 Hey, welcome to Stan Energyman, Stan Osterman here from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technology, State of Hawaii D-Bed, and glad to be here today in the middle of the World Conservation Congress going on downtown with the president here visiting and all kinds of great stuff going on at the convention center and Blaisdale and even at East West Center. So I hope you're getting to spend some time down there and check things out. A lot of great folks from all around the world showing off the things that are happening around the world in sustainability and doing the right thing for our planet. So I hope you get to see them. Before we get started today, I'd like to thank Rachel James and Katie from the leadership group last week that took my place on Friday. They did a great job. I watched the show and we're really excited to be working with the young interns that Katie is getting from the public school system and hopefully get them connected with some high-tech stuff that we do out at HCAP. Katie's guest comes to us from California and I thought I was just going to be talking hydrogen with a hydrogen lover like myself and figure that would be good enough. Then I find out he works for a high-powered philanthropy and then I find out he wrote a book that I was like all Google over when I went to Texas to the Earth Day celebration down there and got a chance to pick up this book and start reading it. So here today is a welcome aboard, Terry. Terry Temanen from Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and author and just all-around earth-friendly sort of guy and you're here for the World Conservation Congress. I am indeed. I'm going to be speaking at a panel on how to move more finance into technologies like hydrogen and other things that can solve our sustainability challenges for the future. Well, welcome to the show. I really appreciate you being here. And we'll start off by how did you get into all this stuff? How did you get started doing philanthropy work and clean energy stuff especially? Well, Stan, you and I and some of your viewers may be old enough to remember the old black and white TV series Sea Hunt and Lloyd Bridges and he played a character called Mike Nelson and every day he'd go diving in the waters off Los Angeles as it happened. And he would have all these great adventures and I wanted to be Mike Nelson. And so when I was about 12 years old, my family moved to Los Angeles and I got a diving certification and I dove beneath the waters and was just amazed to see that actually it wasn't black and white. There were hundreds of species and these towering kelp forests and I was just mesmerized and I went back 10 years later, my family moved to Australia. I came back 10 years later to go to college and went diving in that favorite spot again and I was just devastated because there was nothing there except rocks covered in polluted sediment. And it was then that I said, I've got to learn how could this happen in such a short period of time? What happened to the towering kelp, the 600 species that depend on it, this vibrant ecosystem completely gone. And of course I learned about polluted sediment, polluted urban runoff and of course over fishing and changing the balance of species that would eat things like urchins, the urchins in turn ate all the kelp and those kinds of things. And I became an environmentalist from that moment on. When we have a similar background, I actually grew up here in Hawaii and I did move away for about four years when I was in elementary school. I had a similar experience. I used to go down to the bay in Kailua Beach and on Saturdays the local families would do a hukilao, they would put a big net out and we would go and beat the water with palm leaves and stuff to get the fish in there and we would do that on Saturday. But when I came back as a preteen, that wasn't happening. There weren't enough fish there. People weren't going to the beach and doing that anymore. And then I went diving snorkeling, not scuba diving yet. And the same thing, I'm looking at where all the fish go, where's everything. And it just shows you how fragile everything is and how you have to work to keep it all going. So similar background, but the people in Hawaii, they tend to be naturally bent towards taking care of our land, our water. And so we're fortunate that we have kind of a natural tendency to be that way as a community. And it makes it a little easier to sell some things. But in terms of keeping things clean and green. So what are some of the things that you're looking at here as you attend the World Conservation Conference, besides giving your presentation, you probably get a chance to go and visit a lot of stuff. And what have you seen so far that's impressed you? Exactly. And I'm now the CEO of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, as you mentioned, and honored to work with Leo every day on his passion, which is trying to restore many of the habitats that have been lost. We're talking about many of the endangered species. He's had a great impact already on things like tigers and elephants with a lot of conservation grants that his foundation has made long before I got there, so I can't take any credit. But he is now very passionate also about climate change solutions and has a documentary coming out called Before the Flood, which is his two-year exploration of going around seeing the impacts of climate change. So if you and your viewers may remember Inconvenient Truth, an Al Gore's movie 10 years ago, sad to say that what Leo is demonstrating is that many of those predictions are now coming true, and we can see the evidence of what was predicted