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How We Can Ingrain Car Sharing Into American Culture. With Aric Ohana

Ian Sumner — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 21:55:51 +0000

Aric Ohana 0:01
You know, what is the need of owning a vehicle, if I can push that button in that pod or, you know, whatever that might come to my front door, and I get into it and it takes me where I want to go without a driver, so the cost is pretty low and it’s even lower because it’s shared amongst, you know, communities and cities or whatever you may have. Like that’s, that’s where it goes, right? Yeah.

Ian Sumner 0:27
This week on big feet, the role car sharing has today in its place in bridging us into the future of mobility. To help me out with that

Aric Ohana.

Aric Ohana 0:42
My name is Aric Ohana I am the CEO of a company called Envoy. What we do is we provide electric car sharing to communities so we partner with large property owners of apartment complexes, offices, even hotels, the electric vehicles that can be shared by those community members. So it’s exclusive just to that property. So what we do is really provide mobility as an amenity, to these communities.

Ian Sumner 1:12
I really think what you guys are doing with envoy is really cool. Because I mean, I know like Zipcar has been around for a long time, but having it as like an amenity to an apartment or hotel and making sure like, because you guys are only doing an electric fleet, right.

Aric Ohana 1:28
That’s right. I think

Ian Sumner 1:31
it’s a really cool, unique approach. And I think it could really change sort of the landscape of transportation, which I guess is the goal, right?

Aric Ohana 1:40
Yeah. I mean, we actually came from commercial real estate. And what we saw was the convergence of mobility, energy and the built world, and they’re gonna have these huge impacts on commercial real estate. So we definitely have some forward thinking thoughts as to where it goes. But step number one by providing an amenity makes it very easy for any community to adopt. And we’re seeing really big impacts on many different levels within those communities once we place those vehicles, right. For most people, it’s our first experience with an electric vehicle, which is super important for overall adoption of electric vehicles, because there is a connotation of range anxiety. And, you know, one way to get over it, is by using the vehicle to cover your groceries, or, you know, pick up your kids. So envoys platform really enables really, to see how you could live day to day with water, if you will. So that’s one major impact as well as sustainability so that we’re focused on

Ian Sumner 2:45
and that’s a good point. So you, you you started in commercial real estate, you still consider yourself as a in commercial real estate as well. Right. So can you talk about how electric vehicles and commercial real estate how did those end up together? How do you go from one to the next?

Aric Ohana 3:02
Yeah, so we were developing a student housing complex that was actually in Texas. You know, one of the big issues and developments is cost to construct. And those costs have, you know, been increasing over the years. And building parking is extremely expensive. You know, in some cities, it could cost you know, 25, all the way up to like $75,000 per parking space to build. So any reduction on parking, we thought was super important. And we weren’t actually sitting in Texas where, you know, cars are very central there are as many cities and you know, their parking count was like one car per bedroom. And we know student housing, doesn’t need that much parking. But so we approached them with the novel idea of including car sharing within the community. And what they’ll do is reduce the amount of people that bring cars thus not eating as much parking So that was kind of the initial approach. And, you know, after that we actually reached out to Zipcar reached out to reach now and a few others, you know, kind of with the lens of a landlord that wants to lease up this building and provide, you know, value add community service, there was there was definitely a disconnect with what we were trying to accomplish, and what they said they could do. So that was the initial kind of like, Hey, you know, this is an interesting thing. So when we were actually coming up with this idea and building out the business plan. I was driving electric vehicle at the time, my co founder or he siggy. And I used to carpool essentially, to our office. And, you know, it was a big part of, you know, the business model we actually it was a fee of 500 fee and we actually launched our first properties with Fiat 500. Ease. So yeah, that can that that was automatic from the beginning. We knew that they were going to be electric vehicles within this platform from the very.

Ian Sumner 5:04
And I mean, is that just something that’s based on your experience already driving electric car? Why does an electric car lend itself more to car sharing?

Aric Ohana 5:11
Yeah, so the way you should look at it is, well, we should probably should have find the different types of shared mobility. So we’ll just make it simple in the car sharing site. So car sharing typically has station based. So you know, essentially that Zipcar, you might use the vehicle and bring it back to the same place. And then there is one way station base where you might, you know, take it from one location and drop it off at another location, but both are stations for that car sharing platform. And then there’s also floating, floating is what you’ll see like roaming around the streets and you can really drop them off anywhere around the city. That one probably has the largest operational hurdles. Station base is what we do and it’s community base station based so it only community members can use that vehicle. And it’s always been returned to that community after someone’s done with it. But one of another hurdle on the operation side is how do you feel these vehicles, typically they’ll have gas cards in them for people to fill up fuel. But these experiences not great, right? Either you have to go fill up fuel. So what we do is we install a dedicated charger, out the parking space for the vehicle, and you’re instructed to plug in the vehicle before you end the reservation. And thus, everybody gets a pretty much full charge, you know, right when they start their booking, which is, you know, I think on the operational side that is super important. And we can also get into the future of how that interacts with the built environment as well. Yeah.

Ian Sumner 6:43
And I’m very interested in getting into this future.

Before we kind of go there, I mean, so and I know this this first project that you were doing, you said it was in Texas, I know you’re based in LA and it seems like you guys have a lot of projects down there as well, right. And I mean, these are cities They’re very, I mean, most US cities, there’s not a ton, where you can really you can get or get around without a car, but I can I know in LA, like I lived down there for a couple years, and it’s, you’re very reliant on a car. And so how do we get people to actually adopt these car sharing networks? Right? How do we get people to start sharing as opposed to just having their own personal car and commuting everyday in it?

Aric Ohana 7:31
Well, the big part of it is the education. And actually the shifts in consumer, you know, needs and behaviors. So we’ve seen that, you know, now especially the younger and the millennial generation, they’re looking more to have experiences than owning things. A lot more renters a lot more plug and play scenarios like we work and you No car sharing or getting rid of vehicles all together has always been a very difficult thing to try to accomplish. But now that we have Uber lifts, we have other car sharing platforms. We have micro mobility, shared, shared micromobility. All those things provide an ability not to own a vehicle. But if you really want to convince somebody not to own a vehicle, we think there’s three pillars, right? It needs to be just as affordable or more affordable than owning a vehicle. It needs to be just as reliable. And it needs to be just as convenient as open up a collab, the keys in my pocket, I walk outside and I get in my car that’s right outside my doorstep. So if we look at mobility right now, you know, if you look at Uber Lyft, they have the convenience you push a button inside your doorstep. They have the reliability because you push a button, it’s at your doorstep and they also but they don’t have the affordability. So Like you can’t replace your car and say it’s gonna cost me less to use Uber and Lyft in non owner car, you know, car sharing what they have is the reliability, right? They also have the affordability, it’s actually cheaper than owning a car in many ways. But the convenience isn’t there, like you know of Zipcar, you know, have reached now. But for you to find one, you probably have to pull your phone, look at a map. And you might actually take need to take another piece of mobility to get to that, that vehicle. So that’s not very convenient. Combined, you know, those two services? Yeah, they’re not, they’re not so bad. They could they can meet both of those things. And that’s why we see less and less people owning cars, especially in dense urban areas. What we provide is really all three pillars, right? We’re more affordable than current Crusher, things were cheaper in many cases than reach now in the car. We’re just as reliable, and we’re super convenient. We’re at your doorstep like this is a car you know, it’s a quarter That you probably use multiple times a week. So that lends the ability not to own vehicles. And that’s somebody that’s a that’s one use case, the other use cases, I’m a family of three or a family of four. I need my big minivan to move everybody around. But I don’t need to own this second car, I can be a one car family, and I can use a car in my community or other mobility services not to own that second car. So it’s about reduction. Overall, but yeah, there, you know, there will never be probably a world that no one owns a vehicle. In the other piece of where we see it is, you know, if you want to provide a service that can span the socio economic spectrum from affordable and disadvantaged communities, all the way up to luxury. It’s probably not a one size fits all business model. Like for instance, like public transit, you’re typically in most cities, you’re gonna get mainly a certain, you know, segment of that population. And same with Zipcar, right, you’re getting a certain segment of that population. Uber provides Uber x and Uber Luxe and different levels about the try that differentiate and provide that service. But that’s kind of needed if you want to get full adoption. So what we do is we actually match the car type to the community type. So you know, we have vehicles at affordable housing and disadvantaged communities and student housing, senior housing, luxury and even kind of like market rate, both in suburban and urban markets. So you know, putting a Volkswagen e golf in a disadvantaged community and putting a Tesla Model X in a luxury community. You know, that’s how we can differentiate and provide, you know, the several same level high level service throughout that spectrum. And just provide the cost point that that individuals actually need makes sense or the luxury They’re trying. Yeah.

Ian Sumner 12:00
Um, I so I mean, do you think America can get behind this type of transportation? Well, do you think we can disconnect from our cars? Right? Yeah, I

Aric Ohana 12:11
think, well, you’re never gonna disconnect from mobility, right? I just think the form of mobility might change. Right? So personally owned vehicles is what we know now. And there’s a couple different ways to own them, you can be semi finance them. Now we’re seeing with car sharing, and subscription. So those are different kind of business models to obtain mobility. But you know, what is the need of owning a vehicle, if I can push that button in that pod, or, you know, whatever that might come to my front door, and I get into it, and it takes me where I want to go without a driver. So the cost is pretty low. And it’s even lower because it’s shared amongst, you know, communities and cities or whatever we may have. Like that’s, that’s where it goes, right? Yeah.

Ian Sumner 12:57
Gotcha.

And so

Yeah, I guess that kind of transitions us a little bit more into the future of where you see this industry going. And is that so you’re convinced that that’s gonna be autonomous cars. And that’s going to be no one or very few people owning private vehicles like what does that future look like?

Aric Ohana 13:21
I think they’re autonomous cars, but people own personal vehicles also, I mean, the person that buys a Rolls Royce today will more than likely have, you know, their personal autonomous Rolls Royce in the future. But I think the way we’re going to look at moving around cities is really, we’re going to pretty much aggregate all our mobility solutions under one platform. So you’re going to say I’m going to go from point A to point B. And just like in Google Maps, now you can see different modes and how long did it take you, but we’re going to connect those. So you know, it might be walking or how taking an autonomous vehicle to, you know, a train station I take that train across town and then getting off the train station taking, you know that that autonomous pod to you know where you’re going. And that that could all be under one umbrella with connected services, all different service providers, but connecting that user experience through mobility, I mean, that would lend yourself not to own a vehicle and you know, living in LA, you know, just looking at the Expo Line down the street here in culver city that can take you all the way to downtown or the Santa Monica. You know, you can see how that can start making sense if we can pull those types of abilities together. And there we’ll see even more of a reduction in vehicles owned. But at the same time, somebody that’s going from point A to point B, they’re going to have that option. They can take that the public transit or, you know, whatever that might be, or they could take an autonomous vehicle all the way to that destination, and each one will have a different price point. You know, I think that’s how we’ll we’ll see kind of Future moving around the city.

Ian Sumner 15:01
Yeah, I think bringing public transit into the picture is important as well, right? Because it takes other mobility infrastructure to replace some of the car trips in order to have it in order to allow people to go towards a car sharing. Culture,

Aric Ohana 15:20
right. Yeah, I mean public transit. Well, public transit, there is a need for it, and especially in many cities in God should never go away. But there’s no question that public transit has struggled with profitability. Usually there are costs for a city versus a way to make money or even breakeven. So they’re always looking for more riders and users. So and I think when you get less and less people owning vehicles and you make, you know, public transfer, more technology oriented, you know, that’s where you start seeing ridership. trips go up, and we’re starting to see that more and more. It’ll be interesting to see what, you know, the post COVID era looks like when it comes to public transit and also shared mobility in general. Yeah.

Ian Sumner 16:12
Gotcha. And so, okay, so I guess so the average car sits about unused about 90% of the time for my understanding, right. And so you’re providing a car for that, maybe 10% that people need. And ideally, people aren’t feeling constricted because there’s other types of mobility accessible to them as well, right? It all kind of goes hand in hand to build a network of access, right?

Aric Ohana 16:40
Yeah, that’s right. So, you know, if all of our cars are rented, somebody that doesn’t own a car is not going to feel abandoned. You know, that day, they’ll probably take an Uber or figure out some other mode of mobility, but that’s now available in most most cities, most places we live in.

Ian Sumner 16:59
So And what are some of the cities that you’re sort of targeting? to begin with? Most of our cars currently are in Northern California in Southern California. And there’s a lot of good reasons for that.

Aric Ohana 17:12
We also were awarded a grant from the California Energy Commission, and did a partnership with electrify America. In both those programs, we deployed vehicles in apartment complexes. And we committed to having a minimum of 75% or around 75%, I should say, of those products, those communities have to be within a low income or just venge community census tract. So we’ve been super excited about that. We pretty much have fully launched that program. And in many of those communities, they’ve been running already for over a year. But so most of our vehicles are currently in Westlands.

Ian Sumner 17:52
What sort of sustainability or yet what sort of impact do you see carsharing hat

Sorry, I cannot talk this morning.

Aric Ohana 18:03
It’s a little funny.

Ian Sumner 18:05
It’s one of those days, I’m basically I’m trying to figure out what the impact carsharing can have on climate change, right sort of big picture. Why do we need this? why it’s important and what impact it’s having now and where that’s ideally going to go in the future.

Aric Ohana 18:23
So in regards to climate change, and just pollution from vehicles, you know, we’re, like I was saying, I’m sitting in an office alone, because, you know, everybody is working remotely due to Coronavirus, and it’s a very strange time. But there’s a lot of I don’t know, I think there’s a lot of silver lining if we kind of reflect on what’s going on here. And one of the most impactful ones is just seeing the clear skies over Los Angeles. And even in cities in China, from everybody staying home and not driving their vehicles and all sudden the skies clear. So anybody that says That pollution is not an impactful thing on health and environment. You know, at this point, you can prove it, you got everybody off the road for a couple of weeks in the skies cleared up. So car sharing plays an important role in that. We, for every car share vehicle that’s out there, studies have shown that that’s reduces the amount of car ownership by 10. So we’re taking 10 vehicles off for every one vehicle that’s put into car sharing. So that is a major reduction, and also car sharing. And using electric vehicles, I think that is probably the most important component of it. And what that does is gives a real opportunity for anybody to make that change to an electric vehicle. So I think the combination of helping reduce the amount of car ownership but also giving people an avenue of showing them how electric vehicle in fundamental life and giving them the infrastructure to do so, I think are two key components of how car sharing, at least on our business model can impact climate change.

Ian Sumner 20:05
That is amazing. 10 cars off the road for one.

car sharing ride sharing car.

Aric Ohana 20:13
That is, yeah, so there’s studies from a group in Berkeley. Yeah. And most recent reports, I think is like 10 to 12. Wow. And it makes sense. You quoted that course. Support 90% of the time. I think actually, most studies show like 95% of time. So we’ve literally, you know, it’s even more like you’re literally using, it’s your second highest cost of living, right, first rent or mortgage. And then, you know, personal car ownership, your second highest cost of living, and you use it only 5% of the time. It’s a huge waste. Yeah, it’s huge impact. Yeah, no question about it. And, you know, as we become more socially conscious, you know, and individuals like you who are measuring their carbon footprints or, you know, do more recycling or whatever, like, extra level we can do as long as we, you know, keep, you know, doing that. I think we’re going to see a much cleaner future. Yeah.

Ian Sumner 21:15
Last couple questions. Um, I was wondering how the efficiency of a car sharing program compares to a ride sharing program. So what you’re doing versus like, what Uber is doing?

Aric Ohana 21:32
Yeah, well, currently, they’re very different, right? Uber will bring a card you with a driver, and that driver will take you somewhere and drop you off our service. We pretty much you have a key on your phone, and you unlock the car and you drive yourself where you’re going. And then you bring it back and your reservation when you get back home. So right now they’re completely different services. In the autonomous future, they probably converge. But you know, all all mobility goes like rental cars, Uber lifts, our services and other car sharing all become the same business model, once vehicles become autonomous,

Ian Sumner 22:15
Hmm, that’s a really interesting way to kind of look at because I was considering them two very different approaches to mobility. But yeah, I it makes sense that they would kind of converge. Ideally, we get to that point, right.

So what if and then the question is,

Aric Ohana 22:36
who owns those vehicles? So in that, you know, situation does Uber own their vehicles? Or does Ford and BMW launch their own programs with only Ford or BMW Vehicles that come pick and move people around? You know, do you have a subscription to BMW because you like BMW more and only BMW, come pick you up? You know, I think the business models will be it’ll be interesting to see Where those business models go? You know, we believe, if we look at, you know, the industry, that’s probably the most poised to profit and find new business channels in mobility, its commercial real estate owners. You know, they have the parking infrastructure, that can you park and charge these vehicles, they have the tenant base to use these vehicles. So that’s kind of the role that we’re playing. We partner with commercial owners, and say, you know, we’re going to put these vehicles in your property, people are going to use them, your tenants are going to use them. We’re going to collect this data, this data is and enable you to go to the city and ask for a parking reduction or a density bonus for your next development. But we’re also going to find, you know, clear, sustainable business model that can enable you guys to create a business business channel from mobility in the infrastructure you already have in place.

Ian Sumner 23:59
Yeah. So I guess the ideal setup is for a daily commute, either by bike or public transit. And for those runs where I absolutely need a car, some sort of car sharing program, hopefully electric.

