 Welcome back to Think Tech, I'm Jay Fidel. This is you from the North, featuring our special guest, Dr. Ken Rogers and Kalora, British Columbia. Welcome to the show, Ken. Hello, Jay. We're gonna talk today about energy. Will energy profits obstruct our efforts on dealing with climate change? We seem to be heading in the wrong direction. And I know you have many thoughts about that. So why don't you scope out our discussion and then I'll give you my input also. Well, I think that when you have to look at energy and solving the climate crisis, you have to think from a worldwide perspective. If you look at the United States, generally the United States has been a net importer of oil and a net importer of gas. But over the years, the U.S. has cleaned up its environmental act somewhat. You've had significant economic growth, which takes more energy. But you've had a reduction in the amount of the use of coal in particular. And the use of coal has generally been replaced by natural gas. The, all of the wind and solar energy really has roughly equaled the rate of growth or the growth in the economy. Or you really have two factors that have added to the power mix or energy mix. You've had more natural gas and you've had more less coal but you've had more wind and solar. Now, if you stand back and take the world, in the last year, the world used more coal to produce electricity than it did the year before and it used more last year than it did the year before that. You know, that the rest of the world is going backwards pretty fast. You have the major population centers, India and China in particular, even though China is a main developer of solar and wind and their, and hydro, you know, their population increase in standard of living has increased the amount of energy they're using at a very phenomenal rate. You know, the US, this rate now has a pretty nice growth rate going. Well, that's a nice growth rate if you're comparing that with Western Europe and Canada and Mexico and Australia but if you're comparing that with, you know, China and India and Indonesia and the very large population countries in the East, you know, really the US is not growing very fast at all relative to the rest of the world. So if we're gonna solve the climate crisis and I believe that's a very important thing to do, you have to watch what you have in energy security and, you know, to have the best example of some of the what not to do is to look at Germany. You know, right now Germany is suffering economically. You know, let's call it a mild recession. However, one of the key causes of all of that has been the extreme increase in the price of their energy. You know, they have the farmers, you know, rolling their tractors down the highways and blocking things because, you know, their economics have gone down the drain purely because of the change in the price of energy. Well, let me jump in on that now, Kenneth. Seems to me the most important story in our lifetime, which we do not acknowledge generally, is climate change. It's going to ruin the world that is ruining the world. And I blame the media for telling us that there's fires and floods here and there and everywhere, but they don't connect it up, not in the public mind with climate change. That's exactly what's happening. It is happening everywhere. You know, we styled a show about corporate profits, energy company, oil and gas company, corporate profits. And indeed, those guys have, just like Tobacco, another couple of decades ago, an initiative to try to dull the senses, you know, on public policy about the connection between climate change and oil and gas and so forth. And I think they stand in the way, politically, of dealing with climate change. Also, as you said, you know, there's a connection between the economies of various countries all around the world and their efforts at dealing with climate change. If the economy needs more energy and growing economies always do, or efficient economies always do, then, you know, the problem is that we don't pay attention to climate change, we pay attention to cheaper energy and that stands in the way. So then you have misinformation, disinformation, you have a confusion or priorities and social media does not help because people don't understand the existential nature of climate change. We are distracted. You know, look what happened with the Maui fire. The Maui fire is very ironic. It's the product of climate change, although the press doesn't dwell on that. And we are distracted from further efforts at dealing with climate change because of the effects of climate change. You know, it's so interesting and so ironic. Electric vehicles are really not going where they should go. Hawaii still has a very small number percentage-wise. It's a drop in the bucket and I think it's a drop in the bucket in many places and countries. I blame the media for all of this. I blame the educational system for all of this. People don't see it, not from K-12 to higher education. They don't see it. They'd rather protest about what's going on in the Middle East on campus but they don't protest about climate change. Now, you and I are old enough to know that 20 years ago, there was a lot of protest about climate change and the environment and all that. What happened to that? Now we protest about the Middle East. Organizations that were dedicated to dealing with climate change have gone off the side. To which here in Hawaii, we had a thing called Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. It's all but dead right now and we've watched that and it's said that there was all this energy about energy. Now there's no energy about energy. The EPA is not helping in terms of