LBW 5.1 (Please see vid ^^^^ above. This one is flawed; .)
Gil Friend, Ken Homer, and Hunter Lovins discuss what came out of COP28 and why the UN process has limits. They argue we have the technical solutions: renewables, regenerative agriculture, geothermal. The real problem is scaling them through local ownership, policy reform, and bottom-up action.
Chapters
I want to ride through the bridge.
Where the west commences Gaze at the moon until I lose my senses I can't look at Hummels and I can't stand fences don't fence me. Hello, everybody. This is Living between worlds for January 17, 2024. First time I've said that out loud. I'm Gil Friend, CEO of Natural Logic, and with co host Ken Homer. We'd like to welcome you to the fifth season of Living Between Worlds and our special guest, whom I'll introduce in just a moment. Ken, you want to just share the logistics for the call with folks?
Sure. Hello, everybody.
Welcome.
If you don't mind, please turn your camera on. It's really nice to see faces instead of a whole bunch of just names on black backgrounds. So we like to see people's faces. We have a really big crowd today, so please use the chat. Feel free to drop questions at any time. I'll be monitoring that periodically. Hunter will scan through and look for questions to answer. We may or may not do a breakout room. Depends on how things are going. We're very fluid in the moment here. If you would like to raise your hand, depending upon the version of Zoom that you have and the way you've.
Set it up, it's either going to be down at the bottom as a.
Standalone or it'll be under Reactions. Please use the raised hand feature so that we know it puts you in the queue, up in the upper, upper left, so we know you're there. And please keep yourself on mute unless you're being called on to talk. So that when we do the post production here, we don't have any, you know, jumping while Hunter's talking so we see their screen.
So I think that's it. Gil, is there anything else that I missed? No, I think that does it. Thank you, Ken, for that. So many of you have been with us on these calls before. Some of you are new. Just by way of background, we began this series in the early days of COVID I was struck by the congruence of the COVID climate and other messes that we're living in. The challenge of moving at speed, scope and scale in the face of what has become called polycrises and metacrisis and so forth, which we've called the challenge of living between worlds and doing that with grace and dignity and power. These 40 sessions, we'll post the archive link. In the chat, we've discussed Covid and climate. We've discussed the structural defects of capitalism, we've discussed the places to Intervene in the system tipping points, systems change, thinking, feelings, Santia Pensard and more. Today we return to our focus on the climate crisis, and I'm delighted to to welcome my friend, Hunter Lovins. Hunter, in case you don't know her, don't know how that's possible, but in case you don't, is president of Natural Capitalism Solutions, managing partner of NOW Partners, co founder of Future Economy Forum, professor of Sustainable Management at Fordham University, chief of impact at Change Finance, and last and certainly not least, a regenerative rancher in Colorado. According to me, she's brilliant. She's feisty, as you'll see, she's outspoken. She's my former faculty partner at Presidio Graduate School MBA program, and most important of all, she's a friend and a trusted colleague and collaborator of many decades. How the call is going to go we're going to start. Hunter and I will be talking together for a while, then we will open the conversation to you all both with raised hands and in the chat, and it's wide open, we'll see where this conversation goes. We may do breakouts, as Ken said, because with so many of you, it's not likely everyone will have a chance to speak on camera. And then we'll either just continue in plenary or come back to plenary. And in the last few minutes, Ken and I will offer some closing remarks and some next steps. Okay, that's where we are. So, Hunter, what happened at cop?
In some ways, nothing. In some ways, a hell of a lot. Now partners, through our Future Economy Forum, put on 65 separate events in four venues around Dubai. So we ran our asses off. We had a team of, count us, five of us. And so COP went by real fast. The cop, for those of you who don't know, is Conference of Parties. It is the UN's annual exercise in frustration, where 190 some this year, I believe it was. Seven countries come together in theory to negotiate how to deal with the climate crisis. In fact, they don't. And in fact, they can't. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which set up the COPs, is structured in such a way that any one nation can veto any action. Saudi makes a billion dollars a day. Every day they delay action on climate change. You really think something's going to come out of the cops? And for better or for worse, this is not my first rodeo. That is the pin from Cop 3. That was Kyoto. Yeah. I was at Cop in Copenhagen when it visibly failed in front of the whole world. And at the COP in Paris, where Cristiana Figueres pulled a rabbit out of a hat in large part because she spent the year before going round to all of the parties and negotiating what at that point was the only agreement that could be negotiated, which is the individual nationally determined contributions INDCs. So now, rather than a global agreement, limit greenhouse gas emissions to some set which had been the Kyoto Protocol. It's like, well, you all tell me what you're going to do. And if you take all of the Paris commitments, the world gets to somewhere around 2.83 degrees C additional warming over what the planet was when we began the industrial age. 280 parts per million. We're now at about 424. Yeah, when climate science was, well, climate economics, more to the point. Climate science has been around since the late 1800s with Arrhenius who pointed out if you keep emitting CO2 and other greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, you're going to get a warming planet. Guy named Nordhaus said, well, 2 degrees C is the safe level. By that he meant limiting warming to 2 degrees C additional would not cripple the economy. On some modeling that is wholly counterfeit, that's where the 2 degrees C number comes from, I. E. It is scientifically meaningless. Scientists like Jim Hansen have said 1.5 degree additional warming is the upper limit of safe. And by safe they mean 5050 chance we won't have a catastrophe if I said to you here, come drive with me. 5050 chance we won't have a fatal car wreck. But believe you drive with Gill. So we are.
Who can't offer you better odds this.
Year we are nearing the 1.5 threshold and Hansen has said we will exceed it next year. It was thought we would not exceed it until well into the2030s. We're here. Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, Hunter, you said from out of Paris 2.8 degrees based on those agreements. But that's if countries comply with those agreements. If countries fulfill those plans. Does anybody, country or company at all on track with their climate?
No.
There actually are a few countries that are getting close. Costa Rica is. Has a shot at meeting its Paris agreements. No.
And the Gambia, I've heard too, but it's a small, small player.
It's a small player.
Yeah.
And we are. Anyway, take your pick. Business as usual. Before Paris we were headed for six degrees. The belief now is that we, we're not at risk of 6° because of business. It is now cost effective everywhere on earth to use renewables instead of fossil and that is in the face of $2.7 trillion in fossil subsidies, and some people say much higher that are thrown to make the price of fossil look cheaper. Me, I'm a free marketeer. Let's get rid of all subsidies. Let's let these technologies compete in a real market. And then you would see the end of oil. You would see the end of, well, a lot of what is causing the planet now to hit, as Rockstrom has said, 15 tipping points, nine of which are in motion. We are exceeding the planetary boundaries that Rockstrom and the other scientists warned us we ought not to do. We would solve this problem. We know how to solve the climate crisis at a profit. You do two things. Stop emitting greenhouse gases largely from fossil fuels, clean up a little bit of industry and implement regenerative agriculture. You do those two things, we can, within some estimates from some scientists at Tufts, 60 to 100 years time, we get back to the 280 to 300 parts per million that we were at at the beginning of the Industrial revolution profitably. So we know how to solve the problem. Did we at cop? No. What we got was the finalization of a loss and damage fund. This is something that the most vulnerable nations have been begging for. This is an issue of climate justice. They are the collectively responsible for something like 4% of global emissions and they are suffering most of the harm. And so the nations of the world pledged $700 million to try to deal with loss and damage. The annual cost is 4 billion a year. So we're nowhere near funding the loss and damage fund. And the money that was put into that is money that was already pledged for development. So did we do any good with that?