Aric Ohana 24:14
But you know, it’s interesting, we look at it the same way and we put these cars where people live work and also hotels where they stay and aren’t Yeah, that’s the whole idea in with residential apartment buildings. You know, we provide a messaging and we talk about a car free living or car light living, you don’t need two cars, you could use one car, here’s envoy or maybe you don’t even need to own a car at all. And then we also put these vehicles in office buildings and for those members, you know, we are messaging through property management and the ownership. You know, you don’t need to take a single occupancy vehicle to commute to work, you know, get to work using carpool rideshare walking, biking public transit, but if you have a business meeting Or a personal errand or anything you need to do during the day, there’s cars available at your office building that you can use during that period of time. Right. So that’s very much aligned with how we position our business.

Ian Sumner 25:14
Gotcha. And I guess it’s also a good question. I mean, you have statistics, at least about we know where these cars are going and how often they’re being used and stuff. Where are most people going with these cars? Are they going to work on that all day? I’m assuming they’re not doing daily commutes on them. Is it a grocery store? Like what are people what are these mainly being used for?

Aric Ohana 25:33
So 15% of all our bookings right now are daily rentals. So you can book the car for entire day. So majority of them are pay per use, right? So you’re using it for you can rent it, you know, for 15 minutes at a minimum, right? So 15 minutes to a few hours. In most of those cases, individuals are using them to go get groceries. pick their kids up from school. You know, it’s funny we have, we have a running campaign where you can get like a promo code. If you just say, you know, fill in the blank I use envoy for. And it’s you know, everything that you somebody will use a personal car for. But why this is impactful is in many of these communities. People can’t afford a car, they have unreliable transportation and they live in a food desert with no grocery store within a few miles, right. So there’s no public transit. There’s no grocery stores. So you know, that’s where the service is really impactful. But people use these vehicles for anything you would use a personal car for concluding that road trip.

Ian Sumner 26:42
Good to know. And I guess just realized, last, just because I’m kind of curious about it. I mean, do you see these cars like are they in use a higher percentage of time than a normal? The normal like 90 95%

Aric Ohana 26:58
Yeah.

Ian Sumner 27:00
Yeah. What does that look like then?

Aric Ohana 27:02
Yeah, I mean, and that’s the goal, right? I mean, if we don’t get utilization, I think the industry, the market, like so Zipcar and other car sharing companies, you know, 20 25% utilization is what they’re aiming for. We’ve seen up to 45% utilization in some of our buildings. And, you know, I think we’re averaging right now about 15%. But a lot of the properties and a lot of communities we just launched in the last six months. So there’s definitely an adoption period of three or four months to get season. But on average, we’re about 15%. But we definitely have a lot of properties that are seeing well over kind of the industry average as well. So that’s great.

Ian Sumner 27:44
That’s really cool. I guess that really goes into the convenience factor and why you guys are kind of targeting that pillar of those three that you identified earlier.

Aric Ohana 27:52
That’s right. I think like I think 90% of our users are repeat users. So meaning they booked more than once. Yeah, we have, you know, we have users that have rented the cars over 400 times in the last year. This, you know, either becomes kind of like, hey, my car broke down, or it’s in the shop or have a family member in town. All those are use cases that people might use the car. Not on regular basis. But then you have the people that were using Uber and Lyft. Or their lease on the car just came up and they’re not really sure what they want to get. And they just start using it. And they just know that this becomes part of their lifestyle.

Ian Sumner 28:33
That’s phenomenal.

Anything else you kind of want to touch on before we go? That’s kind of

super thorough so far, I think so.

Aric Ohana 28:43
Yeah. I one thing I would add is kind of how like looking towards the future. This convergence of how does electrification of everything, and how does mobility electrification of mobility impact the built world And we see it as very synergetic. And we look at electric vehicles as batteries with wheels on them. So they’re, they have the ability to store energy, and they have ability to store and clean energy with solar in a building and store clean energy. But what that vehicle does, you know, if you wanted to install a stationary battery in a building, that was, you know, 93 kilowatts or whatever. It’s very costly, it’s almost as much as a car. And the service that we’re providing provides an offset for the cost of that vehicle, or that battery. But it still enables us to look at this battery as an asset for not only the building but potentially for the grid as well. So a lot of the projects that we’re focused on this year, have to do with either collecting data or doing pilots on vehicle to grid or vehicle to building technology and installing bidirectional chargers. That would enable us to take energy from the battery. Have a nice Some leaf in power, you know, a building. And you know, that’s super important, I think, you know, right now in California we produce more renewable energy than we can actually use. And either, you know, don’t use it or it gets shipped off to other states. The issue is we don’t have the ability to store it. And if we kind of look at, you know, electric vehicles that could be plugged into the grid, where they live in their apartment building or through services like ours, you now can quickly expand your storage capacity for energy. And we think that’s going to be a huge component of our business model of, you know, the general future. You know, not too far off. I’ve got to come to four times here. Hmm.

Ian Sumner 30:43
Wow, that’s, that’s a lot. A lot of really cool. Very different features.

Aric Ohana 30:49
Yeah, I mean, they all come to one future but a lot of stepping stones to get there for sure. A lot of different stepping stones. One very cool, very sustainable, very green, hopefully future. Hope we get there in time. That’s the goal.

Ian Sumner 31:06
Well, thank you so much for talking today and coming on the show.

Aric Ohana 31:07
Yeah, thank you for your questions!

Ian Sumner 31:15
Big Feet is a production of The Impact and produced by me, Ian Sumner. Music by Swaroop Pujari.

Check out our whole publication along with our other podcasts at readtheimpact.com – We’ll be back next week.

The post How We Can Ingrain Car Sharing Into American Culture. With Aric Ohana appeared first on The Impact.

How You Can Bank Sustainably Today. With Ravi Mikkelsen

Ian Sumner — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 17:44:48 +0000

Ravi Mikkelsen 0:00
If we get hung up on

all of these, you know, these smaller decisions, we’re not going to be able to move forward on these bigger ones. And that’s really what we need to focus on is moving. These much larger, systemic portions of our society are at primarily our energy and a much bigger like food production system as a whole. move that forward. You know, rather than our small individual purchases, it’s like do the best you can, but focus on this bigger change.

Ian Sumner 0:36
I like that. That’s it. I we haven’t really talked much about the bigger structural change of industry actually kind of with that, but it’s really important.

This week on big feet. We talked about one of these massive systemic industry wide changes, sustainable banking, and what role it plays in our communities.

Ravi Mikkelsen 1:01
My name is Ravi Mikkelsen. I’ve been in the climate fight this climate change space for almost 20 years now since freshman year of college. And I’ve done a ton of different things in that time. And mostly as an engineer, so materials engineering, undergrad, and started off thinking that I would build the technologies to move us off of fossil fuels to cleaner energy future. And then for the last five years, have been focused on developing technologies and business models around capital deployment so that the technologies that other people build can get deployed much more quickly. capital is the Archimedes lever, with climate change. And so I’ve been doing a few different things. I run a network primarily focused in the Bay Area. on climate tech startups are showcasing new technologies connecting them with capital and all the way from individual angels up through hedge fund and private equity government and philanthropic capital, because primatech clean tech as the sector used to be called requires different types of capital at different stages. And then my personal startup, which should be announced soon, is is focusing on deployment capital and drastically reducing the cost of that capital for

for for projects. Yeah. Awesome. And so, yeah,

Ian Sumner 2:55
I think that is a really good point that capitals, what do you call it, the capitals, the Archimedes lover in the climate fight? Can you break that down for me a little bit? Like, I mean, why is it more of a lever in like climate and clean tech and clean energy sort of type of stuff than it is in like, in like fossil fuel? Right? Well,

Ravi Mikkelsen 3:14
yeah. So there’s, I mean, you know, again, it’s, there’s so many different layers, and we can go into the weeds here. But so, you know, and that’s sort of on the project deployment side. And then there’s additional, it’s like, Okay, if you give funding on the innovation side, you know, you might be able to take somebody from having to, you know, work on, you know, some new clean energy technology on nights and weekends to full time and then you don’t you it’s hard to model out innovation. You just don’t know when it’s going to come when that result is going to be where we jump from, you know, 10 to 20% efficiency on solar cells when drilling technology for geothermal. Melissa’s going to, you know, reach this point where it becomes economical. So there’s all these different things and then there’s scaling those technologies up on the fossil fuel side, because it’s a more mature industry, because the scale is so much bigger. The cost of capital there is much lower. Also, because their tax and other subsidies from the government are also 100 plus years old, that they’re basically just the permanently baked into the system, versus the subsidies on the renewable energy side have been, you know, okay, here’s five years, here’s two years, here’s three years, here’s seven years, here’s five years, and that variability causes uncertainty within the market, which leads to higher financing costs. If you can only model out a few years, yourself. Okay, well, here’s the risk if and you look at the, you know, the EIA modeling, and basically being fossil fuels just has this sort of continuous line versus every, you know, every model that the AI does, it goes up and then they say, okay, in, you know, 20 1620, the ITC stops, and so then it becomes flat or decreases. Oh, and now 2020, okay, it goes up and it stops going to and it goes up, stops it, like, all of these little jumps, that they sort of assume, you know, flattened or decrease growth. When those subs he stops and that’s what sort of the market See, and you get that risk sort of post ending of those tax credits because they’ve been so pivotal to the economics of these projects, God and and without that without the certainty and you need some sort of, you know,

the truth in pricing of what something is going to cost or be worth to, you know, adequately model that out, then you say, okay, with our risk adjusted return, we want we you know, we’ll give you a loan at 2% 3% 5%, whatever it is. And now Yeah, you can come back from that. So with fossil fuels, now these, you know, 50 year, plants and pipelines and mines, etc. They’ve had very low cost of capital, but what we’re seeing is as we’re transitioning now, solar and wind have reached a scale globally that it’s the cheapest form of new energy on the planet. And utilities and independent power producers are putting these in just because it’s the cheapest option. It’s the better option. There we go. And so it’s reached a manufacturing and deployment scale where the cost of capital there has, you know, is starting to reach parity in some places, maybe not. But what you’re what we’re seeing, even if it’s not a parody, that the cost of Yeah, there’s the risk cost for fossil fuel plants like coal, all these big banks are saying, we’re not going to fund coal anymore. We’re not going to fund you know, oil drilling in the Arctic desert. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, really, those are like Penny ante steaks, this is not they’re not really coming in yet. Like, okay, all fossil fuels. There’s still a lot of money flowing in. Yeah. If you look at the rainforest Action Network for this last year, you know, for the last two Three years prior if something like $600 billion dollars was

was funded by the big, you know, the big four banks, which is Chase, BoA, Wells Fargo, and City Bank. And now, you know, Chase alone did 65 billion for last year in sort of the extreme fossil fuels which is in this Rainforest Action Network network report. Yeah. And so it’s called banking on climate change and everyone should look at that.

Ian Sumner 8:36
definitely was a peak and I guess it’s it’s tough because it’s it’s I mean, fossil fuel energy. Like you kind of pointed out before we started talking is really deeply ingrained in our daily life. Right. Right. You were you were telling me that you know, before the interview to consider like this the psychology psychology and or, or sec Yeah, psychology. And financial and logistics behind, like, what would it actually take to remove that? And it because it it really is pervasive, it really is everywhere in our lives,

Ravi Mikkelsen 9:10
you know, and focusing on the personal action. So all that previous talk was about these, you know, big projects and large amounts of capital. And I like to focus on what each individual can do. And so I in one of my monthly newsletters in this essay I wrote last fall, and it was about sort of the five biggest steps a person can take, but basically, it’s vote, you know, move your money out of move your move your money out of, you know, basically fossil fuel, you know, funding industries, banks, insurance and investment. It’s, you know, so, you know, to get energy from the sun or other renewable energy sources electrify your home and electrify your transportation, or decarbonize it by biking and walking. So it’s those are the big five things that that we each can do. You know, then if I was going to add a sixth one, I would say, you know, eat more plants. Yeah, um, you know, you don’t have to go 100% vegetarian or vegan, but if you just eat more plants, and slightly less meat, that’s a great thing. Yeah. You know, I’m personally vegetarian, but that’s not where I focus, you know, my education and activism on.

Ian Sumner 10:40
Yeah. And so I also wanted to like, talking about so you do so with climate link? You do a lot of what you call it. community building activism, what sort of space would you describe that in?

Ravi Mikkelsen 10:56
Yeah, I am. I’d say it’s more community based. In education and activism, with climate link, I mean, it’s a it’s a meetup and a network. And we, you know, it’s a lot of welcoming and introduction. So there are folks like myself, who’ve been it for a very long time sworn have there a touch light, who’s, you know, built products and has been working on this for a while, but then there are people who come from other tech companies that are, you know, consumer focused and like, I’ve been working on ads or social media or photography and all these other things, and I want to do something to directly, you know, have a positive impact on the planet on our environment. What can I do? And so they’ll come to one of our meetups and they’ll hear a talk on, you know, software for grid controls or creating robots that can, you know, help reduce pests without chemicals. agricultural fields are controlled water, so we’re not wasting water. Yeah.

Ian Sumner 12:04
So that being sort of your goal, I mean, so how would you, I guess, how do you describe the importance of community in fighting climate change and transitioning off of fossil fuels? Like, well, like, what role does that play? In this?

Ravi Mikkelsen 12:25
Yeah, there’s a few.

There’s a few ways.

One, like we live in communities, and we need to support each other. And this is not about saving penguins, but about, you know, saving us, it’s the habitability of our planet. And there will be bands that are always you know, temporary and good and all this. But as our climate zones shift, we’re gonna you know, people are going to be disproportionately affected will have migration will have great conflict. So it’s about, you know, preserving our way of life on this planet and the livability of this planet for us. And so we need to remember that and we need to, you know, help each other out in our families out. And so there’s that aspect of it, it is, you know, the community is like this local and global community that we need to take care of. And the other is about, you know, education and sort of social proof things like, okay, they’ve shown that if, if there’s one solar system, you know, once the first solar system goes into a neighborhood, then that is likely to, you know, be copied sort of within, you know, a couple of times over within like a half mile radius, people see it, it becomes normalized. Yeah.

Ian Sumner 13:56
So they’re like, they get a Tesla and everyone is curious about it and trying it out and test driving and everything right. Same thing was told, yeah, that’s interesting. And I guess the same thing with solar panels.

Ravi Mikkelsen 13:59
Same with the, you know, so like when I got a diesel vehicle in college and started, you know, putting biodiesel in it and talking to people about it, um, I constantly heard, it’s like, you know, I never saw diesel vehicles on the road, but now I see them everywhere. And it’s like, when I got a Nissan LEAF, the first one in 2011. You know, it’s like, v one. You’re like, Oh, now I see them everywhere. And that’s, oh,

Ian Sumner 14:35
here’s this EV and you really do see those ones? They’re very distinctive on the road. Yeah,

Ravi Mikkelsen 14:40
exactly. But it’s, you know, once it enters our consciousness, then we can start seeing it more that we recognize it. And, and so there’s that part of it, and then, you know, educating each other helping each other out this collective action. So there’s a You know, there’s a movement called stop the money pipeline. And it’s about getting people to move their money out of, you know, Chase Bank. And we want to, yeah, like Tesla has done, they’ve all accelerated, you know, their own development of ease. And so there is this movement to shift capital out of the big banks, you know, we move our deposits out of the big banks, you know, and we focus on deploying that capital towards these renewable energy projects. And if you can’t tell this is what I’m working on. And, you know, so we will be, you know, giving a place for people to move their deposits to hopefully soon. And once that happens, it’s like, we get enough of that capital moved out. We’ll get these big banks to you know, reach that end state which we will Which is then to say, okay, we’re not going to find any fossil fuels anymore. We’re going to, you know, only focus on this transition. You know, metallurgical coal is going to be very difficult process eat, there’s a lot of challenges, electric vehicles, you know, easy rooftop solar easy, but there’s a lot of difficult things in there too. And we have to figure that out. And we’re doing that as we go. Yeah. And we have to take again, community, like, there are still, you know, millions of people that work in the fossil fuel industry and around the world. There are people that go into mines, and, you know, they dig up cool. And that’s how they take care of their family. And that’s how, you know, we’ve gotten to where we are, is the progress that has been made has been on the fossil fuel economy, and we need to take care of the people that still work in that industry and get them to transition. As you know, oil has declined And, you know, people have been worked on oil rigs and drilling have lost their jobs. Well, geothermal has, you know, risen in its potential. And so they’re, you know, geothermal companies are hiring oil workers, offshore wind companies, and the same people who built an installed offshore oil platforms are going to be the same people who are the experts, I’m going to lead on offshore wind platform development.

And so this, you know, let’s bring them in.

Ian Sumner 17:40
Yeah. And I guess so you see the beginning of this transition. It starts with, I guess, people moving their capital choosing and pressuring banks and financial institutions to not

make these investments, In the fossil fuel industry.

Ravi Mikkelsen 18:02
exactly, and there will be so on the banking side on the insurance side on the investing side. So the in 2006, the UN launched the principles for responsible investing. Since then, you know, it’s essentially gone from maybe a few hundred million or billion at that time to a $50 trillion asset under management industry globally. And this past year, they launched the principles for Responsible banking. And so now banks, and there were, you know, 131 signatories of these global banks representing roughly one third of the total assets, which I believe was $47 trillion represented. And, you know, it’s all about ESG environmental, social and governance how to be more transparent How do we you know, so some of those banks are now including a sort of climate or carbon price in their loans. Like, we’re talking, okay, very slow ramp up, but like this is happening. And there are laggards and they’re going to lose out. But so they’re, you know, so on the banking side, and we’re also going to see more competitors there, you know, if you work in climate tech, but you own you know, an s&p index, you know, shares in an s&p index fund, you are, you know, owning and funding fossil fuels there. And so, we need to solve that.

