Is Climate Change Fixable? A Conversation With California’s EPA Secretary with Jared Blumenfeld

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

So on the one hand, we've got planetary decline and the other we have incredible innovation and leadership and different thinking and many different ideas about where we can go. And we kind of have to grieve for what we've lost, right? If we're not grieving for the species that we're losing, if we're not grieving for the impacts we're having on the planet, I don't think we can move forward. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. That's Pharmacy with an F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about the world we live in, if you care about the environment, if you care about how to fix the problems that are really facing our total global environment, including America. And this conversation is for you because it's with an incredible man, Jared Blumenfeld, who's California's Secretary for Environmental Protection, basically the EPA for California. He was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom. And he has been one of America's most innovative environmental leaders. He has 25 years of experience of environmental policy and management, although he looks about 25, so I'm not sure how that works. He's really worked at the local, national, international levels. He's a bit of an anomaly because he's a Brit who is in American politics, which I find fascinating. He's from 2009 to 2016, he worked under President Obama as the regional administrator for the U.S. EPA for the Pacific Southwest. And he was also working from 2001 to 2009 as the director of San Francisco's Department of Environment, we work with Mayor Newsom, who's now the governor, to make San Francisco the most sustainable city in the nation. He's also led international campaigns for NGOs, including the International Fund for Animal Welfare and National Resource Defense Council. He's a graduate of Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, has law degrees, both from the University of London, UC Berkeley, and he has been advising on clean tech strategies and strategic planning. And one of the favorite facts about him that I love is that hike the Pacific Crest Trail. For those of you who don't know it, it's a 2650 mile trail that goes from Mexico to Canada, which is an amazing feat. And I admire you just for that alone. And I'm jealous, actually. So the other thing he does, which everybody should check out, is he is the host of an award-winning podcast on environmental topics called Podship Earth. And I just got to be on that. So check that podcast out. So welcome, Jared. It's great to have you.

Thank you, Mark. It's great to be here.

All right. So first of all, I just have to ask you how you got into being so focused on the environment. You grew up in the UK, obviously. You end up in America, but you spent two decades fighting for environmental protection, preservation, and really making a difference, which we all hope we can do in our lives, but you made a difference for communities and ecosystems. So how did you get interested in the environment? Like, what was it for you that went, oh, mate, maybe I should do this?

So I grew up in a small village in England called Granchester to two American parents who left the US kind of out of frustration with the Nixon administration. So depending what happens, there may be a few more like them, more like me maybe, people who moved to New Zealand and have Kiwi children. So it was a small village. My only escape from the village was bicycle. And so I would bicycle with my friends into the fields. And that sense of escape and freedom in nature is something that's carried with me to this day. I only feel like I can truly be myself at a certain level when I'm in nature. And so then I went to law school. I was really focused on human rights and With the time that I was at Berkeley, it was this big UN summit in Rio de Janeiro called the Earth Summit, the biggest gathering of heads of state in human history at the time. And it was the beginning of everything from climate to biodiversity. And I was writing this report on human rights, and we were asked by the UN, could we do a study of the relationship between human rights and the environment, namely if you're an indigenous community and, you know, how are your rights to life, to prosperity affected by environmental contamination? So it was the first time that anyone had kind of looked at this intersection between human rights and the environment. And after that, that kind of has really been a focus of mine, which is We often have thought about the environment as somewhere else, Mark. Like, we're going to go and protect nature somewhere else. But what we really realize is our environment is all around us. As you've so eloquently described, it's the food that we eat, but it's the water that we drink, the air that we breathe. That is our environment. So that urban interface has been really the focus of what I've what I've done.