Yep.
And we got this great announcement on in over time, extra innings of a transition away from fossil fueled energy systems. Everyone, yes, we have an end of fossil. No, we don't. By energy systems, what they mean is fossil energy used in power plants. At Glasgow there was already the agreement to phase out coal, so that's already in place. Petroleum use in power plants is 3% of petroleum use. So again, this is a non announcement like sorry, what else did we get? The forest people got various recognition of the damage that is happening to forests, the need to stop deforestation. Those are real achievements and it's worth doing. The real reason to go to cop. Why burn jet fuel to fly halfways around the world to sit in rooms where nothing is going to happen. It is the coming together of the world to talk about climate. So I spent my time with heads of state, with ministers, with CEOs with heads of NGOs talking about how do we implement these real solutions? And a lot of good things happened there.
For example, I had a stack of other questions, but I'm right with that one. What resonated in those conversations? What did you find that CEOs and heads of states responded to, not just in their roles, but as live human beings? Where was the juice in those?
The juice was in things like a trip out to the desert with a young sheikh who is captivated now by the concept of regenerative agriculture, is astonished that that part of the world used to be grasslands and that it can be again. If you manage grazing animals the way nature managed grazing animals, dense, packed because of predators, eat everything in front of them, keep moving until they've the grass has regrown. They eat everything. They trample what's left, they fertilize what's left behind. They don't come back until the grass regrows. When you manage grazing animals that way, you take enormous amounts of carbon out of the air and put it into the soil. To the point that paper by a guy named Greg Ratalic and I will pull up the reference and put this in the chat box. Ratalic showed that 60 million years ago the Earth was at 1000 parts per million. When humans entered the picture, we were at 280 parts per million. Where'd the carbon go? It turns out it went into grass and thus into the soil. When an animal nibbles grass, the roots slough polysaccharide sugars that feeds the microbiological community, particularly the mycorrhizal fungi that mineralizes the carbon. That's why when the pioneers came across the Great Plains of the United states, they found 10ft of thick black soil. An animal nibbles grass the roots. Now why am I hearing myself back again? Because somebody's taping. What Ritalik shows is that the earth decarbonized itself. We know how to do this. We can do it again. So as I said, that's half the solution to the global climate crisis. So I met with this young sheikh. He wants to convert Emirati agriculture to regenerative. So we put him together with Vijay Kumar out of India. Vijay runs a thing called community Managed Natural Farming. He's working with a million plus four largely women Indian farmers, helping them convert from the way they had been doing it in many cases, the the green revolution with fertilizer. High cost fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides to no poisons, entirely organic. Using Gabe Brown's five Principles of minimal disturbance of the soil. Living root in the soil year round, cover on the soil year round. Diversity of crops and animal impact. In India they don't eat the cows, but they need the cows. It is that manure that enables them to make a compost based fertilizer, a mycolrizal inoculant. They use only indigenous seed and no poisons. He has tripled productivity, doubled profitability amongst these poor farmers. It's now spreading. And we put Vijay together with Majid, put them together with Helmi Aboulesh out of Egypt. Sechem magnificent program in the Egyptian desert where they are doing organic biodynamic farming, lifting poor Egyptian farmers out of poverty. They were working with what, 2700. We put them together with World Food Program. They're now upping that to 40 some thousand. Built a carbon market scheme with the national bank of Egypt, the Egyptian stock market and they're doing south south carbon transfers. And by the by, if any of you want to offset your carbon, this is for my money, the best carbon offset in the world. And I will pop up in the chat how you do that. So it is, it's putting these kinds of people together again, human to human interactions. Odie says that cow farts are an important release of CO2. Not quite. It's a release of methane and it's more the cow burps. If you leave cows on grass, they have their heads down. Eating in the grass is methanotropic bacteria, so the methane is eaten by the bacteria. The problem arises when you go to industrial agriculture. Take the cows off grass, put them in feedlots, feed them corn and soy grown at great carbon intensity, energy intensity, chemical intensity. They were never designed to eat corn and soy. They get sick, so we load them with antibiotics. We eat the meat, we get sick. This is spherically senseless. It's stupid no matter which way around you look at it again. If we go to regenerative agriculture, we solve all of those problems together. There's a new set of films coming out shortly from a guy at Arizona State named Peter Bick. B Y C K. The series of films is Roots so deep you can see the devil down there. He took five sets of farms, one regenerative, one industrial. Put hordes of scientists out on the land for four years studying everything from CO2 equivalent gas releases, so CO2, methane oxides of nitrogen, health of the land, carbon in the soil, health of the animals, health of bird populations, health of insect populations, profitability of the farms and showed that you get A massive net sequestration of greenhouse gases on the regenerative side, interestingly you actually get some sequestration on the industrial side because again these cows are on grass. But when you manage them holistically, the work of Alan Savory, this is such a net sequester of carbon that if we were to do this on all the world's grasslands 60 to 100 years time, we get back to 280 to 300 parts per million. Very, very helpful.
Helpful, Enormously important. Something most people don't know about because you know, most of the public talk about carbon capture and sequestration is about large high tech industrial systems that existing fossil fuel companies can adapt to. It's not about regen agriculture. You've got the industrial agriculture system in place, you know, parallel to what you talked about the Saudis making a billion dollars today on drilling. So how, how does this all shift when there's such a consolidated body of vested interest in the way we've done it? And the new things that you're talking about, which to me are thrilling echoes my, you know, ancient background in sustainable ag. But these are little pieces all over the place gradually getting stitched together one by one by one in these face to face conversations. Arguably the way change really happens. But how does it scale and displace the existing game?
That is the question, isn't it? And what's really clear is it won't happen at the cops. So a, a group of us are working. I was asked by a very senior UN official to help him create an alternative. Well help him implement. He's already created it. An alternative to the cops. This is still in stealth, so I'm not going to talk a great deal about it, but our tagline is but what can I do? I'm just one person. Yeah, said 8 billion people.
Yeah.
And clearly we need an alternative mechanism. So a group of us around the world are in the process of trying to put this together. Watch this space.
Excellent.
The other half of course is market mechanisms. If we let them work, Dr. Mark Jacobson @ Stanford has shown that we could be by 2035 100% renewably powered with a six year payback. And if any of you don't know Mark's work, just Google Dr. Mark Jacobson. Brilliant science, showing what it is that we need to do. On the energy side, Mark has done.
A country by country analysis for 137 countries which represent more than 90, 95% of global emissions. Six year payback. So call it at 17, 18% ROI which you cannot get legally anywhere else. The budget for this is about $65 trillion over the next, whatever, several decades, which sounds like a lot of money, but McKinsey says that's the budget to sustain the fossil fuel industry over the same period of time. So you want to put the 65 trillion here or do you want to put the 65 trillion here? I don't know. I'm just 8 billion people. What do I know? It's a great line. So stepping away from the physical details for a second and back to cop. Cop, you said, is crippled by being a consensus process.