dealing with the environment. The COF 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 is on a decline every single year. Now I say COF, I mean COP. COP 21 Conference of Parties that's supposed to deal with climate change and evoke a collaborative response and they haven't been doing it. People have not been going even or contributing. International organizations like the United Nations, it's a failure on climate change. In general, around the world, people don't know or care and they don't know and they don't care. It's less interest, less caring than before and government in this country is locked up. It can't do anything. Even if Joe Biden really cares about climate change, he's not gonna be able to get anything through and government is not spending enough money. It's not addressing this as an emergency, which is what it is. COVID got in the way. Science is not being funded, not to the same extent as before, even a few years ago. And yes, we're still using coal and oil and gas. We call that a bridge fuel. I'm not a permanent fuel, that's what it is. And so what's happening is all the plans to deal with climate change have been undermined or forgotten. Our efforts and alternative fuels like wind, algae, burning garbage and all that, it's out. And you see greater and greater opposition in the communities by way of NIMBY, not my backyard. They don't wanna have anything in their backyard. Even if on a global basis, it's important to do that. The city planners don't concentrate on it. Transportation organizers and planners don't concentrate on it. And political initiatives, you know, who exactly in this election year has a meaningful platform plank on climate change? People don't care. And geopolitically, people don't care. Countries don't care. We're too busy fighting wars. We're too busy trying to take over the neighbor. Our tax incentives sit here and elsewhere and globally do not savor efforts at climate change. I need to interrupt you, honey. I just need to interrupt you. You have to interrupt me on guns, weapons and profits. I just need to interrupt you to say that it must be a gloomier feel in Hawaii than it is in Western Canada. Certainly here we have an awful lot of climate protests. You know, the climate problem really is front and center in Canada to the extent that they're making stupid decisions. You know, part of it is thinking that as if Canada were an island and they had no connection to the rest of the world, you know, where to me you need to use in the long run, you've got to have a lot of nuclear energy to deal with the need for adequate energy total and you need a lot of it. And importantly, you've got to, in the interim, you need to start knocking off the worst creators of CO2 and methane. And the first one would be coal. You know, well, so far, the speed with which we're adding wind, solar and having increase in natural gas mainly because of LNG, they have been able to sort of together handle essentially the rate of growth and getting rid of coal. You know, but they really need more of them. For example, I think that Biden has had a recent policy thing to slow down the United States' ability to export LNG. From a world climate solution scenario, that is insane, that is really stupid. What's good for Putin, you know, is what he just did. And all you have to do is look at Germany and say, what are they going to do? Are they going to let the lights turn off or are they going to take the fuel from Putin? They call him Putin, but it's kind of the synonym suits the guy. However, I think that, you know, you've got to phase out natural gas, but it'll be quite a while to do it. So you have to deal with things like carbon capture and the sequestration of CO2. In Canada, we have a mega project to sequester all of the CO2 created by all of the oil sands. Now the oil sands are now producing, you know, a huge amount of oil, and it's much cleaner than regular oil produced in Nigeria or Angola or Libya, but it's still not clean enough. And, you know, Canada's policies are the federal government's pushing that clean up faster than, you know, China is able to reduce the use of coal. I kind of connect those here, but I'm reminded by, you know, we have an exigent situation. We have an emergency called a human emergency, mobile human emergency, and we're really not doing anything. So movie last year, a year before called Don't Look Up, and it was about an asteroid that was going to come and destroy the Earth, and these guys were talking about the price of instant coffee at the local food shop, food store. And you say, wait a minute, what about the priorities? Is the price of instant coffee more important than the destruction of the Earth? And I could list a hundred issues in this country alone where people think of those issues and it's more important. We are living in an emergency, and frankly, and I would like you to discuss this, and frankly, everyone has to, everyone has to sacrifice the oil companies, the gas companies, every household in order to survive the planet. And we, you know, including Germany, they have to sacrifice their economies. They have to sacrifice having, you know, the kind of energy they want to have all day. They have to back off until we straighten this out. Don't you agree? I think that's a little idealistic in an academic sense. I can understand what you're saying in a practical sense. I have a little trouble saying that, well, we should tell all the world to stop increasing their GDP. Like slow down, no increases in anything that will expand the abuse of energy. Now we want everybody to turn off the heat or turn down the heat. Let's have nobody take warm showers. You've got to have a cold