 To Think Tech, I'm Jay Fidel. We're here at the four o'clock block with Marco Manglestor for Energy 808, The Cutting Edge. And of course, energy touches everything, so the show touches everything. Hi, Marco. Hey there, Jay. It's such a pleasure to be back with you. My goodness, last time we were together two weeks ago was a different world. And now what's the world that we have right now? We have Jay and Marco and we have the electrifying energy of energy topics, large, medium, and small. So once again, my friend, great to be back with you. Okay, today we're gonna do a bit of an oblique. We're gonna ask the question, what can Joe Biden do about climate change? And this was discussed in a PBS news hour piece a couple of days ago. It was a quite remarkable revelationary in its own way. So Joe Biden gets up there and says, we're gonna do climate change in this country. We're gonna rejoin the Paris Agreement on day one, he says. And we're gonna reach, what do you say? Let me think, wait. By 2030, we're gonna deal, we're gonna take all the greenhouse gases out of transportation. And by 2050, we're gonna take all the greenhouse gases out of everything. That's pretty aggressive, ambitious, don't you think? And I guess the question is to discuss today is exactly how do you do that? Do you remember a wonderful song that one Jiminy Cricket sang with great acclaim decades and decades ago in terms of when you wish upon a star? Oh yeah, Walt Disney, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. One of the most beautiful tunes I think that can't help but giving anybody with feelings with chicken skin, right? So to use that as an intro, I think there's gonna be a lot of wishing upon stars, which is not a bad thing, right? I mean, to get a bit Polynesian on you Jay, of course, is what the ancient mariners from the South Seas, right? They use stars to guide their journey about some successful that we've heard about and some unsuccessful, right? To guide these double hull Polynesian canoes across thousands of miles of open water using the stars and the wind and the scent of the ocean to traverse great distances. So we have to start somewhere to get back to where we need to be as a responsible member of the global community and the community of nations. So, you know, it was music to my ears to hear Joe Biden announce these top priorities for his administration. So to answer your question, how do we get there from here? Well, 2035 is, of course, you can do the math as well as I can, let's say about 15 years from now, 15 years away. And he wants to make the, what part of the economy again, power generation, power generation. So I think it's feasible. I think it is feasible to, in the next 15 years, I mean, it's gonna, it's a rather aggressive target, but to be able to phase out all power generation within the next 15 years is gonna be a stretch. It's gonna take, of course, substantial amount of money, but I do believe that is possible. Getting the U.S. economy, so it's going to eliminate all greenhouse gases in the next, what do we say, 2050? So next 30 years, I mean, that's also gonna be quite, it's also very, very aggressive. So how to get there? I mean, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. It's gonna take money. It's gonna take trillions with a T and not billions with a B. And it's going to take adequate political consensus to be able to move in that direction. And all eyes are on January 5th amongst other days because that's the runoff day for two, count them two Senate runoffs in the great state of Georgia that if the Democrats are able to prevail, which a lot of people believe is kind of a long shot, then that would give the Democrats control of the Senate with Kamal Harris, the new VP is the tiebreaker, but assuming that doesn't go that way, then Mitch McConnell would be the Senate majority leader. And I guess the big question is, is this the Mitch McConnell that used to cut deals with Joe Biden when Biden was in the Senate for the decades he was there, or is this the Mitch McConnell that is gonna play the Merrick Garland card over and over and over again, which is essentially to do everything in this power to guarantee that Joe Biden is the one-term president, just as he vowed the same thing with Barack Obama in 2008-2009. So. Well, what do you think is gonna happen? What do you think about Mitch McConnell? He's done some really heinous things in this past four years. You think he's gonna turn good? Oh boy, oh boy. I have to ask for a lifeline. Can I call a friend on that? Yeah, tell me you'll get back to me on it. Anyway, bottom line is a couple of things. One is Biden said he's gonna spend $2 trillion. It's interesting, the bandy about numbers like trillions. And yet we spent more than $2 trillion already on COVID without any notable success. See how quickly it goes and see how much went into the wrong pockets too. That will come out in history. Although I would say it's very interesting when you look at anything that has happened in this four