It is not a consensus process.
Okay.
We're in a consensus process whereby the overwhelming consensus would rule. It is a one country can veto everything process. That's a little different.
Any prospects for that ever changing or do we need to just build another show somewhere else as you're talking about doing?
Good question.
I mean, some people have suggested that, you know, what if the 10 most significant emitters in the world got together and said we're going to do this, y' all follow us or not? Make any sense?
Yes, this is a approach put forth first by Steve Rayner at Oxford who said the Kyoto process was flawed from the get go by having to have every nation at the table. And so yes, if the major emitters got together and said, right, here's what we're going to do, that would be a big difference. Is that going to happen at a cop? No, that will, that will take something else. If any of you follow the writings the speakings of Antonio Guterres at the un, the head of the un, he is apoplectic at how little progress we're making. And so it is possible that the UN could dig its head out. I'm part of several groups that are looking at how do we reform the COP process. The Club of Rome. Sandrine Dixon Declave, who's co president of the Club of Rome, has been leading this effort for some time. Johann Rockstrom, the great climate scientist, is working on this as well. We had this conversation at cop, so it'll be interesting to see. But myself, I think it's going to take moving outside of the COP process and going to all of the people of the world and saying, let's do this together.
Maybe we go both ways. We go to all the people in the world and say I'm just one person and 8 billion of us and we try to get the United States and China and Europe, EU in some way to take a step together. Not easy to do. But if that happened. Wouldn't that tip the game?
I think so, yeah.
Yeah.
So, as I say, you know, I'm hinting at what it is we're doing.
But.
Watch this space.
Yeah. One more question for me, then we'll open the room. I. I just did a piece last week, I don't know if you saw it, saying, well, you know, COP doesn't really matter. And of course it does, for all the reasons that you say. But you early on cited the importance of the business world and the innovations that are happening on the ground in business. And if I'm advising a business client, I'm saying to them, don't track the COP any more than you would track the regulations. Track the living principles of the living world, how things work on this planet. You know what the roadmap is? You know, the roadmap is renewable and edible and cyclical. You know, it's regenerative. Do that as fast as you can, faster than the regulators want, faster than your customers want, and faster than your competitors might be doing. So from that perspective, COP doesn't matter at all. Yes or no?
Sort of.
Okay.
I'm about to put into the chat a series of articles that I wrote leading up to and at COP on what is and is not happening there.
Great.
As many of you know, years ago, gosh, almost 40, we created a little group called Rocky Mountain Institute on the thesis that we could work with the business community. And it was very much in the interest of the business community to implement more regenerative practices, to behave more responsibly to people and planet. Yes, that's true. And it hasn't happened. Yeah, something. Well, we wrote natural capitalism in 99. At that point, we were kind of going on guts, like, really, really. Believe us, there's a business case here, 2005 Flammer showed that the companies that are behaving more responsibly are outperforming. By 2019, even Larry Fink was on board. A year or so later comes the framing of esg. Now you have the backlash, and all these companies are going, oh, excuse us, we didn't really mean that. And if I look back over my history of book after book after bloody book after consulting. At one point, Natural Capitalism Solutions was consulting for companies representing something like 3% of US GDP. I've consulted for most of the big companies. Many of you on the call do this as your. As your bread and butter activities. We've failed. According to the scientists, we're losing. Yeah. One of you put in that Hansen thinks we're going to hit. 350 by this May likely. So what then? And literally about two years ago, I was going to hang up my spurs. I was going to quit.
And do what?
Ride my horse? Watch an eagle fly?
Yeah.
Retire.
Yeah.
I had sat on the board of a brilliant little battery company which had exited happily, and this astonishing amount of money landed in my bank account. It's like, whoa. I learned something. I've always sat on nonprofit boards, sit on for profit boards. They have stock options.
Yeah.
I'm doing. And my husband's been after me to retire. And so I thought, add up everything I do. Is it enough? No. Do I know what enough is? No. Then why go down the road? Why burn carbon? And so I was going to hang up my spurs.
So why didn't you?
Because a very senior official at the un, whom I had fought for two years prior as part of a UN program, gave a speech on regenerative agriculture. I could have given. I thought. So I walked up to him, stuck out my hand, said, howdy, my name's Hunter Love. And he laughed. He said, I know who you are. Like, yeah, probably so, huh? Gave him heartburn for two years. I said, I may have been wrong about you. And we sat down and talked, and he pitched me. I thought, okay, that's big.
Yep.
It's too big. I have no idea how to do it, nor do I know anybody who could. If it could be done, yes, that. That would be enough. So I shrugged and went on to my next gig. He showed up there. We wound up, for some silly reasons, seven hours on a bus crossing Italy. I had no agenda. We're just riding down the miles. I was telling. We were both telling war stories somewhere in the middle of Italy. I thought, son of a. He can do it. And he looked at me and said, will you join me? And I looked at him and I said, I will ride for your brand. I said, you have no earthly idea what I just said, but let's go. And since then. So now I just have to go. Ray. We are variously told we need $2 million, $5 million, $30 million to pull this off. So, yeah, I'm in fundraising mode. It's a little hard, though, to raise money when you say to somebody, I can't tell you who's involved, and I can't tell you what we're going to do, but trust me, it's big.
There's times for that, you know, I take some comfort in the. In the. In the realization that I really don't know how this change happens, this is not like cause and effect, like billiard balls, you know, and we are falling behind and yet we're having impact. I mean, that guy who gave the speech that you could have given might have seen something that you said or some of your colleagues said. And so the influences ripple slowly and gradually. We've had sessions in the past about tipping points, which I don't think is a mechanistic magic number, that if you had a certain percentage, things flip over. But we do know that change is discontinuous. And if things look stuck and look stuck and look stuck, then suddenly they move. And so for me, that's what fuels me. And just continuing to do the pieces that I can do as just one of the 8 billion of us, hoping to have little inroads here and there and occasionally getting some feedback from somebody that had actually made a bit of a difference.
The, the one thing I'd caution you on is the Martin Luther King quote. This is not the time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to go hard.
Going hard, ride hard.
So that's what I'm doing.
That's why we're all here. Thank you. We've got a bunch of hands up, let's take some.
Yeah, let's go.
Conversation from the room. Mark, then Jane, then Shams and George. A reminder again, if you want to speak, raise your hand. If you have questions and don't want to speak, stick them in the chat. We'll handle as many of them as we can. Mark, go ahead. Thank you. So I'm looking at it from an economic point of view and a technology point of view. And we're a two person startup. But the core, the technology core of the startup is a guy who got a patent for 22 and a half percent efficient solar thin film in 1983 when the violet film that NASA was paying $100 a watt for was 14%. So we're aim, we're in the same ball game again. We're looking at 41% efficiency on thin film and 2 to 5 kilowatt hours per kilogram efficiency on batteries and dirt cheap prices. And in the United States we got the RA, which slashes 30% off the cost of the solar and $45 a kilowatt hour off the price of batteries. So we can go into extreme expansion mode because of disruptive economics here as well as the disruptive technology. And I figured, you know, just doing spreadsheets on how Fast. We could add factories which are ceramic tile factories. Mature product we could do. We could get rid of fossil fuels by 2030 and we could get, we could get trucks and buses cleaned up by that time too. Maybe it might take till 2032 to really finish the job on fossil fuels, but we could do most of it. And the profits from this can not only fund the sales of the technology, but they can also fund sales of or purchases by communities of the technologies they need to transform their economies beyond energy and beyond transportation, which we've got covered.
