 climate changes of Ian and Nicole in Florida. Wow. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Think Tech Hawaii. We are joined by Shannon Magnesen in Florida, in Jupiter, Florida. Am I right, Shannon? That's right. That's where I'm from. And if you didn't know, Jupiter is on the east coast of Florida, not the west coast. This is very important for our discussion today. And Shannon, you are with VOLO Foundation and that means you are the podcast director of VOLO Foundation. Am I right about that? Yes, that's right. I've been with VOLO Foundation for five years and I've worn many hats and I currently produce the Climate Correction podcast, which streams on every podcast streaming platform. We have one in English and one in Spanish. And I envy you that because I know that podcasts are so popular now and people listen to them and they're valuable. They're high value. And have you seen Rachel Maddow's ultra? There's a podcast for you. There you go. A few weeks ago and wow. And so podcasts are important and I envy you're doing that. And I'm appreciative that you're here today with us. So let's talk about VOLO Foundation. What is it? What does it do? What is its mission and activities? Yeah, sure. So VOLO Foundation is a 501C3 non-profit. It's a private family foundation started by Tai East Lopez Vogel and David S. Vogel. David is a brilliant predictive modeler. He's been on your show a few times. He runs VOLO Ridge Investments and there they are. Tai East is our manager. She's also raising with David's six kids. She's an attorney and cares very deeply about the issues that are facing people and the micro issues that we'll talk about during this episode. And as they were developing data, they started to realize that all financial people and healthcare practitioners, they're all talking about the same thing which is climate change. And so David reviewed oil industry inventories which are public records and he compared with ocean buoys to see how sea surface temperatures were changing. And he really saw without a doubt that there is human caused climate change that's coming from an increased amount of greenhouse gas emissions into the environment that can't really leave the lever. So they're heating up the globe and that's causing a whole host of issues that ultimately are very costly. And now we're starting to realize they're devastating to our human health. So that's why we're here to talk about it. Okay, let's talk about your podcast first though. What kind of subjects do you cover? Give us an example or a couple of examples of recent podcasts where you've covered these climate change issues. Absolutely, yeah. So climate correction podcast is the evergreen version of climate correction, our live event that's an international, main stage conference with keynote speakers. We talk to healthcare providers. We talk to other nonprofits and activists. This year being a midterm election year, I talked to a lot of politicians to see how his policy coming into play. We talk to people from the military who know the ins and outs of how mapped routes are changing as ice melts. That opens new kind of pathways. We talk to economists. I really think the money factor is a big one. We talk to researchers and people that hike up to a really big mountain site, but in South America and they drill for ice and they pull out millions of years of data that's frozen in an ice core to see how carbon levels or CO2 levels have changed in the atmosphere. So yeah, all of them, we bring a solutions focused message across. So we've really always tie it back to how can a listener, what can we do at home for just, you know, main street people like me? How can we take action today that would be meaningful to moving the needle? Sounds like these guests of yours are from everywhere, not just Jupiter, Florida. No, they're all over the planet. They're very diverse in their educational background. I would say diversity across all areas. It's important because climate change is one of these topics that it's not just affecting one person or one group of people, you know, similar to how the COVID pandemic affected the whole world. Maybe for the first time in our lifetimes, we saw something that as a people, we were affected and climate change is no different. And we just, we see that in seasonal headlines across Europe, in California with wildfires, in South Florida with hurricanes and floods. Yeah, so how can I access your podcast? It's simple, if you just go to Google and you type in climate correction podcast, many different options will show up. I find that Spotify and Apple podcasts are two of the most popular streaming platforms and that's just based on, you know, what kind of phone you have, but anywhere where podcasts stream, you can find climate correction podcasts or in Spanish it's, let's see, El Podcast Corrección Climática. Okay, so let's talk about Ian first. You know, Ian really did some devastation. And, you know, like in the case of Puerto Rico in 2017, you know, devastation, but it's like you've got to learn from it. You've got to figure out what it teaches us so that it can help us deal with this, adapt and protect ourselves next time. So can you talk about, and we have slides, can you talk about how Ian