years, you have to take it with a grain of salt because there was an article today, I think it was in the Atlantic and it was for the proposition that Trump doesn't take notes at meetings. He doesn't allow other people to take notes. He has systems that destroy his email and tweets as soon as they're sent and received. In violation of the Presidential Records Act and when he leaves office, assuming he hopefully will soon, there won't be a track of what he's done. A lot of the records that you find presidents leave behind them, he will not leave behind him. We won't know what he did with his hands behind his back. We'll know it was in the newspaper, we'll know what he said in his tweets, but we won't know what he did. It's very troubling to find. Anyway, not to get too far off the point. One of the things in that news story on PBS that struck me and a fellow's name was, I want to say Nat Kahane who spoke about it. I think he is from Columbia and he's an environmentalist from Columbia University. What's interesting is that we really, we really can't just join back into the Paris Accord. You've got to meet certain standards to be a member of the Paris Accord. And we have been reducing our greenhouse gases by a very small amount over the past few years. Nothing close to what we would need to have reduced them to meet the standards of the Paris Accord. So it's nice that Biden wants to join on day one, but the Paris Accord membership will have to waive certain requirements for him to do that. And I think they will, but it just shows you how far off we are. It just shows you how pathetic our efforts have been around climate change. I mean, we look back at the four years. Trump has done nothing to work toward ameliorating climate change and he's done everything to make it worse. Including things that the automobile manufacturers felt were too drastic even. I mean, so, we have a lot of work to do and in that piece, oh, it show a couple of hours ago, we had a fellow who was talking about the the multilateral trade agreement in Southeast Asia just recently established. For the lack of any American presence there and he said, it's gonna take Biden, not four years, but eight years to balance again in terms of world standing. For right now, we're a laughing stock. Right now, they pity us. And they're not gonna just open the door wide and let us come back. We're gonna have to pay dues. We're gonna have to show them we're sincere. And that's hard because we have a country that's so divided. Well, I'm gonna try to push back a little bit on your Cassandra here, Jay, with a little bit of perhaps Pollyanna because we need a little bit of Pollyanna here. I had a chance to look at earlier today this information on the Climate 21 project, Climate 21 project, which actually has its pedigree from Duke University originally with a whole bunch of really top caliber people both inside the Academy, former government officials. And these folks have come up with a blueprint that they have been gestating with the hopes, of course, of a Biden victory, which we have witnessed now, that would act as recommendations, concrete recommendations to the executive branch of the government, Biden presidency, to allow his administration to, quote, hit the ground running from day one. And as you mentioned earlier, one of the, as Biden has vowed that he, on day one, June 20th, excuse me for what I dare, wash my mouth out, January 20th, couldn't happen sooner. January 20th, that he will make whatever moves he can. So we rejoined the climate agreement protocol, which was arrived at after much negotiation, of course, five years ago in 2015. So I took a look at this Climate 21 project and it actually seems to me that it gives me some hope. It gives me some hope that there is a lot of firepower. There's a lot of optimism. There's a lot of determination to start the right to ship, just take those steps in Munchkin lands with Dorothy and Toto, knowing they have a long way to go, long way to go to get to Emerald City, but you got to start somewhere. In this case, well, Dorothy and Toto was the beginning, the Yellow River Road, right? For us, it's having actionable plans like this, such as the Climate 21 project, which is essentially providing suggestions for each of the major parts of the US government with the Executive Office of the President on down, including the State Department of Energy, Agriculture Department, Interior Department, Department of Justice, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, and has specific recommendations in the first day, in the first week, in the first 100 days. And I mean, that is a start. That is a really good start that this administration will be able to at least stop the bleeding of the past years that has witnessed what we witnessed from this particular Trump administration and start moving in the direction that we all, or so many of us feel that we need to go in. So, yes, it's daunting, Jay. It's really an uphill struggle. It's going to be, you look at the politics, you