This. The rolling forward of technology is one of the more exciting things that's happening. The Chinese are about to sweep the world with cheap electric vehicles. I drove to my office here in a leaf. I love evs. I love passing a gas station and not having to stop in. I fuel the leaf off the solar panels at the ranch when we have power outages. What problem have a heat pump on the, on the ranch. We were comfortable through -10 two days ago. These technologies work. They're here, they're now. Let's use them.
Yeah, with the IRA, with that $45 a kilowatt hour, the average price of batteries today is. It was recently 134 and someone just said it was down to 114. So 114 minus 45 is like 60 something. But $60 a kilowatt hour, pilot plant, wholesale price, which is what I was planning, minus 45 is $15 a kilowatt hour. That means that you can put all the batteries you want into any project. And I saw somebody suggesting that cost effective wise. Somebody just said that or wrote that if you put, let's say you need put in three days worth of solar.
And you put in three to five.
Days worth of batteries, or they just put in, you know, plenty of solar and 3 to 5. Oh, that was it. There's plenty of solar for enough solar for winter. And three to five days of battery storage would basically take you off the grid.
Yes, four, four days is the canonical number. Australia's doing this. Hawaii just closed down its last coal plant, put in a big battery. We know how to solve the energy crisis just through wind, water, solar. This again, this is Mark Jacobson's work. We got plenty of technologies now if yours come aboard. Buo. So again, thanks for what you're doing, Jane. It's. It's a thrill to, to see a Rancher fresh from COP28 Talk about deep soil and punching cattle in the right way. And it's kind of amusing to think of cowgirls and cowboys kind of taking the place of the old predators, the great predators of the grasslands. Maybe we'll get there again someday. I'm picking up off of China and I wonder if you've heard discussions, some of them disturbing and I can't tell how much of it is propaganda of Chinese interests buying up huge amounts of American farm and ranch land, particularly ranch lands that are close to military owned properties in the United States. But I wonder at the prospects of if this land is bought and agriculture is engaged in whether a country that's notable for having the only nation in the world with a, with the Department of Ecology would become farmers in the United States and regenerative ranchers. No, the, the Chinese are, the Chinese are very smart. The Chinese have written into their constitution that they will be the ecological civilization. They are the largest deployer of renewable energy around the world. They deploy every year more than the rest of the world combined. And no, that's not the reason they're buying up land.
Now.
I used to spend before COVID I spent a fair amount of time in China working with a number of people there. It's gotten a whole lot more difficult and the Chinese are back now on a hegemonistic agenda. So no, I would not trust the Chinese to be better farmers than the young people of the US and what we ought to be doing is buying up land and enabling young people to become regenerative farmers. I will go tonight to a meeting of soil Woody Tash created slow opportunities for investing locally. There's a group of us in the Boulder Valley who each put in 300 some dollars a year. Some people put in more. We meet once a month and give loans to people who are doing regenerative agriculture at zero interest to enable this to spread in our neighborhood. True patronage of the future.
Yeah, I like your model better than Bill Gates investing in farmland.
Actually, it's between the Chinese and Bill. I might take the Chinese. But yes, we do need to pay attention to our land. Was on a webinar this morning of a thing called Beyond Bretton woods that I serve on. This is a group of people trying to rethink the Bretton woods financial institutions. Brilliant guy out of Africa who has done a book on the just transition talking about how Africa is still being colonized by the companies from the north who come in and say oh, we're going to give you jobs to make stuff that then gets exported to the north or agricultural interests to grow things to get exported to the north. And as a result Africa imports all of its Oil, essentially all of its food, essentially all of everything else that it uses. And this goes back, in fact, Moose Schumann is on this call. Michael Schumann, who is the master of local economic development. How do you. And if you, if you guys aren't, you should subscribe to his Main Street Journal. Here's how you do real economic development by enabling people in communities to own their own businesses, to produce for food sovereignty, to produce as much stuff as you can locally to ensure that you get a net economic gain out of any investment that comes into your community. The stuff we did years ago with the Economic Renewal Project. Michael has all of these books. Go to your favorite local bookstore and buy Michael Schuman's books on economic development. This is what we need to be doing in this country and indeed in developing countries.
And from, from that perspective, the potential for Africa is huge. Africa seen, you know, from a local economic development perspective, the resources that are there, the population and growth level of education, which is uneven. But the Africans that I've met who are educated are brilliant and full of fire about a creative future for that continent. So. Yes, yes, indeed. Michael Schuman, do you want to add anything at this point?
Yeah, Moose, jump in.
Not to put you on the spot, but I'm putting you on the spot.
Well, the one thing I would add to this is the incredibly important role of finance. And we, you know.
Right.
We have talked about all of the technological opportunities and policy opportunities and desubsidization opportunities, but if we want to move this faster, we've got to shift our investment. And my guess is, is that if we did an informal survey in this call, we would find that maybe 1% of the people on the call were putting aside at least 1.1percent of their money into local economic development. Almost everyone else is fully invested in Wall Street. So shifting small percentages of our capital as fast as possible in any way as possible is pretty critical to turning things around.
Michael, thanks. Very specific shams. And then George.
Hello. Gil Hunter, thank you so much. You're so. Such dynamic forces in remediating our, especially our energy conundrum, I wanted to segue from this other aspect that's been touched on regenerative agriculture and community, local community development. To raise a kind of.
Perhaps a.
Somewhat disruptive question here, but what if what underlies climate change, diversity loss and our other crises fundamentally is our outsize footprint and planetary overshoe, which is now 1.7 planets per year.
So, you know, why? Do you know where that math comes from?
Wait, wait, one more thought.
Do you Know why? Do you know where what the overshoot is?
One more thought. One more thought. So in that context, and I want to hear what you have to say. But providing less deteriorate deleterious sources of energy, the renewables and this is rarely talked about, have themselves quite high footprint costs. Resource costs to enable the world to continue more or less pretty much to continue to turn as it has, including rapacious direct destruction of the environment, of ecosystems is not in that sense a solution. What seems to me to be required is reducing consumption, waste and population. That where the footprint lies in human behavior. Okay, Hunter, I want to hear from you.
I wanted to hear from you. You talked about the overshoot. What is most of that overshoot? Have you looked into those numbers?
Yes, I have.
What is it?
What is it?
Is it material consumption? Is it mining? Is it farming? Where does that so called overshoot come from?
That's a good question. I'm not prepared.