affected Florida and how it affected you and what we learned from it? Yeah, so obviously we've had Hurricane Ian that came through at the very end of September in 2017. I know that you're speaking about Maria. And in 2017, we had several storms. There was Irma, there was Maria, and then of course Harvey. And every storm was different. Maria and Irma packed an unbelievable amount of wind but Harvey brought in tons of water and then stalled out at the coast and flooded these really expensive neighborhoods. And that was unprecedented. No one had ever seen rich neighborhoods like that affected. They always thought it's maybe more just coastal environments. How dare they have a big hurricane in an expensive neighborhood. That should be against the law. Right? We thought that they were exempt but no one's exempt apparently. And now we've seen that. I think Hurricane Ian rocked Florida and probably maybe other parts of the country because it came ashore in Fort Myers and it's a high tourist location. It's also an upscale community and it's relatively newly constructed. And in the slides, I wanna show you some of the things that were really unique about Ian because every storm's different. That we could tie back to a changing climate. One of the big components of Ian was that it rapidly intensified. And so rapid intensification's a phrase that means when a storm increases by 35 miles an hour or more in a 24 or 36 hour period. And so as Hurricane Ian crossed over Cuba and left it was a tropical storm. So that's 45 miles an hour of consistent winds and lower. Over the next 24 hours we could see if you look at a radar, a historical radar you can see that the eye changed from about 12 miles across right there as at least Cuba. And it goes through an eyewall replacement cycle which is not uncommon but in this eyewall replacement cycle the area a distance across tripled. So it went to 36 miles wide. The important thing about that is that as the eyewall increases in spatial area the winds increase and they become stronger. So the storm went from a tropical storm to a cat three which also in that previous image you can see the National Hurricane Center report. Oh, I guess that got removed. Anyhow, it went from a 45 mile an hour wind field to 110 wind field. So that's a significant increase in wind speed. And it continued to increase over the next 24 hours as it approached Fort Myers and made landfall literally a half of a mile per hour shy of a cat five storm. So tropical storm all the way up to 155 miles an hour. That's 110 mile an hour increase in wind speed over the course of about 48 hours. So that's rapid intensification. And when a storm rapidly intensifies like that that's where you saw that with the Hurricane Eerman we saw that with Hurricane Maria in 2017 like you said and people just don't have time to prepare. No one in Fort Myers had an evacuation order until probably a day before the storm hit. So many people stayed and obviously you can see the mass devastation. The second issue, you want me to go to the second issue? Yes, please. Great, if you can pull up that slide it was the amount of rain that the storm brought. So it was a heavy heavily moisture. It was a storm with a lot of moisture. When it crossed over the gulf the sea surface temperature and deep deep into the water it was warmer about maybe it was about one or two degrees warmer, which doesn't sound like a lot but it makes a huge difference when we're talking about atmospheric sciences. And so the storm just took up an incredible amount of moisture and there is a law of physics that says that with every one degree Celsius of warming which is about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit the atmosphere can hold 7% more moisture. When this storm came through a study was done after the fact running this whole storm cell through a model that has been peer reviewed in 2020 and accepted that it basically compares a storm cell today to a storm cell in the 1900s prior to all of these industrial made emissions cars and buildings and industry. So without all of that the storm hurricane in dropped 10% less moisture. So 10% more moisture was dropped because of that storm and when you're talking two feet of rain then you need to add on an extra two and a half inches of rain which if you think Death Valley for example it receives less than two inches of rain a year and we got that extra in Florida because of a warming environment on top of 18 to 24 inches of rain. So there are some pictures if we can't pull them up here I would highly recommend Googling you know floods from Hurricane Ian in central Florida. The storm obviously crushed the coast with winds but then those winds they start to die down and they'll slow down as the storm makes landfall but those rains don't stop. And so the storm continues to draw up more moisture from the ocean and then drop that inland. So there were several hundred I don't know I don't wanna misquote the number of people but there were a number of counties let's say in central Florida all the way to northeast coast of Florida that were flooded. They had floodwaters eight feet high. And now you might wonder how does two inches of two feet of rain lead to eight feet of storm surge or not storm surge