But it's striking that in this time we have in just a few generations become so divorced from nature and from wildness and wilderness. And David Attenborough's new special on Netflix about the Earth describing his lifetime of 93 years and the changes that have happened in the natural world, the disappearance of biodiversity, the disappearance of wildness, the sort of growth of our population, the increases in environmental damage and climate change, it's sort of staggering. And I think we are so disconnected from wildness. And I think I have the same connection as you do. And I clearly, it wasn't just riding your bicycle, you walked 2,000 miles on a trail by yourself in the wilderness. and I used to backpack and hike for days and days in the wilderness. And it was really the thing that connected me to nature. And we're so divorced from nature. We live in a little bubble of technology and comfort and lack of resilience in the face of our environment. And it's really prevented us from really having a real relationship to sacred wild places. And that has really, I think, hurt hurts us and has hurt us in a way that has allowed us to desecrate this place that we live in and a way that it's to our own detriment. Right? So can you talk a little bit about the ways in which our neglect of the environment, our pollution of the environment, our over reliance on, you know, fossil fuels, our destructive agriculture, which is driving climate change, how big are those problems? Can you sort of lay out the issues for us in a way that people can understand about what we're facing today in 2020.

Well, before we get to that doom and gloom, I want to answer an earlier question that you asked, which is about why we're divorced from nature. Yeah. Because I think this is kind of the single biggest feature psychologically that allows us to basically commit planetary suicide. So, you know, we rely on all these systems to be alive. So how could we be destroying the very things that we need to keep us life. So for me, it started like, you know, and, and if you or your readers have read Sapiens, you know, when you think about why we evolved faster and different than others in the animal kingdom, we, we've gotten to a point that our communication, our collective ability to work together and our consciousness has led us to this precipice, which I'll, I'll describe in a minute, but. If you think back to when we were hunter-gatherer cave dwellers, there were some real threats, right? And those real threats have created, as you know, a sense of flight or fight that's so integral to how we think. And if you look back to Genesis, the beginnings of our consciousness and religion is really about dominion over nature.

Well, that translation is not, I think, a good one, right?

It's not a good one.

It's stewardship. It's really meant to be around stewardship as opposed to domination.

Right.

But unfortunately, that's our interpretation now. But unfortunately, for 2,000 years, it's been interpreted as dominion. and that dominion included over other animals, over children, over women. I mean, it was a very, very, very wrongheaded way of looking at our relationship to the world. But it basically created a line mark between us and nature. So most people, I think, don't view ourselves as animals. We're not part of the animal kingdom. We are distinct. And there's this whole theory myth of human superiority that we are somehow so much better than the rest of the world that we it is here to serve us. We're not connected in an integrated fashion to the world around us. We are separate and it's here to serve us. So the sense of stewardship that I would completely concur with you is the way that we need to think about our relationship with nature isn't how we actually view it. And so I think it actually pervades into issues like evolution. We can't believe in evolution because that links us back to our lineage of animals. And how could we possibly be connected to anything that's related to an animal? We're so much better than that. We're humans. And anything that reminds us of our humanity, especially in our society, like mortality, we don't talk about. you know, it's almost taboo to think about the end of life or even, you know, lots of different facets of anything that connects us to feeling like an animal, I think we're afraid of and we push away. And so people have a fear of water, people have a fear of night and darkness, people have a fear of going into wilderness. And that's really pushed. Like people want, you know, horror movies are all around the terrible things that are gonna happen in all these different situations. So that's where we're at. And in this march towards progress, I think we saw this infinite space of our planet. We didn't realize until 1969 how small we are, what a small dot in the universe we are. and that we thought of resources as inexhaustible. Like, doesn't matter, you know, the oceans. We could never pollute the oceans tomorrow because they're just so big. We could never pollute the sky because it's everywhere. And I think this convergence that we now have of understanding the planetary health at a very granular level is too much for most people. And it actually is too much for me. I mean, it's almost. you know, there's so many inputs telling us how much is going wrong that people close down. There's only so much bad news that people can take before they freeze up and, and calcify. And I think we're there. I really do. I think people don't want to hear the next bad thing about climate change or, you know, soil health or species decline or, and I actually, I ever heard someone talking about the David Attenborough movie and saying, Jesus, it was just such a downer. And so some of us are able to process it and understand a positive vision of where we want to go. But I think for many people it's just like, good God, what does that mean? We've diminished the planet. We've diminished these resources. We have kids. what does it mean and what's my accountability and responsibility for that? And it's tough. I think psychologically, my response to people when they ask me is, you know, mental health is being able to hold opposites in balance. So on the one hand, we've got planetary decline and the other we have incredible innovation and leadership and different thinking and many different ideas about where we can go and we kind of have to grieve for what we've lost, right? If we're not grieving for the species that we're losing, if we're not grieving for the impacts we're having on the planet, I don't think we can move forward because we are losing a lot. But we also have to move forward. And many conversations that I have with people, they're just feeling like, How can we move forward? Why are we even, why, you know, people are depressed. I'm depressed often, like, even just, you know, this will come out later, but in the lead up to the election, it's like there's a lot of anxiety. And I think the issues that you and I focus on, that you focus on in food fix that I deal with every day, the wildfires, COVID, the issues of the economy, greenhouse gas reductions, all these issues, let alone the 80,000 chemicals that are not known, that are used in commerce every day, the issues of recycling markets collapsing. I could go on and on, but I'd rather think about kind of how we get out of where we are right now.