It comes from carbon emissions, essentially all of the overshoot. You know, fair enough. Matiswager Nako, Bill Reese, who put forth the concept of global footprint of overshoot have a point. But if you take away the carbon emissions, we're not in overshoot at all. And the recent UN numbers fertility rates are decreasing at a rate that's actually concerning to a lot of countries. They're saying wait, wait, we're losing our demographics.
Yeah, I know that.
And so one, the population problem will take care of itself. And this has always been true. Assuming that we had ever growing population, it would take care of itself through misery. Not a good answer. It is taking care of itself because one, women are waking up. They're realizing that more kids is not an answer to what do I do in my old age? They're moving to cities. In cities you tend to have fewer kids. Women are getting jobs. And if we want to help with dropping the population to zero population growth and I served on the board at CPG for a while do things like Ashok Khosla in India where he works with poor women helping them get jobs in green technologies. When they have a job, they delay pregnancy until they're 29, 30, that erases 6, 8, 10 generations help women have. Well, first of all and this is the work of Malcolm Potts at University California Berkeley School of Public Health. If you do five things, feed people. So end hunger, reform, land tenure. This is the work of Hernando De Soto Mystery of capital. Educate people, particularly women. Provide information about an access to contraception. Population automatically goes to ZPG and stays there. We can solve the population crisis, if we think there is one very humanely just through and in many cases just educating women. That by the way is also one of the best economic development answers out there.
Thank you. I'm going to get off, but I just want to leave you one with one question. Are you saying that the large impact of energy use on overshoot is not not because of extraction of resources?
Correct, correct. It is not because of extraction. Again, let me see if I can pull up the exact reference to this. It was a BBC article a few years back that actually looked into why is it that we are in overshoot and it's carbon emissions. So solve the climate crisis, the so called overshoot goes away. Now I am not saying everybody run out, jump on TIMU or whatever this stupid program is and order everything that you could lay your hands on. And that's the answer to happiness. Reducing our load on the earth would be a good thing. Using resources dramatically more productively is a very thing. It enables us to buy time, energy efficiency, material efficiency, circularity, the circular economy is a very good thing. And by the way, one of the better ways of slowing the climate crisis using approaches like biomimicry, manufacturing, everything the way nature does this is Janine Benus's great brilliant. Managing all institutions to be regenerative of human and natural capital. These are the core principles of natural capitalism. They are still true, they're still better business than the way most businesses conduct themselves. But yes, the overshoot comes from carbon emissions. So let me go see George while you ask your question. Let me see if I can find. Oh, where would it be? Okay, well.
Amory Lovins used to talk.
About what 90% of everything that we buy goes into the, into the dump.
Within six months and about more than that.
But yes, 30, 40% of the food we grow is waste, is, is never.
Eaten by anybody except microbes. So a lot of what we have.
In terms of overshoot is actually waste. I looked at a Swedish Environmental Institute, a COP28 post match analysis and I was really impressed by one person, Ricardo Marshall from Barbados, who is a representative of the small island nations, really somebody to watch out for.
And another thing that came through was.
The like minded developing countries LMDCs which are Algeria, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bhutan, China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. And according to one of the panelists at that Swedish environmental institute talk after COP 28, they said that the LMDCs.
Were not willing to engage in the.
Conversation about development goals during the first week of negotiation. So I'm interested in the different groups at COP like the smell and developing small island nations who are on the real front line. So they're serious and things like these.
LMDCs, like minded developing countries, the different.
The, the different cliques and clacks that are, that are moving in COP and I, if you can say something about.
That, yes there when you get into the, the world of the UN there, there is this Alphabet soup of acronyms of bingos and angos and Ringos and on, on, on there are lots of different groupings trying to grapple with this, trying to deal with the fact that the UNFCCC framework doesn't allow conversation about what really matters I. E. How the hell do we get away from emitting all of the fossil energy fossil greenhouse gases that we are now. And literally at most of the discussions at COP we're arguing over where to place the question comma and the brackets. Brackets are around text that's not agreed to. We pretty much negotiated everything that could be negotiated at Paris. So unless you really wholly reframe the discussion, it's going to go nowhere at this cop. When Sultan Al Jabar, the president, the UAE President of the COP who is also the head of the Emirates National Oil Company adnoc mansplained to Mary Robinson saying there was no scientific evidence of a need to transition away from oil and gas, the small island nations damn near walked out. It, it was this close. Many of us were kind of hoping they would leave because that would break the whole thing apart. It's on the other hand in many ways the COP is the only thing we have so far. Again, watch this space. It's the only time all of us come together and it would have been a massive international crisis. Now the small island nations, the coal, the what is it, High Aspiration Coalition, the countries that want to put in place a fossil Fuel Non proliferation treaty, they are continuing to agitate for a different form of the COP and a different rule set. We'll see where we get to. But it is a, it is a fascinating process to observe. There is a guy named Ed King by the way. I think if you google him you'll find his blogs. He did a daily blog on what's happening, what's not happening at cop. I tried to get him to publish with Climate and Capital Media, which is where I'm publishing these days and he wanted to keep doing his own blog. But if you really want to get into who's who in these processes, that would be the best Blog to follow again. Ed King.
Good. We've got five more hands queued up. I noticed that none of them are of the female persuasion, which is kind of interesting. I invite people who haven't.
I think I may be dominating that category.
Well, there's, there's room for more. So we've got another half hour if you'd like to share your thoughts. Please get your hand up into the queue, Don, and then.
Okay, thank you very, very much and thank you for all the wonderful work you have done. And continue and don't hang up your boots for a long time. I, I grew up on a ranch in North Dakota and I know about wearing boots. But I only wanted to say two things because I've got another meeting in just a minute. I put in the chat that the net increase in the human population is 83 million annually. And that isn't trivial. As the driver, that's one of the elephants in the house, if you want to call it that. And so often. And you too have totally overlooked the role of geothermal. And we are underutilizing geothermal globally. There are millions of, or millions, thousands of places where we can tap into geothermal. And thirdly, we're wasting 35% of our food as an agricultural worker. And net regenerative agriculture. There's much more like that. But I must go. I've got another meeting now. Thank you so much.
Thanks so much for being with us. You're spot on about geothermal. Google did a study a couple of years back showed there is more capacity for cost effective geothermal under West Virginia than there is coal resources. Geothermal is another one of the renewables that has an enormous amount of potential.
As with carbon capture, the question isn't just what resources are they and where are they, it's who owns them.
It's also what does it cost. Carbon capture is extraordinary. Well, unless you're doing regenerative agriculture, carbon capture.
Well, let me, let me.
Chemical carbon capture is horribly expensive to capture 0.01% of emissions.
Let me continue the thought. Yes, that's true, but there are certain players who make money at that, who are different players than make money at the other things different folks make money on cold and geothermal. There may be an overlap there. So you know, it's not just a question of what are the, what are the economic analyses, it's who does the counting.
Very good point.
And who counts up the gold. And so back to your point about, about the soil fund in, in Colorado, not just looking at farming practices, but looking at ownership of land. We're turning an increasing amount of our work on the ownership of companies. Not just not employee engagement, employee enrichment, but employee ownership. How do you share the value with the people who create the value? And that produces a different decision matrix than I got a billion dollars a day coming in from drill and oil versus Mark Jacobson's compelling economics or something different. But that doesn't speak to Sheikh Al Jabbar and MBS and those in the same way it speaks to you and I.
