 Yeah, we're back. We're live. We're finding our future. That's the name of the show, Dorei Shin can't make it today, but I'm stepping in for her. And let me say that finding our future is getting more complicated all the time. And to help us understand that as a person who deals with, I guess, now in science and the future in science, Jim Fletcher of SOAS. Hi, Chip. Thank you for joining us on the show. My pleasure, Jay. It's good to see you again. The same. So, you know, first, I want to congratulate you on your recent award. The award Think Deck gave you for community service and science service to the state of Hawaii. Thank you so much for that. And well, thank you. It was fantastic. It was a great evening and I was surprised and I love the opportunity. Thank you. Yeah, it's great to see you there and family and all that. So, you know, you're heavily involved in climate change and the amelioration of climate change. Perhaps there's no one else in the state is on a scientific level. And this is very relevant to us because we're we're working at the suggestion of some of our underwriters. We're working on a program called climate change unfolding in Hawaii. That's a that's a verb that seems to apply, because we'll find out more as we go along. And we'll see what we can do about it. We'll find out more about our abilities to deal with it as we go along. And I actually I'm hoping that you'll help us with that. As in terms of testimony about what's going on and consulting as to how we can handle that that particular show. So anyway, let's let's take a look at, you know, what you've been doing. Let's take a look at your vision of it. First of all, I know you're, you know, I remember you're doing all these charts and graphs about about sea level rise and about the inundation of our beaches and coastlines. It's always very encouraging to look at that. And, you know, that's going to have a huge effect on tourism. That is to the extent we still have tourism left at that time, because, you know, part of the threat of this show Chuck is to talk about the relative priorities of existential threats. So one of them certainly up to this point has been clearly, and the School of Journalism always says this, that the climate change is the most existential threat, therefore, the most important journalistic story we have anywhere it threatens the species. So you've been making those charts and graphs and I'm sure you've gone further because you're on the Climate Change Commission city and county. And I want to know, you know, the depths and breath of your activities these days. Oh, so we're going to start with a small question, huh. I'm giving you plenty of room to go for it. That's a scope. Yep. Let's see. Well, COVID-19 is the issue of the day. And, you know, I'm calling in from home here. There are people all over the state all over the world in fact now working from home. It's interesting how climate change and influenza map on to each other. In fact, a new study just came out, indicating that high levels of weather variability. This is the occurrence of heat waves that developed suddenly have been shown to have a 50% probability of increasing the influenza epidemic potential by mid-century. That's only 30 years from now for mid latitude locations. So think of the continental US, most of Europe, much of Asia. It is the dramatically warming days that are forcing our immune system and are the thermal regulation of our body temperature. And we have to turn towards that need and away from battling the incidence of influenza that may invade our bodies. And so it's conjectured in this paper that as we go into warmer and warmer weather, and we have these extremely hot days, the human body loses some ability to mount the immune defenses against influenza. And so there's anywhere from a 20 to 50% increase in epidemic scale influenza because of this problem by mid-century in mid latitude countries. So that, you know, that's the go ahead. Does this paper or any evidence you heard support the notion as expressed by the Trump administration that when it gets warmer, the current pandemic will die down? No. In fact, this paper is suggesting that as we head into the summer, as we see the development of heat waves, and in 2019 we had two separate heat waves in the continental US and we had a record three heat waves in the EU, the European Union, as our bodies attempt to thermoregulate in the face of these extraordinarily high temperatures, we will see reduced ability to counteract the invasion of influenza viruses into our bodies by our immune system. You're not talking only about coronavirus. You're talking about influenza viruses. It could be any number of viruses going forward. This phenomenon, the paper reports, can happen again and again as we get further into climate change. That's right. That's what it's projecting that our susceptibility to epidemic scale influenza will grow with temperature. Well, here's an interesting question I'd like to put to you on the flip side of that. What about the other way around? Coronavirus has an effect on our species. I mean, maybe other species too. We've heard of species that have been involved in the creation of the virus. Our species is changing its conduct. Our species is changing the way its communities and cities and countries and its industry and activities in the world have been conducted. I don't think it's a temporary, you know, through the spring or the summer. I think we're going to wind up, for example, social distancing ourselves and washing our hands going forward, not only for corona, but for other potential viruses. So human conduct is going to change. My question is, it's a hard question. Could that affect climate change? If we take advantage of it, yes. In fact, I would hope that Hawaii specifically doesn't come roaring back in late 2020 or 2021 with the same addiction that we have to tourists that we've shown in the last two decades. I think this is an opportunity for us to refocus our look at making ourselves safer as a coherent community, less dependent on outside goods and services, outside forms of revenue. Let's take this opportunity to readjust our economy and anticipate that in the next 10 to 30 years, we may very well see a strong decline in global trade. We may see climate emergencies hitting the ports that provide us with 90% of our food. We may see the cost of shipping