then. And it's even worse in many cases than we thought. So I'm here today to really understand a lot about how climate change in particular is impacting these species and habitats and the connectivity. I wrote a book called Watercolors, How JJ the Whale Saved Us. And when I mentioned I wanted to be Mike Nelson, well I kind of became Mike Nelson. In my 40s I started a nonprofit called the Santa Monica Bay Keeper, and we were out protecting the Santa Monica Bay around Los Angeles there and restoring those kelp beds that we had lost all those years ago. And so at that time we rescued a baby gray whale that had washed up on the shore and got it to SeaWorld and were able to have them help us restore it and put her back into nature. And we believe she survived, but the sad thing is, and I wrote about this in the book, is that she should live to be about 75 years old, a very similar lifespan to us, but that she will not live that long because we're wiping out her food supply in the Arctic because of climate change. So while we're very concerned, all of us, about habitat and species, and we do everything we can to preserve those, we nonetheless have got to be thinking about climate change because we're fooling ourselves otherwise into thinking that these are long-term solutions, even if in the short term we see populations beginning to come back and the habitats beginning to be restored. So I'm here at the Congress now this week trying to learn more about what different groups are doing and how we can partner and support them. Great, and a lot of times you have the climate change impact, but then you also have overfishing or you have illegal fishing. This is a big Pacific Ocean, but as you know, fish tend to hang out in certain areas, whether it's a temperature gradient or a certain habitat where they exist best, they either breed well or they end, they move around, but the fishermen are getting smart, they're using computers, they're using satellites, and they're targeting, and you have per-sane fishermen that are just vacuuming, they're vacuuming up huge gene pools of fish, and then you put climate change on top of that, and we could be in deep, deep trouble really quick if we don't pay attention to all of that stuff. And that's another reason that I'm very passionate about marine protected areas and understanding that those have the potential to protect some of those micro climates and micro ecosystems you're talking about. In Loretto, in Baja, California, for example, there's the Gulf of California there that separates the peninsula from the mainland of Mexico, and there was an effort by some friends of mine in the philanthropic community and local fishermen to create a marine protected area there, which some of the fishermen opposed, because that's the only way they make a living down there, so if you tell them they can't fish in a certain area, that's taking away their livelihood, but ultimately it was worked out, and after about two years, the fish came back in such abundance that now the fishermen themselves are the wardens and are protecting this from illegal commercial fishing and any other kinds of illegal fishing, because all around the marine protected area, the abundance is so much greater and they're making so much more money and feeding their families and feeding the world, so we know these things work, but they take time. Well, let's switch gears a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your house, because you know it sounds like you've got a regular ecosystem going on at your house and doing a lot of renewables. Well, I do, and so it's just a modest, it was built in 1928, a little bit of remodeling since then, a modest home in Santa Monica, which is a suburb of Los Angeles, and it has 10 kilowatts of solar on the roof, so that's actually quite a lot, and it also has solar water heating on the roof, and so we heat all of our water with solar and we get all of our electricity from solar, and because of the way, and when I was secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency and the Schwarzenegger administration, I don't know if I mentioned that, but I was, we passed laws that would require the utilities to buy any excess electricity that you would generate from your rooftop, so my wife and I actually generate more electricity than we consume, especially now that our teenage son has moved out and gone to college, and I know that works. Yeah, and so that now goes to the grid, and we're actually solar and energy entrepreneurs, but what we want to do is actually use that excess electricity with a hydrogen home fueler, which Honda is now beginning to make, and use our wastewater from our laundry, use that electricity to break the hydrogen out of the wastewater, and so we'll be powering our hydrogen fuel cell cars from our roof as we even power our vehicles, our home. So you're in California, so they have the Moray in California, and they have the Hyundai Tucson in California, are you going to buy both? Well, actually again, because of the work that I did with Schwarzenegger, we created what was called the Hydrogen Highway Program to break this chicken or the egg cycle of the car companies didn't want to bring cars if there was no fueling, and the fueling companies didn't want to bring stations if there were no cars, so we've got 200 stakeholders together and worked out a plan for the rollout of both together, and as a result today, you can drive anywhere in the state of California on hydrogen, and Toyota has their Moray, as you mentioned, Honda has the Clarity, which is a great car, I've been driving that now for four years, my wife has the Hyundai Tucson that she's had for about