Yeah, I think that's fair. I think we can be in the doom and gloom of it all, and I certainly flooded my neurons with a lot of that, and as a way of helping myself wake up to the urgency of this existential threat to humanity. And I say humanity because I remember sitting in a talk by a leader in the American Indian Movement in 1978, John Trudell. And we were in this sort of young, idealistic crew and we were like, oh, the earth, we're destroying the earth, we're destroying the earth. so bad, terrible. And he stopped us. And this was, you know, this was back when it wasn't even that bad in the 70s. And he said, the earth will be fine. It's us we have to worry about, that we are facing the sixth extinction of our human species. And it was so beautiful in the David Attenborough movie was he started the movie in Chernobyl, showing the massive destruction that happened as a result of human activity. And at the end of the movie, he was still in Chernobyl, but he showed how nature was reclaiming Chernobyl, and it was now full of wild animals and trees and nature. And I think, you know, the Earth will reclaim itself. It will clean itself. It's a self-repairing organism, but we might not survive. And I think that's really what we're facing. And I think we can't keep, you know, crapping in our own house or peeing in our own bed. You know, we have to actually. come to grips with what's going on. And the good news is that you have been acting for decades to make inroads to make the real changes that need to happen. So from your perspective, working in the federal government and state government, being immersed in these issues for years, what are the points of light that we can look to to say, if we can act in these ways, if we can change the trajectory, what actually are we already doing? that is starting to change the trajectory. So maybe you could, instead of the doom and gloom picture, which might depress people and have them turn off the podcast, talk about the points of light and hope that you're seeing in your job every day in the EPA, both federally and state.

Well, a great example of kind of what we've done is around clean air. And this year actually is the 50th anniversary of the Clean Air Act, which is kind of amazing, this federal piece of legislation, but it has impacts in innovation and has impacts in actual measurable reduction. So our air is in places like LA about 80% cleaner than it was 50 years ago, even though we have significantly more vehicles on the road. We've used the legal system to innovate. So innovation has come from catalytic converters that we have on internal combustion engines all the way through Right now, we're in a place that the state of California just announced that by 2035, all new vehicles have to be electric vehicles. And that has led, not, we're in some ways following, but in some ways leading, we need to send market signals. So I think 50 years ago, there was a clear sense that government was a regulator and the private sector would do whatever government said. We're now at a place Where in many cases, the private sector has the power to lead and also the power to prevent leadership. And so engaging that innovation, there's now just, for an example, 34 electric vehicle manufacturers in California, 60 suppliers of electric vehicle parts in California. It's the number one export from the state of California. And more than 50% of all the electric vehicles sold in the United States are sold right here in California. And those kind of revolutions take a combination of innovators like Elon Musk, but regulators that really understand here in California. We have a regulator, Mary Nichols, who's just retiring after 40 years of pushing for this. And consumers and voters that are educated and and energy companies that are saying, you know what? Our future isn't in oil and gas, it's in providing clean renewable energy generation. So California's energy mix, we have a goal that 100% of our energy will be clean by 2045. We have a goal that will be as a state carbon neutral, so zero net carbon emitted from the state. We have literally, even now, we have the Chinese government, the Indian government doing Zoom calls with us, understanding how do you make those mechanics work? How do you do enforcement actions? Like, unfortunately, it wasn't the Europeans that caught VW in their cheating scandal around emissions. It was California. So we have, it's investing in institutions and people and a mission that allows us to move forward on these issues with progressive legislation. We often get cynical and think it doesn't matter who's in power. It doesn't matter if, in the case of the environment, there really has never been a president as bad as Donald Trump. We've sued him, I think we're on our 58th lawsuit. We haven't lost one. Yeah. And so legal protections are important, the political will to get stuff done, market signals that allow us in a system that we exist in to incentivize good behavior and punish the polluters. When I talk to businesses, Mark, the number one critique is that there's too many of their competitors that aren't adhering to the letter of the law, that they're polluting and like we as a good company are paying more money because we want to do the right thing. So go after the bad company. So it's, you know, I feel like people are waking up to a place of understanding that they can have an individual role, but we're never going to solve this. I think back in the 70s, there was this sense of individual action alone can make a difference. It is. indispensable. We need everyone to focus on voting, to focus on what they can do when they're consumers. But we also need big government action because these problems are huge. And as you said, the word existential, which came from Kierkegaard and Sartre and others, was really about the expression of free will. How do we exercise a sense of free will and the existential threat to us as a species is real.