The same problem comes up with solar. Who owns the solar? Are we doing big utility owned solar or are we doing rooftop solar? Rooftop solar. You own it. Well, if you buy it yourself, if you let the no money down folks put it up, then they own it. So, you know, back to Michael Schumann's work. Who owns stuff? This will determine a lot of who makes the decisions on this. This is a question on food waste in restaurants in California and now in Colorado. Guy named Anthony Mint Zero Food Waste is working with restaurants to put a 1% opt in extra charge on your bill that pays to collect food waste from restaurants, compost it and get it to regenerative farmers. So again, lot of very good solutions around food waste.
Absolutely, Louis. And then Brent. And let me, since we've got less than half hour left, let me ask people, keep your comments for questions concise so we can give as many of you as possible a chance to talk.
Thank you very much. If Michael Schumann is still around, he might address this. Your point on who owns it and individual money coming in is critically important. I'm always curious, what do people on the right say to that? Who in this country? I realize I'm narrowing it for a moment, but I'm just curious if there's any interaction since owning resources is a bedrock of capitalism and yet that seems to go by the wayside when you talk to those folks. Well, I'll just, I'll just quickly say that a lot of conservatives are very supportive of local investment and new ownership schemes. The crowdfunding reforms that were introduced by Congress in 2012 were led by Patrick McHenry, who you may recall was briefly the head of the House during the Republican upheaval. And the Republicans have been far more supportive of crowdfunding reform than Democrats have. That's another discussion on ownership. There is an interesting bill pending that Marco Rubio has co authored with Democrat Chris Van Holland around co ops and other forms of ownership as a way of getting us more invested in our community. So I think this track is a really good way of building a left right coalition that we're looking for.
Brent, welcome. You're on mute. Brent, we've lost you. There you go.
There we go. There we go. Okay, thank you. Thank you. So, yeah, I, I work in NRT in the built environment. I was actually inspired into this industry 25 years ago by a visit to the Aspen headquarters. And I was interested in hearing your thoughts about the, the role that, that, you know, that aspect of the, of the problem in your mind plays into, into what we're facing going forward. The, you know, the very recent focus on electrification of the, of of buildings is, you know, this is something that is, is really taken the industry by storm in the last few years. And I think it is the other half of our adaptation to high penetration of renewable energy. Not only the ability to use that electricity, but also to manage our demand for that electricity so that we're matching our patterns of consumption to the patterns of availability. So I would be interested to hear your thoughts about where you see that now, where you see that going and how you see that stacking up relative to some of the other areas. You know, EVs get all of the attention. Renewable generation gets all of the attention. I see buildings as sort of being under loved perhaps and efficiency being less focused on be interested in, hear your perspective.
I was once talking with Dana Meadows, Donella Meadows, the, you know, our generation's greatest writer, thinker on many of these issues. And I said, you know, RMI is all about efficiency, but if we keep doing more and more and more and buying more and more and more and growing the population more and more and more, don't we just eat up all the efficiencies? And she said, if the real role of efficiency is to buy time. And I thought, yeah. In the book Natural Capitalism we had four principles. Efficiency, biomimicry, the solutions economy and Dave Brower's cpr. Conservation, preservation, restoration. I've changed those principles to make them verbs. So the first principle is buy time by using all resources dramatically more productively. Two, redesign how we make and deliver all products and services using approaches like biomimicry and the circular economy. And three, manage all institutions to be regenerative of human and natural capital. Buildings are, depending on how you count them, 40% of our carbon emissions. Let's get buildings right. And we again know how to do this. And there, there's so much good work on that. Oh, there's a book, but it's way over there, Green Building Integrating Ecology and Real Estate that I helped write many Years ago and we laid out the all the principles of green building and people like you, Bob Birkabile, all the great green building experts, David Johnston, who tragically just died. We, we should be doing this simply as a matter of good building practice. Some places are now starting to require it. California has had several good pieces of legislation. There is no excuse for building a building that needs external energy to heat or cool it. Buildings should keep themselves well. The building doesn't care. The building should keep the people in them comfortable year round, just through good design. So it's a very, very important area. When, by the way, you do this, you have a more delightful experience of being in the building. When you have good lighting, you can see what you're doing. When you have good acoustics, you can hear yourself think. Green buildings are just more pleasant to be in. And again, where this has been done, you get up to 16%. Excuse me. Yeah, 16% higher productivity from things like good lighting, good air quality. Do you know that in most buildings CO2 concentration is a thousand parts per million? I was in at COP with a guy who had a little CO2 monitor and he kept posting it around. I was like, here we are talking about CO2 and we're inside buildings where we're poisoning ourselves.
Thousand ppm is standard of practice.
Yep, you're making yourself stupid at higher concentrations of CO2. So yeah, buildings is very important. Mark, you're spot on. High performance cement. I'm in a battle here with CEMEX cement plant. It emits, what is it, 470,000 tons of CO2 every year. It's operating under outdated permits. Nasty, nasty sort of plant. We're trying to shut it down and CEMEX itself is moving to much lower emission cement making. Again, we know how to do all this stuff. Let's just do it. Leslie? Yes. Marin county has been leading on many of this stuff for years.
Stuart, before I go to you, just want to say on the, on the matter of the buildings, contra, as you know, I spent five years as the chief sustainability officer for city of Palo Alto and a good part of the job was working with the building department to shift the permitting. We had the most advanced building standards in the state of California, which is arguably one of the most advanced in the country. And man, it was like pulling teeth to get anything done. The friction in the bureaucracy. We've always done it this way. The requirements from the state of California that we demonstrate that every code element was cost effective when a lot of them were effective in synergy with others. But you had to analyze them one by one by one. Enormous hurdles that took, you know, a lot of will to push through. Most jurisdictions don't have that will. And so the, the innovations from the early adopters, you know, Boulder would be one, Berkeley another, some in New York. That's that set the proof case that this can be done, can be done economically. All the benefits of green building that you talked about. But this is sort of the hidden part of the challenge is grinding through the bureaucracy to shift the rules of the game behind the scenes.
The building industry. Is innovation hostile? Sadly?
Well, a lot of, a lot of industries are and a lot of governments are. I mean, look, you know, if you're, if you're in a, if you're in a city government, you are highly risk averse. You have long planning cycles where everything needs to be vetted carefully. You're doing, you know, you're planning two or three years ahead on things that are changing every six months. It's a, it's a, it's a problematic process. And that's maybe the topic for another call. Let me go to Stuart and then Alan and then Sarah and we're going to come into the home stretch here.
Great. Gil, thank you for teeing up. What I wanted to talk a little bit about or have Hunter talk a little bit about, I appreciate all of the incredible scientific and technical advancements and solutions and focus. What I'm thinking about though is the human element. When we talk about food waste and things ending up in the dumpster six months after purchase. I'm wondering, Hunter, if there is any conversation around the element of human change, human adaption, humans thinking and being a little bit different. And the second part is my concern that it seems that so many advancements are imposed or talked about in the context of a traditional capitalist model. And we know the kind of havoc that that has created on the planet. And I'm wondering if there's any thought about that aspect of the solutions that you're talking about.