a year, we tried also the Mercedes F-Cell, and a good friend of ours now has the Toyota Moray, so all the car companies are coming out with their hydrogen vehicles in California because we solved this problem of the fueling infrastructure. Right, we have the Moray here, our local surfboard company has a direct connect to Toyota Japan, not Toyota North America, and we were able to get six Morays into Hawaii based on the, we're trying to accelerate our hydrogen. Our hydrogen highway is only about 10 miles long though, not like California, we have a fairly small problem to solve, but we're looking forward to piggybacking on everything California is doing to get that hydrogen infrastructure in as well, using material handling equipment, vehicles, and building infrastructure so that, so it'll sustain itself, basically the private sector will pick it up and make money doing it and make it viable, but that's a challenge, California's got a bigger problem than us, but we're working hard to try and skin that cat and really give them along because we do care, and our transportation sector is not doing well. Our grid sector, our governor and our legislature set a goal of 100% renewable electricity by 2045, and everybody stepped up to that and they're rolling, but our transportation sector is just creeping along and not making a lot of headway, so that's where we need to, we need to start filling in that transportation side. Well, and especially for an island, I mean, obviously you don't have a lot of distances to drive compared to, say, California or someone who might live in the Western US and want to drive to Vegas or to Vancouver or something, so it's a perfect place to experiment with those things, you don't need that many fueling stations, it's not a bad place to also experiment with battery cars, and I'm sure many of you viewers know, but some may not, that hydrogen and battery cars are the same thing. It's our electric vehicles. The only difference is how you supply the electricity, and I've had this challenge with Elon Musk who's a friend and I admire what he's done with Tesla, but I've said, why don't you and I have a race from Los Angeles up to Vancouver, where they've got a big hydrogen network, and we'll both have to stop about every 300 miles to refuel, but I'll refuel in about seven minutes and you'll refuel in seven hours, so I'm going to beat you to Vancouver by days. Just, and look, they're all good technologies. He doesn't have much sense of humor on that. He doesn't, he doesn't, but I think he will over time, he'll have a great car company, and he'll have done a lot for battery technology, but at the end of the day, hydrogen will be our electric vehicle future. Well, I'm a hydrogen fanatic myself, but you have to give Elon Musk credit for one thing. He made a sexy looking electric car. Absolutely. I mean, I look at some of the other car companies that go, come on, seriously, can't you do better than this? And Elon broke the code. Absolutely. He's a great guy, and obviously having done SpaceX and so many other great things in his career, you never want to bet against Elon. Well, we're going to take a quick break here and be back with Thierry in a few seconds, and we're going to talk more about transportation and a book that he wrote called Lives Per Gala. Aloha, I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii is my mainland every Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. I also have a blog of the same game at kauilukas.com, where you can see all of my past shows. Join me this Friday and every Friday at 3pm. Aloha. Aloha. My name is John Wahee, and I actually had a small part to do with what's happening today, served actually in public office. But if you don't already know that, here's a chance to learn more about what's happening in our state by joining me for a talk story with John Wahee every other Monday. Thank you, and I look forward to your seeing us in the future. You're welcome back to Stand the Energy Man and we're the talk of transportation here and a great book that that I got to read after going to Earth Day Dallas, which was a great experience for me. It's called Lives Per Gala by by our guest today, Terry Tim, Tim Tamanin, that's a tongue twister for me. And it was a great book because it's filled with some great data for one thing. A lot of times I get in discussions with folks and I get frustrated because I didn't have it done the research or haven't had the time to do some of the detailed research. He has some great data in there on how much fuel has been subsidized in our country. And when people start arguing me about whether hydrogen makes sense from an economic standpoint, I don't have much ammunition to fight back a lot of it's in that book. So great book, Terry. And tell us a little bit about what what got you writing this book and tell us if you can't capitalize the book. I mean, I could probably do it, but you wrote it. So you should do that. Well, thank you. I, you know, was just outraged by the fossil fuel industry and the way it was manipulating the public and and regulators and coincidentally, or ironically, after writing the book, I became one of those regulators. As I mentioned, the Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency and I even mentioned in the book, the updated version of the book, how the diesel industry, the trucking industry lied to us and tried to put into feet devices very similar to what Volkswagen has recently done. So Volkswagen was not the first. So it was really just this notion that we have got to evolve to something better that the oil industry has gotten us commercialized into great industry and great advances over