 Welcome to Wednesday afternoon, we're here already again after another week. So welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. This is sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum with funding from my organization, the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. So we'll be talking today to Eric Kwam, who's a friend of mine, he's a lawyer. The topic we're going to be talking about, it's a really interesting topic, it's his new book entitled, You Can Reverse Global Warming. So you might say, really, do I have that in me? And the tagline or the sub subject here, the subtitle here is, how you can ask a question, make a decision, and start a conversation to reverse global warming, and that's how you as an individual can do this. So I'm going to ask Eric, how does that work? So Eric, a little bit of background first. Of course, thank you. So tell us a little bit about yourself. You told everybody you were a lawyer, how long you've been here in Hawaii? I've been here for 16 and a half years, and I've spent about 13 of those years doing renewable energy advocacy and lawyering as well. You're also a patent attorney. A patent attorney, a tax attorney, almost every kind of attorney, you can imagine. But the great blessing of being in Hawaii has been the ability to comprehend the entire energy economy in microcosm. Hawaii's the perfect place to do that. And in the book I say it's just big enough to contemplate all of the many energy options, because they're almost all available here. It's a place to contemplate all the benefits of those options, because we have a record going back at least 15 years of decision makers saying, this is what we want. And it's just small enough a place that one can get to know all of the decision makers, not just in the policy world, but also at the electric utility, people that are involved in alternative modes of transportation, and even decision makers in hydrogen. Yes, thank you for getting the plug into hydrogen, because I didn't see hydrogen too much in the book. It is in the book. It's in the book. OK. So anyway, Eric, how can an individual do anything about climate change? It seems like there's such a huge problem. I look at myself, I mean, I'm trying to do my little thing, but it's still such a huge issue, like how can a little wine drinking us have any kind of an effect on climate change. So you're going to tell us how to do that. I'm going to talk about three steps. And maybe this is a good point to segue to the first slide. It's a quote that I use and apply. That's Buckminster Fuller. He said that a problem adequately stated is a problem solved theoretically and immediately, and therefore subsequently to be solved realistically. In other words, if you can state the problem in a certain way, the problem becomes solvable. And so in the book, what I did was my problem statement was just that global warming presents as the biggest possible problem than one can imagine. And so in the book, I stated as global warming is billions of people, more than 7 billion people, making billions of energy decisions every day. Every time you turn on a light, every time you jump in a car, you're making an energy decision. And the vast majority of those decisions are decisions to use energy in forms that pour carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So every time one is making an energy decision, you're making that. So by framing it as a decision-making problem, it makes it solvable with the decision-making process. And that's the segue to the second step of the book, which is, and I have a quote there from Jonas Sock. Maybe we could bring that one up. And who was Jonas Sock? Jonas Sock was the discover of the polio vaccine. So you might wonder, what does he have to do with energy and global warming? He articulated this idea, which, again, I use in the book extensively. He said that solutions come through evolution. They come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. It's the questions that we must define and discover. You don't invent the answer. You reveal the answer. What that means is that the answer, the solution to global warming, does exist. And the trick is to ask the right questions. Questions like, well, what might a solution for global warming look like? And in the book, basically, and I can't, I don't want to recite all of this stuff. I suggest in the book, I invite the reader to consider that groups of decision-makers swiftly achieving 100% renewable energy for a given energy system, whether it's a transportation system or an electric power system. Groups of decision-makers throughout the whole human society, swiftly achieving 100% renewable energy, addresses each of those elements of the problem statement. And therefore, that's what a solution might look like for reversing global warming. And that launches one into the Jonas Saw question, well, how do you do it? How does any group, how might any group of decision-makers swiftly achieve 100% renewable energy? And that's been the question that's why has been the perfect place to ask and answer that question. And that gets into the Jonas Saw thing. So in the book, I break that down to asking the question, what might a decision-making process look like for swiftly achieving 100% renewable energy? And what it ends up looking like is a planning process for identifying and evaluating all the many energy options that are available, comparing the benefits of those options so that the decision-makers, and this is the key, the decision-makers persuade themselves which ones are best. Because when decision-makers are in consensus that this is the best, we're all looking at the same information, now you've got consensus. Now