Yeah. How do we make people smarter in a hurry.
Thank you. Because we have an epidemic of stupidity.
We do. It is the, arguably the most common element.
We got some folks who are committed to manufacturing stupidity. That's one of our other challenges.
We do seem to do that well. We, we, you know, capitalism. I've spent my life trying to reform capitalism, trying to make us actually implement capitalism. What we have now is Randy Hayes calls cheater capitalism. We socialize the harms and privatize the gains. And it would be nice if we tried real Capitalism. I wrote a paper which was where the hell was it Published some book or other on the economics you didn't learn in high school. But going back to Adam Smith, Pareto Ricardo and looking at what they actually said and it turns out much of what they are quoted as saying they didn't. Or they used it as a throwaway line like Adam Smith's invisible hand. He never put any real stock in that. Ricardo if capitalism is to work, capital has to be locally bounded, I. E. By nations. Companies have to be chartered by the nation if capital is mobile. Ricardo was very clear, you're not trading to comparative advantage, you're trading to absolute advantage. So yes, it would be really nice to have real capitalism. In the book Natural Capitalism, I believe it was chapter 13 we walked through what you have to have to have real capitalism, a real market, and then all the reasons why we have none of that. So what we have are very powerful market mechanisms and yes, the work of some of the better economic thinkers. Kate Raworth talking about donut economics. Marion Mazucada, the My favorite on this by the way is John Fullerton's regenerative capitalism paper that you all really ought to read where he lays out the eight principles of what does it mean to be regenerative? And then how would we organize capitalism around these principles? I don't think we're going to make people any smarter. We, we're going to get to work with the people we have. Yeah. And you don't start by calling them stupid. And the work that I'm doing now is going to people the world around and saying how would you solve the climate crisis in your community and how can I help? And building the global capacity to do just that and begin coming at this as opposed to cop conference of parties coming at this from the bottom up of empowering people the world around to solve the crises in their own way in their own community. This I believe will happen much faster than any agreement where we'd ever hope to get out of the UN and as I said, I just need to raise a few millions to get this sucker off the ground.
Well, let's talk about that more. Lots to say about the topic of capitalism which I hyphenate these days. We did a call a couple years back about the structural defects of capitalism that I think none of the reform efforts, including John's Fullerton's fully address and you know, diagnosis prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. So I'm you know, putting a lot of attention at a really clear eyed diagnosis of what do we need to do to shift that but more on that another time I want to give a chance these last three hands up for some quick comments and then we'll wrap Ellen, Sarah and Stuart and Greg if we have time. We'll get you to we'll see if that works.
Alan Haber, unmute Thank you. Thank you.
And let me ask you all please be be concise. We don't have a lot of time left here.
Yeah, well concise is always a problem. As a anti war activist I was, I raised the question how does this and I like the idea of the transition coming from the bottom up, participatory democr commons and all that but we live in a system of full spectrum domination by the Pentagon, by $900 billion of their federal money taken out of the people and by a pipeline politics that has the centers of power around the current energy system and the military pretty much in place. And is it possible for these endeavors to actually function from the bottom up without actually engaging the war system and the politics of oil and so on in the Middle east and other areas of the world? This is these questions have not been part of the conversation here at all. And in some way I'm delighted.
Whoops, Alan, you've frozen. We'll go on to Sarah and come back to you if you come back. Sarah, go ahead and good to see you.
Causes of environmental human devastation we ought to do, we all ought to be doing everything we can to bring an end to the conflict in the Middle east and conflict everywhere. Every time you engage in war it is a failure of human imagination and let's stop it now. Exactly how do you do that? Yeah, that gets a little trickier. Okay, so speaking about imagination, okay. I come from the background of ecology and education and I really truly believe and I have this written out mostly now in the chat because I wasn't sure I would even get a chance to speak that changing our perspectives on the earth and our role in it can truly become much more efficient in many ways. We're, we're, we're all talking about dealing with changes from the top. And I truly believe that children are much more open to change than adults and parents are much more open to change when their children are teaching them rather than when government is trying to force restrictions on them and children. I mean and that involves a special kind of education with children. Also where you're not coming from the top down, you are helping them. You're guiding them into discovering the things, the truths about the environment, about the planet about our role in it without telling them what they should be doing. They will learn, they will know. We have many kids killing each other with upset on drugs because of a situation where they feel helpless. And all of that is true. And this is very much the theory of change on which the work that I'm doing now is based. Let's trust people, let's empower them, let's enable them, and let's collectively solve the climate crisis.
Very good, thank you. Hunter and Sarah. Stuart.
Stuart. Hey.
Hey. Hi there, Hunter.
See.
Yeah, long time, Good to see you. And again, Gil, thank you for creating the community forum you have and even naming it Living between Worlds. Because by implication that means our role is to build the bridges, right? And I see no other way for the, the communion we're talking about without each of us sort of giving up our sacred cows and being able to sit in dialogue with people we don't immediately agree with. And I go back to the compass needle that I think Hunter, you and Amory named way back with that simple, I still have it, that magnetic thing on the back of my car. Abundance by design. And you mentioned it, you know, this is a supreme design challenge. And I guess what I'd like to offer is that so much of what I have experienced in my 63 odd years of this, and I grew up with this from day one in the 60s with parents who are on this conversation almost exactly is that we have an overbalance in the intellectual, rational, engineering fix approach to this problem. And I think just recognizing that this challenge is nested right within a bigger cultural crisis of existential separation from a cosmology of who we are on this planet, how we're connected with this planet and being accountable to our relationship with this planet. So I mentioned Hazel Henderson's in the chat, her principles of ethical biomimicry finance, and of course you mentioned Janine's worth and biomimicry. Clearly the pathway is to get into communication in our communities. I call it in place impact. And yes, we need top level, top down policy, but the real power is going to be from each of us taking that in place impact responsibility in our own communities and spending some quiet time getting into right relationship with this planet and the cosmos that we all, you know, depend on for our life. And living a lot more quiet time, in my opinion, would open channels of knowing that desperately are needing, are needed in this quest to find the right future for humanity. Because it's way beyond an engineering fix, way beyond that. So thank you for making this conversation available.
Thank you.
Thanks.
And come back again. We talk about culture change from time to time and how planetary cultures shift over time. One of the ships we're in now.
I cited the chapter in my book which, if anybody cares to look at.
It, put the link in the chat, please. Okay, Greg, over to you, if you would.
What's that?
It's over to you. And I'm going to ask you to be very brief, please.
I'm very brief. So first of all, obviously, thank you very much for all that you do. And thank you, Hunter. This has been fascinating. I've been really inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the Future. And really, in some ways, obviously not a perfect roadmap, but lays out a heck of a roadmap, including the global. Global carbon rewards and all that sort of thing. I wanted to get your reaction to. To what extent you. You see that as not just a. A speculative fiction novel, but something that we can really look to for what may be happening, including some of the scary eco terrorism stuff.
Yeah. I require Minister E. For the Future for my classes. It is. It is an awesome book. Thick. A colleague of mine said he was reading it in homeopathic doses because the beginning of it is very, very grim.