time, but it's time to move on. And and we can't do that if we continue to subsidize an industry that's already incredibly wealthy, hardly needs our charity. And if we continue to fool ourselves about the impacts that the industry has, and if we continue to try to hide the viable alternatives. So lives per gallon, while that's kind of an ominous title, I like to say the book has a happy ending, because the last half is devoted to how we will transition to hydrogen vehicles. And all of the technical questions are answered in there. But what we find out in the book is that the oil and auto industries really collaborated along the same timelines in the 40s, 50s and 60s as tobacco did to lie to regulators to lie to the public about the impacts of their of their pollution and their vehicles and their products. And that that prevented us prevented Congress, of course, they sprinkled a lot of money around Congress, prevented us from actually understanding the truth and and changing it. So today, for example, we still subsidize the oil industry, thanks to a lot of well paid lobbyists, to the tune of about $7 a gallon. So whatever you pay at the pump tomorrow for gasoline, just imagine if you were paying $7 more per gallon on top of that. That's the true cost. And that's for things like defending oil around the globe for direct tax subsidies, things like the oil depletion allowance where, you know, when an oil company depletes its reserves, it gets to take a tax credit, it's a reserve that it didn't do anything to create the first place. It's not like a farmer who actually grew something. And and and the cost of health care, which is enormous to Medicare, Medicaid and in different states and so on. And so when you take all of those things that are actually measurable on someone's balance sheet, it adds up to about $7 a gallon. And that doesn't include, say, lost productivity of a worker that has asthma, which you could even add even more. Yeah, we refer to that in the military as a fully burdened cost. That's right. So, you know, and I make that point all the time, I go, you know, if you really took the cradle to grave cost of of technology like fossil fuel to gasoline, and took into account, like you say, the the health risks for people who are breathing particulate matter and carbon dioxide and things like that, you put all of it in there, the health costs and everything. It's like, we can't do this. I mean, it's just unsustainable. It's, we're not paying for the fully, the full price of this thing, or we are, but we're paying for it with our lives. And it's not the right way to do it. And what the best I could do with for a hydrogen station, which, which I thought was pretty novel was, when you look at my hydrogen station at Hickam, which is basically the same size as a gas station, I said, this is your oil field, your oil pipeline, your oil tanker, your oil refinery, and the truck that drove the gasoline to your station in the same footprint. Right. So if you just took all those transportation costs out of the price of gasoline, you can't tell me that hydrogen is not cheaper because all those transportation costs are part of gasoline. And just the cost of that itself is going to drive the cost way higher than hydrogen. Well, and that's the beauty of hydrogen is that we can make it from what we have locally. So wastewater, which, you know, comes through our wastewater systems, you can take that water, which normally gets treated and dumped in the ocean. You can actually break the hydrogen out of that. And, you know, most people don't understand that there's about the same amount of water in same amount of hydrogen in this, in this amount of water that would power your car if this was gasoline. So if you think about a gallon of gasoline, think of a gallon of water, there's enough hydrogen in that gallon of water. And we throw away more treated sewage water every day than we use in terms of gallons of gasoline or diesel. So the energy is there. We're throwing it away. Imagine if every cash strapped municipality were to start making hydrogen with that wastewater, and they could do it with renewable energy in places like Hawaii, you have plenty of wind, sun, so you could be breaking the hydrogen out of that water and the cities could sell it to the oil companies. We're not trying to put them out of business. We're just trying to civilize them. And they could then retail it to us. So everybody would win. The only people that would lose would be, you know, the Saudis and the other people around the world that, as you say, are selling us oil and having that enormous footprint of sending it around the globe. And what we're trying to do here is convince our public utility and the grid that, see, we're at about 18% saturation of intermittent renewals on our grid, which per capita is probably the largest in the US. So our utilities freaking out. They're like having grid stabilization issues. And we keep saying, but if you took an electrolyzer and you put it on your grid, and when you had too much solar or too much wind to make a hydrogen, you've got to load. And then you've also got stored energy in the hydrogen. You put a megawatt fuel cell out in the community and you can generate the power out there in the community without running it through lines from your power plant in, save all that loss. Exactly. And everything else. So why don't we do that? Because that same hydrogen that's out in the community could be used in our vehicles too. Right. So we're finally, we think we're, they're finally listening to energy storage and using hydrogen as energy storage as a viable means that will also help our transportation sector. And that