Yeah.

And I don't want to say, I do sometimes get worried that people feel like there'll be no people left. You know, it probably will just be. And this is kind of the sad part. We need to think about Equity in this regard. You know, I think the one percent are going to be fine. They're going to move from their Waterfront houses to the Rockies. They're gonna. Yeah. Get on their boats and planes and. But it's low-income communities of color that are already feeling the biggest impacts. And so we don't all feel climate change the same way. We don't all feel the effects of air pollution the same way. And we need to double down, because any solution that we have that doesn't have equity as its core will fail.

Well, I mean, you're right, Jared. And I think that one of the glaring examples of this is the problem of climate refugees, that the developed world is producing most of the greenhouse gases. I think we're 5% of the population in America, we produce 25% of the greenhouse gases. And the populations that are being most affected are the low and middle income countries, even though they're not the ones producing the problem, they're the ones at the short end of the stick with increasing famine and droughts. and food insecurity that are driving climate refugees, which the UN estimates maybe 200 million people. Look at the instability just in Syria, which was a combination of climate and food and also war. One million Syrian refugees destabilized Europe. Imagine 200 million trying to find a place to go. We can't live in our little bubble anymore. We have to understand we're part of a global ecosystem of humanity and that the environment and climate don't have national borders on them. But there are little pockets of hope. I remember speaking to a key leader in Abu Dhabi who said that they aren't heavily investing in solar. I'm like, why are you investing in solar? You've got more oil than anybody needs for hundreds of years. He said, well, because it's cheaper for them to desalinate their water using solar than it is using oil that they have. In Morocco, they used to have to import all their oil. Now, soon they'll be exporting their solar energy from their power grids to Europe as net energy exporters. In Holland, which is one of the smallest countries, not only does it feed its own population, but it's one of the largest exporters. I think it's the second largest exporter of food grown in greenhouses and using technology and innovation. And I think There's so much hope when you look at the solutions out there. There's not a lack of knowledge about what to do and how to do it, but there is a challenge dealing with the business of large corporations that profit from doing the wrong thing without being held accountable to the real costs of their activities. And I think that's what you've done in terms of the work that you've done. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now there are a few things I.

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Let's just talk about climate for a minute, 'cause I think it's becoming more and more of an issue. I think Joe Biden just announced a $2 trillion climate initiative that he talked about as being a source of jobs and economic revitalization. Do you sense what's happening globally in this country and in California as moving in the right direction? Are you hopeful? Do you feel like you're seeing signs of us dealing with this effectively?

Some days I'm hopeful. Just in our world, in my job particularly, we just had 4 million acres of California burned. we're in the middle of COVID and we have a $54 billion budget deficit. So some days I feel a little more positive than others. Ultimately, Mark, I think bold action is needed. Like the incremental working in the margins is not where we have to be. We have to be bold actions that result in meaningful reductions quickly.