look at the economic situation, you look at COVID, and at the same time, we do have something of a blueprint before us, and there will be a lot of good people coming into government at all levels of government that will have us starting back in that more positive direction. Well, I don't mean to be on the other side of the coin with you, because I certainly believe in what you're saying, but I like to add two points. You know, it's devil is in the detail. I think that Biden can negotiate his way back into cup, the conference of parties, the Paris Agreement pretty easily, they're all waiting. The mayor of Paris, when she learned that Biden won, she said, welcome back America, welcome back America. That is so profound. And it reminds me of the slogan that the French took up after 9-11. I can't say it in French, but I'll try. New Psalms, twos, amelie, can. Very good, very good, not bad, Jake, not bad. New Psalms, twos amelie can, yes, yes. We are all American, and the same thing here now, welcome back America, bienvenue, amelie can. Wait, wait. So I think, you know, we'll be able to get back in there. I think where I get stuck is in two things. You know, when Trump was wrecking our environmental architecture, he just repealed things. I mean, regulations and the like, which I guess there are issues about whether he had the power to do that, but let's assume he had the power to do that because everybody accepted it. So that was the end of that regulation, that regulation, that, very little pushback. What could you do? Now you wanna rebuild that regulation. And Biden says, I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna do what I can. Short of legislation, I'm gonna rebuild those environmental regulations for climate change. Well, don't forget 70 million people voted for Trump. Don't forget that even if the Democrats controlled the Senate, even if they controlled all of Congress, there were still Republicans left. Republicans to make trouble. Republicans to oppose everything. Who don't like climate change and who would follow Trump and who may still be a force in the media even after he's out of office, hopefully soon. And so what you have is a burden on the administration and the Biden administration. Well, I think we'll build this regulation back. And they say, not so fast. We got periods of bureaucratic response and due process. You have to have hearings and allow for comments and all that administrative procedures act kinds of process. And so they can hold it up. They can complain about it. They can try to negotiate it. They can try to push back in general, push back. So it's not so easy. It's easy to repeal stuff. It's hard to reenact regulations. You have to go through some gauntlet there. That's one thing. So I don't think we can assume that Biden can get it all back in the stroke of a pen. Not true. The other thing is, of course, it all hangs on Georgia. And while you sing Disney songs about stars, I sing Georgia on my mind. I have even gone to listen to Ray Charles. He sings America the Beautiful, Amber Waves of Grain, and then he sings Georgia. And it's got the same feeling about it. Georgia is America right now. Meanwhile, your friend Mitch McConnell is putting $100 million of Republican money into those two races in Georgia. It's gonna be a struggle. Even one would help, two would be really good. But it's gonna be a slugfest on that. And if the Democratic candidates for the Senate in Georgia don't win, we're gonna have a terrible time. We're gonna have a terrible time getting any legislation through. I don't think there's a good bone in McConnell's body. I think he's gonna resist anything Democrats do because he wants the presidency back after the four years because he wants to hold the Trumpers together. And this is the way you do it. You keep on playing Trump. So the result is if he controls the Senate, Biden's gonna have a terrible time getting legislation through. And as Kehane said in the PBS show, is you can do stuff, certain kinds of stuff on regulations, but for the serious money, for the serious climate change steps, you really do need legislation in this country. And without McConnell, without the Senate, it won't be serious legislation. Sorry. Well, it kind of goes back to what I said a little while ago, Jay, which is is it going to be assuming that the Republicans, the Republican party remains in the majority and the Senate is it going to be a Mitch McConnell of obstructionism that he has shown certainly a propensity to do when there's a Democrat in the White House or is it gonna be more of a Mitch McConnell of the days gone by where you give something to get something, you give a little to get a little and a recognition that the country cannot do the status quo thing, whether it's COVID, whether it's the economy. So, I mean, these are all really juicy questions. You know, we've still got a total of, let's see, 14 days plus 31 is 45, plus we have 65 days until January 20th. If I can do the quick math in my head. And of course a lot