know in you'd like it to be electric In zero emissions, but it's just too much for batteries Right because it's too much battery in the bus and then when it returns to the depot You need a tremendous charger to get it charged back up for the next shift And so the hydrogen starts to look like it might be good for at least some Of the buses There are also trucks that go out and do jobs That you know Extracting you know these sewer extractor trucks and garbage trucks and things like that that are doing something They're powering something running around all that. Yeah Well, we're a running route. Yeah, or sitting still just running some big piece of machinery There are a lot of trucks with power takeoff on them. Yeah, they're doing things Yeah, right and for that hydrogen could could play a really important role But it's everything is about you know fitting the fuel to the application But the point of all this is that all the fuels have to be renewable whether it's electricity Whether it's hydrogen or it's a hydrocarbon It can't involve carbon atoms that you pulled out of the ground It has to be carbon atoms you pulled out of the air And the same is true when we get to that residential industrial commercial There's sort of in that world. There are there's low heat and high heat If for low heat you could use heat pumps and just you know stoves and things like that But when you get to high heat you're making glass you're making steel you're making aluminum or you know refining metals or something like that You often have to burn something. So what are you going to burn? Well, you can burn hydrogen again Or if that doesn't work, you're going to have to burn a hydrocarbon again made from Carbon atoms that you pulled from the air not out of the ground So then you you stack everything I said, you know, look each one of those pieces I I described a piece of machinery that does the job How much does that piece of machinery cost and you can just Chunk your way through make that analysis piece right piece right and it's very and what I there are very sophisticated analysis I kept mine very simple. So anybody who looks at it can say oh, that's where that number came from and you you go through that into and it turns out that to eliminate the five billion tons of carbon carbon dioxide that the us emits every year and enable carbon free growth After that The total cost to the economy is less than a trillion dollars a year. Now that sounds like a stupendous amount of money But remember We don't spend and this is where I have trouble with the politicians You're not spending the trillion or the 700 million in the first year Right because you haven't decarbonized in the first year. You've only decarbonized in the last year Finish the job. So you only spend the trillion dollars a year in 20 70 Right and in 20 70, we're going to have a 50 trillion dollar a year economy more than that Right, so it begins to catch up right. So that's less than 1 percent or you know 1 percent or 2 percent of the economy and then there are people who say oh, that's terrible because you're taking away All of that economic growth, but you're really not it's the same as having it's just shifting it By one year if your economy is growing 2 percent a year in the cost of Being decarbonized as opposed to the cost of not being decarbonized Is the trillion dollars that's the same as one rest one recession Yeah And we've had recessions and we've all survived Yeah, and even if those numbers are not exactly accurate. I mean we need to make a sacrifice here We need to understand the public and the government need to understand that a sacrifice is necessary to achieve these goals Right, but it has a but we can describe that sacrifice purely in dollars We haven't asked anybody to move to a different city. We haven't asked anybody to stop driving Quality of life remains essentially the same That's the point of this you could make it cheaper by asking people to do other things But you don't have to and it's it's affordable At this price a big question. I don't know if you covered this and you're talking to east west center, but So we let's say we agree on everything you've said In fact, we agree on on the numbers on the relationships on the on the you know, the mathematical analyses and the technical You know solutions How do we actually achieve that in policy and in action? Well policy is the real difficult part And one of the things we talked about even in the little bit I talked about transportation is You know, you saw that there were different technologies that that Met different needs and all those different technologies are at different states of development And may not may work out better than we think or not Work out as well as we think and the needs will change so Trying to write policy that speaks to the technology Which is very tempting And is actually what is done today. Yeah would actually be probably um Non-productive a short term anyway short it would be short term Yeah, what you what I look for and I've talked about this some is to ask people to think about a policy that Focuses entirely on what you want the outcome to be Without saying a single word about what the technology or the pathway Should be because it will all fall into place once you agree with the goal Because if you believe the numbers I laid out that's the worst case scenario Yeah, so you lay out a policy where you promise to not cost more than that and that's a promise you can make with a straight face Speak to the end goal without speaking to the means and then a whole lot of smart people Will be falling all over themselves to meet the new rule Cheaper than the previous way of finding the technology or building the technology. So