 Okay, we're back. We're live. This is Community Matters. I'm Jay Fidel. It's the one o'clock block here in Honolulu on ThinkTech. And we have an interesting, you know, discussion to follow because we're going to cover the subject of climate change and COVID, the interaction between climate change and COVID with our special journalist, our investigative journalist in San Francisco, Ken Howe, who is researching writing for a movie we're making called, well, not sure the exact title. Maybe you remember, Ken. Climate change and COVID. Hyaluronic crises. There you go. Now, this is made possible by Volo Foundation. Volo Foundation has been a ThinkTech underwriter for several years. They've been very generous and kind with us. And the remarkable, wonderful thing about Volo Foundation is we did not find them. They found us. I think they wrote to us out of the blue a few years ago and said they wanted to support us. And that was so nice. And so this year, they're going, you know, beyond the ordinary underwriter support, they did grant support for this movie, which we greatly, greatly appreciated. This is David Vogel and Tice Vogel are the principles of Volo Foundation in Florida. And we are so, so happy to be associated with them. So, Ken, you know, it was great to find you, you know, we found you through the networking of journalism here in Hawaii and they knew you at the university and in the journalism program at the communications department. We were looking for somebody who could help us, you know, open the box on this really interesting subject. We thought of it last summer and we was enticing, seductive even, to look at the interactions between the two. Both, you know, existential threats, both beyond, you know, our understanding, both very troublesome to our society and our economy. And that's why we wanted to see if there was a feedback between the two and lo and behold, we found there is and probably will be a continuing feedback between the two. So can you talk about your journalistic experience and your career little and tell us why this interested you? Well, my journalism career has mostly been not entirely, largely it was in finance. Started out in San Francisco and then after many years there covering finance and energy to some extent. And then I did some time at the investigative team where it was social policy issues and crime. And then I became business editor. But what really fascinated me fascinated me was, was China. I had a short trip to China, kind of a study session. And it convinced me I wanted to go there because I just thought that China story was the best I'd seen. So I spent 10 years over there. And then when I came back, and most of my most of the work there was editing rather than writing. It was taking journalists whose first language was Mandarin or Cantonese and working for the South China Morning Post. And then for the Wall Street Journal. So I had a lot of varied experience. And then when I came back and I taught a journalism class at UH via Zoom, and through them, you guys called. And I remember when we, when you first broached the topic, I, you know, the idea was, what's the relationship between climate change and the coronavirus? And I thought, I just drew a complete blank. And, and if you remember, I said, before we start, one should give me two weeks to look and see if there is a relationship. I do remember that conversation, yes. And, and so, but, but remarkably, and this, what I found most remarkable when I started just Googling, you know, coronavirus and climate change, I got a lot of hits. And normally, when you're, when you're new to a subject area, and this was not entirely new, and I'll tell you that in a minute, but it was fairly new to me. The first thing you see are a lot of other, you know, news reports, you know, the New York Times did this or Atlantic did that or the medium or somebody, somebody's already there before you. But I didn't see that. I didn't see anything. I'm not to say that nobody has written about it, but I haven't stumbled across it. What I saw were scientific journals and abstracts, where people were talking about this, and also the, oh, I forgot the Harvard Chan School of Medicine, I think it's called. I think it's the Harvard Chan Climate Science Institute. I should know that by heart, but I'm afraid I don't. And people were talking about this. So that I was, I was very surprised. Now, I did have a little bit of background. My nephew is a professor at Reed, and his specialty is he's a history professor, but his specialty is the history of the environmental movement. And then my niece's husband is a essential climate scientist at the University of Washington. And so I immediately called those two and said, what's going on here? And I said, oh, Ken, this is a huge topic. That made me feel there's nothing worse than trying to make a story where one doesn't exist. But this one I, you know, first looked at it. This is a pretty fertile field. Well, then so you were satisfied after your initial research, there was a story here. I remember I was gratified because I wanted you to find that I wanted to get on firm ground and there was firm ground. And then we went about the idea of structuring a, you know, a documentary, an hour long documentary on the subject, which we will distribute