in this case of inland flooding I don't get it. And I didn't get that either. So I researched it and what I learned was that as heavy rain falls and it doesn't have to be just from a hurricane either it can happen in Hawaii as well. They go over as these storms are dropping rain over top of rivers and lakes. The water levels go higher than the boundaries that are set to contain that water. Also in rivers the water can't flow out to the ocean fast enough. It's dropping faster the rain's dropping faster than the water can flood out. So it overflows its banks and when water overflows its banks and when the sewers can't contain the water they blow the sewer lids off. And so now you have downtown areas or main urban stretches that where the water is rising quickly. Sometimes the pressure and the amount of force can break pipes. So now you have freshwater water intrusion. So there's a number of sources where this water comes from but it starts with an increased amount of rain dropping from the sky. And because of that law of physics we really can tie it directly back to a warming globe. And you have the evidence of it with Hurricane Ian. There were a lot of urban farms and Florida's agriculture which is in central Florida that were flooded. Part of the issues with that are fence lines breaking and then livestock getting loose, livestock falling and becoming flooded. I mean, it sounds crazy but cow is washing away. These are some interesting statistics which is that only about 4% of homeowners in central Florida had flood insurance which means 96% of the people who had home damage or property damage to waters that rise from the bottom up would then have to come up with the way to pay for that out of their pocket. So you also had another statistic that showed that most water related deaths don't occur at the coast. They occur inland when people are trying to navigate through floodwaters. Cars constantly bottom out in floodwaters or we had something crazy here where batteries, cars with electric batteries were ionizing or ionizing from the water, the salt water that was coming from the ocean and the rain and then exploding weeks later after the water had abated. There's just tons and tons of stories of that. We live in a complex and interconnected society and the absence of casualties like this but we don't realize how many things can go wrong. There's a movie on a cable about a flood sort of like what you're describing in Poland. So suffice to say that these things happen everywhere now. No place is exempt. Florida has had far more than its fair share when you have a flood like this, it can come in a flash flood kind of way. It can come from another direction. It can be enhanced by a reservoir or other water features and all these things, including the cattle can be kind of a surprise because we didn't see it before and now we've seen it. The devastation was really tremendous in the case of Ian and I remember too, and this and I'm asking you about what we learned. In the case of Maria in Puerto Rico, there were two large solar facilities. One had one kind of fastening and the other had another kind of fastening and when the storm came through it ripped off the one fastener as they weren't strong enough and it left the other fastener, the other field of solar alone. I mean, it didn't rip it off because it was a better design and so now we know that one design can be better than another and there's all these lessons and I guess my question to you is what did we learn if we know yet, we may not know yet from Ian and also, aside from your podcast, Shannon, what's the central repository of those lessons? How do I find out what we learned from Maria or from Ian? Yeah, this is a really good question. I don't know, I mean, our podcast is definitely a great resource to go to because you hear the different solutions from the horse's mouth, if you will. I'm happy to talk about Babcock Ranch because that was such an exciting development after Hurricane Ian came through. We have, Florida's very newly constructed. We always have construction projects. Our economy depends largely on new people moving here, on new jobs moving here and so Babcock Ranch was created not too long ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago. It's 35 miles northeast of Cuyah Coastal which is exactly where the hurricane, where Hurricane Ian's Eye at 155 miles an hour went over. It's just a small community. It was built in partnership with Florida Power and Light which is our main electric utility here in South Florida. And there are 700,000 solar panels on the property that power the entire Babcock Ranch. There's currently 2,000 homes that are constructed there with a development plan of 20,000 but that solar farm also provides power to other residences in the Fort Myers community. So everyone was kind of, I mean, no one was really thinking about Babcock Ranch after the storm but certainly no one was expecting to hear what we heard which was that the power never went out. They never even lost wifi. The residents that live there said that they sat under this cat for intense hurricane for eight to 10 hours and just kept waiting for the solar panels to fly away. And they kept waiting for lights to go out and floods to come