Ian Sumner 19:44
So if I like don’t want my money going to fossil fuels, right, I, you know, yeah, a little bit of money in the bank, right. I’m not doing any big huge stock investments or anything, and especially not now but um, Like, if if I don’t want any sort of piece of my money going towards these things, what can I do right now to prevent that?

Ravi Mikkelsen 20:09
So like the, what’s available right now is primarily your local banks and credit unions, which fund things within the local community. That’s where, you know, community comes in once again. So if you go to one of these local community banks or credit unions, your money will likely not go to fossil fuels other than help perhaps, you know, providing a loan for somebody to buy a car, which is likely to be an internal combustion engine vehicle right now.

Ian Sumner 20:42
But at least if they’re buying a new car, hopefully more efficient than they used to have. Exactly. Or maybe it’s actually an electric car suit. Okay. Okay, good.

Ravi Mikkelsen 20:49
Yeah. So there’s so there’s that local credit unions,

Ian Sumner 20:53
and banks, okay. There’s a

Ravi Mikkelsen 20:55
couple of

you know, all Neo bank or alternative non banking startups? I mean, they’re specifically the Clean Energy credit union based out of Boulder. And,

you know, so our startup,

you know, will hopefully be providing a solution here. And we’re going to, you know, we’re going to need several solutions here. And the thing is, it’s like, it’s not easy yet. Yeah. And that’s, you know, that’s what we want to do is make it easy for people. Yeah. But, so right now, I’d say, you know, go to your local bank or credit union, and also, you know, follow along. And hopefully, we’ll be provided, you know, like, drop me a note. Sign up, and we’ll let you know when we can, you know, provide you with a fossil fossil fuel free banking solution.

Ian Sumner 21:57
Yeah, once you get that up and running, I think we Great to have you on to get more into the weeds with thinking Sure thing.

Ravi Mikkelsen 22:03
Yeah, we’ll do it. We’ll do a follow up.

Ian Sumner 22:05
Yeah. Where are we right now? And what do we need to see as far as community action? And and to get from where we are now to where we want to be, which is I guess Climate Neutral, right and not having a climate crisis.

Ravi Mikkelsen 22:20
Yeah, or regenerative? Like, yeah. Instead of just neutral, let’s let’s make it cyclical, whatever. Make us yeah, I mean, so let’s, you know, make it as one I heard one person say that, you know, the, the health of the planet and their vulnerability, it’s like, gets better by our presence here on the planet. And, and what we need, you really it comes down to in the US probably, you know, I can said sort of these these top five choices, the top five personal actions that people can take that will lead to systemic change. And that’s what we need the personal actions of refusing, you know, plastic or something like that or a straw, while grade is not going to do a ton, it’s not going to do a lot. But if, you know, we make sure that everyone gets out and votes, and not only that we understand the issues and we vote for, you know, local, state and federal represent, you know, our leadership that continue to move us in that direction. Yeah, right now, like with this recovery bill, that’s that’s gone through with the money that the federal government is going to be spending with the state governments that are going to be spending, let’s make sure let’s speak with our leadership to make sure that that money goes towards, you know, projects that move us in this, you know, future direction, we want these technologies that you are beneficial to our future? And are not just propping up the past. Hmm.

Ian Sumner 24:06
Yeah, so I guess I guess the the the root of it kind of right is to get people to start making these calculations and just to start thinking about their actions and their impact of that. And I mean, just bringing it back to where we were kind of earlier as well, like you were saying, you know, one person gets solar on their roof, and, or someone gets a Tesla, and all the neighbors and everyone else, you know, in their network kind of sees and looks over at that, and it starts to kind of spread so by, I guess, taking that a step further, right. It’s, you know, starting to do these calculations and starting to ride to work instead of this are starting to bike and drive like that. Just our actions and being involved in our community can lead to compound that and make and inspire more people to do it right is kind of I guess what you’re getting at that right? Would you say?

Ravi Mikkelsen 24:56
Exactly, and, you know, some of these complicated calculations are complex, and I don’t expect everyone to, you know, become energy or financial experts. But if you understand the crux and then you come to resources, you know, like, like me, like my startup like your startup we’re building. Yeah, the trusted advisors for people. And we say, Okay, here’s how, you know, here’s how you walk through this calculation. Here’s here are the things to know. And, you know, we can meet people where they are, rather than say, Oh, you should do as I did, because I’m holier than now. But we say, like, what are your goals? It’s like, okay, maybe I can bike, you know, one day a week. Oh, I have to drop my kid off at school. And then rather than go all the way home and get my bike and do this and take an extra hour, I’m going to just, you know, just drive the extra two minutes. You know, do that. a two minute drive from kids school to the parking lot next to the public transportation and then do that. And so it’s, let’s all do the best that we can, where we are with what we have. Yeah. And that’s, that’s, that’s what’s going to create this better future for all of us, not just a few of us, you know, being absolutely perfect. And then everybody else being stopped because we have this, you know, gateway, or if you’re not doing 100% you’re not allowed in. It’s like, well, it’s like, well, you know, let’s say somebody is, you know, they physically can’t bike to work, or walk. It’s like, Well, okay, let’s, what’s the best for them now, like, it took me you know, I was I was hit by a car in 2010. And it took me many years to be able to, like, physically and psychologically get back on a bicycle like And so I had to overcome those things to ride again. And still, I’m super cautious. So it’s it is I feel it is a privilege to be able to bike to work. And I want to protect that. And I I want to, you know, be cognizant of not everyone can now I want to help them to do the best that they can, where they are with what they have. Nice,

Ian Sumner 27:29
Ravi, thank you so much for coming on. And good luck on the startup, the rainforest Action Network report thinking on climate change. I’ll put that link in the description.

Ravi Mikkelsen 27:38
Yes, I’ll tell you that. And then also a link for our newsletter. Yes. Also bit.ly/climatelinknews. Pretty easy.

Ian Sumner 27:49
Awesome. Yeah. Well, both of those will be in the show notes. And thank you so much for talking.

Ravi Mikkelsen 27:55
Yeah. Oh, great. Now, and thank you so much for this opportunity. Everyone, do the best you can. Let’s make every day better and take care of yourself and your family right now. This is an important time.

Ian Sumner 28:14
Big Feet is the production of the impact and produced by me, Ian Sumner music is made by Swaroop Pujari. Check out our publication along with our other podcasts at readtheimpact.com. We’ll be back next week.

Interesting Links Mentioned during the show:

ClimateLink Newsletter: https://bit.ly/climatelinknews

ClimateLink Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/ClimateLink-NewYork/

Rainforest Action Network: https://www.ran.org/

The post How You Can Bank Sustainably Today. With Ravi Mikkelsen appeared first on The Impact.

Why Venture Capital Needs Morals – With Joel Solomon

Ian Sumner — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 21:20:48 +0000

Joel Soloman 0:00
Well, they’re there. Yeah, there’s a selfishness that that comes into play. You could say there’s an arrogance about it, which is we who are clever and got good education and had access to things and know how to, you know, build successful businesses and things like that have have forgotten the idea that if we don’t use that success, to take care of the stability of the entire society, that the results are not pretty. And so we’re going to we’re going to live through pretty serious period of that right now. Yeah, right now is a really great time for those of us that have benefited from big runs in the stock market. But whatever we did, you know, whatever we did, and we accumulated wealth and, and the ability to make choices. We’re the ones with the biggest obligation wherever we think we go when we breathe out. last breath, we better be ready for some scrutiny.

Ian Sumner 1:09
This week on big feet, we’re talking about power, purpose and capitalism and how to use these levers to create a more sustainable community country enrolled to help me out with that, Phil Solomon.

Hey, everyone, just a quick audience sidebar before we get into everything. This interview was recorded back in late March 2020. So any topics or ideas that are covered in it, like in the intro, for example, are prophetic, not reactionary. I know Joel would have a lot more to say specifically on what America is seeing now in June compared to just a few months ago. Anyway, onward.

Joel Soloman 1:53
I’m Joel Solomon. I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I’m from Chattanooga, Tennessee, originally My life’s work became about how the powerful forces of business, money and finance could actually work for a better world and be conscious of its full cycle. So how does money affect the world? By my actions through my actions? I’ve written a book called The Clean money revolution, reinventing power, purpose and capitalism, that addresses some of the history of this kind of thinking, my personal journey, and lots of stories about entrepreneurs, organizations and people that have been part of bringing these questions to the forefront. And today, I’m co founder of an impact venture fund. We like to call it mission venture capital, and its name is renewal funds. We are now in our fourth fund. That means we go out and raise money from a with individuals, organizations, charitable foundations, wealth managers, government entities sometimes, and we invest that money into organic foods, non toxic households, and clean technologies in Canada and the United States. And we have several hundred investors around the world. We love what we do. And there’s a portfolio of companies on renewable funds.com. And you can look that up. And I hope you’ll take a look at my book, and I’m excited to talk to you That

Ian Sumner 3:37
sounds great. Um, I guess just to dive right into those three pillars that you have in your book of power, purpose and capitalism, how have you found that sort of like, what does this mean to you?

Joel Soloman 3:50
Well, I, for me, what that meant is power and who has it makes a huge influence on the world and There’s gigantic power, there’s human power, there are all kinds of different levels of power. It’s important that we assess what our power or influence is on the world around us. And we attempt to be conscious and make sure that it’s used for things that we believe in care about, and particularly for the well being of the long term future. purpose is, of course, that part about that we care. And we care about what we will look back on from our deathbed, we we care about future generations and our role in supporting a world that can be awesome for them. And we care about values we, we want to treat people well, we want to treat the rest of creation well, and we want to be good people basically. So that causes us to figure out what our purpose in life is and how to align our life with it the best that we can and then capitalism The system we live in. Today, around the world, it’s really hard to find anything other than that capitalism effectively refers to the exchange of goods and services. We are all consumers or exchanges of goods and services. Many of us, we work for companies that do that, or we create companies that do that. And it’s just part of the soup that we live in, the better that we understand it, how to influence it, and how to participate well in it, the more that we accomplish some of those goals that I mentioned and other goals that we may have as individuals.

Ian Sumner 5:37
And so I guess, part of what you’re doing the approach you’re taking in the capitalism sentence, right? Is you’re using, like, are you? How would you say you’re approaching? I mean, are you changing capitalism and the way it works? Are you kind of hijacking it for the greater good? Like how would you kind of describe it Your approach to that.

Joel Soloman 6:02
Okay, so yes, hijacking it for the greater good would be the starting place. It turns out that we do have a lot of influence over the money, at least that that we touch, or that comes through us. And we get to choose where to work. And we get to choose a lot of things. Those of us that are fortunate, those of us that can I just want to acknowledge at the beginning of the conversation, there are billions of people living on a very tiny amount of money, and they live at the will of our choices also. Hopefully, someday that will be a more level playing field. But it’s our job to understand where we that we live in a world like this where there’s an exchange of goods and services that goes on constantly all around us. 24 seven, we make choices. We decide where what who to bank with, how to invest money, if we have some savings, or we happen to made money and we have higher, higher amounts of wealth, and we make consumer choices and eat and we make all kinds of choices every day all day. My argument is, the more conscious we are about that, the better quality those choices will be. And if you combine that times millions of people, we can have a big impact on what the future looks like.

Ian Sumner 7:25
So I guess it’s kind of getting into the argument of like, vote with your dollars, right. That’s right. Yeah. So okay, so and I’ve, I’ve heard that argument sort of for a long time. And I mean, I’m not trying to be defeatist, but I mean, does it does it work?

Joel Soloman 7:42
We have seen so many improvements in the world, based on this kind of attention and intention. We, we as we discovered, that our choices affect the air we breathe the water we drink. The level of toxicities around us, many other people’s lives, etc. Over time, as we got more organized as civilizations, we started to make rules that govern the commons, we start to set rules about what is considered acceptable of how we treat the workplace and workers, how we deal with agricultural land, how we who gets what pieces of what we have taxation systems, we, we have a whole set of things that government decides we have a huge set of things that the private sector often does decide and influence. And then we as individuals are indeed making choices pretty much all day long every day. And we’re influencing our family and friends and the systems that we touch. So you could look at the environmental movement. You can look at the justice movement, peace movements, society. has evolved over time and citizen action and taking responsibility for certain things. We could get more specific about this, but it has driven a lot of these changes. Hmm.

Ian Sumner 9:11
I like that view on it. I mean, it means that we actually, as an individual can have an impact, obviously, those impacts when we influence other people, and we’re compounding and making it larger. Right? That’s right. How do I know I guess then, I mean, how do I know if it’s working? Right? So we’re talking about these big, complex systems. And I mean, I don’t know what my bank is doing with my money. They could be investing my savings into fossil fuels for all I know, I and I would never know, right? That’s right. That’s right.

Joel Soloman 9:50
I’m 65 years old when I was born, there were less than 3 billion people on this planet. We’re about to hit 8 billion. There’s no state There’s no end of that growth in sight. I, back in the 50s, when I started paying attention to anything. And then in the early 60s, they used to have things like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. And you somehow believed that that told you that you were doing something better. These days, we have all kinds of organizations that do very serious science about determining better and worse in society. So you can disagree with these you can choose your own systems. I was born and diagnosed pretty early in life with a genetic kidney disease that my father’s lineage carried. And it basically was a deterioration of the kidney over time until it stopped functioning only in the kind of late part of his life and middle part of mine. did it become possible to actually receive a kidney from Someone else. So I, but but I didn’t that I went further in the story there just say the kidney transplant I finally had a transplant my friend gave me her kidney 12 years ago, everything went fantastically for both of us and we so far live happily ever after. But But I want to make the point that when I was faced with, okay, you could die from kidney failure and it could happen soon or you could live long, and there’s nothing you can really do about it. I resisted that diagnosis, because I started reading the labels on the packages of what I was buying to eat. And then what I was cleaning the house with, and then what I was putting in the air with my car and you go on from there, you start to get interested and you become curious about where things come from what influence they have on people in places. And so I look I’ve tried to find out what what is the kidney do well, it’s Its job is to clean the blood. Okay, I take a label from grocery store package, I look at it, I can’t understand what any of those chemicals are, I can see a couple of simpler ingredients that I sort of understand. And I start questioning what, what am I putting in my body? And why is it even okay for people to feed me this much less? You know, why am I making the choice? without really having knowledge about it? Am I damaging my kidneys. And so I concluded that what whatever information I could put together, that it probably made a difference, what went in my body, so I should make better choices that led me to be an organic foods investor, shopper, etc. And you kind of go from there and look at every part of the world that affects you and start to care. If this is damaging me, then how do I find a better way to do it? So that was the beginning.

Ian Sumner 12:52
Gotcha. And that is that I mean, it seems like the I mean, not only logical place to start, but the Guess the place where I mean I kind of where I’m starting and I guess where everyone is hopefully starting to are beginning to consider these things, but it just seems like I guess I guess the main, the big takeaway early is just start caring.

Joel Soloman 13:19
I think so. I think that caring is really the starting place. And religions have the job historically in spiritual practices, and families and schools and society. But let’s just start with the spiritual practices of giving us a sensibility about what life is, what it’s for, what what is being a good person mean. And most religions have some kind of afterlife that they talk about. You can interpret it how you want, but the message is Do unto others as you would have others do unto you or other forms of that kind of thinking in life. And though I saw many examples that convinced Meaning that we had lost that it started to give me some grounding to, to feel more empowered. And to think well, whether anybody else thinks this or not. I’ve got this situation I have choices to make, why don’t I make these choices rather than these other ones? Because maybe I’ll live longer. And maybe I’ll be happier, and I’ll feel better. So I think we all have that responsibility, and really an obligation to care about the unseen impacts of everything we do everything we purchase, etc.

Ian Sumner 14:36
I first off, I really like that. I think it’s a great approach. Um, I was watching one of your TED Talk speeches earlier and you use the term our name is on our money. Yes. Which I think is kind of getting into there as well. Right? That’s right. What’s the responsibility here?

Joel Soloman 14:56
Yeah. Well, once money comes to me once I’ve got one I hand on it, so to speak, whether that’s a symbol on a piece of paper or an actual piece of currency or a coin or something. I do like I like to think this way. And I encourage others to think this way, which is my name is on that money. And I would say that crypto and Bitcoin world and new technologies will not that long from now be able to track everywhere that that $1 bill circulated before. How did it get created originally? Was it digging something up out of the ground and selling it for more than it cost you to do it? Was it employing people and selling what they created for something more than it cost you to pay them and etc from there. So if you can simplify the economic system down to we purchase goods and services that represent extraction and concentration of the labor of people Or harvesting from the planet from the earth, something and then figuring out how to make a margin on it, and how to employ people to do it and how to do it more efficiently, efficiently, etc. And then someday we have now trillion dollar valuation companies. Back to the simple part of that. I take responsibility, that the way that I earn my money, the way that I hold money, like what where to put it in the bank or in a retirement fund or things like that. And then where I distribute my my dispose of my money or use it is actually something that fairly soon will be trackable, from birth to death, and our great grandchildren will know the choices that we made. And we might start to care about that. If we realize that there actually is a you know, a moral reason But moral and ethical responsibility that someday we may have to answer to, depending on your belief systems.