probably later this year with with your findings and some, you know, narration by you and some interviews you have taken and some, you know, scientific facts that you have confirmed. I'm so happy we have a journalist doing that because that, you know, that means that you have a certain level of credibility that we're not just puffing in the wind. This is, this has been vetted. And that's what you've been doing. You've been betting it, researching it, going that step, talking to the scientists involved, interviewing them on video and so forth, really all around the country. It's a fantastic project. So can you talk about the steps you've taken to, you know, get into it? Yeah, well, when we first thought about the relationship, I'm, I like to be fairly logical, even though I'm kind of an intuitive reporter, you have to harness that. So I thought, well, let's just, is there, is there an effect of climate change on either this particular virus or diseases like this? Well, is there a direct link we can make between climate change and disease and probably COVID-19? And then flip it around and say, is there a relationship between COVID-19 and climate change? Does one bear upon the other? And then thirdly, because things are never neat, you know, how are these things wrapped up together? And so that's the oddly enough, the way I actually started was, is there any effect that COVID-19 is having on climate change? And, and I did a dot, dot, dot, or the fight, you know, to reverse climate change or hold climate change or study climate change. And there I hit something right away is, is that I found out that as soon as, you know, a year ago, now my niece's husband was going up to the Arctic for what they call a cruise. It's not a pleasure cruise. It was a scientific expedition that they were going on to study wave heights and temperature in the Arctic, because their theory is, you know, as ice melts, winds pick up and there's a farther, what they call a reach for the wind, causes bigger waves, slams into the ice, melts more ice. Well, anyway, they were about to go on their expedition, they were shut down, was shut down because of, you know, quarantining. So they couldn't, initially they couldn't go. And they finally got clearance to go because the National Science Foundation said, no, no, no, we really got to do this. But it meant that, I guess, a three week cruise turned into a 58 day cruise, because they had to quarantine everyone had to quarantine, both coming and going. They had to limit the number of scientists. So it ran up a bunch of money and also killed off other projects they were going to do, they were going to study this year, hurricanes in the Caribbean. So it delayed a lot of things and limited what they could do. So that was just one effect. And then you read about, remember, I'm on COVID, how does that affect climate change? Well, thank you. Look at what's happened to mass transit. Mass transit is getting killed because of this. And as my, you know, this professor was saying, yeah, we've seen a reduction in say CO2 a little bit, but it's all temporary. And what's really happening is, you're getting this shift in the use of energy. So instead of going to fairly efficient office buildings during the day and using heat and light and air con, we're all staying home and are very inefficient and separate houses. So that's not good for the environment. And while we stay at home, mass transit is getting killed because they're not getting any fares. And some of them are going to go under. And mass transit was one of our ways of, you know, reducing greenhouse gases. So there was another one. So, and then just the other day, I was talking to someone from Harvard, and he was saying, he thought the biggest effect climate COVID-19 had on climate change. And he was really worried about it. He said, there always seems to be something that steps ahead of our work on climate change, because everyone thinks of it as a very long term issue. And so if an emergency comes up, something immediately like a disease, we say, okay, we'll take care of climate change after we solve COVID-19. We'll take care of climate change after we fix the damage from the hurricane. We'll fix it after there's always going to be a seemingly more immediate threat that will push off into the distance our efforts to fight climate change. So that was just on that, you know, what I thought was going to be the harder side, which was seriously, you know, COVID-19 is affecting climate change. I don't get that. So Well, you know, there is the effect that if you if you cut back on economic activity, there's that that sort of suggests that the less carbon, you know, emitted into the atmosphere, you get pro and con there, you get two things happening at the same time. And what you don't know is how do they net out in terms of the effect? Exactly. Well, yeah, I don't think they know exactly, but they they pretty much show that the warming hasn't slowed. Yeah, there's less, there's less and fewer emissions. But there's not and there's not an appreciable decline in CO2 levels. There's a very appreciable climate pollution. But the world's a big place, you know, and we've been at this for a long since 1850, pumping out, you know, carbon dioxide. But the other side, of course, was just as fascinating