and none of it happened. They literally kept going. Their life kept going on normal. And everyone was like, well, why? Is it just because they have solar power? But that's not it. The entire community was built with sustainability in mind and it is very much a prototype community. So this is one takeaway that your audience can listen if listen to, if we're moving, if we're choosing a different home to live in, if we're working on our own property, we can take some of these development ideas and or hey, if you're a real estate developer this is the way of the future. So the system is hardened. The electrical system is hardened. In most communities you see power lines above ground. This property has the power lines below ground. And so they're not gonna get torn off by flying trees or high wind speeds. They can withstand that. There are these battery packs which is what you're looking at there. These are storage batteries where the sun of Florida shines 364 days a year and that those solar panels are acquiring energy and then instead of losing it they're storing them in those batteries. Those batteries are in a cement block building not underground but well protected and also in kind of a hardened area. There's a hardened water management system. All the roads are constructed for water intrusion to be away from the houses and to run back out to retaining ponds which also serve to be kind of a beautiful feature. They have fountains and big large ponds with natural wildlife but those go to collect the water. In Florida, very different from Hawaii, we live at sea level. I mean, I think the highest point is maybe six feet. Natural point, not man-made. So you always wanna look for a higher area so that the water will run away but this property was built 30 feet above sea level which is a big deal. It doesn't sound like a big deal but it's three stories above sea level and so that does help to protect it from water intrusion. It also has natural plants. I think a really important point about this kind of plant choice to talk about is that we actually had to reschedule this recording because I was deadly sick after Hurricane Nicole. In fact, my whole town was, we took a near direct hit and several things happened. A lot of our trees are not native in our town. We have a lot of oak trees and a lot of big heavier trees that when the winds come, it blows off the foliage and so there's new seedling sprouts which can cause ragweed and pollen rejuvenation. We also had with Hurricane Nicole lots and lots of rainfall that washed. A lot of that runoff, a lot of fertilization, a lot of fungus down to lower areas. So when you use natural plants, native plants, they're generally more resistant to the tropical environments so this Babcock Ranch used all native wind resistant tropical plants whereas here in Jupiter, we don't have a lot of, we have some of those plants but that's not most of our, that's not most of our landscaping. So many of us became sick after Hurricane Nicole which I just thought was interesting because our pharmacies ran out of antibiotics and ran out of the steroid packs and ran out of flu tests and that's another small symptom of these increasing hurricanes is how these waterborne illnesses or respiratory infections or allergies crop up after a big storm. I'm sure you see the same thing in Hawaii. All right, you did tell me about that and I was really astounded by it because I'd never heard of that and I said to myself, just another implication of climate change. God knows what further implications are out there that we're gonna find out about the hard way as we go forward. So talk a little bit about Nicole. It wasn't as serious. It was on the East Coast. It was very close to you as opposed to Ian which was pretty far away and didn't have any direct effect on the East Coast apart but what happened in the case of Nicole? Yeah, so it wasn't a big storm. It wasn't a lot of wind but it did require that people come, not quarantine, what's the word I wanna say? We kind of all hunkered down, I guess I would say meaning lots of people, these are things you don't think about, lots of people inside buildings together while we let, it was a lot of rain. It was probably two or three days of just heavy tropical downpours. We were getting between three and six inches on the lighter side of the storm and up to 12 inches on the heavier sides of the storm. Flooding was a big risk, was a big issue but what you don't think about with these storms is that the more moisture they bring, the more time you're spending indoors and that creates an environment for viruses to spread amongst people who are either evacuating or just hunkering down together. The rainfall does have a tendency to wash stuff that's not maybe the cleanest. It can overflow sewage. There's a lot of risks to these storms as they increase in moisture. So yeah, the biggest risk with Nicole was the amount of rain that came through and yeah, just kind of what that meant for places that had already been inundated with water. When I see news footage of people walking through water up to their waist, I said, well, good, they didn't drown but on the other hand, they're walking in a sea of microbes and dangerous microbes and they don't have