So it's not just about people, you know, having electric cars and changing their light bulbs and recycling. You're talking about much bigger actions that are needed.

Yeah, we have to transform our economy and decarbonize it. So decarbonizing, if you imagine carbon in every aspect from fertilizers all the way through the energy we produce, the cars we use, the transportation, the entire system is built upon fossil fuels and we have to decarbonize. And the pace of that, if we're going to have a chance of living on a habitable planet, has to be between now and 2045. You saw China recently commit to 2060 carbon neutrality last week, South Korea and Japan both committed to 2050, the European Union, there's more and more commitment. So the commitments are hopeful. I think what California offers is a model of once you've committed, what do you do? And it really isn't going to be one thing. It isn't just going to be electric vehicles. It's going to be the entire way we think about the distribution of products in commerce. So the goods movement system is huge. And that's going to involve not just passenger vehicles, but trucks, all the way through ships and planes and locomotives. And then thinking about how we build our new homes. Should new homes have connection to natural gas? Should we be having homes use natural gas in 2045? Like how do we, if you work back from what we need in 2045, which is zero carbon emissions, we also then need to look at sequestering carbon because we're not going to get, we're going to try, but we'll unlike to get to zero carbon emissions in 2045. Healthy soils, you know, the more carbon you have in soil, the more water is retained in the soil. We basically have emitted so much carbon into the atmosphere and into the oceans, and ocean acidification is an issue that is often neglected. But where, you know, the calcium carbonate in the ocean is is getting removed through the carbon dioxide that's being absorbed into the oceans. So there isn't any room left for carbon anywhere other than the soil. The soil has an incredible potential to absorb. But when I think about hope, I think the large corporations, thanks to things like the UN sustainability goals and millennial goals, large corporations have stood up and made commitments to sustainability. They're now finding that they actually have to make good on those, that they're gonna be held accountable. So corporate behavior is changing. I think the debates that we saw, you know, last time between Hillary and Trump didn't even mention climate change. Now it became a big issue for Democratic voters. NPR poll recently showed climate is the number one issue for Democratic voters in this election. Incredible.

So- that's amazing.

The level of consciousness has increased as the impacts have increased. We used to think here in California that we'd be dealing with the impacts of things like drought and wildfire and sea level rise 40 years from now. That climate-related impacts were in the future and we could plan for them. Our agency alone spent two and a half billion dollars last year cleaning up from wildfires. Just to clean up. That isn't rebuilding the homes. That's just getting rid of the destroyed landscape and allowing homeowners to go back in. So the costs of not doing anything, Mark, are so huge, so huge right now, that I think everyone's realizing the cost of taking action is going to pale in comparison to not taking action. And so I am hopeful. I believe that we have momentum, we have to capture that momentum, And we also have to be really thoughtful about helping communities, whether it's the Appalachian coal miners or oil and gas workers in Texas or California. We need to have a plan for a just transition so that the industries that are most affected by us decarbonizing have a pathway so they see a job in the future. And those jobs definitely exist. In California, for instance, the ratio of clean energy to fossil fuel energy is about five to one. There's five times more people working in solar and wind and energy efficiency than there are in fossil fuels.

That's extraordinary. You said something that caught my attention, which was the need to decarbonize our economy, which means a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. and that's essential. It's difficult, but you also mentioned the soil. And I've heard a lot of different stats thrown around, even up to the fact that we could remove 120% of the current emissions if we scaled up regenerative agriculture and recarbonized the soil. And the striking thing to me that I learned, I didn't know, was that a third of all total greenhouse gas emissions that are in the atmosphere of the 1 trillion tons, a third of that has come from the destruction of our soil and the release of stored carbon in the microorganisms, literally the microbiome of the soil. And that is because of our industrial agricultural methods. So I guess what I'm asking you is how as the EPA Secretary of California, are you communicating with the Secretary of Agriculture to talk about how to use California, which is the nation's largest agricultural state, to be a model for the world to transform from a extractive, destructive agricultural system that adds carbon to the atmosphere to a carbon sink that literally can stop climate change.