spike, the cost of food spike, because these climate emergencies that are occurring on the mainland are making, and in Asia and elsewhere are making trade much more expensive. And by actually fulfilling the governor's initiative to grow more of our own food here in the islands, and if we do it in a way that supports a growth in jobs, that supports a rising economy that's focused on internal effort, internal sustainability, rather than always turning to one continent or another for the various things that we have become dependent on. As we move towards the middle of the century and heat waves begin to take down bread baskets of the world during the summers and ports and shipping begin to experience climate emergencies such as we saw the Port of Richmond last summer when wildfire took out the electricity around the San Francisco Bay Area and the port was shut down for 48. Those sorts of emergencies are going to grow in frequency and intensity and we need to be able to support ourselves. This is a term that has been used a lifeboat community. The Hawaiian version would be Pu'u Honua. We need to be able to feed itself to have our own water and to have our own sustainable economy under which we can all thrive while areas in continental regions are battling severe climate emergencies because the continents warm faster than the oceans. In summer time now we see temperatures of four degrees Celsius above pre-industrial conditions in the central part of North America, the European Union, Eurasia. Those are temperatures at which food crops fail at which food and water systems become unreliable. We need to anticipate this so that we can be a society that continues to thrive as the rest of the world, I'm afraid, is going to be dominated by growing chaos. Yeah, chaos being the output of work. Well, you know what, I get a bunch of reactions to what you've said and one of them is, gee whiz, if you're looking at dealing with climate change and you have been and sustainability and resilience and all that, all of a sudden, with the entry of coronavirus, you realize, or I do, you probably realized it before, is that sustainability means sustaining the species against viruses. Also, it's not just the weather. It's not just the food source or the water source, it's viruses too. So now your mission is kind of expanded. This lesson over the past few weeks changes the way I would look at sustainability and resilience, no? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just think of all the medicines that we all use, the type two diabetes and the type one diabetes, all of our insulin comes in from someplace else. I don't know that we, so we educate pharmacists, pharmacologists in the state, but I don't know that we actually produce any medicines in the state. That's a key thing. And I was reading this morning that people had better bulk up on their medicines. And, you know, in the, in the eventuality that we'll have less shipping arriving at the islands. It's a very scary situation. And while I'm confident that we'll get through the current coronavirus problem, I hope that people don't fall back into complacency and ignore this emergency. These emergencies of various types are mounting now. We have seen direct landfall of tropical cyclones and hurricanes. We've seen wildfire growing in Hawaii. We've seen coral bleaching. Sea level continues to rise. The king tides, the extreme tide flooding is increasing. Now we have medical issues and epidemic influenza. We, we can't just go back to thinking the way we've thought in the past. We need to add these all up and they need to equal a new way of living in the islands. Yeah. Well, that's two words going to be on the final exam chaos. And what was the other one you just mentioned? Oh, yeah, complacency. We cannot afford complacency. And that takes me to another. And that, and that takes me to this whole notion of the president said he was going to spend now hundreds of millions of dollars of dealing with coronavirus. And I said myself, whoa, you know, it's it's that's that's pretty interesting. I mean, if, if, if he can do that and actually win the game, that'll be terrific. You know, we should be spending hundreds of millions of dollars billions that I say millions billions of dollars on climate change. We want to address it properly. So if you add that up, you get many, many, many hundreds of billions of dollars trillions easily trillions of dollars. Okay, and, and, you know, we're already in a kind of big, big time deficit in Washington. And that's why it doesn't have all that much money and they're trying to raise taxes and we do not have the money to deal with either climate change, which is, I'm sure you can speak to that also. But also, you know, with this combination effect of the virus and the need to deal with it as well. So what I, what I get is that going forward a, our world is going to change. Our lives are going to change. Our society is going to change in order to deal with this and be, and this is the really tough question. Actually, I hate to ask this question. Can the planet, after it changes in this way, and after it has to spend all this money, can the planet support the same level of population, or is, or are we going to have to call the herd. Did you say called the herd, Jay. The virus is doing viruses calling the herd right is sweeping across our world, and it's knocking off the older people. And when you when when it's all said and done. The herd is going to be less. The same notion here these things cannot support in my view they cannot support the same level of population 8 billion plus whatever it is. So we have now the nature is going to reduce the number or yeah nature is going to reduce the number of people who can live on the planet. Don't you think so. Okay, so you are skipping to the, you're skipping to the punchline and of the range of punchlines you could choose your, you're choosing the most draconian and and depressing of them all so I'm not going to go into your narrative and instead, I'm going to point out a few things number one, the projections coming from the energy economists of the world. Yes, do project increase and continued co2 emissions this is largely coming from the developing world who want to have the, the food and water reliability the transportation systems the education and hospital systems that the developed world has and the quickest and easiest