relief. It's not like you can go take a shower somewhere, change your clothing. You're carrying that around for a while, for long enough for it to get into your body. And I don't think people realize that there's all these health implications, microbial implications of any storm where you're submerged, even partners that merge. Right, when we went outside just to clean my, I have a 10 month old daughter and she had a little cut on her finger and was playing in the sand while my husband, my sons and I were dragging stuff and she got a fungal infection in her finger and I got a fungal infection in my sinuses just from breathing in all of the particles in the air. We went to an allergy doctor, we had to get on antibiotics and I didn't realize that even in your sinuses, there are cavities there, if you inhale a fungus, it can literally grow in your sinuses. I know that that's disgusting, but until you start to experience these micro problems that are related to maybe natural or man-made disasters that are the result of a warming climate, it is super hard to tie it all together. But we see a lot of micro issues that we want solved, things like lots of seaweed on the beach that comes from a higher nitrogen content in the water or what was the other one I was going to say? You're drinking water that's supposed to come from aquifers. There is a town here in Florida called Pembroke Pines where a couple of days a week, it doesn't happen all the time but we got a letter from someone that explains that their water is contaminated a couple of days a month and so there are certain weeks where they have to not use their fresh water and that's an aquifer contamination due to rising seas, more water coming into the clean water. So there are a lot of micro issues. Yeah, right, so the disruption happens not only when you blow the house down but at a micro level as well. Absolutely, yeah, for all the surfers that watch your show, sea lice, there's a higher prevalence of the jellyfish larva, sea lice that make your skin itch when it's the summer months in your warm water. Well, a couple of thoughts come to mind from the discussion so far. One of them is, I have to carry flood insurance. I'm not sure whether that's county, state, federal or whatever, I have to carry it. All I know what it is, it's the mortgagee. The mortgagee is saying, as a condition of your mortgage, you have to carry flood insurance. We live near a stream, so there's a risk of that. But it seems to me that if you only have, what did you say, 4% of the people in Florida are carrying flood insurance and something wrong with that system? Yeah, and that was only in those counties in central Florida. The statistic was only 4% of people in that central Florida county area had flood insurance because it's by your flood zone. So for example, out by our beach, it's maybe flood zone AE or AX, and you're required to have flood insurance there, but I'm in flood zone C, so I don't have to have it. Now I've chosen to have it because it's not very expensive because the homeowner's policy will cover water damage unless it's water coming from the ground up. That requires a different type of policy, and ours is maybe four or $500 a year, so it's worth it, even if that flood never comes. But there are 96% of the people whose homes were flooded or could have been flooded in that central Florida county. I'm not sure if it was Osceola County or Orange County, but that will have to come out of pocket to make those repairs. That's true, it's tragic. It is, and part of the issue is then, when you're a homeowner, if you're gonna go and purchase a home in a neighborhood where someone didn't have flood insurance and needed to make those repairs out of pocket, the quality of that workmanship is probably very low because they would do just the bare minimum. I mean, that's an assumption, but it's a likely scenario that nowadays, it seems like finding a home that has water damage is more common, and it's just because of the atmospheric ability to hold so much more moisture and then drop so much more moisture, places in the Midwest are getting tropical downpours and their infrastructure is not prepared to handle that amount of rain. Gonna change the insurance industry, isn't it? The other thing that comes out of this is that if my house is destroyed, parts of my house are gonna go on my neighbor's lot and those parts are gonna do damage to my neighbor's house. So it's an interdependency. And if one house is damaged, you can expect other houses will be damaged, not only by the same process, but by secondary implication. And so you really wanna have a neighborhood where everybody has sustainable houses and everybody has flood insurance too. Otherwise, that neighborhood not gonna be able to recover. The other thing I wanted to mention, Shannon, is this, just serendipitously, I was watching as I am want to do various podcasts like yours and video casts. And one thing I just found out recently, you may not know this, is on Google Earth and there are a half a dozen programs that do the same thing as Google Earth. There's a dynamic feature. In other words, you can say, show me what it looks like on your last satellite pass. Now show me what happened last week and the week before