we actually want to harness innovation and invention and competition to all aspects of the economy But under a simple single simple overarching rule Then you know and that that's what I sort of looking for and trying to get people to think about So how does this isn't is this going to be ultimately in a book? It's going to be in a video. Maybe it'll be in a video just like this one, right? But uh, you know, how do I get this? You know a to the public so they fully understand we've had a lot of talk about it But query, you know, what what kind of understanding do you need in the public mind in the public thought process? to get to You know adopting the policy as a legislative or regulatory matter Well, I'm trying to learn that and that that's that's my retirement ambition I could see is to Try to try to figure that out Um, part of the problem is that um, it's just not the way Regulators and regulatory structures and legislatures think Yeah, right because You know, we tend to regulate electricity separately from regulating automobiles separately from regulating other things, but everything becomes tangled up because In the scenario I talked about in the simplistic scenario In 2070 we'll be generating three times as much electricity as we generate today And we need that right but more than half that electricity is going into jobs that we don't electrify today Right, so entirely anticipate right but so the relationship between, you know, what is electricity and what is transportation and what is oil or You know transportation fuel because you have electricity generating power to run a look these machines called Electrolizers that make hydrogen Then that's being combined with plant matter to make a liquid hydrocarbon fuel So where does one leave off and the other? That this takes me back to something we talked about before the show. You told me that when you work for ford Um, and you know the the technological components and cars change and they still are changing right? Um, you your contribution among other things was to write the algorithms By which the various computers talk to each other Right sort of settle down on these relationships and make them real time make them most efficient So isn't it the same thing here? You have various components going on You have various relationships. You have factors that are changing all the time So you could write algorithms to connect up all the elements in the system. Am I right? Yeah, you know in a sense. Yes, but the problem with it is that Whatever algorithm you write Has to be one that is completely blind to the behavior of the technologies themselves It has to be one that gets the best out of them. That was my invention that got me in this business Is algorithms that get the best out of whatever you throw in but don't constrain what you throw in That's the highest level algorithm, right? Yeah, right and in order to do that you have to have um, you know I don't want to get mathematical about it, but you you have this idea of what's a requirement and what's a constraint and You know the ultimate requirement is has to be carbon neutrality by 2070 Right, so that has to be the thing against which you measure yourself and then try to remain blind to everything That goes in behind that as As a sort of optimization exciting challenge, isn't it for somebody who wants to study this who wants to go to asu or UH menorah To to tackle this to write the algorithms to figure out the relationships and to make it May I use the term sustainable right no matter what kind of technology is in place at a given moment? Yeah, right? Well, um, this is pretty sexy stuff I have to say mike and and and it it tells me that there's a whole new generation of students and And graduate students who can and should and will come into this field To write those relationships. It's not just building the grid. It's building the whole What do you want to call it the whole community system? It's a new it's a new energy ecosystem. Yeah So we have a minute left and there's camera Four over there And I would like you if you would to leave a message with those kids those students those graduates and post graduates And with the community in general including the legislators about what they ought to be thinking about going forward to achieve this Well, the message would be simple and it's actually the message of the seminar I like to give which is sort of in in three pieces one is Climate change is real And it's easy to prove that The second is that we did it. It's also easy to prove that Along with that you have to be careful not to get climate change confused with the weather Uh, which is quite popular, but the most important thing is we can fix it. That's the phrase I use we can Fix it. We can describe How to do it. We have many of the tools we need in the toolbox today The rest of the tools are in research or in early pilot stage. They're not necessarily the best tools I welcome every innovator and inventor to develop better tools But we do have the tools in our toolbox to get started All we need is a simple overarching policy that just gets everybody moving in that direction And just overcomes the inertia And then we will learn that it is not that horribly expensive and the one thing we didn't talk about at all Were the secondary benefits of more jobs cleaner air quieter cities Uh, less pollution Uh, there there are a lot of secondary benefits that we're we're not putting dollar value on that are will be Really really good for us And the the simple message is it's it's time to move. It's time for policy simple technology blind, but outcome specific policies Thank you mike tamar great to talk with you. We can fix it. We can fix it. We can fix it