way for them to increase their standard of living is using the embedded fossil fuel infrastructure that that means that we in the developed world need to assist the developing world with the deployment of renewable energy. If you take a look at these projections of carbon dioxide they actually put us on a pathway of three to three and a half degrees Celsius increased warming above the pre industrial era. By the end of the century, that is a far better pathway than the five or six degrees Celsius that was the worst case scenario that has been modeled by the intergovernmental panel on climate change. We are not tracking the worst case any longer we are tracking a middle of the road case. Given that three degrees see by the end of the century is still an incredibly dangerous and fraught world and we had better prepare ourselves for Can we live on this planet at our current population. Yes, we can if we change our habits. Habit number one, stop eating meat. This will significantly decrease deforestation across the planet. It will significantly decrease your own personal exposure to cancer and a number of other diseases go vegetarian and even better than that go vegan. If everybody on this planet were to eat a more plant based diet. This would, this would push us an enormous step forward because 26 to 31% of our greenhouse gas emissions come through the agriculture chain from the field to the table. We can also take advantage of the trend of human population moving into urban centers, as we retrofit and build new buildings let's make sure that these buildings capture and manage some of the water that falls on their property if not all of it, Generate some or all of their electricity needs. Grow some of their own food and let's also have buildings talk to each other. Let's create. Let's push forward the Internet of things where my refrigerator talks to the battery in your car and figures out where's the best place to store electrons and where's the best place to draw electrons. Let's also take advantage of opportunities for increasing the education of the future generation. I am not a, you know, there's there's an idea unfortunately among some folks that they don't want to have children because of the negative future that science paints but I think that's not the right response. I think the response is if you are, if you wish to have children and you're lucky enough to have children. Let's own the responsibility of educating those children so that they are making decisions based on empiricism and that they are scientifically informed individuals. You know, making carbon pay for its real cost. Just the way we've made cigarettes pay for their real cost on society driving up the cost of health care. We should implement a carbon tax and as you probably know there is a bill in the Hawaii legislature which has just taken a break but there's a bill in the Hawaii legislature for a carbon tax. We need to move strongly towards creating the carbon tax in Hawaii and it will send a powerful message to the world. And there are, there are lots, dozens of things that we can do. Let me just mention one or two more. There is a massive investment opportunity and pulling carbon out of the air, turning it into a fuel such as kerosene which is jet fuel. Turning it, that carbon gets re-released into the air we pull it out again. And if we can close the loop on burning and carbon fuel source, we can totally replace fossil fuels. There are trains of dollars of impact investors out there who are looking for opportunities to help humanity. This is one of the major areas to take ourselves away from fossil fuels. And to buffer the step away from the internal combustion engine in its various forms and develop this sort of zero fuel opportunity. A friend of mine here in Hawaii would like to create a direct air capture plant located at every airport in the state. Power it through either geothermal or renewable energy, pull carbon out of the air, generate kerosene which is then can be used by the airline industry as jet fuel. And, you know, that could offer an opportunity for putting some cap on the airline industry in Hawaii. If some portion of the jet fuel can be made through direct air capture, this might offer a parameter under which we could require, you know, put in place limits on the airline industry. There are also possibilities for repairing climate. Formally known as geoengineering and everybody has a negative reaction to that. I think it's worth investigating protecting the Greenland ice sheet. Over the last two decades, the Greenland ice sheet has seen an increase in cloud free days and artificial creation of clouds over the Greenland ice sheet so that we slow or decrease or eliminate the warming there would prevent seven meters of sea level rise which would displace thousands of the world's cities if we allow it to happen. And also there's a possibility of repairing the United Nations process the cop process which is currently dominated by the Trump administration going in and threatening all the players with threats against their relationship to the United States if they happen to agree to the UN goals of the cop. This is what happened in Madrid. I'm working with some folks to try and create a parallel process for the Glasgow cop, although there are rumors that it might be canceled because of the virus, but there are lots and lots of things that single individuals coming together with the determination to not allow the world to enter into the bleak future that that we've become used to hearing about. There are things to do on the job. Coronavirus teaches us some things. I mean, for example, multiples, for the lack of cohesive action by the federal government, multiple states get together and they make kind of compacts on certain issues and actions dealing with the virus. Multiple countries in Europe and elsewhere get together and so you find actual movement collaboration collaboration being the operative word that that's probably the third word on the final exam I hope you put all these words on the final exam chaos and I can never remember where you know where people don't care and finally, you know, collaboration so. Yes, so, so, you know what I get out of this is that we are learning we but by by by requirement necessity breeds invention necessity breeds collaboration. We are learning that to deal with this global epidemic, we have to