Yeah, so I often like to think of the fact that the dirt under our feet can save the earth. It really can. And, you know, there's, I think, more than 200 different types of soil in California alone. so soil type, obviously, you know, and then the application. So there's rangeland where you have cattle, there's road crops, there's all kinds of different soils. So we spent a lot of time, and the Secretary of Agriculture, Karen Ross, has been a real leader in climate and agriculture and thinking about these solutions. But when you go to a farm, and there's a dairy farm in Visalia that I visited, fourth generation farmer Dino Giacomozi. And Dino, you know, is a libertarian. Very, you know, these aren't, you don't have to be a progressive Democrat, it's my point to believe in these practices. And he started with no-till agriculture. So your point is every time, every pass over the land where you're digging up that soil, and the way that we think about agriculture is, you know, he went, he said from 17 passes on his field for corn to one.

So basically disturbing the soil and you lose the carbon by tilling, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just imagine, yeah, you've got that piece of farm equipment and you're pulling behind it something that rips the soil up and turns it over. To your point, if we've got a third of the carbon from in our atmosphere from doing that, it releases it each time. So we want to keep the carbon in the soil and no-till practices are incredibly effective. And if you're a farmer, you just save the labor mark of paying someone to go over that same field 17 times. Now you're paying them once to do it once. So you reduce your labor costs. the gasoline or diesel that you're using, you've saved significant money. So a lot of these practices, farmers are starting to realize, wow, they actually save us money. And here in California, it isn't carbon that is attractive. First and foremost, it's the water benefit. So for each percentage of carbon that you add back into the soil, the water retention benefits are huge. And so I was just at It's.

Like 25,000 gallons per every percent of organic matter in the soil, which is.

A lot per acre.

Per acre, yeah.

And so I was just with the governor in Winters, California, with a farmer, McNamara and his walnut farm, because of increased, he said it went from, I think, 1% soil carbon to five.

Wow.

In 20 year period, he doesn't have to water his walnuts for a month and a half longer than the neighbor who has poor soil health. That amount of water is money. We're living in an era of really scarce water resources. So on every level, how do you do that? As you know, one of the ways, which is really interesting in California, is you take food scraps. So about 25% of all the freshwater in the United States is used annually, Mark, to produce food that we throw away.

Whoa.

Yeah.

So a quarter of all the water that we use, which is a scarce resource, is used to grow food that we throw in the garbage.

Correct. So yeah, upwards of 40% of the food that we buy and that produces methane, which is 71 times more potent a greenhouse gas when the food is rotting in the landfill than CO2. So if you took that and composted it and then apply it to land, that's actually how you create the sea state change in the soil for it to be able to absorb the carbon. So taking that urban food waste, composting it, putting it on the soil, is actually a recipe for planetary health.

It's unbelievable. And I think, you know, the, the, the Innovations around ways in which government can, can get behind Farmers to do this. And it's not a Republican, a Democrat, a libertarian issue. It's really about the economic viability of farming. It's about addressing the risk of food insecurity because of the way we're farming will prevent our ability to grow food. It will Really, when you look at it, it's just sort of like a no-brainer and just kind of a sort of a list for a couple of minutes for people to understand the potential of this. It's not just about soil carbon, which is important, but it's about the biodiversity of these lands that brings back pollinators and wild animals and increases biodiversity, which we need to thrive. It increases yields, it increases the nutrient density. As a doctor, what I care about is the food my patients are eating. and if you're eating broccoli today, it's probably 50% less nutritious than it was before. If you're growing food in a rising climate temperature situation, you're actually putting more carbon in the plant, which creates more starchy vegetables and more starch in the food, which makes people gain more weight. Doing regenerative agriculture will create resistance to climate shocks, to drought and floods and reduce the risk of wildfires. It'll actually create more jobs and farm workers will be healthier and happier. There'll be reduced reliance on agrochemicals, which will prevent the destruction of, you know, a lot of species through pesticides and agrochemicals and nitrogen fertilizers, which pollute our waterways and create climate change as well. It's 300 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And Farmers, you said, make more money. They make up to 20 times more money, and these rural communities will come back to life. So It seems like if you present this to a policymaker, they're like, this is a win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win. Why isn't there more effort driving this movement through policy across the country? Because it just seems so obvious to everybody who's looking at this.