was how does climate change affect COVID-19 or other diseases? And one of the most obvious ways is both the warming of the earth and the warming of the oceans. And you see the warming of the earth, even by not a lot, kind of all these disease vectors, like mosquitoes and ticks and bats and all sorts of other animals, they move away from the equator, because more and more of the earth becomes habitable for them. So they move north and south of the equator, and they start moving into areas they hadn't been in before mosquitoes particularly. And that's just say, if you're talking about earth or land temperatures, if you but then you look at what's happening in the oceans, those the warming of waters has brought this cholera virus virus to and the bacteria associated with it into climate that hadn't been before in Northern Europe, because it sort of rise on these little things called copepods, which are tiny little, not microscopic organisms, but plankton like at zooplankton. And it brings the cholera around. And so you have it where you didn't have it before. So just the warming both the ocean and water spreads disease. And that's one. And then if you expand your thought and you say, Okay, things that we do cause climate change. And if you expand your thought to that, then you can look at things like deforestation. Like, what does deforestation have to do? Well, that's like a direct hit. Because if you just take SARS, and the SARS virus, which is a coronavirus, they've traced it to bats. And they've traced all sorts of nasty things to bats, you know, it's the Nipah virus, Ebola, rabies, SARS. And what's happened is because people have, particularly in areas like in Indonesia, even in Africa, they've deforested so much of the land to plant palm trees, you know, they give off the that has a fruit that you get palm oil from. Well, bats love that stuff. So whereas bats used to be scattered in their natural environment, now they're focused on these palm oil plantations, where you've got workers, and maybe and they come in contact with other animals. And that's a huge spreader of disease. As is for the same reasons, factory farming, the more we move out into the wild and come into contact with these disease vectors, and the more that the wild comes into contact with us, you know, because we've destroyed their habitat, the more you're going to get these interactions. And you can't just say, well, let's just eliminate bats, because bats do all these things. They rid us of a lot of insects, including mosquitoes, and also they, they pollinate so much of our plants, so many of our plants. See, you can't solve it that way, you just have to sort of stop interfering with Mother Nature so much. Stop destroying it. It sounds like the inquiry reaches to the planet in general, you know, weather and the physics of Earth, of Mother Earth, in terms of climate change, but then it also reaches into microbiology, I mean, viral biology, which is really tiny. So it's a very big and very little. And it's all part of, you know, a global ecosystem. And I'm not sure we've ever been forced to look at this in the same way before, to have these two, you know, existential threats working at both ends, and requiring us to look and see, you know, how the planet, how the ecosystem, how our world in every way and every size is changing. And those changes, you know, the transitions, if you will, that's the message I get from hearing you describe this. It's transitions, any kind of transition, manmade or secondary to manmade has an effect on both the larger and the smaller. And we have to follow that. We haven't done it. We have to follow all the sciences. It's really multidisciplinary, isn't it? It's everything at the university research level, isn't it? Yeah. And there's one, you know, you can look at this as a catastrophe. And it is where you see these blending of the problems of climate change and the problems of the emergencies, the emergence of disease. The brighter way of looking at it in reverse is you can do a lot towards solving both with the same actions. The actions are not easy. You know, just don't eat so much meat. We use I haven't exactly signed on to that one yet. But a lot of this factory farming is really devastating to the environment. And also, again, brings brings closer and to more more deadly disease. Like, for instance, a really good example, I've got a half a second is like, say you're doing chicken farming. If a disease, say a virus goes in to, you know, a normal area where, you know, just a small chicken coop. Evolution does not favor a deadly disease. Because if the virus kills off the couple of chickens in the arm, the virus goes away, it dies, it doesn't have a host. But when you have something like, say a mass, you know, chicken farm where there are thousands and thousands of chicken or turkey or whatever. That's not true. It favors. It doesn't. The deadly disease is not, what can we say disfavored? Because, okay, it kills them off. But you know, there's plenty of chickens where they came from. So there's no break. And there's no there's nothing to stop that disease because it's got such a big environment to to grow. You know, this is strangely reminiscent of this, this whole process with the variants, the more COVID you have out there in the community, and