the adoption happens 1, 2, 3. There's a planning process, and you have to get PC approval. But the key to getting the key, for example, when Hawaiian Electric makes the decision to put up a 20 megawatt PV plus battery storage with ARM, they've made that one decision. Now, every time millions of people in Hawaii every day use that energy, they're making a renewable energy decision. And so that's the scaling effect. That's how you get to a process through which millions, and then eventually billions of people are using renewable energy for most of their uses and radically reducing their global emissions because it's coming from renewable energy. If you as an individual make this decision that I'm only going to use renewable energy, for example, I'm going to use an electric vehicle car, and I'm only going to charge my car up with green electrons. So what's the feedback loop to the utility company do so that they know that they've made the right decision on the right solution? Is that part of this process? Like they tell the utility company thumbs up. Thanks a lot, guys. We really appreciate that, so that they know they made the right decision. It's not feedback from the consumers. It's the way I suggest it works in my book is that when the electric utility is looking at the many options that are available to it, that they evaluate it, each option is going to stand somewhere in the spectrum of a benefit. And I talk about five benefits. Let's talk about electric power because that's the easiest to illustrate. Performance benefits. Electric power has to be of a certain frequency and voltage. If the grid doesn't deliver electric power of the right frequency and voltage, it doesn't work, right? Is all our equipment is keyed to that frequency? Absolutely. And so if the addition of a given energy option to the grid impairs the performance of the grid in delivering electric power, it's not an option. It's not going to be considered. I'm not going to consider it. So that's by far the most important. The same thing goes for transportation. We expect our transportation to deliver us to a certain destination within a certain time period and therefore at a certain speed, or to deliver rate within a certain time frame. So these are the performance benefits that we get from energy. And they have to be maintained. Because if the energy option, which can be not only the fuel for a vehicle, but also the vehicle itself and the infrastructure to support it, if it doesn't perform, we're not getting anywhere. So performance benefits. Second one is economic benefits. There are many, many energy options. And this was demonstrated by a group called Project Drawdown. There are many, many energy options that are available today, both transportation and heating and cooling and electric power, that deliver the performance. The technical performance. Right, the technical performance. At an economic cost, that saves money because you're avoiding the economic cost of burning fuels. What that means is that, I mean, there's so many examples of that. Solar water here is a good example. LED lighting. Energy options that pay for themselves and energy cost savings, which means effectively they don't really cost anything if they're paying for themselves in savings. And then the savings you get from that is actually wealth creation from that point. Project Drawdown demonstrated that with the process for adopting these options, we could save about $65 trillion over the next 30 years and pull out about 375 gigatons of carbon. That's a lot. That's a huge amount. And these are options that are available today. So if the people are going back to the example of the people of the utility, if they're saying to themselves, this option delivers the power we want. It has energy cost savings, which means some of that is going to get passed on to our consumers. And it radically reduces the greenhouse gas emissions because we're not burning fossil fuels to get it. And it contributes to our energy security because the renewable sources are inexhaustible. And you've got four big benefits. And if we're satisfied that it doesn't really present any big risks, there's no resistance. And so the decision-making process by which they arrive at, that allows people, for example, at the electric utility to make decisions, more decisions, faster decisions, better decisions, more benefits for all involved. And that's the process. That's the gist of the process. Before we launch into more, we're coming up to a natural break here. We're going to have one minute off. So we'll be back in about a minute's time. And we'll come back with round two. Exactly. OK. Thanks. Thank you, Mitch. Thanks to our ThinkTech underwriters and grand tours. The Atherton Family Foundation. Carol Mun Lee and the Friends of ThinkTech. The Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education. Collateral Analytics. The Cook Foundation. Dwayne Kurisu. The Hawaii Community Foundation. The Hawaii Council of Associations of Abarbon Owners. Hawaii Energy. The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. Hawaiian Electric Company. Integrated Security Technologies. Galen Ho of BAE Systems. Kamehameha Schools. MW Group. The Shidler Family Foundation. The Sydney Stern Memorial Trust. Volo Foundation. Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. OK. We're back. Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm here with my good friend, Eric Kwam. And he's talking about his new book. Basically, you can reverse global warming. And so the first part of the show, he was telling you how you can make informed decisions. And now we're going to talk about implementation. First of all, as we talked about together in the break, what about the need for speed? I mean, this is the frustrating part about working in Hawaii on any of these big projects. You make the right decision. You get everything lined up. Everybody's ready to go. And then you're stopped dead in your tracks, because whatever it is, the bureaucracy, or whatever, just can't get that sense of urgency. They don't have the need for speed. That's correct. And so we're stopped. Let's talk about that. This is something that I address directly in the book. Because the situation with global warming is urgent. I mean, pick up the newspaper. Read about all the things that are going on in the world. And the solution to that, there's a few different levels of solution. The first one is the idea of consensus. So the decision-making process that I talk about in the book, the idea of once people in an organization are in agreement on the process for evaluating those options, they can come into consensus much more easily, come into agreement. And now, where's the resistance? So the idea of consensus decision-making is that's the first place that you gain an advantage of speed. The second way you do that is what I call the adoption accelerator. And there's a figure in my book, which we won't be able to get to. But basically, once people have an electric utility, they've gone through this process. They've persuaded themselves. And that's important, too. Because if they have persuaded themselves, they're going to go ahead and do it. Yes, they're a solution. Right. So it's a matter of setting up a process that minimizes the resistance that causes the delays that you spoke about. And in this process, once they have a process down where they say, well, we've looked at everything. We've looked at 200 options. Here's the three or four that we think are best. But we'll implement. We go ahead, speedily implement them, which means forming a plan, not just for those options, but for the ones that you're going to do later. Doing a procurement process, that takes time, too. But once the adoption occurs, now you measure the benefits. Did this option deliver the benefits that we thought it did? Maybe it did worse. Maybe it did better. But whatever it happens, as long as it's close to what they imagine would happen, now they're enthused. Yeah, they've got a success. They've got, right. It's like, look how we did this. We're enthused by, enthusiasm is huge. Enthusiasm makes all the difference. Now it's like, OK, we did this. We got results better than we thought we would. Now we want to do that process more and faster. We're going to look at the changes in some of the variables that have occurred in the meantime. We'll tune it up a bit. We'll tune it up again. We'll reevaluate all the options again, see which ones look like the best. And now the incentives are to make more decisions, faster decisions, and get on an accelerating growth curve. That's huge, too. And then the third way is the scaling. This has to do with the trim tab figure. And maybe this is a good time to bring up the trim tab figure. OK. Do you have the picture of the ship with the little rudder on it there? Yes. There you go. This is a concept. I love this picture. It takes a little bit of explaining, but this is a Buckminster Fuller idea. And he had this idea. He was familiar with, he was in the Navy, I think, during World War I. And on a large ship, you've got the big rudder, but you've also got a tiny rudder. The rudder has its own rudder. It's called the trim tab. And in the figure, it's illustrated in red. And the idea of the trim tab is that it provides leverage to turn the big rudder, which is, even for a big ship, it's going to be a big thing. So you use the small lever to turn the rudder, which is a bigger lever, which turns the whole ship. So he uses this as a metaphor for the fact that one individual person, this answers the question that you opened up with, that one person can be the person that influences, say, a group of decision makers. Right. OK. And when that group of decision makers is persuaded, they persuaded themselves to adopt a renewable energy option, or to set a goal for 100% renewable energy, and then a process for getting there, now you've got an example, a model, a successful solution that can be imitated by groups of decision makers throughout the whole of human society. But that's the power that one person can have. So when I suggest in the subtitle of the book that you can ask a question, make a decision, start a conversation, anyone can do this. You read my book. You can reverse global warming, right? It's an empowering book. And it's what it does, and this has to do with the Nelson Mandela quote that we might pull up now too. OK. It's wise to persuade this Nelson Mandela. It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea. So that's nice to hear, but how do you do that? You do it by asking the right questions. Sure. Because when you ask the right questions, basically our brains are question asking and question answering machines. When a question is put to us, we start thinking about it. We're almost helpless in terms of not thinking about it. And if you ask the right question, this goes back to the Jonah Salk idea, there's a preexisting answer to that question. If you've asked the right question, the answer preexists, which means that the person of whom you've asked the question, or invited them to consider the question, eventually they're going to get the answer because it preexists. And you ask, if they have the preexisting answer, eventually, and if you've asked a series of right questions from the preexisting answers, that person is going to evolve the solution from those preexisting answers. And this is the Nelson Mandela