There's a great book, Martin, that you should read. It's called Food Fix. And in that book, the guy's got the same name as you actually, in that book. I mean, the reason is that there's a lot of interests vested in the status quo of farming. Like farmers are actually innovators. Farmers, every small farmer that I've met, small scale farmer in California, they're eking out a living. They're worried about why they Kids don't want to become farmers. They're feeling overwhelmed. They're trying to just make a living, but they're adapters, right? They're feeling climate change right now. And they want the tools, they want the incentives. I mean, we're talking things like crop insurance. If you have crop insurance, you can only get it for conventional ag, you can't get it for regenerative. that's a problem. If you don't have the equipment to do no-till ag, then you're just going to use the old equipment that you have. So we need to help support farmers. This is really about not demonizing farmers. Farmers, I think of as conservationists. They're environmentalists. And often, I think there's been a temptation to make them seem like the bad guy. Farmers want to do the right thing.

They're not.

We want to give them the tools to do the right thing and that comes in the farm bill. But how you make sure you get the right incentives in a massive piece of pork like the farm bill is tough. But some of them are in there and there's even federal agencies, even during this terrible four-year winter that has been the Trump administration, the Department of Agriculture has actually been the ones still talking about climate change, still talking about soil health, even in this administration. So even in these times, I think farmers are realizing climate change is real, they want to be part of the solution. And one thing that I know you're very bullish on that also helps with soil health is your microbiome. Like if we are sterilizing the soil, that same piece of broccoli that you eat is going to be sterile as well. And so understanding this whole relationship with the soil is important. And, and our goal, I think, as policy makers, needs to be to raise it up because, yeah, it is a win-win win-win win-win. At the same time, you meet with a lot of resistance.

It's amazing.

And people are willing to fund a lot of other things before unfortunately soil health. And they don't connect it. People will immediately connect Mark, yes, we should incentivize electric vehicles in California. But when you say, how should we incentivize farming practices that lead to healthier soil? People think it's too technical, too complicated. And it's going to take a big education campaign to get people to the level of awareness that we need them to be at. We just don't have time for that.

Okay, so we're recording this before the election. We're going to release this after the election. Let's just assume for argument's sake that Joe Biden wins. And you are nominated for the EPA secretary. You pass the Senate confirmation, and you have a job to fix what's going on. What are the top five things that you would do for environment, climate, agriculture, if you really had autonomy to implement a set of policies, what would they be? What are the priorities?

So one, you just need functioning institutions again, because we can have all the great goals. So really investing back in the people in the science, in the law at US EPA, because I think we often forget that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people that make this all work. in government. And often we just jump to.

What.

We should be doing. The second, I think, is what Joe Biden framed up, but didn't say it maybe with the eloquence that we would like in terms of transition is we need to get rid of the negative subsidy. So you've been very bullish on this, Mark, but you look through the federal government, there's so much negative that we're funding with our taxpayer dollars and reorient those towards the things that really can be demonstrated through science and evidence to actually improve. We need to set a national goal for getting to net zero carbon, and it needs to be 2045 or sooner. And it really needs to be backed economy-wide with the tools to help get there. So underneath that, is everything from a renewable portfolio standard that says energy has to be and Joe Biden has already said 2035 is the goal that he wants to achieve. So that's very bold, but actually getting there is important. We need to do all the things that we talked about in terms of decarbonizing on this particular thing. I think, you know, everything I was talking to Alice Waters, who's got been pushing, and I think it's a really important place to start our schools. So day one, you have 100% organic regenerative school lunches for every kid in America. You really think about the food system in a way that produces the health outcomes for all of us. You make issues like obesity a national emergency that needs to be tackled seriously as opposed to ignored. You really invest in people. This has to be economic revolution. I think we've talked about the clean economy for so long that somehow we think that it's just a potential alternative to the status quo of burning fossil fuels and destroying the planet and community. So we have to have an equity economy. linkage that's rebuilding our economy. So whatever anyone tells us in the news, unfortunately, our economy is in really bad shape.