you know, in, in the population, so to speak, the more variants you're going to have. So that's one good reason to try to dampen the you know, the spread of the original COVID. If you don't do that, then you have multiple COVIDs. It's the same thing here. If you don't control it, if it goes wide, gonna have multiple problems. So we really have to pay attention to it. You know, one of the most interesting parts of the research I had done was since I'm talking to most of these folks are academics or scientists. I guess everybody is, you know, from oceanographers to pediatricians to research scientists. He quickly got down to the issue of kind of, I don't know whether you want to call it the polarization of science or the politicization of science where what has become of us where we don't trust science. And it was the guy I was talking to yesterday, Dr. Aaron Bernstein was saying, he said, we've always been a kind of naive and success, susceptible, susceptible species. We're kind of, and we don't we don't take in information that conflicts with what we really want to believe. And so that led to this other, you know, this professor saying, you know, there's a, that's true. And in America, particularly with there's been this anti intellectual streak in America from the beginning, that was not helped by an actual, actually, he sort of partly blamed some of the oil companies for denying, you know, climate change for years. But also, he said, science hasn't always, you know, fessed up to their mistakes, like philotomide babies and, and other things that didn't quite work out or, you know, the Tuskegee experiments. So there's a mistrust of science. And this has been exacerbated, you know, by the previous administration, and indeed has been politicized. So then the question is, what are you going to do about it? And some people were arguing for, you know, scientists got to get out from just the data and talk about what they see. And, you know, not everybody's comfortable with this. And the professor I was talking to said, all science is political. I mean, that was his point. And you sort of see his point. But then this other scientist I was talking to in Hawaii, she was saying, she's kind of uncomfortable with, you know, speaking out on political issues, or even speaking out too strongly on you got to do this or that over climate change. But she says, preventing ourselves from killing each other is not political. That's just science. To shade on that one. Yep. Yep. Well, aside from doing the reading of scientific journals, you know, where the, you know, raw material, if you will, of science is found. And of course, you can measure the quality of the science by the journal. You've talked to a lot of scientists, you've talked to them on the phone or in person, you've interviewed them on video. And so you're sort of shaping a multidisciplinary analysis of all of this. And I find that a very interesting experience. How has it been for you? I mean, how has your view of the world changed in the course of this project? Well, it makes you examine your own life. Because you can't help it. I wasn't by any means an expert in this subject. But the two things, I think you were getting at it with when you were talking about transitions. And I would what struck me is, you know, just the obvious, the interrelationship among things. Because I saw these as two separate issues. You got a, you got a disease out there. What on earth does that have to do with warming oceans? But you talk to these people who have been the scientists who had been working on cholera and warming oceans, she's been doing this work for 30 years. She's known this and published. And she's actually fairly famous in her field about how climate change affects the spread of disease. So as this has been out there. And that that surprised me, the relationships between these things and the discoveries that these people had made and frankly, their dedication to what they do. You know, when I think of this, I think of the horizon of the project. Where what time frame are we looking at? And you think of climate change, you know, we have known about climate change. I remember the moment it entered my consciousness, which was back in the 70s of the 80s. And, you know, I've become increasingly concerned, but I don't think the world has. It's been concerned that we've had a problem taking action and fully understanding its implications on the planet and our lives and the lives of our progeny. So climate change is going to be with us, because we're not going to solve it right away. And we're going to have to, we're going to have to step up our action points a lot. You know, it was good that Biden went back, you know, to the Paris Accord and all that, but we're going to have to do a lot in terms of action. And here in Hawaii, we have to do a lot in terms of action, dealing with sea level rise and all that. So it's a long haul on that one. And I don't know if people realize that we live in a world of viruses. The COVID is not the only virus. You know, SARS certainly was not the only virus. It was a virus that we became aware of because it was so threatening. But and now you find this mutation effect, you know, that's pretty scary. And it's going to go on. It's going to go on into the future. We live in a sea