that and the week before that. And you can actually make a movie of how the thing changed. And if we are looking at the devastation created by Ian, we can go to Google Earth and you can see what it looks like today and blow it away and what it looked like before and see how it changed. And I think in using that kind of technology, we can see what houses broke up. We can see what streets were inundated. We can see how the flood operated on that community. It's really an interesting possibility. I think that's very interesting because following that logic, we would also be able to see what's happening forward because the story is over, right? The news cycle has passed. No one's speaking about Ian anymore but as that community rebuilds, they're likely going to choose more sustainable, they're gonna make more sustainable choices. They might try to bring some battery packs in so that if they lose power again, they're not without power for weeks and weeks, which we know can lead to a whole host of other issues. They're probably building with maybe metal roofs versus shingle, things like that. So we could kind of go forward in time and learn the lessons to your point in the beginning of this episode, what can we take away? Well, let's see how these communities are rebuilding because let's learn from their mistakes and let's learn from their tragedy. The media handles this. The media will show you the tragedies, they'll show you the houses blown apart. They'll show you the people sad because they didn't have insurance and they're standing there in the street with nothing but their pants on. And then of course, it goes away. The media here in Hawaii is not really, and I think the national media is not really covered, the rebuilding effort. It's just how serious was this and what secondary effects. And the question of what have we learned? I think, of course, we have a lot of stuff on the media and we have a lot of national issues and all that, but the media looks for raw meat, they look for excitement and tragedy and they don't cover it after the fact. The cleanup is not part of the media coverage. And that leads me to a point that you and I discussing before the show. And that is, does the media effectively connect climate change with extreme weather and other implications of climate change? And my answer to you, and you can agree or disagree, a lot of people disagree with me, is that the media is not covering this to the point where the average citizen actually understands how climate change results in extreme weather. And the more climate change, the more extreme weather. And it's coming more now. And it's becoming bizarre now as some of these damage points you've mentioned, they're bizarre. So, querie, what are your thoughts about what the media is doing and how it could do better? Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks, Jay. So I definitely think that I get Google alerts myself because I work in climate communication and have done so for five years. So I do see pretty much any of the major news outlets if they're talking about climate change. I get alerts every day. So the conversation is happening. However, what I see is that it's super on the surface. I would say 35 to 40% of the time it's politicized about this Democrat supporting climate legislation and this Republican tearing down the climate caucus in the house. I also think that we have, there's a lot of climate tech startups. There are lots of them in the tech industry right now that have a really hard time finding funding. They can't really get Series A funding because historically ESG related companies or sustainably, let's see how is it? It's like sustainably responsible. Companies don't return the, don't offer the investor returns that some of the other maybe dirty energy companies do. So having more seed funders or first-in funders for some of these climate tech startups that have a really cool innovation and are meeting these detailed micro problems where they're at, I think that's huge because once you get these companies off the ground and profitable, then you can find government funding. So the Inflation Reduction Act that just promised all this money to each state to combat climate change, well, the state needs somewhere for it to go. So if we don't have innovation, if we don't have those solutions that the state can invest into that money is just gonna sit there and not be used. So empowering young people, I mean, old people too, sure, but younger than myself who are hungry with ideas. And I would say educating more on climate change, that's where the media could do better is maybe talk about the very specific micro problems that are affecting each community and the solutions in a very specific way that I think would maybe start to, it needs, the conversation has to stop being climate change, climate change, climate change. It has to be, hey, water intrusion into my aquifer or fungal runoff that is gonna infect my whole family or da-da-da. Because once we know the specific problem, someone's gonna come up with a specific answer, a specific solution. Volo has a VISTA award that awards $10,000 and up to $25,000 for university students that come up with a really great solution that helps anywhere along the Gulf