seems to be the break in the code here. Well, and that is the future. I mean, look for years, we invested in massive transmission lines, massive coal fired and other kinds of power plants. And we now understand that that was good. But now there is more efficiency and a greater future in distributed energy like solar on a rooftop. And that countries like India, even Brazil, China, they're going to leap progress. Countries in India used to live in Nigeria. I talk about that in the book. These countries had cell phones long before we did because they didn't invest in the telephone lines, but they wanted phones. And so they're going to do the same thing and they're going to get there before we are. Yeah, I think you're right. Well, we've got a couple more minutes left and I want to leave the last couple minutes to you to just tell us whatever you'd like to talk about that you think Hawaii should be doing to make a difference. What can we do here to make a difference and make things better? Well, first of all, I think you're already doing it to some degree at the opening session of the Conservation Congress. We heard your governor talk about these great commitments, including the 100% renewables by 2045. And so we would like to do with the foundation and with a lot of the colleagues I work with, we would like to do anything we can to help Hawaii, maybe even accelerate that, but definitely achieve that because you don't wait until 2044 to start. So obviously there's a lot of good things we can be doing today and we'd love to be able to help with that. But I also think there's great opportunities and things like waste. You know, we throw so much away and especially in Hawaii with all of its green waste and food from the agriculture and from the restaurant sector. There's a tremendous amount of energy that can be taken out of that even to the degree we do still need plastics. You can recycle PET plastic from things like this bottle back into usable PET plastic. And it creates a lot of jobs. It ends the concept of waste and obviously has a much lower carbon footprint. So I'm excited about trying to get people to think more about waste as a resource and really just end the concept of waste. Well, one of the nice things about being part of the business economic development, which is where my office falls under in the state government, is that a lot of those answers, a lot of those things are technology. They're technology driven. Whether it's taking plastic and pelletizing it and making new products out of it or the energy side. So we're excited because the governor and the legislature are positioned and committed to doing what they're doing and helping us out. And we do look to the private sector and the non-for-profits to help get us kick-started on some of our projects. And so we we hope that, you know, that organizations like yours can help us do that. But I also know that you have to be careful. Even it seems like you have a lot of money because you've got a great, you know, contributor there. But coming from the military side, the military budget's huge too. But by the time you start actually putting it places, you find out it's it goes pretty quick. Well, it does only do so many things. That's true. But you have to get started and plant those seeds. And I think the public plays a great role in today with social media and great shows like yours that and people like Leo who can tweet about it and talk about it that other people learn about these things faster than we did in the past. And so then they make demands. They say, wait a minute, why can't I have an LED light bulb instead of a fuel guzzling and energy guzzling incandescent bulb and things like that? So we can accelerate this transition by communicating. Great. Well, we're going to keep on working here in Hawaii. We're going to keep on pressing. We've got some great products, you know, going on with Blue Planet. In fact, you got to go back and visit Paul. I will. He said you've got to come visit him. I will. Because he's they're working on some great stuff with the University of Phoenix or University of Arizona over in Phoenix and some great like liquid hydrogen carriers that can be put in the vehicles faster and maybe get internal combustion engines running on hydrogen at a much better clip than just the fuel cells. With the end state being fuel cells, but a bridge being a liquid carrier to an internal combustion engine with only water out the tailpipe, which is a good thing to do. So we're we're as a state pulling ahead. I'm trying to get the Air Force to broaden its aperture and take them and see a future flight line that runs off hydrogen and stores energy and doesn't have to ship 55 gallon drums of fuel around the world when they deploy someplace. So we're we're doing our part and we'll keep doing our part and we thank you for doing your part. And thank you for your passion. Seahunt was one of my favorites. I remember getting a life Preserver unit and putting it on backwards like it was my scuba tanks. We had twin scuba tanks, by the way. And the single. That's right. That's right. And I used to jump off the couch and into the into the pillows for my ocean. But look where we are now. Look where we are now. We're actually making some changes. Exactly. Thanks for being here, man. We appreciate about the great work. And I hope you can come back in the future and give us an update and maybe give us another book to read at. Absolutely. And as my former boss in California used to say, I'll be back. OK, well, thanks for being with us there yet. We'll be back next week. So join us here at Stanna Energy, man. Fantastic. Thanks, Terry. That was fun. Nicely done.