of viruses. I'm sure you, you know, you understand this way better than me. And so the lessons we learn in your analysis now, the lessons we cover in this movie, not only relate to the interaction between climate change and COVID right now, it's, it's climate change in the long term, and it's viruses that will, that will last forever in their relationship with, with the species. So this has a lone horizon, don't you think? It does. And there are so many, they're different. They're sort of polar opposite ways of dealing with it. One of them is one of the scientists that I've been looking at. He was one of the first, I think he might have been the person who discovered that SARS got back to bats in a cave in Yunnan province, traced it all the way back. So what he's doing in the future is he's setting up a program where they basically test and monitor bats in, in certain areas where they know that there are viral outbreaks, because bats, I can't remember what the number is, but they have a huge number of really nasty viruses. And there are all sorts of theories about why bats, which I can get into. But so he's studying the diseases that the bats in situ, you know, have so that they can come up with vaccines or ways to prevent them should they get out. So that's, that's on the sort of like the front end. And on the other side, you've got people like your Professor Mora at the University of Hawaii. You know, he's written dozens of papers on these issues. But what he's doing is he's planting trees. He's planting 1000 he wants to plant a million trees before he dies. Fortunately, he's a fairly young guy. But as his way of how do you sort of reverse the climate change and trees, because deforestation is one of the main ways that we have warmed the planet, or at least halted the kind of the natural cooling system and natural distribution of CO2 and oxygen. That's what he's going to do is make it in making this analysis and making the film seems to me that you know, you you reach a conclusion, ultimately, on what we need to do. And I'm sure that, you know, that that'll be a tremendous contribution to the community conversation on both of the elements of this analysis. But one thing that strikes me is, as we have heard from many scientists, and many other people who analyze our world, is that we have to change things. We have to roll up our sleeves. We have to change our quality of life, our quality of living together, quality of our economy, really everything, or else. You have a you have a handle on where the conclusion goes just yet. I was afraid you're going to ask me that question. Well, I was thinking about ending it with, with what I think the natural way to end it is like, what are you going to do? Because I mean, one of the one of the people I interviewed came a vegetarian, you know, and the other person is planting trees. But I think the bigger message is, if you can get people to, to believe that there is, there is an immediacy to the problem of climate change. There's any number of ways you can participate in solving it. But it's the immediacy factor that has been missing is that people don't see it as something they got to take care of right away. And there's this disconnect between individual responsibility and community responsibility. And unfortunately, it's not an easy one. Because as one of the scientists was saying, you know, what buying a Prius isn't going to make a big dent in climate change. It's like, no, your one vote isn't going to change the world. But everybody's one vote will change the world. And everyone's efforts to stop deforestation, stop waste, stop burning fossil fuels. Individually, no, collectively. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big test going forward. Can we get together collectively and do this? And it's more than just asking for voluntary, voluntary compliance. We have to find governmental structures that can require people, even those who don't believe what we're talking about. Anyway, Ken, it's wonderful to work with you. It's wonderful to work with you. Great project, great project. We really appreciate your time and seal and your passion. I really enjoy watching you work and participating with you. And of course, I want to add that I really appreciate our funders here, Volo Foundation, who care, also care passionately about both climate change and COVID, and they do research on both of those things. So I'm looking forward to every step of the way, Ken. I'm looking forward to, you know, getting this film out to door to the point where we do have an effect on the public conversation, and maybe get people to realize and take action more than they have before. Fosing words, what are your remarks that you'd like to leave with people today? I guess I'd like to have, I'd like to go back to the immediacy issue. I'd like to, like for everyone to think about, you know, how can they be a foot soldier? There are just so many different ways to attack both of these problems. But they do require kind of the immediate action and dedication. And the question is how do you get there? Yeah. And that means everybody, every single one of us. Thank you, Ken, our investigative journalist, extraordinaire. I look forward to talking with you, working with you on this in the future. Thanks so much. You're welcome.