Coast to combat a macro or micro problem related to climate. So if you're watching and that's you, apply. Yeah, and it has a larger effect than that because Hawaii has a similar risk and we could have, we have had extreme weather and we will have extreme weather and what you learned there, the technology that is developed anywhere, especially along the coast, would be very useful for us. So we should follow you. You should have it on your podcast. I hope you, I assume you do, Shannon. Yeah. One last point before we go is this and you and I talked about it before we started the show. And that is, we have micro problems. We identify them through hard experience and then we have micro solutions and we have to work on that. But the macro solutions, we're not doing so well on that. The United Nations and COP 27 have not been all that effective in raising the money and making, having a solution that is global, that deals with the exigencies that wraps around the possibilities. We don't have that. And for that matter, the country is distracted with so many other issues that this kind of public policy is way down the road, if at all, for the United States, which should be a global leader in this. And so what would it, well, do you agree with that? Number one, I think you do. But number two, how do we achieve macro solutions? And can we achieve macro solutions or is it simply going to be a question of adaptation which is second best going forward? Right. So I know our trustees really focus a lot on mitigation because, and that means finding other ways to produce the business that we produce here in America and across the globe that is not emitting such, warming greenhouse gases. It's not just CO2, which is largely coming from auto emissions and industry emissions. You know, really they're just, people are digging into the ground, they're pulling out oil, which is fossil fuels. It's like the dinosaurs and putting that out into the atmosphere. And what's in the Earth's crust should really stay in the Earth's crust. It shouldn't be in the atmosphere because our atmosphere can't digest it. So that's your climate 101. And so, you know, seeing some advancements in electrical vehicles or solar, wind, or hydro energy will help. I hate to say, I hate to have such an opinion because I'm by no means a professional in any of these areas, right? However, from my consumer perspective, it seems like electric vehicles, solar powered energy for a single family home residence, these things are not accessible to the general consumer. Most, and I wanna say the, I don't know if it's the average, but I would say many electric vehicles cost $50,000 and up. I just saw an ad for a new Volvo and it said coming in under 80K. And I thought that's insane. That's just so much money to, you know, so it's not equitable. Not every person can purchase that yet. Plus there's the components of not yet having the infrastructure for charging. That's part of where these IRA funds, the Inflation Reduction Act funds need to go is to building free or low cost charging stations, really like at gas stations. Because I think if I had to buy a car like that and then install a charging meter at my house, which still is drawing on fossil fuel energy, it's all gonna cost more. So that needs to be a little more equitable. Things like chlorofluorocarbons or another greenhouse gas, that comes from our aerosol cans, spray paints. I think microwaves. No, that might not be right. But I know Energy Star, for example, purchasing appliances that have an Energy Star rating is something that we can do to ensure that we're not using dated equipment that release energy that you can't see but they're actually global warming molecules. I've read some of the ingredients, I can't remember because they're such big names, but there's some ingredients in like hairspray that I used to use that was a chlorofluorocarbon. And so I had to just switch to not an aerosol hairspray, but to one that's maybe liquid based or oil based. These things could be outlawed by the government. People doing it voluntarily on a spot basis. Because you need to know, most consumers don't know these things. Well, I hope we get there. It just sounds like we're going to have a lot of hurricanes before we realize the connection. I mean, all of us realize the connection before we take action. This is an emergent situation and the country has to focus on it. And I appreciate your view of it, your podcast and Volo Foundation's work. We appreciate you. I'm with you all the way, Shannon. And I want to do another show with you. Definitely. Well, stay healthy. Not you, but to the audience, stay healthy because I think we can buy new houses and we can get new cars, but we really can't restore our health. That's one thing that you only get a limited supply of. And one of the biggest risks from climate change is the effects to our health. And having come out of it myself in the last week with these respiratory allergies, I say that from my heart to yours, just stay healthy. Thank you, Shannon. It's wonderful to talk to you. I hope we can set up something again soon. Shannon. Absolutely. Thank you. Megan Eason and Volo Foundation, Volo Foundation. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.