can happen as you and I both know in the next 65 days. There's this thing called executive orders, right? Which we're both familiar with, which Barack Obama used, I haven't done an analytical quantitative study to see whether Obama was issuing more executive orders than Bush did or whether more than Clinton did. So I don't have those stats right in my head, but he certainly was slammed, Obama was by the Republicans for, you know, he's acting as a king, as a tyrant. He's bypassing the people's will in the Congress and so on and so on. So, and it's something of course that every president does because to some extent, right? And Trump has been doing it as well in terms of executive orders. So, you know, that's certainly a fallback for Biden to do, because he does have a fair amount of discretion. But like you said, in terms of the really big stuff, you can't probably have an executive order to come up with $2 trillion, right? To be able to fund clean energy projects. I mean, that's a bit of a stretch. You probably couldn't get $2 trillion, you know, siphoned away from the defense budget as Trump tried to, well, not $2 trillion, but tried to cut siphon away a chunk of it for his border wall, right? So, you know, let me kind of change the pace a little bit here. And this is I think a bit of good news since we're talking about billions of dollars and hoping to see good things. So when Jeff Bezos announced not too long ago an earth fund of $10 billion, with a B, $10 billion, that he, Bezos being, I think, the richest person on the planet, but you know, when they get up to hundreds of billions to kind of lose count. But Bezos just recently announced, I believe it was today, the first recipients of money from the earth fund, including a disbursement of $760, somewhat million dollars, including $100 million to the likes of, let me just read this. Nature Conservancy, the National Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund, to name a few. So each of those that I just now, or just mentioned, $100 million will come from Bezos' earth fund. So, you know, that's not a trillion dollars, but hey, $100 million is pretty good seed money. I mean, if I was at any of those organizations, I would certainly break out a good bottle of champagne, getting that kind of news. So my point being is that you have private actors, in this case, a very wealthy private actor, who I happen to, you know, you can see all kinds of things about Amazon's business model and having destroyed retail stores and da da da da da. But at least at this point, and this particular point of Bezos, you know, he's donating a fair chunk of money to do good things. So there's, yeah, 70s. It's good, but you know, that's not the optimal solution. The optimal solution is that the government has to take care of this issue just the way the government has to take care of COVID. And if the government doesn't do something with an existential threat, like COVID or climate change, we're not gonna make it. This is anecdotal compared with the kind of resources the government can bring to bear on a consistent basis. I mean, it just demonstrates that our government is really quite dysfunctional. Democracy is quite dysfunctional. So let me remind you, oh, you already know, you already know that climate change, I mean, aside from COVID, it's a combination or awful, but climate change is an existential threat to the planet and time is of the essence. And those storms in the Pacific Northwest, the melting of the ice caps, the change in the flora and the fauna around the world, the need for all the people to have to migrate because their home environments are disappearing. This is a pretty serious business. And the US could be, should be, would be, maybe the leader in getting the global act together, but it's been a wall, Trump has been a wall, and we have allowed him to do that. So now it's time to get back to it and query. We lost a lot of time, are we simply too late? I don't believe so, Jay. I just, I feel that sense of despair sometimes, of course, you know, what normal feeling rational, even being on the planet, so I wouldn't feel that, but I also choose to also believe that there are still plenty of people who are working in the same direction that you and I are, and that there's still, I'd like to believe it's still not too late to write the climate ship and have it go in the better direction. And this is kind of a, I don't know, sidebar note or sidebar question to you, but I'd like to hear what you have to say about it. So clean energy, clean energy. Notice that they're not talking renewable energy necessarily, okay, clean energy. Is nuclear energy clean? What about, and I kind of almost choke on saying this, clean coal is clean coal, clean energy. So, I mean, is nuclear energy going to, do you think should it play a bigger part of our energy generation portfolio in order to get us to zero greenhouse gas emissions within the next 15 years? You know, it's a really good question. We've been talking about, when I say we, I