shower only. You know, change all your habits. Like if you want to overnight solve the climate crisis, you can list about 20 things of that sort, and they would probably work. Like tell everybody in Africa, go back to subsistence living. Don't aspire to any improvement to have any standard living that looks anything like Europe or North America. Just, you know, stay in a hole. You know, and, you know, China stopped growing, and India, you know, just stopped, stopped any expansion of your economy. Well, that just didn't get to work. No, but the alternative is, you know, destruction of the species. We're going to have more floods, more fires, more catastrophes around the world, and many, many people will die. So it's a Sophie's choice. Well, what I was saying is it's a dilemma. It's a dilemma for world policy. The problem is we don't have a way to determine world policy one way or the other or in the middle. And, you know, it's a choice that could, if we do nothing, that's the test. If we do nothing, which we are largely doing now, maybe Canada's doing more than the U.S., but globally we're doing very little. And in making that choice, we are doing a good part of global population to be destroyed by climate change. What do we do? Well, an interesting one, just a little bit of a side post. Because of climate change, Canada has had a phenomenal amount of wildfires. Well, last year, the CO2 created by the wildfires added more CO2 to the atmosphere than did the Canadian industrial side of the Canadian population. That is what the world statistics show for Canada as a contributor to CO2. We're probably about the 15th largest contributor to CO2 in the world. But that's only counting, you know, the human activity. Well, last year's forest fires added more CO2 than the rest of the Canadian economy. So the climate change itself is being self-cumulative. Similarly, in the Canadian North, as is also the case for all of Siberia, the permafrost is freezing and the methane that's been captured in the permafrost is starting to leak through and into the atmosphere. And methane is far more potent as a greenhouse gas than is CO2. By the way, most people don't know that natural gas, the chemical formula for natural gas is H2CO4. And that's just, that's methane. Like that is the chemical formula for methane. That is natural gas is methane. So whenever natural gas is being shipped anywhere, you know, you have to be really careful that the pipes don't leak or anything of that sort. And when you're extracting it, how much is escaping into the air? And this is where, you know, the Canadian industry has really been pulling up their socks is when you have a natural gas well, they never flare it out. Like flaring a gas well or flaring an oil well, wherever you see those flames at the top, they're just burning off methane. That's far worse than CO2. So, you know, you can have those practices to capture CO2 and capture methane at their sources and sequester it. You know, that's a major item that Canada's doing. That's where we felt that in Canada, or at least politically, that you cannot keep the economy rolling at all if you don't continue to have some oil and gas. But how can you have the oil and gas used to help the economy go without increasing any CO2 or methane into the atmosphere? It's biblical. This is biblical. It's a destruction, our own suicidal destruction of our civilization. You know, you can say that Canada's better than the U.S. You can say that if Hawaii tried much, if Hawaii tried really hard to do all the initiatives that have been discussed in utility over the past 20, 30 years, if you could take Al Gore and put him in charge, maybe he would do more. But that's only one country or two countries. We have 192 countries in the world, or maybe 200 countries in the world. And we have to get them all together on the sacrifice that's necessary to save the planet. And we're not doing that. We're not close to doing that. In fact, it's slipping down the chain of priorities. Well, the Europeans were ahead of Canada and the U.S. You know, and that's where, you know, in all their enthusiasm, the Germans, you know, shut off the nuclear plants thinking, well, gee, in the long run, you know, you have nuclear waste and that's not a good thing environmentally. So, well, we're on this route of rah-rah for the climate. Well, let's not even have nuclear and let's use Russian gas instead of our local coal, you know, and that seemed to be working for a little while. A German economy was going along. And then all of a sudden, you know, the Russian gas, the pipes were shut off for a little bit of Putin leverage. And suddenly, you know, reality came in saying, gee, we need practical ways to do this where security has two dimensions. You need military security or like keep Putin in his hole, but you also need your sort of economic security. You know, like, you know, do you, where's your energy security while you do this? You know, and you can say, is it a good plan to slow down growth? Well, the population, no politician would do that. It's kind of a little business. If you don't pay attention to the economy and people lose a certain part of their quality of life, then they're gonna vote the bums out of office and you're gonna have a new crowd and they're running things. And their platform is gonna be, we don't care about climate change. We want everybody to have a better quality of life. The other aspect is a guy named, not like Putin, he cares about taking over his neighbors. He cares about war. He cares about weapons. He cares about dealing with the sanctions. He doesn't care about climate change. He doesn't give a rip about the methane escaping through the