Ian Sumner 17:06
So you’re you take responsibility for your putting your visual or your theoretical, you’re putting your name on your money, right? You’re giving yourself the idea. And putting yourself in that sort of mindset of how you spend it really does matter. And,

Joel Soloman 17:21
yes. How imperfectly. Oh, sorry,

Ian Sumner 17:25
no, you’re good.

Joel Soloman 17:27
Well, it’s an it’s an imperfect process. But I still have an obligation to take responsibility for the choices.

Ian Sumner 17:35
Yeah, so how how, how far does that go?

Joel Soloman 17:41
Well, I tried to take it pretty far, but not but that’s not only am I a bit fanatical about it, and it’s part of my life work now. To do so managing money for other people and promising them that we’re going to do better with it then is how it’s going to be handled elsewhere. Not bad. And get a good financial return, we’re going to make positive choices that are less damaging, less, less harmful, and more generative. And we’re going to make you money. Well, we’ll find out whether all of that is really true and can hold up over the long term. Maybe that works today, because the powerful tend to have the rules written for them. And so you get a little extra advantage because of that, which leads to a responsibility for why you should only ignore politics at your peril. And you should understand how power works as well. But anyhow, back to the point. So this is a very high bar to put on oneself. And I feel like I make myself somewhat of a sacrificial lamb. I mean, you can pick apart, I can look around my house right now. And you can show me all kinds of things that have contradiction in them. Well, we don’t live in a world that makes it very easy for us. But what I think because it’s such a complex world today Is that we have a relative, we have a responsibility for the relative impacts of what we do. If you can figure out perfect then do that and write a book about it and talk on podcasts about it and help us out. And I think that we’re in a period where those of us committed to this. There’s a whole movement around these things. I will repeat again, they’re imperfect, yet we can do better. And we can do then better than that once we markets get built around this now, the organic food market when I got involved was a flaky, obscure unknown thing. You had to go to weird health food stores, you couldn’t understand the packaging or what the products work. Yeah, today. It is a major industry. And it’s still not 10% of the North American food dollar to get clean food. Huh. 90% of the food is still chemical laden and has all kinds of bad things in its cycle from from seed to stomach.

Ian Sumner 19:57
Yeah, I guess that’s where it starts. Just And I mean, I guess that’s the way to continue, right? If we just keep on doing the best we can, we’ll eventually get to a point where doing we’re, we’re doing net positive. And then we’ll upon going from there, right?

Joel Soloman 20:13
And the lucky ones of us do this as a life process anyway. Yeah. How, you know, you can, you can talk about dating, you can talk about parenting, you can talk about what you read, what you choose to do, how you spend your time, how you affect all kinds of things in society. And I’ve maintained this should be, this should be the moral and ethical teaching of spiritual traditions at the core, is to watch out for that. And that gives us a baseline to make choices with.

Ian Sumner 20:46
So as far as as a starting to make choices, and and and looking into a little bit more and just be more conscious of what I’m what I’m consuming, I think so. If you’re not Paying attention to politics or industry what you’re consuming, right then I guess you’re gonna get taken advantage of kind of right?

Joel Soloman 21:13
If you don’t care about electoral politics, care about the politics of what it’s what your community is like to live in. The the another politics that’s gotten very weird is the divide between how much a few of us can own and pay less taxes and get all the services. And how much can the masses earn less, end up paying higher taxes, ultimately, a lot of a lot of that is the reality of it, and get the worst and most damaging products because they’re the cheapest. And so this is just you, you either have a moral compass about these things, or you and your moral compass. is either aligned with, I’m looking out for the long term. I know many people that take an approach, which is I’m looking out for me, and I’m looking out for my immediate family. Okay, well, fair enough. If you believe that looking out for your immediate family, and your next generations is going to turn out okay, if you ignore all these other big picture things you know, you can’t there’s only so many ways to build walls and, you know, fight off everybody else that’s being bit taken advantage of so that you can have all the benefits. Yeah. So my politics are clear.

Ian Sumner 22:42
Part of part of part of caring is taking taking a look at the longer term, right. Capitalism. I don’t know it feels inherently sort of very short term and short sighted. Do you think? I mean, do you kind of agree with that Do Yeah,

Joel Soloman 23:01
I do I but here’s here’s my answer to that we should have progressive taxation. Those of us that are able to make more money should pay higher rate of taxes. Those of us that are laboring away in jobs that don’t pay very well should be given all kinds of social safety net and services to, to keep their lives together. Because we’re going to find out right now during this COVID crisis, what it means to have a massive amount of people with insecure employment on low wages, and have barely be barely able to hold on to their homes. And so now the government, we have united states government is about to pass close to $2 trillion of bailout, to spread money around to be sure and calm things so that chaos doesn’t ensue. It didn’t need to get that way. Yeah.

Ian Sumner 24:01
But I guess there was a there was a hope that that just wouldn’t or. But, I mean,

Joel Soloman 24:08
Yeah, there’s a selfishness that that comes into play. You could say there’s an arrogance about it, which is we who are clever and got good education’s and had access to things and know how to, you know, build successful businesses and things like that have have forgotten the idea that if we don’t use that success, to take care of the stability of the entire society, that the results are not pretty. And so we’re going to we’re going to live through pretty serious period of that right now.

Ian Sumner 24:45
Yeah. Heading back to sustainability a little bit as well. Do you think that we’re able to achieve sustainability through capitalism?

Joel Soloman 24:54
So it’s not capitalism, per se, in my mind is capitalism versus socialism? versus communism. Those are way too simplistic. I have concerns about dictatorships about fascism, about the those who have the most advantages, losing ourselves into greed and self indulgence and believing that we are actually smarter and better than everybody else. And that we deserve to have infinite wealth for ourselves. I think that’s a bad idea. And I think that people who are successful need to remember that. If you’ve got we got 8 billion people Pretty soon, seven and a half billion of those people are not going to tolerate a few of us having everything. Yeah. It’s just not just not, it’s not workable. Nor let’s let’s just throw climbers in here for a moment. And all of the environmental challenges facing us. species extinction, ocean warming, I mean, it goes on and on now, and, and science and all kinds of intelligent people are waving the flag of warning saying you got to get your act together people. And you got to do it. Now we’re almost out of time. I mean, they’re saying climate collapse, you know, is now in numbers. I hate to even repeat. It’s so short. But we’re going to see from this mobilization, so we’re throwing $2 trillion from American US government into subsidies to try to keep the system afloat. Well, where’s that $2 trillion to solve climate? climates is just is, is this serious? Is anything going on right now?

Ian Sumner 26:48
Yeah. So I guess the question is, I mean, can we do it without government? Well,

Joel Soloman 26:58
can we do without government I don’t think so. I think I mean, government is a result of our consciousness focus choices, how we operate, you know, we have all kinds of things. So these are very simple terms when boiled down to single words or a couple of words. But no, we need a regulator of the commons. There are major there’s major money being made all day long every day on damaging climate. We can make super efficient cars we can, we could be heating, we don’t need to be using oil products to heat our buildings. We have renewable energy advancing quickly. We got all kinds of solutions. But there are economic political choices that are underway, which bias the system. And most people don’t most of us don’t even understand how the system truly works. Yeah. How does legislation how And who influences it who gets to choose? So this is where you know, it’s an informed citizenry is dangerous to concentrated power.

I’ll just leave it at that.

Ian Sumner 28:15
So it comes back to power, purpose and capitalism. Well. Yeah, those are three good How to come full circle then.

Joel Soloman 28:22
Right. Fair enough.

Ian Sumner 28:24
Yeah. Um, so I guess just wrapping up what is sort of like your, your biggest takeaway that I should start doing now, and hopefully other listening should start doing now.

Joel Soloman 28:39
I think the biggest takeaway of the kind of day to day is really be conscious and make choices and keep making better choices and do the work to understand what that means for you. The bigger picture part of it is, we’re all going to face the deathbed if we’re lucky. I mean, we could die suddenly or something else could happen, but we’re going to Die. That’s one thing, pretty guaranteed still, we’re gonna die. And our job being alive has always been that we are ancestors of what’s coming. We’re ancestors of future generations. It’s our job to look after them.

Leave the best world that we can.

I’ve put my I’ve put my life into a zone, where I’m around the kinds of people who do think about those things. And I only shop it the kinds of places that I do trust, I try to bank with credit unions that actually have values and do something with their money in the local community. And don’t just ship it all over the world to the next, you know, quickest buck and and once you reach a certain point that you’re going to have to judge and that I have to judge for myself of a certain amount of athletes. I have that now. And I don’t need to keep piling up more and more money, unless I’m going to do something useful with it. And I mean for the world, yes, first family, personal family community, but communities the world. And if right now is a really great time for those of us that have they benefited from big runs in the stock market, but whatever we did, you know, whatever we did, and we accumulated wealth and, and the ability to make choices. We’re the ones with the biggest obligation. We’re gonna, you know, wherever we think we go, when we breathe our last breath, we better be ready for some scrutiny.

Ian Sumner 30:48
I mean, that seems like as good a place to end as any. Thank you so much for coming on. You’re welcome.

Joel Soloman 30:53
I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for indulging me the time. It’s been fantastic.

Ian Sumner 31:04
Big fee is a production of the impact and produced by me Ian Sumner music genre. Check out our whole publication along with our other podcasts at read the impact.com. We’ll be back next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Why Venture Capital Needs Morals – With Joel Solomon appeared first on The Impact.

Your A/C Probably Sucks. With Liam Berryman

Ian Sumner — Mon, 04 May 2020 06:11:48 +0000

Liam Berryman 0:01
The global warming potential. So the impact to the climate of the refrigerants that are used to power a standard air conditioning or refrigeration system are at minimum thousands of times higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. When it fails when it leaks. This is not constant, right? This occurs only when there’s damage or break in the system. But the but it’s thousands of times more more detrimental on a volume basis.

Ian Sumner 0:28
Now we’ve covered a few different approaches to addressing the climate crisis here minimizing plastics and waste encouraging better behavior. And there’s no one magic bullet to the next essential problem. Solving the climate crisis is going to take many different solutions for hundreds of challenges. Now, we take a look at what role material science will play in solving the climate crisis spoiler, making those ACS run more efficiently and avoiding critical failures that leak harmful refrigerants this week on big feet, why? You’re Eric conditioner sucks and what it’s going to take to improve this hundred year old technology to help me out with that. Liam Berryman. First off, I mean, thank you so much for coming onto the show. So there’s a lot of different ways that material science is going to play in the climate crisis, air conditioning, just being one of the ones that you’re working on. Before we dive into that, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and the company that you’re building?

Liam Berryman 1:26
Sure. Happy to first of all, you know, very pleased to be on the show. I appreciate you guys having me on. So my name is Liam Berryman. By background, I’m a chemical engineer. But for the past approximately four years actually close to five at this point I’ve been building the company in Colombo and Colombo is a materials company. We focus on bringing the world’s first low cost highly scalable and environmentally compliant platform for applying nano structure to surfaces to a variety of different Products many of which you use in your daily life. So our first product line is in the cooling industry for air conditioning and refrigeration equipment, where we’re using this nano structure to solve problems like frost and ice and low temperature systems, corrosion and outdoor systems and water accumulation and mold for your standard air conditioner. And what this does is it increases energy efficiency and increases the longevity of how long this equipment can last in the field. One of the new product lines we’re working on is on more flexible substrates like nylon, which is something you should be hearing a little bit more about later this year. But the basics of us as a company is we develop the materials and we bring in strategic partners that bring manufacturing and distribution channels or existing products. We work together to develop a product that integrates in nano structure typically for the very first time. So we’re almost always a first mover in these product lines that we’re entering. And then we go to market with those particular partners Hmm.

Ian Sumner 2:59
So Diving back into the field of materials engineering, what would you say is the importance of material engineering in the climate crisis? So looking at the role you’re playing in New lumbo, how would you describe the approach you’re taking to attack climate change?

Liam Berryman 3:14
Yeah, that’s a that’s a really good question. So if you think about it, if there’s two big ways that materials can contribute to or change the products that are around us. So one is by enabling those products to do something they can’t currently do to bring bringing in a new capability or a higher level of performance that currently exists. And then the second reason is that it simply is what the product itself is made out of. So it’s after the product is is no longer being used. It’s what still exists in our environment, whether it’s recycled or we put into landfill or dissolved or or gasified or whatever other means we used to get rid of that. The materials are, what the product is I got what’s what it’s made out of that. And so there’s a really cool opportunity where if you get the material science, right, and you really make something, where the chemistry itself is what it is, the composition of it, is not detrimental to the environment, it you know, easily dissolves, or it’s easily recycled. Or it’s, you know, something that is very minimal in terms of impact the landfill, it’s something that, you know, unlike, for example, a lot of fluorinated chemistries, they were off into the environment and start becoming bioaccumulate Tory, so they become toxic plants and animals. You can create chemistries that don’t do things like that, and also improve the performance or bringing new capability to a product because it’s something that it hasn’t been possible before. Then you get kind of get to two for one is how Yeah. So I see that that is a big part of our role looking at the materials and things is it’s asking, you know, what’s, what is? What’s not possible today that we think we can do? And can we do it with materials that at the end of the day are going to be at least neutral if not making a very positive? move towards What’s the last time when this product is discarded or no longer use?

Ian Sumner 5:23
Okay, yeah, so it’s changing products. So they last longer, and are actually recyclable. And you know, and I know more and more companies are moving towards more sustainable products with those types of qualities. And you’re part of helping companies actually achieve that. Right.

Liam Berryman 5:41
Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s a big part of our goal. And alanda is, every product that we work on, we’re not only increasing the economic value of that product by bringing it a new capability that hasn’t had before, or a threshold of performance that it just simply hasn’t seen before. We’re also in some manner are increasing the environmental sustainability about products. And that’s through both indirect and direct means. And direct means directly, we actually contribute to a reduction, again, in the case of our first product line, a reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions that occur through preventing acute failure of heat exchangers in cooling devices, which cause very harmful refrigerants to leak into the atmosphere. So that’s one direct way we can contribute to reducing the amount of carbon equivalent emissions and then an indirect method but still very important is simply making the devices we use much more energy efficient, allows us to in the consumption and in the generation of pool or in cooling down air, or other fluids use less energy in that process. So for the equivalent amount of cooling using less energy, you’re interact indirectly going back to where that energy was produced, reducing the amount of emissions that are generated Yeah, um,

Ian Sumner 7:01
so I guess just going I know a lot of your guys’s work has been on h AC sort of H HVAC systems, which, depending on how we, where we are, where you live for climate change you might be using a lot of I know I, I lived in LA, all last year, I was using my AC a lot. And so I have an AC I mean, well, what’s wrong with it?

Liam Berryman 7:23
It’s a good question. In basic form, there’s not something that’s wrong with the system per se, right? It fills the function that you need as a consumer and it takes air from the outside and it cools it down to a certain temperature setpoint so that you can experience a more comfortable indoor climate. And that’s the basic function of an air conditioner. And then a refrigerator or freezer system is effectively the same product, the same system that just goes to a much lower setpoint. The challenge though, is that and this is what’s what’s pretty unknown to the, you know, the most consumers is that as you’re operating these systems components that that drive that operation during the process of cooling air actually have a lot of different surface challenges that occur, similar to things that I listed earlier. So things like the accumulation of water, this is what happens when you cooled down very humid air, you take water vapor, and it condenses into liquid water, very similar to what happens on the outside of a drinking glass of water that’s gotten too cold. That causes problems for your system decreases its energy efficiency, it causes the buildup of mold and other contaminants which are further further detrimental for the system. And then over time, you also have the deposition of contaminants in the system on these components that are operating to cool air, which further decreases efficiency and leads to these these problems like leaks that cause catastrophic failure of the system. And ultimately a huge amount of very high global warming potential refrigerant being leaked into the atmosphere. And so you know, all of that is is not something that’s it’s obviously advertised By the companies that are producing these systems, but they’re very real problems. And the big challenge is that the air conditioning system itself is actually a pretty darn mature technology, right? It’s been around for 100 plus years. And so the challenge is in a mature industry that’s very cost competitive, you have to find ways to increase performance or increase energy efficiency or longevity of the system. At a very favorable cost point, we think of this as the performance versus cost trade off. And so it’s actually pretty difficult to do that with a lot of the existing mechanical design differences that you can go after. So what we see our approach as is by bringing a material a nanostructured coating, if you will, to certain components in the system. We’re using low cost chemical inputs to create ultimately a difference in energy efficiency for the system.

Ian Sumner 9:56
So what’s the scare with these refrigerants. Like what type of stuff if me running a–

Ian Sumner 10:02
I don’t know it’s probably like a 20 year old maybe 10 year old probably pretty efficient because I was renting right in LA and it’s sitting out in the hot sun all day and I’m assuming the person that was there before me used it probably not a very efficient one I did because I’m I try to not using as much as possible but you know, you live in LA you can only do so much like what what type of stuff was I putting into the air by by using that air conditioner is it Yeah.

Ian Sumner 10:38
That harmful Yeah. What are we looking at?

Liam Berryman 10:40
Without going without going into the chemistry details because it you know, that would be a longer conversation. The basics to understand are that the the global warming potential, so the impact to the climate, of the refrigerants that are used to power a standard air conditioning or refrigeration system are at minimum thousands of times higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. Well now there’s much more carbon dioxide produced than on a on a volumetric basis and and and emitted into the atmosphere per year than the refrigerants that exist in the systems but it’s a non negligible number every every you know, unit if you just think about, you know, equivalent amounts of carbon dioxide versus the stuff that’s in your air conditioner. If you just admit one unit of each of those the same time, you’re actually getting thousands of times more impact from the stuff that’s coming out of your air conditioner. When it fails when it leaks. This is not constant right? And this occurs only when there’s a damage or break in the system. But but it’s thousands of times more more detrimental on a on a volumetric basis.