mean the planet, we've been talking about, you know, the kind of green new deal, you know, that the environmental community has been suggesting for a long time. We've been talking about solar. We've been talking about wind. We've been talking about all kinds of, you know, harnessing the ocean. Gee whizzes, you know, for that matter, geothermal. All these things that do not add greenhouse gases at all to the environment. But you know, although Hawaii has made a certain amount of benefit on that, certain amount of progress, Hawaii has made as much progress as we would have hoped 10 years ago. Those aspirational dreams and targets 10 years ago have not been realized then. And I don't know if you agree with me, but my feeling is we're not moving fast enough now. We've lost our mojo in terms of Hawaii, in terms of moving fast. And the country certainly is moving fast and Trump has slowed it down. So what I'm saying is while the existential threat increases, obviously, clean energy in that sense, you know, no greenhouse gases, no fossil fuel. Okay, the world hasn't moved fast enough. It hasn't moved as fast as the threat has gotten worse. So if you ask me, what could happen in the end, is that we gotta catch up. And catching up is by all means, all possible means. And a reasonable solution in the circumstances of an existential threat may very well be, take anything that is less dirty. Take anything that you can find that is reasonably clean and use that in order to allay the existential threat. And that would include cleaner coal. It would include, you know, LNG. It would include nuclear. That's what could save us in the end. But Jay, you just said coal and LNG, they're both fossil fuels. So you combust them, you're putting stuff in the atmosphere. But less, but less. I mean, I think it's gonna get to be an emergency where anything that is better than what we're doing now is gotta be considered. We're not there yet. Well, maybe we're not there yet. But you asked me whether these things were viable options. Well, no, we've rejected them. I mean, you and me, the environmental community, but we're losing ground all the time. The past four years, we've lost a lot of ground. So what do we do when it gets worse? Well, let me give you, since we're, I know we're running, we're almost out of time here, I'll just share with you the news of last week in terms of geothermal, speaking of geothermal, is that Pune geothermal venture is now back online. They are producing power. According to press reports, it's only a megawatt or two, megawatt or two, but it gotta start somewhere. They expect to be maybe up to 15 to 20 megawatts by the end of the year. And by up to full strength sometime, maybe early mid 2021 full strength being somewhere shy of 40 megawatts. So, you know, through Mike Calachini and Oramed and although those hardworking guys and gals, now they were able to go two and a half months with no revenue and still the revenues is very, very low with only a megawatt or two being produced for still the helico, but they're back online. It remains to be seen, you know, that the real fate of geothermal here on the sound, they're still losses pending, accusing PGV of not having done a required or in the view of the plaintiffs of required environmental impact assessment last one having been done 33 years ago. So, but at the same time, you know, the real world speaks sometimes and the real world is speaking that for now, at least geothermal is back producing power on this island. So we'll see where it goes. Yeah, but I'm, you know, to me, that's part of this kind of inexplicable resistance. To a diversified portfolio of non-fossil fuel renewables. And I'm sad to see that. I think it's related to TMT. It's related to the cable between Maui and Oahu. And the same pushback on geothermal in the same camps somehow. I think we have got to look at a longer view. We got to look at a bigger picture and we have got to stop fighting about everything. It really bothers me. There was some neighborhoods where they had large groups of people were consulted about whether they would tolerate wind in their backyard. And sure enough, as soon as the wind was built, and they said, okay, they said, fine, we're on board. As soon as it was built and people put in all that money, they said, no, we changed our mind. We don't like when now we're gonna fight with you about it. That's really not cool. I think we have to make every step an emergency step. We have to keep going. We have to be the best in the world. We have to follow through on all the plans. And once it's approved, let's do it. Well, I approve of you being my friend and still being interested in hearing what I have to say after all these years. Okay, Marco, there's lots to talk about. And energy is a centerpiece of our world these days. And that means that it affects everything. And that means we should talk about whatever it affects. You're here, my friend. Thank you, Marco. Marco Manglestor, the time goes so quick. Thank you, my friend. Aloha.