permafrost. He doesn't care about that. Well, that's exactly the point of it is a combination of priorities. You can't say, we must have a climate change priority and to hell with everything else. You know, or you can't say, let's make the economy grow like crazy because the economy will get more votes and let's ignore everything else. You need a combination of things. If the economy is going well and the public is happy, they will make sacrifices that they would otherwise not make. They will make investments in things for the long-term future they would not otherwise do. And so the upset of the German economy when the Russians shut off the gas shows really that you've got to keep the economy rolling. You've got to keep the public happy in order to achieve your long-term objectives. And the happier they are, the more they will allow. I mean, you know, you have naysayers about adding, you know, the new types of nuclear power. And yet, you know, I can't think of any way that we're ever gonna solve the climate crisis without a ton of nuclear power. Well, I wanna add to that that we have in the state of Hawaii, our legislature is in session right now. And there are two bills, count of the two bills that call for nuclear power. Now, we have a provision of the constitution is you can't have nuclear power without a certain super majority of votes in the legislature. And that's important. That was well-motivated back in the, whenever it is the 70s or the 60s. But the fact is that these bills are not gonna pass. It was a noble idea to introduce them. Maybe this will happen elsewhere. But I totally agree with you, Ken, without nuclear power, we lose in the calculus. In other words, our efforts are not enough to keep people up with the advance of climate change. We'll have to move faster. And the only way we can move fast enough is with nuclear power. That's my thought. Well, one might say, is Hawaii a good place for nuclear power? So let me use a good example. Would you have a nuclear power station at the south end of the big island? Not bloody likely. You know, that is, if you're gonna have nuclear power, you gotta say, well, gee, I think Kauai would be a really safe place. You know, or safer, you know, but, you know, lots of places, you know, are less safe than others, as Fukushima just proved. You know, you can't put nuclear power anywhere near Hilo. You know, you're gonna have the Fukushima equivalent someday, you know, a tsunami will roll in like they've done for hundreds of years into the Hilo area. So you have to pick where you're gonna have some of these. You know, the Southeast US has just a ton of nuclear power stations that they've been running for years. They're doing well. But the new type of nuclear is, you know, really pretty good and, you know, the world is generally considering it, but like you say, your legislature in Hawaii is plodding away and it's going very slowly in the US federal legislations in gridlock or let's call it Republican denial that they have a duty to approve anything. You know, that they're supposed to do the job that they were elected to do. However, I think that the public is pretty conscious of climate change and the politicians in the press need to keep beating that drum, but they need, you know, more comprehensive solutions, not isolated solutions. You know, just a single shot things are not too terrific. I think the, one of the few things that I might agree with, that Trump has said was drill, drill, drill. I should have said, but I would qualify that, you know, drill for natural gas so you can ship LNG to Europe so that they do not have to take Russian gas and therefore cause military problems like that side of security. And that starts to give the Europeans economic security. I mean, Germany has always been the Germany and Britain, the key engines of economic activity in Europe and in Germany is floundering right now and it's got a scary rise in the, you know, far right political side of Germany because of the, you know, what most of the world think is a minor economic setback, you know, but Biden instead of cutting off the LNG should have been standing on his head saying, Germany, we're coming, we're helping, you know, please be patient, we're puffing as fast as we can, you know, and encourage, you know, a lot more. At the end of the day, it's political because no leader, at least in the Western world, the democratic world is going to take a step that's going to have them thrown out of office. And if, you know, if it's dangerous politically, he's going to be very tentative about doing it. And so our system itself is being tested at the global system, the United Nations and all kinds of international organizations they're being tested and the world itself is being tested to see if we can come together, determine smart policy, execute the policy, pay for the policy, make the necessary sacrifices to achieve the policy, and thus beat off climate change. But I don't think we're even close to that, Ken. And it may not happen in our lifetimes, maybe the next generation, we're going to find more storms, more floods and more effects of climate change and more deaths resulting from the advance of climate change. And I don't know at what point we realize that we really got to take global action. Your thoughts? I agree with you on that. I mean, I think of, you get funny extremes, like, you know, a major contributor to CO2 is the airline industry. Well, how do you, you can't run an airplane of the size and weight that we have on electrical batteries. You know, you really need something like hydrogen. You know, well, you know, if you deal with it as a combined problem, like how do you solve, keep the economy