By the way, Hunter, I had to start it. I had to start it three times to build up another head of steam to get through those first few chapters.
Yeah. The Mary, by the way, is Mary Robinson, who I was honored to be able to spend some time with at cop. Wonderful woman. It. My one critique of the book is it way short pedaled regenerative agriculture. It had lots of solutions listed. The only one it really named my name was Delton Chen's Carbon Coin. That's a very interesting one. But the real point to read the book is for what could well be coming at us this year, next year. It's set 20 years in the future. Yeah. No, it's not. It's now. I doubt that they're going to go back to.
Everybody, please mute your mic.
Mute yourself, Daniel.
Go ahead, Andrew.
I said over to Daniel. You have a new book out, which is awesome. The Value of Values. That's something everybody ought to read.
Daniel, open your mic. And we appreciate that and be succinct.
Okay. So first of all, I greatly appreciate that. Thank you. The thing that I would. Oh, and Kathleen, thank you for that. I guess just two quick things, and I will be succinct. One is that I think it's not. We need to remember that a lot of the things that we have capitalism and so forth. They're messed up from how they should be. It's not that we need a new, necessarily we need a new thing like, oh, something other than capitalism. As Hunter pointed out, we don't have capitalism now. And as I try to point out in my book, there's a lot of money to be made that isn't being made, which doesn't make any sense. The other thing is that it can be difficult sometimes to remember this, but I'm trying to remember the adage, start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. Which I, I think it was. George Washington Carver had the original version of this quote. But, but that's, you know, where we are is in a, a system that's crazy, but could be changed in the short run and could be really changed in the long run. And we need to do all of that.
Thanks, Daniel. And none of us get to hang up our spurs just yet. I want to thank you all for joining us. We've covered a lot, way more than I expected in this call. We started out talking about cop, and I'm not going to say much more about that, but some of the things I heard is that we know what to do. You know, if it's, you know, cut the subsidies, regenerative agriculture, educate women, three items that move a lot of the mouth from there. The future that we know is profitable, but it depends on who's counting the coins. You know, I'm just one person, but there's 8 billion of me. So what do we do? You know, if we're, if, if you're a business, you drive hard to the new world, you, you share value broadly with those who create value. You try capitalism, because we haven't for a long time. If you're government, democracy, democracy is a good thing too. If you're government, you cut the subsidies, you change the codes. If you're, if you're an individual, Solar, batteries and EVs for sure, but also local investment and also food waste. And also vote, damn it, and get your friends to vote. The amount of non voters is more than enough to shift the election in almost every jurisdiction in the country. And so this is not a time for apathy and pessimism, but get out the vote because this if, well, you know, you know, if the election goes one way in November, none of the things we're talking about happen, so there's.
That they happen faster because all hell breaks loose.
And then it's pretty.
That's not the preferred route to change.
Well, it's a Pretty unpredictable route to change. And remember, you know, it's all about design. So with that, Hunter, thank you so much for taking the time out of a crazy, busy schedule to be with us. So love every time we spend together. Some people have asked. The video of this call will be up probably by the end of this week, certainly by the beginning of next week. It's on on my YouTube channel. I'll put that in the, in the chat in a moment. We reconvene third Wednesday of every month. The next one is February 21st, so please join us then if you're able. Invite your friends. We'd love to expand the circle, expand the diversity of this circle. And that depends on not just us, but you all inviting people. Let's see, what do we got here? We got. Here's the archive link. If you want to save the chat, we set. We say we post the video, we do not post the chat. So if you want to save the chat, use the three dots to grab that bottom or the top of your zoom screen. And last but not least, if you want to contact Natural Logic or me, here are some links. I'm sorry for the formatting. Got a little wonky here. I've got a link tree link to give you a sense of the things that I'm up to. I didn't want to take the time away from Hunter. You got a little bit of a sense of what she's up to, but it was tip of the iceberg. There's more there. So follow her at what's best link Hunter to track you put it in.
The chat, but www.natcap solutions.org n capsolutions.org.
And publishing on Canary Climate and Capital Media. Capital Media. So check out there. You can follow me on LinkedIn or Substack or our blog. I look forward to seeing you next time on the 21st. And if you haven't had a chance to talk today or post today, please get in touch directly. Love to hear from you, what you're doing, how we can support each other. Thank you, everybody. Ken, what's the last word from our friend Brandy?
Second Well, I'm. Well, I'm queuing that up. Why don't we take Hank's mail. Hank will be quick.
Sure. Go Hank.
I also just want to express my thanks not only to you, Hunter, and you, Gil and Ken, but to all the people who put in terrific ideas in the chat. As some of you know, I'm helping to organize a conference in Iceland next month about the the futures of Democracies Both futures and democracies are plural. And I'll try to post something about.
That.
On some of the sites that.
I think you all know about.
And any contributions that you all have to make to thinking about the futures of democracies are very, very welcome.
Being held in the home of the oldest democracy in the modern world.
Indeed. Great to see you, Hunter.
Thanks so much.
It was a wonderful call.
Thank you all for coming.
Thank you everybody. Go in peace and kick butt.
You can dance in a hurricane.
But.
Only if you're standing in the eye.
For decision matrix. Then you know I got a billion dollars a day coming in from drilling oil versus Mark Jacobson's compelling economics or something different. But that doesn't speak to Sheikh Al Jabbar and MBS and those in the same way it speaks to you and I.
The same problem comes up with solar. Who owns the solar? Are we doing big utility owned solar or are we doing rooftop solar? Rooftop solar. You own it. Well, if you buy it yourself.
Yeah.
If you let the no money down folks put it up, then they own it. So, you know, back to Michael Schumann's work. Who owns stuff? This will determine a lot of who makes the decisions on this. This is a question on food waste in restaurants in California and now in Colorado, guy named Anthony Mint Zero Food Waste is working with restaurants to put a 1% opt in extra charge on your bill that pays to collect food waste from restaurants, compost it and get it to regenerative farmers. So again, a lot of very good solutions around food waste.
Absolutely, Louis. And then Brent and let me since we've got less than half hour left, let me ask people, keep your comments for questions concise so we can give as many of you as possible a chance to talk.
Thank you very much. If Michael Schuman is still around, he might address this. Your points on who owns it and individual money coming in is critically important. I'm always curious, what do people on the right say to that? Who in this country? I realize I'm narrowing it for a moment, but I'm just curious if there's any interaction since owning resources is a bedrock of capitalism and yet that seems to go by the wayside when you talk to those folks. Well, I'll just, I'll just quickly say that a lot of conservatives are being very supportive of local investment and new ownership schemes. The crowdfunding reforms that were introduced by Congress in 2012 were led by Patrick McHenry, who you may recall was briefly the head of the House during Republican upheaval and the Republicans have been far more supportive of crowdfunding reform than Democrats have. That's another discussion on ownership. There is an interesting bill pending that Marco Rubio has co authored with Democrat Chris Van Holland around co ops and other forms of ownership as a way of getting us more invested in our community. So I think this track is a really good way of doing building a left right coalition that we're looking for.
Brent, welcome.