Ian Sumner 11:53
Okay, it seems like it’s a possibly pretty significant amount. And I don’t know about you, but I was never up on the road. of my apartment to see what the AC was looking like. And if it was in the right shape, I don’t know about the management if they were actually taking a peek on that. But the are a lot of these being run with some sort of damage in there that are releasing these chemicals were like it is a solid problem.

Liam Berryman 12:15
So it’s actually designed into a standard air conditioner that a given pretty significant quantity of the refrigerants will leak out

Ian Sumner 12:26
WOW, it’s designed in?

Liam Berryman 12:27
Yeah, it’s part of the design. It’s not it’s not it’s not supposed to happen, right? The idea is it for it to not happen. But the assumption is that just due to field conditions just due to you know, machines aren’t perfect. Basically, there will be some leakage of refrigerant so a standard air conditioner, even after it’s lost a pretty big amount of the refrigerant that was put into it. Initially, when the system was first created. It can still operate with a much lower amount of refrigerant. It’s not as efficient but it can still operate. Okay, so they’ve got more

Ian Sumner 12:58
than they need into it now. Some of its gonna yell probably. Okay.

Liam Berryman 13:02
Correct. And then like another factor is sometimes it’s not even the system itself that isn’t working well, it’s just that when routine maintenance is done, you know, like a contractor or someone is providing mechanical services. Sometimes there’ll be a, you know, a leak of refrigerant out that they don’t replace when they are just, they’re just adjusting the system. And that’s not necessarily anybody’s fault. That’s just, that’s just the kind of the way these systems work. And so that’s, that’s already there. If you’ve lost all of the refrigerant system, you do you have a catastrophic failure because you can’t operate a cooling system without that refrigerant. It’s just simply not possible. So your system actually shuts off and that’s when someone will pick up you know, a consumer will pick up the phone and and call, you know, their service company or their or their, their maintenance contract company, and say, you know, my air conditioner is not working, but most don’t have knowledge that that’s because of this particular problem. It’s, it’s to them, you know, it’s just not providing the service that they they want to see from your A standard air conditioner. Wow. But the question is, you know, the answer to your question is that this is the direction that that things are moving. I think we need them to move this direction more quickly. But like, you know, there was the Montreal Protocol. And then the Kigali amendment, the Montreal Protocol, which are agreements that many countries and the air conditioning industry actually have signed on to do going forward with, which account for designing new cooling systems that are able to run on refrigerants that are less environmentally detrimental than what the current state of the market is state of the art. It’s even round. Now. Those redesigns yes, even right now. So there’s basically this roadmap in the industry of, you know, by 2023. People need to be selling systems that are using a different refrigerant and what’s sold today, which means you need to design your system differently, because it’s there’s different thermodynamics. There’s different there’s different mechanics basically that need to go into how these cooling systems are designed and operated. If the working fluid, the refrigerant is a different chemistry, so we’re moving in the right direction. But it’s, you know, that’s just for new sales, that’s not going to account for the existing installed base on cooling devices. So you’re not going to see like an instant switch from an old refrigerant to a newer refrigerant. And you know this, that will happen over time. But it’s not a cure all. I’m not saying that there is anything that can be a cure all. But we we definitely need to be moving in the direction of better refrigerants. And then just devices that use less energy as they operate as quickly as possible because cooling is is one of the runaway issues that we see. With the climate challenge. It’s already a huge fraction of use. It’s continuing to grow based on demand from consumers and businesses. And as the planet gets warmer in different environments, pooling becomes the thing you need in order to continue making people and businesses operate. So it’s a it’s, it could be an exponential problem. That’s the fear that a lot of people have.

Ian Sumner 16:10
Gotcha. So you guys are trying to, I guess, mitigate that exponential problem by trying to eliminate it as a problem. It sounds like right by making except these don’t break down and don’t release these refrigerants into the air to begin with, right.

Liam Berryman 16:27
Yeah, but that’s, that’s correct. And we are, we are one solution amongst, you know, a number of different approaches. And ultimately, to really solve the cooling piece of the overall climate challenge is how I think of it. There will be multiple different solutions that will have to actually be implemented and work together. So there really isn’t a single cure all what we’re doing at NOAA has a huge impact and is great for the industry because it’s a solid performance versus cost trade off, which is hard to find elsewhere. But we are, you know, by no means the only solution or the only thing you should be implementing in a cooling system in order for us all to move towards a more sustainable future.

Ian Sumner 17:10
Gotcha. And there’s less damaging cooling for purchasing something that’s new on the market right now you were less toxic and cooling. If they’re sold better, at least in an older one hour later.

Liam Berryman 17:25
That is right. That is right. But there is still nobody on the market today, except for our company. So this is a little bit of the of our shameless plug for the day. There’s nobody on the market today that is offering a solution to the acute failure or heat pumps that I was talking about before, where you have corrosion leading to a significant leak, which means all the refrigerant escapes your system and your system shuts down. So that’s actually something I know is being discussed within California right now is how can that problem be solved?

Ian Sumner 17:58
Yeah, no, we should. be acceptable that that refrigerant is able to leak out into the air and damage the environment. Exactly

Liam Berryman 18:06
right. So it’s like it’s like you’re gonna if you transition from existing means to using key pumps, you’re gonna reduce the amount of energy that’s being used because he pumps are more efficient. But if you then leak all that refrigerant into the atmosphere because this system, you know, compared to a hot water heater or other other method for your house, because this system, you know, beliefs refrigerant in the atmosphere, you’re going to basically lose all the carbon dioxide on a net basis, you’re not going to actually gain anything in terms of defeating emissions. We’v e got to find a way to solve that problem

Liam Berryman 18:38
that’s that’s one of the reasons Exactly. That’s right. Because nobody has got a really good way of doing that

Ian Sumner 18:43
today. Wow. That’s That’s a lot of refrigerant seems pretty, pretty toxic 1000 times more than co2. I did not. I did not realize that is, is there anything I can be doing to you I mean, what can what can What Can anyone at home be doing to try to solve and stem this problem? Right? Is it just making sure that there’s proper maintenance on these? What can I be doing?

Liam Berryman 19:13
Yeah, that’s so proper maintenance is is certainly part of it. But I would say that for most consumers, and also for most businesses, I think that as, as there is more advanced equipment that’s rolled out, initially price points are going to be higher. That’ll that’ll almost almost definitely be something that needs to be dealt with. And historically, the cooling market has been very price sensitive. So it’s often for less efficient, lower cost equipment. Yeah. For upfront, upfront installation. I think we really need to have both consumers and businesses be OK with or figure out a way to deal with the fact that more advanced people equipment that’s ultimately better for the environment is simply more costly to produce upfront, even if it’s by an incremental amount that you save over the lifetime of that equipment. So one of the things that I’m really excited to see is the rise of a lot of kind of project finance mechanisms that are allowing people to implement, you know, more advanced or even do retrofits for more advanced more energy efficient equipment that they can finance with a third party, so they’re not putting their money up upfront. And then, you know, we’re getting more efficient equipment, the investors are getting paid back from some of that energy efficiency savings over time. And the consumer of the business up front is not, you know, having to outlay their own their own money to do it. So it’s kind of a win for everybody. Rather $1 battle. Exact market. That’s a form of it. Gotcha. Exactly. Yeah. And that’s that, you know, people have learned a lot from the solar from how solar has been finance and are now deploying that into Other areas. So I think the more that that could be adopted, and the more that that can be scaled up for really big cooling applications, like industrial power plants, and and down, or really small applications, like a residential home and maybe made applicable in all those scenarios, the faster we’re gonna get a solution to the cooling problem.

Ian Sumner 21:21
Gotcha. So, and I mean, so so for me right now, the biggest impact I can have as far as making sure my AC doesn’t suck is keeping an eye out for when new ones come on the market, making sure my current one stays properly maintenance. I think I guess just try not to use it as much as like unless it’s necessary, right?

Liam Berryman 21:42
Yeah. Yeah, that so all of those things. And then I’d also say, to, to the extent there is legislation that comes along that supports, you know, at your, at your local or at your state or even at a federal level that supports financing for green energy projects. or energy efficiency projects, or even just supports mandating, you know, improved or higher efficiency equipment, even if there’s no financing for it initially, I think, you know, we as individual, you know, voters and consumers should be should be supporting that. So showing support for that can be really helpful. You know, one example is that California is is already putting into policy transitioning to basically 100% heat pump adoption. And just for reference, a heat pump is basically an air conditioner, you can run in both directions, so you can use it to both heat and cool your house, depending on whether it’s the winter or the summer, and specifically electric heat pumps. So having these be 100% connected to the electrical grid, so that all eventually all new home sales in California or all new builds, will be 100% Electric will actually be no natural gas run into those residential homes. That at least the idea being some of the sorry, the idea Yeah, the idea being if you can if you can generate a bulk of your your electricity from, you know, green green production methods wind or solar, and then pipe it directly to those homes or put through wires directly directly to those homes and then you’ve got all electrical appliances through the entire home, then you don’t have to invest the infrastructure for natural gas and you’ve got a greener, you know, end to end production and consumption of energy. Ultimately, you know, in the beginning, there’s going to be a lot of those homes that are that are you know, connected to the grid, which is ultimately power plants that are producing that energy at first, but having you know, having a residential home that is 100% electrical versus any natural gas or other energy methods, it is the start to kind of pushing the market in that direction. So So California is and heat pumps are super, you know, you know, quite energetic Question on a relative basis that other kinds of appliances and other other means you can use in your home. Yeah, so that’s a, that’s a really good step forward. And those kinds of programs are what the market needs on the, you know, the supply side, I would say, are what, you know, air conditioner manufacturers, ie manufacturers need to see, they need to see that that demand exists for them to invest upfront in making more advanced equipment. So the more that you know, you can get a policy pole, it does actually create an impact on industries like these so we as individuals can can support the generation of that policy.

Ian Sumner 24:37
Nice. Okay. That’s I mean, that’s, that’s super informative. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on and explaining and making air conditioning exciting.

Liam Berryman 24:45
Sure. Thanks. Thanks very much for having me on the call. I look forward to being on again soon. Can’t wait to have you.

Ian Sumner 24:56
Big feet is a production of the impact and produced by me you center music check out our whole publication along with our other podcasts at read the impact.com. We’ll be back next week.

The post Your A/C Probably Sucks. With Liam Berryman appeared first on The Impact.

The True Carbon Cost Of What You Eat

Swarnav S Pujari — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 15:12:58 +0000

Swarnav S Pujari 00:04

Hey everyone, my name is Swarnav S Pujari. And welcome back to off the grid. We are joined here by two amazing food tech entrepreneurs that are here to talk about and unravel the mysteries behind what is driving pollution in the food space, what you might be eating might actually be hurting the environment more than you think. Thank you so much for joining us here Sue and Elliot, I’d love to introduce you guys to the audience. Both of you guys are working on some amazing, amazing stuff in this space. So I would love for you to give a brief introduction to the audience about what you’re working on.

Sue Marshall 00:47

Yes, thank you Swarnav. I appreciate being on and it’s gonna be a lot of fun today. I am a CEO and founder of a company called NetZRO and we are up-cyclers. We use a proprietary technology that works with food byproduct from manufacturing plants, we process that and keep that into the human consumption and domestic pet consumption so that that food does not go to waste.

Swarnav S Pujari 01:14

That’s pretty awesome. And Elliot, what about you?

Elliot Roth 01:16

My name is Elliot Roth. I am the founder and CEO of Spira, Spira uses algae to create replacements for petroleum and animal compounds in the supply chain predominantly in the food industry. We work with a network of farmers all over the world to grow our algae ingredients and replace the more harmful polluting animal and petroleum based compounds that are in our food.

Swarnav S Pujari 01:38

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So as we can see, we have two really, really experienced individuals in this space. And today we want to kind of dive in and really discuss three key topics. Specifically, we want to get started with the idea of what we are going to do to solve this idea of food driven pollution. You Go into different kinds of things like Beyond Meat, and a vegan diet really helps solve the issue of food driven pollution, and what we can do to help solve the supply chain related issues in this industry. So to kick it off, we want to really understand the idea of food waste. Now when we look at food waste, that can turn into methane. And that actually is one of or among one of the biggest what I would call hidden polluters, that people don’t often know about when they’re eating their own food on a day to day basis. And when we’re throwing away any access that we’ve taken from a buffet and things of that nature, one of the biggest issues that we have is how do we stop any kind of pollution driven from food waste? So I’ll open it up to the table. I’d love to hear what you guys think about how we could solve this issue of food driven pollution.

Sue Marshall 02:52

Well, my answer might be a little different than you’re expecting. And maybe some of the listeners might get a bit stunned. But I’m gonna say it’s each and every one of us as consumers. If you look at the research cites a lot of statistics on there and 43% of all food waste is from consumers making bad choices in their refrigerator and at home. So sometimes we can put blame along the food supply chain, but I think we each have to take our own consequences from our behavior and look at that first, another 40% is from retail food, which they order food to supply current demand from the consumer. So the question really is, as a consumer, what choices do we need to make and why to actually handle food waste in a big way?

Elliot Roth 03:42

So I would actually counter that a little bit. Because yes, although consumer driven food waste is the majority of what actually results in the waste in the United States in terms of food. I would say that companies’ decisions on What kind of ingredients to use and how they actually represent their food is the initial starting point of that. When you take a look at the total global global carbon emissions, the US military is one of the largest polluters, and the US military actually has quite a bit of food waste as well. However, they’ve reduced that by using stuff like meals ready to eat. Now, I’m not advocating for individuals on choosing these kinds of prepackaged long shelf life, kind of duration food products, but I would urge caution and say that it’s on consumers. That food waste is kind of up to each and every one of us I think companies play a major role in the potential food race, and that some of the concerning things from my perspective are the reduced use of stuff like preservatives, and preservation style techniques that enable a longer shelf life. If we shift to shorter shelf life foods that may potentially be healthier, quote, unquote healthier It means that it leads to an increase in perspective, food waste. And so I was wondering if you could comment on that, too.

Sue Marshall 05:07

So what I hear you saying is that we should be more clear on what we’re eating from a quality perspective. So we have food that is fresher, and that we should be conscious of that because of all the preservatives and those types of things that these big companies are manufacturing. Is that what I hear you saying, Elliot?

Elliot Roth 05:28

Yeah, yeah, there’s there’s been this movement to reduce the amount of preservatives used in food products, which has led to a direct increase in the amount of food waste, and so he’s wondering if you could comment on that.

Sue Marshall 05:39

Yeah, I would agree on that. And I would also again, lend some information to all of us that says, our choices, what we demand, what we put our money towards, does ultimately make a difference. Now it might take I agree with you, it might take manufacturers some time to understand that They shouldn’t be making some of these preservatives, they shouldn’t be making food like that. But at the end of the day, they go by what we literally put our money towards so at some point, to sit and wait for a big company to choose to do things differently, which we’d all love for them to do. We really have to force the issue. And I really think with COVID-19, I think it’s going to take even more pressure because these big companies are going wow, we don’t have to be forward and food waste reduction now, because we just got to pump out a bunch of bad food that has a long shelf life. I’m seeing it my business that anyone who was saying yes, we want to do some of these great initiatives are now saying, Oh, well, maybe next quarter. So were they really into food waste reduction techniques and technologies and initiatives? Or were they just saying it

Swarnav S Pujari 06:54

and that brings up a really interesting point. Are we talking about the effect of like greenwashing here that’s going on in the industry. Because when you start to talk about human behavioral changes, meaning you’re telling a person don’t buy this, buy that because one is better for the planet, one isn’t. How do you justify to a consumer to drive that kind of behavioral change? Because that’s the one challenge I’m having in hearing both of you guys sides on this thing. What do you guys say to that?

Elliot Roth 07:25

So I have a very interesting perspective on this because it’s something that’s kind of counter to a lot of the eco friendly, more hippie inspired movements going on in the food ecosystem. Now, large scale agriculture has the potential of feeding more people and I approach things mostly from a food security standpoint, as opposed to necessarily a food waste standpoint. I think if we’re doing food properly, food production properly, then there’s a limitation to the amount of food waste that’s produced. And that comes from the selection of the right ingredients at the very get go as well as Supporting food agriculture in such a way that you’re reducing efficiency, you’re reducing the inefficiencies in the supply chain. So what I mean by that is the use of preservatives have led to a rise in the availability of food products, especially for lower income Americans and people globally. And in addition, large scale agricultural systems, on a whole have a reduction in the global carbon emissions setups, partly because it’s a reduced usage and increased efficiencies in production output. And part of that production output is how do you actually use that increased production output? And right now, I think it’s more of a logistics problem. And maybe you could definitely comment on this a little bit more as a logistics issue on getting fresh, healthy food to people who need it the most. That’s where I always have a hold up in the supply chain.