going, that is, we want airplanes in the air, but we don't want to have them use a liquid fuel that's going to put CO2 or methane into the air. So do you find, you know, in the middle of a desert somewhere or in the top of some mountains that nobody's there, you're using wind or solar to generate, to actually to create hydrogen. You know, because hydrogen's an expensive fuel right now, but it's one of the solutions. Can you lower the cost of solar and wind so you can put them in remote unused locations? You know, like, you know, what part of the Hawaiian islands is unused? Well, how about the islands that are closer to Japan than Kauai, you know, that are just barely sticking out of the ground? What, you know, can you put there that can produce enough power to create a fuel that can substitute for what you are using, starting with coal, then kick off oil, then kick off natural gas? I mean, burning garbage is still, you know, you may be getting, you know, solving the landfill problem, but you're not, you're creating methane and other noxious fumes. You know, there's, other than CO2, there's some things that are worse than CO2. Well, we, you know, we used to think that geothermal could be expanded, but it hasn't been a lot of political resistance then and now about geothermal. And we used to think that we could transmit energy by cable among the islands and bring the islands together on one sort of major grid. But we, that ran into trouble and it became politically radioactive. We have to think that we could have wind offshore the way Europe has wind in the North Sea, but there's resistance to that too on the basis actually that it doesn't look good. So what I'm saying is over the past 20 years, we're think tech anyway, and various environmental people and organizations have been thinking about this. The interest politically has declined in this state. You can find some people still excited about it, but the action points have declined. And I just feel that we're gonna have to learn the hard way. Well, you mentioned geothermal, you know, are you familiar with the term engineered geothermal? No. On that, if essentially if you go to deep oil wells or oil and gas wells like down Texas, Louisiana, you got some 10, 12,000 foot wells and the heat of the ground at that depth is pretty great. And a lot of parts of the world, such as Hawaii, there's a large, you know, hot spot in the earth rolling along underneath the islands which are creating the Kilaueas and eventually one, you know, further along the Kilauea. Well, this engineered geothermal, the idea is with advanced capabilities in drilling where you can drill down, you know, you could drill down and just make a U-turn. You know, drill down and let's just simplify and say I have a U-shaped pipe where I make it almost like a big U with a flat bottom. And that bottom of that is at a depth that it's really hot and you simply have, if you put down a working fluid in the pipe, you never have it touch the ground underneath, it never collects any, you know, of the noxious chemicals that may be in the ground at 10,000 feet or 12,000 feet or, you know, some area and you simply have, you're heating that working fluid and bring it up and using it at the top to produce your power, you know, produce electricity. Now, you know, this is a really good point you make, we're almost out of time, but I just want to capture that point if you will. It's unlikely that we're going to see international organizations rise to solve the problem, sorry to say. And, you know, if they doubt, you know, we're at greater risk every single day, but technology can help. The technology of this engineered geothermal is a good example, I'd say. The technology of batteries that are light and could actually, you know, fuel planes, the technology of, you know, a maybe hydrogen fueling planes, all these things have to be, they have to be explored and solved. And, you know, if you've talked to the average scientist working on any of this, he is a very, or she is a very frustrated person because they don't believe that people care. They don't believe that people and governments are willing to pay the price for that research into technology. But I suggest to you, Ken, that the technology that would make nuclear safer, the technology that would work on hydrogen and engineered geothermal and wind in places where the NIMBY community wouldn't object to it so much and laying down cables, all of this has been essentially stopped by the cost and the political resistance to the cost. But if we could just get some good technology working in all of these things, the technology people and companies and investors would be the leaders. So we have got to get the oil companies, you know, to stop misinforming us about climate change and start really doing some investment in technology. That would be, that's my closing point to you anyway, that would be a practical solution. As a Canadian, I smile when you talk about oil companies misinforming where you have a candidate, you know, for president of the United States, that's probably the worst I have ever heard of in terms of misinforming the public. It's not the press. I mean, the press that quotes whatever the idiot says, you know, may be guilty, but you know, certainly the idea of it ought to be a crime to have such a degree of magnitude of misinformation on subjects that are as crucial as climate change. Okay, great point. And on that note, I think we'll have to stop. We're out of time. Dr. Ken Rogers, retired Canadian businessman in Colorado, British Columbia, giving us the view from the North on so many important issues. Thank you, Ken. Aloha, Aloha from Kaluna. Aloha again. Take care.