Even though the stock market's going up, the income inequalities and health income disparities are going up.

Yeah. And, you know, when a company like Amazon does well on the stock market, it's not really affecting that many people. Maybe Jeff Bezos and his you know, wives are doing well, but it's not really being spread around the entire economy. So we need an economic stimulus which will come that really focuses from the bottom to the top. So when we're building a new road, how do we make sure that it's enabled for zero emissions? When we're building a new wastewater treatment plant, how are we making sure that it allows us to process food scraps so that we can land apply those. So I think on ag, the big ag transformations really need to be around moving away from fossil fuel inputs towards a regenerative system. And being there to support, we often pay lip service to supporting workers, supporting farmers, but they need to be trained and feel invested in that new clean economy. And so I would put, he's talked about $2 trillion, I think that's appropriate. I think we should embrace the Green New Deal. I know there's some trepidation in the debates. I mean, it's an incredible platform that brings together equity, jobs, and the environment.

So within all that conversation, and to be honest, I'm not very familiar with Biden's climate plan, And from my understanding, the Green New Deal doesn't really include much of this. If it's true what the UN says, if we took of the 5 million degraded hectares of land globally, we took 2 million of those and scaled up regenerative ag, and it has to be location specific, right? It has to be measured in a way that is adaptable to each context. If we scale that up, which would cost $300 billion, which in the context of $4 trillion for COVID relief seems like a very little amount of money. It's less than we spend on diabetes every year in this country. If we did that, we could literally stop climate change for 20 years and give us a runway to innovate and adapt. If that's really true, is this part of that platform? and, and is it part of the Green New Deal? And if, if not, why not? And how do we get it to be at the top of the list? Because if that's true, and I, I'm asking you if it is, then it seems like there's no other place to start than that.

Yeah. I mean, it, the, I think we look for, unfortunately, in it, and, and I think the last four years have contributed to this Mark, like shiny technology silver bullets that are cool and we understand them. And so electric vehicles are a plain example of that. People want something that is new that they can invest in that is different than the old. And the issue with soil health with regenerative farming is that just sounds like farming but somehow hippie farming, I don't know. I mean, people are very, they don't quite know what it is. And so building that, those foundational elements, like how do we actually help farmers buy the equipment they need? How do we support the practices and get companies to make sure that they're procuring food that is regenerative only? How do we sensitize people to the real opportunities of removing pesticides and fertilizers from the food? And so you've done an amazing job on that. I think it's incumbent on all of us to continue that so that decision makers understand 300 billion can be transformative. I would say, you know, and that's globally.

That's not just in America, that's globally. Right.

And we haven't really been asserting our global leadership on any issue, but agriculture is a perfect one where we could. I mean, one, just to clarify, I don't want to be the USDA EPA administrator, but all that this, the summary of the five points and this is we have to act like our lives depended on it because they do, and with a sense of urgency. And so that requires prioritization. And your point is, regenerative ag should be on the top of every single person's list of top five in every country. And, you know, I think farmers feel victimized. They feel left behind and they actually are because we're not saying these very real practical solutions can help solve the planetary crisis of climate change. And they can, as well as the list that you gave of maybe 20 items that are not tangential, they're pretty meaningful, increase our health, increase soil health and help pollinators. I mean, all these things are good for the planet. And the more we can keep elevating this debate, the more attention it will get.

Well, Jared, thank you so much for the work you're doing for the decades of service to the environment and for really being such a steward. of what we all care about, which is the earth. And I hope that you get to be the EPA secretary. That may not be what you want, but I certainly would be first in line to push you for that job. And I'm grateful for what you're doing. And really, we could talk for hours, but you have to get back to work because you're saving California from all its disasters. But if people want to learn more about what Jared is doing, I encourage you to all check out his podcast, Pod Ship Earth. It's fantastic. He goes into all these issues and more and he's just a real hero of mine. And there are not that many heroes in government right now and he's one of them. So thank you for what you do. Thank you for all of us and for trying to make the world a better place every day.

Thanks for being on the Dr. Pharmacy. That means a lot to me. Definitely check out the next episode because Mark is the guest.

Okay.

He's awesome.

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