Swarnav S Pujari 08:51

So to understand clearly, are you saying to throttle the production capabilities of these companies or are you saying to leverage it properly to then make sure everyone has access to, I guess good unhealthy food. Right? Right, leveraging

Elliot Roth 09:07

it properly. So So when you look at the carbon emissions from the food supply chain, industrial agriculture is one of the biggest polluters, but it’s partly because we’re not efficiently distributing the logistics of the operation of industrial agriculture is that you have these centralized production points, and then you have to get it everywhere. And so that no problem is, Yeah,

Sue Marshall 09:32

I would agree. And I’m sitting in the middle of the Midwest here, and I see it and live it every day. And I see and live the consequences everyday as well as everybody else was in the Midwest. And there is an underlying view that consumers and most people don’t see what that commercialized, production does in a couple ways. Number one, they over produce, and when it ends up in the retail and in the condition tumor and then we don’t eat it for whatever reason. Okay, so I’m not going to pick on the consumer right now. Just Just say that they don’t end up using the strawberry that got to them from gosh only knows where Mexico or something and they didn’t get it. What we’re not realizing is all the resources that it took for that strawberry to get harvested, planted, harvested carried logistically around into the store into our refrigerator and then we didn’t eat it. So all of that is a carbon footprint problem that needs to be dealt with. And that is a logistics problem. The second thing is soil health. Iowa has very little nutrients left in the soil. It’s not even going to be repairable for years to come unless we really go down on that and that is a consequence of commercialized agricultural production that destroyed the soil. And it’s happening all over. So I there is an agreement on that what Elliot is saying is just how do we take a look at it Stop it. And so at the end of the day, I don’t know all the answers, but I know that as a consumer, I decide I’m not eating strawberries in December in Minnesota. I didn’t grow up eating strawberries in Minnesota in December. But for some reason after 50 some years, people decide they can eat strawberries in Minnesota. We don’t grow them here. So,

Elliot Roth 11:23

Yeah, I don’t have the same kind of concept as getting avocados in Canada or something.

Swarnav S Pujari 11:28

So I can’t enjoy strawberries in the wintertime. I’m guessing anymore.

Sue Marshall 11:31

We can all wait. Okay, let’s all be patient.

Elliot Roth 11:36

The general concept is that soil health, that’s a really, really good point too. And soil health is brought about by the microbial activity in the soil itself. So I have a background as a biotechnologist and when you take a look at the science behind fertilizer production, just this one chemical equation called the haber Bosch process, contribute to To over 4% of the total global carbon emissions, particularly focused on agriculture, right? And that’s taking hydrogen and nitrogen in the air and and kind of converting it into ammonia fertilizer. And just that process, when you’re adding fertilizer into the soil itself, you’re depleting the nutrient reserves of that soil. So yeah, I’m a big advocate of, you know, shifting away from monoculture styled crops, but supporting biotechnology in particular as a means of increasing more permaculture style relationships. I think that in order to tackle the joint problems of food waste and food insecurity, we need better logistics resources and a shift to a more localized system of production. And then also use every single technology toolkit possible as a means of making sure that our food is not only nutrient dense but has longer shelf life, to make sure that the strawberries that you’re getting remain fresh. There’s actually this concept in the food industry known as the birthday apple. And those are apples that are harvested and then sold over a year later. And part of what makes it so that they can maintain the apple itself, when you buy it in the store is they coat it in wax, and then they keep those apples in cold storage, deoxygenated storage in these big refrigerant units. And that that really is one of the big contributors to global carbon emissions is all of the cold chain that is put into place to enable the food to remain fresh, so that when it gets to you, you’re able to purchase it. So I think more localized production reduces overall class.

Sue Marshall 13:40

Absolutely, absolutely. There’s a several pronged approach here. So on food waste, it’s easy to say, Oh, it’s this problem. And this problem. And what we’ve realized is tackling each of those problems alone really hasn’t made a difference. And that’s because we’re doing them each individually. They’ve got to step back and say it’s going to include all kinds of things all along that supply chain, you can’t just take it on one prong. And if there is a silver lining on the COVID-19 thing, I do believe people are going to start to see that food just doesn’t appear. You have to know where your food comes from. When you go to the store right now, you’re not going to get bread, you’re not going to get flour, you’re not going to get some of these things that we’re just used to thinking just pops up on the shelf. And we don’t even ask the questions. I think people as soon as they start saying, Wow, I guess I didn’t realize where it comes from. What bad things go into it so that I can eat it a year later. And they start to really understand that that’s not probably good.

Swarnav S Pujari 14:39

But that brings up a really interesting kind of situation, right? Because we’re talking about, you know, people here in America because I don’t think any of us have enough real world experience in another country that we can say that, hey, in Italy, they buy food and eat food like this, but in America at least we see a lot of people you know Hey, I have a craving for strawberries today or I want to buy an apple, which kind of bothers me that I might be eating apples that were picked a year ago. That’s, that’s not a very comforting fact to know. But how do you explain because the commonality I’m hearing in both of your guy’s statements is over farming? And how do you stop or incentivize a company from doing that? Now, I see that under other industries happening through either tax breaks incentive programs, state level government related things. But we all know that when you look at just depending on the government to effect change, nothing really gets done, because at the end of the day, if it was a perfect system, it would be based on what the people want. And I don’t think that people have really spoken up on the idea of, hey, let’s let’s drive, you know, a significant chain change in the way our food is produced and delivered. And as part of that you mentioned not being able to eat strawberries in, in the wintertime. So yeah. What do you think is the biggest contributor to this in terms of like numbers or impact wise? And what are we doing to solve this? And how do we solve this?

Sue Marshall 16:15

Yeah, an interesting way to think about this. And this is a line I’ve been using. I wonder if the end of the food supply chain as any one of us views it. So that can be a farmer, it can be anywhere along the food supply chain, how we view that that end of the food supply chain actually becomes a new Food Revolution. And by that, I mean actually economics, jobs, and economic gain opportunities for the future. I wonder if we chose to look at it that way. Because I agree with you as far as regulatory I, in my business, I’m following regulation where there’s regulation, there’s food problems, and I can maybe solve them. So there’s not an Because they’ll continue to do what they want to do until they’re forced from a regulation perspective to change their behavior as far as companies, right? Sure. But at the end of the day, if I show them which is part of my model at NetZRO is to show them how to actually do it right and make economic gain. Let’s just be honest, for what the United States is we’re capitalists, they don’t want to do anything until they can see that. Number one, it makes them money. And making them money can mean saving them money by changing their behavior and what they currently do with their waste. But more importantly, what can they do to actually have a whole new revolution around the concept of it? So obviously, my business we take by products and we make them into new food ingredients, protein fibers and stuff that normally would have gone away either land application or into the landfill directly. So that is an economic game, but I think everyone along the food supply chain could think like my grandma used to say there is a place for every single thing. You waste nothing. Okay? There was no such thing as waste in the vocabulary. So I think, you know, we just got carried away and Okay, yeah, we can buy this and you know, if it doesn’t work out, we’ll just throw it away whatever that means. Instead of thinking, how can actually it save lives? How can it provide nutrition? How can it become an opportunity that I currently don’t even see, we have entrepreneurs in this country, we have innovation, we have all kinds of ways to make a revolution if we choose to look at things that way.

Swarnav S Pujari 18:34

And that’s, that’s an interesting, you know, statement of, you know, I appreciate that. So one of the biggest challenges I’m still having is, we’re going back to the idea of we have to change human behavior, because if we consume differently, then corporations who want to sell us that service or that product, they’ll stop over farming, they’ll stop buying that and, and we see that trend happening with things Like beyond meat and, you know, the vegan trend, I, it’s it’s almost every week at this point that I hear, you know, hey, I went vegan and, you know, naturally that’s going to help me reduce my carbon footprint from my food standpoint. And again, food is such a weird kind of industry from the standpoint of people who don’t realize the impact. The food we put in our mouth actually has on the environment. You know, things like over farming damaging, you know, the soil, things of that nature. And Elliot, I’d like to hear your opinion as well on the topic of what we have to do from changing consumer behavior much like how beyond meat has driven You know, this idea of buying plant based burgers is that the solution is, is incentivizing people to eat differently. with food that tastes like what we may enjoy the right way to go.

Elliot Roth 19:53

Yeah, yeah. So to the point of changing agricultural systems, first and foremost, where food comes from? I think that our food system is exhibiting something called tragedy of the commons, right. And you see this happening in fisheries in particular, when you go into the ocean to pull up fish, and then what you find out is that the more fish that you actually farm is more efficient you’re able to actually catch, the more you’re able to sell, but you have a limited supply. And that’s what happens in agriculture as well land based is that you you tend to farm again and again and again and again, because you’re able to make money and you’re able to make more money, the more you farm, and in particular, the one policy that the US government has, in order to maintain these same systems, the same monoculture style crops, is the insurance that you’re able to get as a farmer in the farm bill for something that these crops that are categorized as staple crops, and those are corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, peanuts, cotton And I believe sorghum, staple crops in the United States and oftentimes dairy, I believe, and you’re able to get insurance on those crops such that if your field goes fallow, or you have a flood or a drought or other things like that, and the crop ends up dying off, you’re able to get insurance from the federal government. And what that does is that incentivizes people to double down and invest in these kinds of monocultures as opposed to diversify. I think diversification really is the key in order to enable more food resiliency and reduction of food waste in the supply chain. Because by diversification, you’re able to embrace multiple diets, you’re not having to resort to global supply chains, and the kind of cold chain and carbon emissions that we’re talking about. Now, in particular, when you focus on plant based meat as an emerging kind of realm of thought, plant based milk as well, which I think is even more pertinent because it’s led to a decrease in the dairy industry by a massive amount. plant based milk has been around for a long time soy milk has been around forever. Now you have all sorts of different kinds of nut milks that are coming out cashew, Allman and things like that. And what you see happening is that these plant based industries lead to a reduction in the dairy and meat markets. And so it’s a balancing act between the two. And there’s a big, big reaction from current farmers and agrarians against these plant based industries. But in essence, from a consumer adoption standpoint, it comes from a confluence of three factors that the Good Food Institute has really pointed at as a result of changing consumer behavior. And those three are taste which is the number one most considered important issue when consumers adopt a vegan or vegetarian style diet. The next is price and price is a confluence of those other agrarian factors making sure that the crop is plentiful and available to drive down the overall cost and price. In particular when you take a look at beyond me, it was the availability of Yellow Pea, and the planting of yellow pea and the processing of yellow pea that was able to drive down the price so much. In addition for impossible foods, it’s the price of soy and soy availability with soy that drove down the price so much and that was a result of the planting of soy crops during and after World War Two, and then three is the availability. So where is it sold? How is it sold? Initially, it was sold in high end restaurants only for the wealthy and vegetarian vegan diets were only a wealthy thing that was an aspirational thing. And now they’re trickling down into fast food establishments to make it more available to everyday common Americans. And I would say once we start displacing a lot of the more harmful ingredients in our supply chain and getting into that TV dinner that somebody is having in Nebraska at home and having better ingredients in there to enable better health. You’ll see endless results in the overall health of our communities with a reduction of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, things of that nature, bees are swapping out harmful ingredients not only from a carbon basis, but also from a healthy basis in people’s diets. So there there are like other effects in terms of cost savings, pricing and other things of that nature if we just invest and diversify our crop supply and make it so that we remove those more harmful insurance provisions in stuff like the farm bill in order to incentivize agrarians to invest in the kind of crops that will enable that kind of diversity and that’s

Swarnav S Pujari 24:23

that that’s pretty interesting because it seems like what you are working at at your company, Spira is focused around helping provide alternative materials with algae. And I think that’s why it’s really interesting the synergy that both of you guys could bring here in terms of perspectives but us who and Elliot on this on the show is is the angle of Okay, Elliot seems to be handling on the side of more on what can we replace within the supply chain materials wise? Yeah,

Elliot Roth 24:54

The analogy that I like drying is that like if you’re trying to cook a cake But all you have is sand, your cake is going to taste pretty frickin bad. And so right now our food supply chain has a lot of really bad ingredients in it. And so people’s health and the overall outcome, even if we’re reducing the amount of waste, you’re just reducing the amount of sand that you use in the food supply chain.

Swarnav S Pujari 25:18

Sure, so I guess we’re eating sand right now. But it tastes good right now. But it’s something that’s still again, we need to drive consumers to change and it seems like Sue, you’re working on the government side of things, working with institutions to drive different regulatory shifts, and at the same time, you’re upcycling as you call it that that waste that we might be generating on a day to day basis. And yeah, you know, maybe from throwing out those strawberries in the winter because I was just too full.

Sue Marshall 25:50

So my role is actually interesting because I don’t process anything that’s gone bad. I process from the companies that Elliot’s Talking about I process from oat milk I process from breweries, I process from distilleries from almond milk. So anytime that you manufacture some sort of beverage, you have a waste product and the waste product, if you just take oat milk, let’s just pick on oat milk, very little nutrients go into the milk, the majority of the nutrients get left behind in the oats. And then what do we do and I know the numbers because I’m currently working with the company. We’re talking 5 million pounds of oats a year that are being just literally thrown away. Now something’s been extracted that goes into the milk. And then a bunch of things are added to it to have some sort of nutrient value. But what’s left behind can feed the world. And it’s protein and fiber and some carbs and there’s some great vitamins. So at the end of the day, when we look at our choices and we say I want to drink oat milk, because I feel like I’m saving the world. Did we really do that? Did we really do what we didn’t mean to? We didn’t mean to put all this extra carbon footprint out there and all these other things because we felt like this is going to make us feel good. It might taste good. I agree taste has got to be there. Once the price comes down more people can have a chance to taste it. But don’t think of that as replacing dairy because I want to feel better about the carbon footprint. At the end of the day. I know what happens. These plants don’t want to throw away 5 million pounds of a great grain. It’s just the byproduct and the circumstances from the demand of a consumer almond milk demand of almond milk has gone down because consumers are starting to realize all it takes to get what you want out of a little almond to drink it. And what you have left is actually the most important part of the moment so I can do the great work. NetZRO is doing great work. And I can do that. And we can turn around and make new grains and new ingredients to put in and supplement some other, you know, foods to give that protein fiber back. But at the end of the day, do we drink it because we want to feel good about saving the world?

Elliot Roth 28:15

Yeah, I would kind of take a look at also how our culture in particular differs from other cultures around the globe. If you try to convince a Brazilian to give up Brazilian barbecue, on the basis of the fact that it’s less environmentally friendly, you’re gonna have a very hard argument. I tried to convince my friend that he should stop eating red meat and cows and he said, Well, you know, if God didn’t want me to eat cows, he would have made them run faster. So to say different kinds of communities, right, right. When you take a look at different kinds of meat communities globally, some are just not suited to adapting other dietary preferences or lifestyles or other things like that like I would never recommend yet. Farmers are nomadic people in Nepal to adopt a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle just because they don’t have access to those food sources around them. Instead, what I think is that diversification and then seems like you’re emphasizing reclamation of a lot of those processing techniques to be able to utilize all aspects of your food. I also think that a movement away from preservation of and use of, you know, preservatives, is, is potentially harmful because it leads to more waste if you don’t offset that with local production.

Swarnav S Pujari 29:34

Mm hmm. Yeah. And is that even possible? Because there’s a reason that specialties come in, right? There’s a reason why I’ll buy mangoes from India and I’ll buy avocados from Mexico, right? It’s you can only grow certain things locally and, and the beauty of our kind of borderless globe that we’ve sort of moved to is, as the last decade has created Or last two decades ever since the internet really started to pick up? Yeah. How do we really solve this? Because like I’m hearing a number of different themes on this call, I’m hearing, let’s change different parts of the supply chain. But then every time we’re coming to a point like, hey, let’s not use preservatives, there’s a really strong argument as to why we shouldn’t move away from the technologies or solutions, chemicals that we’re using today. And I don’t think the idea of consumers having to change their behavior is going to change or solve the problem in the near term fast enough. Now naturally, you know, as if emissions just keep going up for all of us. That’s not going to solve the problem because if we have to wait on a behavioral change at a global scale, or even a nation level scale, the problem may never get solved or it may not get solved fast enough.

Sue Marshall 30:52

Yeah, yeah. Mother Nature has a plan for all this. I believe this to be true. I think Mother Nature is literally putting things out there for us to deal with. We never anticipated COVID-19 being one, climate change being obvious as well, if we don’t start doing something, those messages won’t stop. So COVID-19 I’m in my neighborhood, I can’t buy any flour. There’s no flour on the shelves. Oh, are you asking for me to get you some spent grain flour? Yeah, I can help you. Okay. And I’ve been packaging it in my house, you know, to help flour go further. I can do that. Right. And it’s protein and fiber. It’s good for you. And it tastes great, by the way. And I don’t want to tell anybody. I’m like you guys. I don’t want to tell anyone to stop drinking their favorite craft beer, or you know, whiskey. In fact, I love those things myself too. I’m just saying, you know, let’s take a look at how we look locally for the nutrients that we need. And yeah, ideas are here.