thing. I think it was their own idea because they discovered the preexisting answers on their own. So it's possible to persuade people to do absolutely extraordinary things, like reversing global warming. Or going to the moon. Or going to the moon. I use that as an example in the book, by asking the right questions. So Jonah Salk was like, he's it, all right? I mean, they didn't invent these ideas. And Nelson Mandela didn't invent that idea about persuading people and making them think it was their own idea. They just used these ideas to astonishing effect. Ending apartheid, discovering a polio vaccine. Elsewhere in the book, I talked, putting a man on the moon, asking the right questions. How do we do it? What does it look like? There was a person that I didn't include in the book. He was the guy that, for NASA, what was his name? John Wolbeck or something like that. He was the one who came up with the idea of the lunar orbital manning module. In other words, the idea of lunar orbit rendezvous. That was the expression. Lunar orbit rendezvous, which is the idea that we're not going to put the lander, right? We're going to shoot up a big rocket in stages. And then the top stage will be the rocket that itself lands on the moon. No, they had to evolve a process of first learning how to dock things to get it to put the lander on the moon. He was the one who figured that out. And it seems so obvious now in some ways. It's obvious, but it wasn't obvious in 1960. And there's a beautiful quote that I found. We didn't even have laptop computers, then. I mean, we had no computers. It was all true and funny. There's a beautiful quote in the book. I mean, it makes me, it gives me chicken skin. It's like Chris Kraft, who you probably remember, and I remember from my childhood, he was the director of Mission Control. He said, when Kennedy told us to do this, he said, it was impossible. He said that we made it possible. We made it possible. So global warming, as big and gigantic as a problem it is, it's solvable. And if you read my book, you can reverse global warming. I'm not saying that this is the solution. I'm saying that it's a solution. And if you can ask better questions than I suggest in my book, that's even better. But this is a start on solving global warming, so it's a problem. So have you tried this out yet? I mean, you wrote the book, but have you done any experiments before you wrote the book? They kind of validate your, it's more than just theory, isn't it? I do two things. In the book, I use Hawaii stories because a process is a whole set of steps. And I demonstrate how almost all the steps in the process that I'm talking about can be proven with real life Hawaii examples. And again, it's one of the great benefits of working in an environment where you've got, when I started to look around, I was able to find examples for almost everything. So give us an example. I mean, I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but just one small one that illustrates this. Evaluating the greenhouse gas emissions benefits of solar hot water heaters, and evaluating their economic benefits, and coming up with a succinct way of saying, OK, this solar hot water heater, it reduces emissions. There's a little bit of emissions that go into its manufacture, but once it's in place, it's reducing 90% of the emissions that you would otherwise have from using fossil fuel generated power to heat up water for a long time. And again, there's examples like that forever. And importantly, there's the whole setting of a goal of 100% renewable energy. I had something to do with that. And it's a conversational process. That's kind of interesting. When I first came out, I got to say that I was one of the naysayers. It's impossible. But there were proving it is possible, like eat my words. I'll tell you. Right now, I'm part of what's called the integrated grid planning proceeding. And there's a thing called the work plan. And in that work plan, it has something called the solution evaluation and optimization methodology. And when you read that, what's it talking about? Performance benefits, technical fit, they call it. It's talking about economic benefits. It's talking about environmental benefits. Talking about RPS standard, which means supply security benefits. It's like, yeah. And we're going to wrap up. OK, so we're getting there. We're getting there. We're getting there. This idea of decision-making processes starting to take hold. And again, why is the perfect place to do it? So how can we get a copy of your book? It sounds like an important book out there. So we're going to put up that last slide with you. For limited time, you can download a complimentary advanced copy by going to my website. I heard this. This is website, Eric Kwam. Eric Kwam, that's how I spell my name with the K. E-R-I-K-K-V-A-M dot com. Right at the top of the home page, there's a little thing. And yeah, you have to give me your email address. But you can download a free copy of the book. Because I want to get the idea out there. I actually downloaded it. And I read it on a flight from Houston back to Hawaii and marked it all up. It's a good book. It's got some great thoughts in it. And it's applicable to just about any kind of solution, any problem that you want a solution for. It covers all of energy, including renewable energy. It breaks the whole topic down. I don't think anyone's done a book like that. So I'm proud of it. Maybe you're right. Eric, thank you so much for coming down. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Good luck with the book. So that winds it up for this Wednesday. We're over the hump day. And we'll see you again next Wednesday, one short week. Aloha.