collaborate. Even the Trump administration has to collaborate and and we'll have to go through this passage together we'll have to spend the money find the political will take the steps agree on them and implement them. This is really a lesson for everyone everywhere. And maybe that lesson to a very existential threat. You know, also is applicable to climate change in general, which people don't get all that excited about and politically they. They don't do a whole lot and that you can't find the political will, but maybe the virus will teach us how to find the political will for climate change to spend the money take the steps and so forth on a global, a global cooperation. I'm hoping that's so. You know, the question is, how do you do that, how do you start that, and I agree with you about education. Everybody has to be educated so nobody, nobody is left behind nobody is is rejecting science, how do you do that. We have already collaboration in play with regard to climate change we have an entity called the US Climate Alliance. This is 25 states and over 400 cities. Together, they constitute the fourth largest GDP on the world. They've all declared that they're still on board with the Paris targets from 2015. The United Nations temperature targets of 1.5 and 2.0 degrees C warning. The US Climate Alliance has an office in Washington DC, and with grants that they've recently received, they are starting to staff up. This is a possible this, this is an alliance that can go to the cops the conference of parties which are happened every year sponsored by the United Nations. This is an alliance that can confer with each other and develop approaches towards a carbon tax, even if a carbon tax can't be passed individually which has been tried in several, at least in Washington state, which has been tried and not successfully succeeded. By having this climate alliance. There are leveraging opportunities and interstate agreements that could be made which can, which can decrease the carbon footprint of things like trucking transportation of various types the airline industry etc etc. So it. We actually are seeing this collaboration if things go well we'll we'll see this collaboration within the US really take. Are you participating in it. Are you participating in these projects these organizations. Are you active who is leading. Are you involved in that leadership. There's a small group of us about six of us that have gotten together from the legal side from the United Nations side from the global scale investment side from the science side. And from the energy technology side and and we have Skype meetings about once once a month. We are generating white papers, for instance, I want to go to the insurance industry and pose large scale experiments in carbon storage in the ocean as a risk reduction exercise. This idea of models over the Greenland ice sheet. We need a huge injection of funding to see what this modeling may tell us in terms of feasibility. We're going to go first through the cop and gloss go to create a parallel event for sub nationals for climate alliances that are not national scale. And, and there is a UN program, which is geared towards, which has four trillion dollars worth of investors that have signed on to certain principles of investment principles that are focused on social equity and climate We are talking to each other and we are not the only group of people like this that are collaborating there's sort of little points of light if you will, as we discover each other I'm very optimistic about the possibilities. I have to have to build it into every student at SOAS every student at UH. Every duration we can find so that these younger generations carried forward you and me are not going to be able to, you know, have this conversation participate in these projects forever so we need to. We need to see the community with people who are carried forward. The last question I want to ask you is, is this. Hawaii is a great laboratory and that's the premise of our program on unfolding climate change in Hawaii. It's a laboratory where you and others from UH and other schools can go out and examine the environment and see how it's working on the shorelines and in the ocean to see how the coral reefs are doing how the weather and the water and you know agriculture and everything in the world in the physical world around us is doing so we can learn here and therefore we can share here furthermore you're on the Climate Change Commission and others seeking to develop political will for a city and state governments here. For officials at every level to try to show them the way show them what needs to be done and help them do it. So Hawaii I think can be a laboratory, Hawaii can teach other places perhaps more than most about how this works, how it is unfolding, and how the, when you call the community response to it is unfolded you see it that way. Absolutely, that was really well stated we are a living laboratory. Unfortunately, Hawaii is highly stratified economically, socially, and these sorts of stratified communities do not do well when climate shocks occur. When you have, for instance, the current pandemic, or let's massive heat wave or hurricane strike. When you have high disparities in income communities like that have been shown in studies. Not to hang together under certain cases that shock can sort of sever what is already very thin connection from one portion of the community to the next. So I would say that, you know, there's a number of important things that we need to increase, increase robustly over the next one to three decades. Among the very top two or three has to be repairing our social disparity repairing the huge gap between the haves and have nots in Hawaii. And if we can truly leverage the foundational culture of Aloha and take care of those who do not have as much as others. Hawaii could be extremely resilient as we move into the world fully digitized fully electronic feeding ourselves with abundant and healthy water. We can be an example of how human society can turn back to back in love with soil fall back in love with the planet and in so doing will fall back in love with each other. That's the term that will be on the final exam back back in love with the planet. Thank you so much Chip Fletcher. It's wonderful to talk to you encouraging. And I hope we can do this again soon. Thank you Jay.