Elliot Roth 31:55

The issue at play though, is that 87% of the global population will reside in cities by 2050. So this problem isn’t going to just get solved by doubling down on what nature currently has to offer. Because when you’re in a city, how much actual arable land you have to grow, you have to support technologies that are able to get higher yields for less area, if you really do want to produce locally. And so that’s why I’m particularly interested in biotechnological tools that enable us to kind of accelerate what nature is already doing double down on nature’s best practices, to enable us to produce more in a smaller area so that we can get that local production. Like I would love to be in a situation where, you know, you can go down to your local meat brewery where they’re able to brew up a burger for you, you know, something like that, where you’re able to get access to a ready supply of protein dense protein near you because to me, protein is one of those supply chain issues that the agricultural society really hasn’t solved in any country. signs you know, direct kind of way, when you take a look at the mountain mouth Lucien style catastrophe where population accelerates beyond the point where our agricultural production is able to actually supply it, we need about 70% more calories to feed the population by 2050. And that’s going to get harder because those calories are going to have to be more and more concentrated in cities. And so these global supply chains, you’re going to have to double down and emphasize what crops and products have higher yields, in order to produce locally for these cities, states and these kinds of economies. So like you’re saying that distribution to your neighbors if you have the ability to produce yourself right now, insanely important local community gardens, organizations that do food distribution, are very, very important. What I’m really concerned with is because we have the global supply chain and borders have to remain closed. I’m very concerned with food insecurity. Now, and being able to enable more local production, higher density production, such that we don’t ever have to worry about food access to nutrition anywhere. It needs to be as effortless as possible.

Sue Marshall 34:14

Yeah, and we do need to concentrate on soil health or like you said biomimicry, so we can actually leverage what Mother Nature has already given us so much. We can do this stuff. I actually gave birth to one. She’s amazing. She’s a soil scientist and that’s what she’s doing. And I listened to this stuff. And she’s right. It’s not, it’s all there for us. We just need to innovate and create it. So those calories that are coming out are full calories, not empty calories. If you look around food, the state that has the highest food insecurity rate is Iowa. People like how does that happen? They grow out what soy beans, you know, corn, you know, they grow all the stuff. That’s because what’s coming out of their soil has nothing left. So what they do grow that’s outside of those commercial crops. Their calories are not the same as calories coming from other parts of the country where their soil is still healthy, or at least somewhat healthy. So you have to look at and like you guys were saying with technology, we can grow food closer to urban centers, that that’s going to look different, then, you know, a large commercial farm in the middle of Minnesota, you know, there’s ways to grow food that literally has soils in it that that we can put together that allow those plants to grow faster, better and have better nutrition overall, that we can do it we’re doing it just more of seems

Swarnav S Pujari 35:33

like it seems like there’s, there’s an idea around the themes that I’m hearing here right now. There’s the idea of localized production so that there’s a failsafe in the event of borders having to shut down. You know, people shouldn’t have to go hungry because, you know, the shelves can’t be stocked with something like right now, if I walk into the ER, I won’t be able to walk into the grocery store in New York. But I could walk in, and it would be entirely empty, it would be entirely wiped clean, and it would be looking more like an apocalypse zone than anything else. Now, again, COVID-19 we’re hoping is just a once in a lifetime kind of situation that we’ve been stuck inside of. But the idea of having a distributed kind of supply chain that could feed local communities or states, without depending on you know, being shipped from Iowa in this example, it seems like that’s a really key focus point. Beyond the idea of, we need to make our supply chain greener. We need to fix and maintain the soil and stop overeating over farming, incentivizing the public to change our food sources. There’s hundreds of different things that I’m hearing from this conversation that have come out to solve this larger issue of how we make food, a non factor in the environmental impact kind of conversation. So going from there, the one major question I want to leave you guys with, and I’d love to hear your opinion too. And your azealia is if I’m an investor, I’m a startup founder, I’m someone working in the space or trying to work into the space. Or if I’m just a general consumer, I’m just tuning in right now because you’re two awesome people that I want to listen to. What can I do at different levels with the kind of resources that I have? What are the simple decisions? And what are the more complex decisions that can go into actually driving real change in this industry? beyond saying, go by and change your entire diet to vegan or stop eating, bro, what was it uh, you know, barbecue every day instead of having barbecue on the weekends. So things of that nature, what would you leave with the audience as actual ways in terms of actionable industry actions that can be taken, that individuals could take today in order to help push Towards an accelerated reduction of the climate impact that food can bring into our world.

Elliot Roth 38:07

Yeah, I got three. So three different levels. First from a consumer perspective, then from an investment perspective then from a governmental perspective. So from the consumer perspective, reduce, reuse, recycle, reduce the amount of meat that you eat, reduce the amount of more environmentally damaging food sources, try to eat local, read reuse, you can plant like your own garden, you can kind of create your own local food source and recycle, try to reduce the amount of plastic packaging and other kind of things. If you source locally, you’ll have less of a carbon footprint from the food that you eat. From a governmental perspective. Anybody who has access to decision makers and government advocates for a change of policy for the Farm Bill, the farm bill comes out every year or so and provides funding through the USDA NFA and other central organizations. to supply farmers with the necessary financing that they need. Part of that is the insurance policies listed through the farm bill itself. And those advocate those that kind of incentivize these more monoculture harmful crop practices. If you kind of lobby the government to adopt more diversification of resources, that means that you’re able to advocate for more diversification of crops and have overall better global food security, and a reduction of potential reduction of food waste on the basis of enabling crop cycling and other such things. reduce carbon emissions, there’s just more innovation that can happen if we stop supporting these, you know, monoculture style setups, and enable more of a farming entrepreneurship and younger farmers to get into the supply. About 2% or less than 2% of the US participates in agriculture, and the average age is over 50 years old. So we need to kind of incentivize innovation in farming and agriculture. ecosystem. And third, if you’re an investor, take a look at these growing trends. I mean, there’s more and more people moving into cities, there’s more people advocating for vegan vegetarian diets. And we need to produce technologies that are able to have higher yields for lower costs locally in city environments. And when you take a look at our food ecosystem, try to find stuff at the very beginning of the value chain. Don’t try to just produce another food product that contributes to the noise. But if you are trying to support a food company of sorts, support companies that do stuff like reducing, reusing and recycling of food waste, just like Sue’s company,

Swarnav S Pujari 40:42

and Sue?

Sue Marshall 40:43

Yes, love all of that. And I’ll just add a couple more things. Consumers. There is a great podcast called Too Good to Waste podcast calm, talks about how you can be involved in looking at your daily behavior. What can you actually ask? What questions can you ask? Ask your different folks where food comes from. If you take a look at it’s like people getting into reusing clothes, right? It’s like, okay, I don’t want to buy new clothes until I figure out where those clothes come from. Do I really need them? Can I reuse them? Can I buy them from second hand stores? The same kind of philosophy is just what kind of questions should I be asking for food businesses, and that includes farmers, taking a look at adding that fourth, our we’ve talked about Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. But let’s talk about re harvest. What food are you dealing with? Whether you’re a manufacturer or farmer, or brewery or anyone like that? What byproducts Can I actually re harvest and make use of again? What are the nutrients in there that we are losing that we don’t have to local governments? I think in addition to letting the Farm Bill like Elliott was talking about but locally, I know in Minnesota and some of the surrounding states. I have a lot of luck with the local government. Some states are really becoming forward on supporting entrepreneurs supporting food businesses to actually re harvest them. They like what I do, they come in, are there grants? Yes, there’s all kinds of funding. We need more. It’s not enough by any means. But there are a lot of initiatives on the local government side as well. And then as far as investors, I agree they need to take a look at not just apps, you guys they need to invest in these food technologies. Every time I go to any kind of session, I see technology that is amazing. And all it needs to be as deployed, investors need to look at how we deploy this technology that can actually assist along this new Food Revolution so that we have 00 food waste, we do not have to accept anymore, everything can be valued. So upcycling, we can all focus on what we can upcycle

Swarnav S Pujari 42:50

And one last question, just to close this entire thing off, because what you both said about investors was really, really interesting to me. What is The return, how do I evaluate return? Because if we remember the clean tech bubble bursting in that time period, I think a few of us remember that time period was tough because people valued investments into clean tech incorrectly, in my opinion, or that was among one of the key factors. How do I evaluate driving an investment as a corporate, someone leading a sustainability department to in order to drive that change? Because there’s always a lot of great technologies. And many times those technologies could never make a dime back for those investors or provide the returns that investing into an app would be so how would you help create that incentive or the evaluation structure so that they could go ahead and start looking at it from the right perspective that’s going to affect change, as you guys are all claiming? I love this question because I think that digging takes things from the perspective of an investor. Like they’re really concerned with return for their LPs, I remember asking a panel of impact investors, what they would incentivize like, what, what they have a priority in. And for them, it was between impact versus return for their LPs, their limited partners who invest in their fund. And 100% of them said, you know, number one priority is that financial return. And so from an investment perspective, I would take a look at things that make economic sense, you know, find things that actually are making money, not things that are pie in the sky ideas, and then double down on those and think, really long term, because I think the ones that the investments that work out really, really well are the ones that are at play for a 10 year time horizon, not at play for like a one year kind of pumping dump style scheme. When you look at these companies rushing into the marketplace for stuff like CBD, for example. It’s too late already. If you’re going to invest in one of those companies. When you take a look at the companies coming into the marketplace, we’re recycling a food waste, we’ll make sure that they have a lot Longer term perspective, if their waste supply stream starts getting reduced more and more if they’re having to pay more money for it over time, really start focusing on the fundamentals of like, how do we shift our entire ecosystem over to better ingredients, supplies, better farming practices, and eventually better food, food products in total, if you just invest in food products right now, you have the potential of losing out on the greater market opportunity coming from figuring out how to start from the very basis, the beginning, the genesis of where your food comes from. So take a look at technology in particular, that can be a foundational building block of everything else that comes afterwards.

Swarnav S Pujari 45:40

Beautiful,

Sue Marshall 45:41

Yes, great stuff. Great stuff, Elliot. I would add on top of that, then instead of just if you take a look at food and feeding people don’t just look at feeding people feed people better. How is this feeding people better not just feeding people and I agree with Elijah’s new food product this new sexy new sexy this That’s not necessarily feeding people better. And then as far as investment on the impact side specifically, and I also know a lot of impact investors, obviously, we’re raising capital at NetZRO to impact investors are the right fit for us. What you have to look at is just assume there’s impact, you shouldn’t even be betting on that you should know what’s their impact. If you have to ask yourself, you’re not even talking to the right entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs these days that are coming out, already know their impact, they already are driven by that in their heart. That shouldn’t be something that you know, okay, let’s make sure they have that. That should be an automatic. So then economics is the thing they’re looking at. But a lot of times, they’re like, Well, you know, we have to have this impact thing. Why are you even talking about that you should even be looking at entrepreneurs who don’t automatically have that out of the gate, then it should be concentrated on how that money works. Impact should be automatic,

Swarnav S Pujari 46:56

and that’s beautiful. I think that’s bang on as to how We should be considering evaluating different projects. And that’s really in the clean tech space. It takes time before any kind of new technology can actually fit in, you know, be it a new kind of solar panel or in this case when it comes to food, a new way to help make food insecurity, not a real thing. And obviously, the net result is how we can reduce that environmental impact. This can all bring to our world. But with that, I’m going to close it off here. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Sue Marshall from NetZRO and Elliot Ross from Spira, I’ll have everything in the show notes, links to their websites, links to their profiles, so you can follow up and ask them directly, what you think and what you’d like to ask and learn about in this space of food and how it impacts our overall climate. With that, this is an episode of off the grid. I’m your host Swarnav S Pujari. Thank you so much. And I’ll see you guys next week.

The post The True Carbon Cost Of What You Eat appeared first on The Impact.

You Can Be As Impactful As A Celebrity. With Debbie Levin

Ian Sumner — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 22:22:54 +0000

Debbie Levin 0:00

We are in a very unique time in the history of Earth, that everybody is connected in a way through social media. And so it’s really it’s really powerful to be a human being right now and to have your voice heard, and also your insights and also your mistakes, you know, and and your process. And I think that’s important to

Debbie Levin 0:23

know, it’s not gonna be perfect. We’re not going to be carbon neutral immediately. But it’s it’s small steps in talking about it.

Debbie Levin 0:30

No one’s perfect. No one’s perfect. No one’s perfect. So

Ian Sumner 0:35

we got to start somewhere. Yes. If you’re celebrating, you’re listening at me on Twitter, but for the rest of us, what can we do to spread the good word of sustainability and save our planet? To help me with that?

Debbie Levin 0:54

Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you guys do?

Debbie Levin 0:59

I am Debbie Levin. I’m the CEO of the environmental media Association. We are a nonprofit 501 c three organization. And we’re celebrating our 30th anniversary this year, which is crazy. I’ve been running the organization for 20 years and over 20 years, and our mission is to be the storytellers for the environment. The way we do that is we utilize the entertainment industry with content. We created the green carpet, we utilize the the talent, we’re talking about everyone from Sir Richard Branson, Elon Musk to Jaden Smith, Matt Damon Natalie Portman, and we’re the ones that help message environmental issues, lifestyle behaviors, personal empowerment, everything that has to do with living a sustainable lifestyle. And again, as I said, we’ve been doing this for 30 years, which is really amazing. We have a huge voice We are the only organization globally whose mission It is really to tell the story. Because if you think about it, it’s very hard for a company for a politician for an educator, they actually don’t know how to link what we’re dealing with environmentally, with being able to speak to this to to everyone in sort of a pop culture language. And we are able to speak to what people are passionate about and interested in doing behavior change in a way that really resonates for the individual.

Debbie Levin 2:34

What do you see as the role of celebrities then in the climate movement in pop culture language you were talking about? Like, why is it effective in changing people’s behavior?

Debbie Levin 2:45

You know, listening to celebrities and, and making people understand that they’re their people. They’ve got kids, they’ve got relationships, they’ve got problems, they’ve got houses. I mean, now more than ever, they’re also staying home. We’re in the middle of this crazy pandemic, and they’re doing what we’re doing. They’re, you know, they’re trying to make sure that their kids are learning in school, you know, at home, they’re becoming teachers like, like the rest of us. They are taking care of their families. They’re trying to figure things out. And in terms of a, an ongoing sustainability message, I think that that this is a way to reach vast audiences in a really relatable way. So we’re sort of behind that red carpet in a sense, in that we have our celebrities are speaking in a way that really relates to the general public globally. I don’t think that this works for every issue. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure that it’s completely efficient for a political party, or for some things that may seem too aspirational, but for a sustainable lifestyle. I think that we’re using celebrities and influencers to be able to speak to their incredibly huge and always growing followers and fans has been so effective for all these years I mean we’ve been behind so many big behavioral changes we helped launch the Prius in 2001 for example, and hybrid and alternative fuel cars in the automotive industry has touched everyone at this point every different company is now doing it because we were we were very instrumental in making the Prius a sexy car and having the celebrities buy it and and and drive and arrive at award shows and priuses was huge for changing the way the the global consumer really thought about transportation and and what made a car compelling. So as well as with the with the food industry and and making people understand that reading labels is really really important.

Debbie Levin 4:58

Gotcha. So it’s sort of if people are able to see the behavior that you want to be encouraging and their favorite celebrities are doing it, then they’re able to sort of learn from it without having it sort of forced down their throat kind of right. You know, is that well, yeah,

Debbie Levin 5:14

and the other thing is going going on the journey together because nobody is there. Nobody is anywhere. And so we’re all in process our most sustainable celebrities still have practices or things that they need to do that are that are not perfect, we’re not perfect. And I think showing and being in process with with everybody is so important. It’s it really humanizes and and gets everybody into, we’re all we’re all the same. We’re all just trying to make the best out of whatever our life has, you know, the path that we’ve chosen is and again, now more than ever, where so much of the world is quarantined are nervous, and you know, and we’ve got a health scare. That’s global What does everybody really worried about they’re worried about their families well, that links to sustainability as well. Because ultimately sustainability is has a huge impact on health and and what we do within our own lives, to be able to protect not only our planet, but also our families. And that means knowing what we eat, knowing what we put on our bodies, knowing what we clean our homes with. All of this all of our choices have a huge effect on our everyday lives, as well as sustaining the natural resources of our planet.

Debbie Levin 6:39

What are some companies just not understanding about sustainability and stuff that you guys you guys get? Right? Like why isn’t everyone doing this? Right? Who’s kind of what I guess everybody kind of gets to?

Debbie Levin 6:48

Well, I mean, I think things will change because the world is shifting a bit, but people are a lot of a lot of companies are getting it. So many companies have Sustainability mandate that now in the last few years have never had this before. And but always it’s always about making money and and being able to maintain corporations and businesses. And so what a lot of companies don’t understand is that sustainability can actually improve your bottom line because there’s always a cost saving when you do something more sustainably. costs have definitely come down in the last 20 years that I’ve been doing this. I mean, just think about you just went to the market for your family, and you bought a bunch of stuff. And I’m assuming that you bought really healthy good organic stuff. If you had done that 810 years ago, it would have cost you more than it did now. Because the democratization of of having the availability in big box stores and the demand from the consumer for more for more transparent whether it’s food or whether it’s cleaning products or whatever we’re talking about, has become so huge, that the companies that are more sustainable are becoming so much more successful, and that the larger conglomerates are buying the, the the brands that are sustainable, and they’re able to have the same shelf space, so to speak. So, I do believe that companies, you know, all things being equal, they definitely want to be more sustainable and move towards a circular economy. But at the end of the day, they have to pay their bills just like we do. And we really respect that and honor that. And we look at companies in the same way that we look at people because everybody, I mean, companies are people, and they have families, and they’re not going to want to endanger their families by not bringing something healthy home and not really being aware of options. But there is an economy that we’re that we’re you know having struggling with right now. Because everybody You know, the the world revolves around people buying stuff. And when you buy stuff and support the companies that are sustainable, then every individual has an opportunity to change the way the world looks.

Debbie Levin 9:15

Make sense? And I guess, I guess it makes sense. It was the, you know, reducing and reusing aspects of the of the cycle. those are those are inherently you’re going to in the long run, hopefully save costs, right?

Debbie Levin 9:28

Yes.

Debbie Levin 9:30

So I guess part of you know, getting people to read labels, getting people to change their habits. So I’m really enjoying becoming more sustainable, and living a more sustainable lifestyle. And I also really love storytelling, but I’m not a celebrity or anything like that, right. So what can the normal person be doing as far as taking you know some of the skills that you’ve or some of what you guys do with like, Sustainable storytelling and stuff like that. Like, how can we take that into our own lives in our own communities?

Debbie Levin 10:07

Well, do you have friends?

Ian Sumner 10:10

I have a couple.

Debbie Levin

Do you have any kind of network or social, you know, group?

Ian Sumner

Yeah!

Debbie Levin

And do you have any followers on any of your platforms?

Ian Sumner

You know, one or two,

Debbie Levin

So you represent everybody that’s listening right now. So everybody that’s listening, hopefully knows a few people. When you share your ideas, they know people and think about how exponentially that grows. You don’t have to be Jaden Smith with 40 million followers like we have on our board. What you can be is, you know, just somebody who really, really cares, speaks to it on your social media, gives your own tips, tells your friends and you become inspiring and doing it in a way that everybody relates to. And so every single person definitely has the power to communicate. And we are in a very unique time in the history of Earth, that everybody is connected in a way through social media that, you know, literally, even 10 years ago, this wasn’t even an aspiration. And so now, I mean, you can be in fourth grade and have it have a whole social network that’s going on. And your little nine year old self or 10 year old self is communicating to, you know, multiples of people every day, what your opinion is, and so, it’s really it’s really powerful to be a human being right now and to have your voice heard, and whether it’s heard in your community or whether it’s heard through millions of people because you’re some you’re you’re a an influencer celebrity person of interest, or whatever you want to call them. It’s really, really powerful to be able to share your opinions with people And also your insights and also your mistakes, you know, and and your process.

Debbie Levin 12:06

And I think that’s important to know it’s not gonna be perfect. We’re not gonna be carbon neutral immediately, but it’s it’s small steps in talking about it.

Debbie Levin 12:14

No one’s perfect. Yeah, no one’s perfect as a no one’s perfect. So we got to start somewhere.

Debbie Levin 12:20

Yes. Great. Well, I’m gonna start sharing that as much as I can. I guess I already kind of am with the podcast. But yeah, in my network as well. I think that’s a really great takeaway. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for talking to me. And

Debbie Levin 12:36

I will thank you for doing this. This is amazing.

Debbie Levin 12:39

Any any other sort of final notes or anything that you wanted to touch on before we

Debbie Levin 12:44

No, I just think everybody being really aware and also giving yourself a break. Like you’re not gonna like you know, every day you wake up and you can, you can try to do new things, and you see what your day brings. And then tomorrow, you can do something different. And again, processes everything. And if If we’re not if we’re not on our own roads, then we’re not doing anything. And I would really encourage people to to be gentle with themselves.

Debbie Levin 13:07

I think I think we especially need that. I know I do right now. Right. Thank you so much

Debbie Levin 13:15

Great. Thank you in.

Ian Sumner 13:24

Big fee is a production of the impact and produced by me, Ian Sumner. Music is by Swaroop Pujari. Check out our full publication along with our other podcasts at readtheimpact.com. We’ll be back next week.

The post You Can Be As Impactful As A Celebrity. With Debbie Levin appeared first on The Impact.

Do you even know what a carbon footprint is? With Victoria Beall

Ian Sumner — Sat, 28 Mar 2020 16:47:10 +0000

Ian Sumner 0:01

I’m just starting to think of all the little tiny plastic stuff in different places that that yeah, it’s really

Victoria Beall 0:07

Floss even.

Ian Sumner 0:09

Oh, God.

Victoria Beall 0:14

It’s everywhere.

Ian Sumner 0:17

No, okay. This week on big feet, I’m drowning in plastic, and why is it everywhere here to help me out? Victoria deal.

Okay, so I did a really, really rough calculation of my carbon footprint for 2019. And I needed some help understanding it so I called up a friend Victoria Beale. So, Detroit you’ve been eliminating single use plastics from your life and using your Instagram at environment Toria it’ll be in the show notes to focus on making bees and sort of other nifty tips that you’ve picked up along your journey more available to everyone. And I know we’re gonna have to talk about my physical footprint of you know, plastic trashed. But first, I converted my rough carbon footprint from metric tons to pounds. And I don’t I don’t like that number because pounds like in like I know how much a pound is right

Victoria Beall 1:11

right a metric ton is kind of hard to envision.

Ian Sumner 1:16

Yeah, and so I don’t have like a quite a good like visual on like saying, Oh, it’s this skyscraper tall or whatnot. But I worry that it is kind of a skyscraper because it’s 22,921 pounds is what I came up with.

Victoria Beall 1:31

Well, bet a lot of that was from air travel.

Ian Sumner 1:34

Over half of it is yeah, so I guess I take this number, which I feel like is really big. And I know

Victoria Beall 1:43

it’s bigger. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So it’s really crazy because we think about in a series of a couple flights, we have used 5.4 times the amount of energy as I use in my apartment for An entire year. Wow. How much how much is from your car?

Ian Sumner 2:05

So, I did a couple while I was driving up and down between LA and the Bay Area. Pretty much all year. Oh, I did a couple more than a couple trips up to Oregon. And back in February of 2019. I did that road trip all the way to Canada and back from LA.

Victoria Beall 2:21

Wow.

Ian Sumner 2:23

Yeah, so I ended up driving a little under 20,000 miles in the year

Victoria Beall 2:26

and that’s with an energy efficient car. Right? The Prius?

Ian Sumner 2:30

Yeah, so that equals out to around 8063 pounds of co2

Victoria Beall 2:38

that is really much lower than I was expecting.

Ian Sumner 2:41

Yeah, it’s great for 20,000 miles. still awkward in the grand scheme of things. But I know from reading your Instagram and having you as a friend, that this isn’t the full picture. So jumping over to the other foot. I know you’ve been focusing a lot on it. Information surrounding our physical footprint. So what do I need to be investigating and considering on this?

Victoria Beall 3:07

Yeah, I love that way of framing as a physical footprint. Because again, I think it starts to become really abstract. Like I was saying, like, really any object is something with the carbon footprint. And the way I mean, I personally choose to think of a lot of this in terms of just like the physical waste it generates. I guess like, you know, we’re talking about footprint to me it has a lot of connotations of like energy and energy usage. And I think that is still like really abstract to people. Like even you know, like, What does what is 16,000 pounds of carbon? Like really mean? Um, yeah,

Ian Sumner 3:52

like, I have no idea how to, I have no idea is a skyscraper Is it a house? Is it

Victoria Beall 3:56

exactly what is that? What are its effects, but I think when you think Both things in terms of the physical product of waste that you’re producing. It’s much easier for people to conceptualize and relate to

Ian Sumner 4:10

and can also have a huge impact, right?

Victoria Beall 4:12

Yeah, it’s, it’s really attainable. For a lot of people, it is certainly not attainable for everyone. I don’t think everyone could realistically live like a zero waste lifestyle. But for people like you and I, who are, you know, members of the middle class coming from, like a relatively like, well to do like background, these are things that are just really easy to do. Something that I’m particularly passionate about is food waste. Not just the actual wasting of food itself. You know, we waste 30% of the food that we produce, but all of the things encompassed in it. six out of the top seven most commonly found plastic Like in our oceans and on our beaches are things that come from food. So we’re talking the plastic cups, straws, the cutlery, the like styrofoam packaging that your bell peppers come in, like, bags, takeout bags,

Chip bags, bottle caps, coffee stirs coffee cups.

Those by far and away make up the majority of the plastic waste that we create. It makes sense, right? Like, what is the thing that every single person on the planet is doing the most every single day?

Ian Sumner 5:34

That’s what we’re built to do.

Victoria Beall 5:36

You have to do it. Yeah, we got it.

Ian Sumner 5:38

It’s the one. It’s the one thing

Victoria Beall 5:40

you gotta do eating and drinking. Yeah. Um, so the amount of waste that is being produced from that is just like truly mind boggling. So I think if there’s only one part of your life that you could choose to focus on for reducing your waste. That’s the part to focus on.

And then yeah, like when you’re out in the world, like when you’re

Purchasing anything, you know, like really anything you consume. So clothes, books, records, like, just like any object that you own has a carbon cost to it.

Ian Sumner 6:16

You didn’t think of it that way. But it really is everything that we interact with has a carbon cost now, doesn’t it? Anything else I should be keeping an eye on.

Victoria Beall 6:24

So I think another important thing for you to be looking at is food. Right? So when we’re looking at like some of the leading causes of climate change, right, there’s a lot of rhetoric around the consumption of meat. Because meat farming has led to like a ton of deforestation. It’s just really resource intensive, you know, to grow a lot of crops to feed the animals and then the process of actually like, slaughtering and transporting animals as opposed to plants is a lot more intensive. So the carbon cost of consuming an omnivore diet I think is really important. I think there’s a significant difference between someone that eats all varieties of meat versus someone who is even just pescetarian to someone who’s vegetarian, someone who’s vegan. So obviously, a lot of the really like hot millennial conversation has been around the straw, right? The war on the plastic straw. And yeah, that is without a doubt important. I personally am just not a person that’s ever used straws very much. I was gonna say like, I feel like the only time I used straws is they put the drink on the counter and already has one in it. Exactly. Like I get a Jamba Juice and they have a straw. It’s good that there’s attention around this particular piece, but it’s really like coffee cups, like a lot of cups, cups and bags. Really. I have the top of the UN. What they say at the top seven found pieces of garbage in the environment, cigarette butts, followed by plastic bottles, bottle caps, like grocery bags, plastic bags, takeout bags, coffee cups and then straw straws are the most common.

Ian Sumner 8:06

Okay, so we’re at least attacking one of those. The lowest of the top seven. It sounds like

Victoria Beall 8:13

the lowest of the tops.

Ian Sumner 8:14

Thankfully, a lot of cities are starting to ban plastic bags but coffee cups. Are you talking about like a like a paper Starbucks

Victoria Beall 8:20

cup? Yes. So pretty much all drink cups that are quote unquote paper are typically lined with a film to make them more like heat resistant or like less prone to tearing. And that is almost always some sort of plastic that then renders some unrecyclable I thought it was like a wax type of thing on the inside. Nope. It’s plastic. No, really. Yeah. I feel

Ian Sumner 8:47

like I’ve been lied to.

Victoria Beall 8:48

Yeah, it is. And I think there’s a lot of greenwashing in the food packaging industry. You know, you’ve probably seen such a rise like those compostable plastic cups. You know, they’ve got a cute little group. Leaves printed on them and you’re supposed to not feel guilty throwing those away. Oh yeah, I know those that so they’re just straight up plastic. It’s pretty much I mean, I think nine out of 10 companies it’s like a some sort of modified plastic it’s not like a true bio plastic and even bio plastics are. So compostable plastics are really problematic because they’re only compostable under really specific conditions that many many cities don’t have the infrastructure to support it really I believe San Francisco is actually one of the cities that does ever this awesome article the other day from the New York Times saying how San Francisco is like at diverts 88% of its waste compared to the national average, which was like 30 something nice, okay. So you know, your standard compost pile is able to take care of plant matter pretty easily. You if you want to start taking care of things like meat and bones, I’m sure you’ve probably heard like you need a really, really big really hot compost pile. Yeah, I’ve heard and the same goes for these. Like really rigid bio plastics or like compostable, like clods and things like that. Like they just need larger, hotter compost piles, which a lot of cities don’t have because it requires like some serious like industrial infrastructure support.

Ian Sumner 10:14

Interesting. Yeah. I was assuming like, you know, that all the city composts, we’re going to be you know, these big, robust, really hot, tall, steaming piles of, you know,

Victoria Beall 10:27

And that’s if your city has compost, right, true, right? Yeah.

And then if it ends up in a landfill, then it’s effectively just another piece of trash like things don’t compost on their own in the landfill. Oh, compost requires very specific conditions. It’s not just like, you throw a banana on the ground and it’s gonna become soil. Like compost requires like oxygen and nitrogen rich materials and like other organic matter to support the process of becoming compost. So in a landfill, you’ve got a lot of inorganic Matter, so it’s pretty much impossible for things to compost there.

Ian Sumner 11:03

Gotcha. So looking at or figurative or even literal banana in a landfill,

Victoria Beall 11:08

it’s gonna break down, but it’s not going to become like a healthy usable soil. Hmm. I understand where like the good intention is coming from with bio plastics, but it’s still better to just use a reusable alternative.

Ian Sumner 11:24

So I’m hearing eliminate single use plastics, and I’m on board. But I haven’t been talking about how prevalent they are and others everywhere in our lives. So how did you approach this because it feels kind of daunting.

Victoria Beall 11:36

Yeah, so I definitely took a much more radical approach that I think is like reasonable possible or desirable for a lot of people. I think I kind of purged everything at once. And not to say that like I was doing an excellent job before but like I definitely it wasn’t as drastic of a change for me as I think it would be for a lot of people just because you know, I’m a single person without kids. But yeah, so I started this whole thing by participating in the plastic free July challenge last year in 2019. And I just sort of started exploring around on social media reading a lot of blogs of like, quote unquote zero wasters, zero waste communities called and seeing what they do and you know, starting with some of the really easy stuff there’s this awesome store called the package free shop it’s a like women run business that just sells household items like entirely without packaging like you go to the store and like you just can buy like a soap bar like nothing no paper just like a naked so far.

Ian Sumner 12:51

Oh my god, I forgot about that to my my soap comes wrapped in plastic. I didn’t even think about that.

Victoria Beall 12:56

I know rightly think you’re winning and there’s always some sort of caveat to it so frequently. So when I started this, like, plastic free July challenge, like every day, I tried like every day or every other day I tried to focus in on the new subject and I would adopt whatever change it is.

Ian Sumner 13:16

I was like, I’m just starting to think of all the little tiny plastic stuff in different places that that yeah, it’s really floss even. Oh, God.

Victoria Beall 13:30

It’s everywhere.

Ian Sumner 13:35

Okay.

So the big things I can be doing that yeah,

Victoria Beall 13:40

I think the step is just taking a look at what you have, thinking about what you actually need. I think you know, sort of going hand in hand with making not just substituting what you have with the reusable alternative, but also considering where there space to produce right One of the other big three R’s. And I guess also, once we figured out what we need, and replace it with a sustainable option, we’re finishing what we already have and making sure we’re not just throwing it out. Exactly. Because then then you’re just wasting stuff. And I think it’s also important to consider like the end of life cycle for all of your items and how to dispose of these things responsibly. Like you can’t just put a deodorant stick in the recycling, and it’s going to get recycled, like that’s considered an object that can’t be recycled in traditional recycling. So figuring out how to responsibly dispose of the things you have, and then taking the step to taking stock of just what you have, what do you use every day? More, you

Ian Sumner 14:42

start to make switches. And I guess the sort of selfish economic argument is that it’s actually cheaper as well to reduce

Victoria Beall 14:50

right yes, that’s an example of something that was immediately like a ton cheaper for me. I think the thing that is difficult about going Really ham on all of these switches all at once is that it’s a really large, upfront cost. But in a lot of ways, like I’ve already gotten, like more than that amount of value out of it. And I’d argue that every single sustainable switch is going to be cheaper for you in the long run. It’s just whether you’re willing or able, you know, to front that cost.

Ian Sumner 15:22

So I feel like I kind of have a list that I’m walking away with.

Victoria Beall 15:27

Yeah, I think you’ll find that it’s one of those things that really snowballs really quickly. Like once you’ve made a couple of changes, and if you’re really going with the mindset that this is something that’s important to you, you’re going to just find so many other things that you want change and start to get creative with the like alternatives you could be using. I think also just the important thing to always bear in mind is, you know, don’t you don’t need to buy stuff. Like you’re saying that doesn’t have a place in your life. So, don’t go around buying a bunch of cool new, like eco friendly gadgets if like, it’s not realistically something that you’re actually going to need or want or use, tying back in that theme of like reducing. That’s an important part of it.

Ian Sumner 16:14

And it’s good to know that I don’t have to go full off the grid hermit in the mountains, living off the land in order to be

better or close to maybe neutral.

Victoria Beall 16:29

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really important to remember right? The term sustainability, right is all about sustaining. What do you need and what can you get that’s just going to help you continue to live your life and as seamless and as least trashy as you possibly can. And, you know, there’s always going to be ways in which we can be better and once we have governments that are actually you know, making these much more accessible to people

was just gonna be a better place.

Ian Sumner 17:00

I know I have a lot of work to do.

But I feel like we’re setting in a really great place. And I have my homework. Thanks for starting me out on on this, I guess journey. We’re gonna we’ll see how this

Victoria Beall 17:11

goes. It’ll be great. And I’m sure you’re gonna find things that I don’t even know about and just gonna keep learning.

Ian Sumner 17:18

I’m excited. Thank you for teaching me all this awesome stuff.

Victoria Beall 17:23

Yeah, thanks for thanks for asking questions.

Ian Sumner 17:26

All right, we’ll talk soon.

Victoria Beall 17:27

All right. See ya.

Victoria Beall

Victoria Beall (@environmentoria) is a UX Designer in New York City that focuses her work on using the intersection of technology and design to create tools for positive social impact in the realm of environmental sustainability. Check out her list of low and zero waste alternatives to the single use products in our lives everyday.

The post Do you even know what a carbon footprint is? With Victoria Beall appeared first on The Impact.