Episode 91- Richard Helppie and Dr. Richard Alley
Welcome to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge. The fiercely nonpartisan discussion that seeks policy solutions to issues of the day. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children.
Rich Helppie:
So today on the Common Bridge, we’re going to discuss a topic that affects everyone on the planet, our climate, and the risk of climate change, and to discuss climate matters today welcome to the Common Bridge Dr. Richard Alley. Dr. Alley, thanks for joining us today.
Richard Alley:
Thank you for having me Rich, and greetings to the listeners of the Common Bridge.
Rich Helppie:
Alright, let me tell my listeners a little bit about you. You earned your PhD in geology from the University of Wisconsin, and today you’re at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. You’re the Evan Pugh professor of Geo-sciences, and you do research and teach on climate with a particular emphasis-and I’m not a scientist so help me get this right-on the great ice sheets to help predict future changes in climate and the sea level. Is that right?
Richard Alley:
You got ‘er. There’s big piles of ice in Greenland and Antarctica. And if they melt we’re in trouble.
Rich Helppie:
We’ve got a full bio on our website, RichardHelppie.com. People will learn about your trips to Antarctica, to Greenland. And the thing that actually drew me to your profile is that you’ve met Punxsutawney Phil. How is he in person as compared to his media profile?
Richard Alley:
A little sleepy, but it’s fantastic, we were over there and it’s six in the morning. It’s 32 degrees, it’s freezing rain and people are just cheering when the rain started freezing. It’s a fantastic place to visit if you ever get the chance, it’s fun.
Rich Helppie:
It actually is on my bucket list. I’ve been fascinated by that for some time. Now you also participated in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was the co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s one of the chief scientific bodies worldwide that brings together climate data, climate change analysis, and the like, am I getting that right?
Richard Alley:
You nailed it. So governments have always tried to find ways to get-we scientists are supposed to argue, and you look at those arguing and you say, well, they argue, but there are ways that you can ask the scientists-now get together and tell us what we really know and what we don’t know. The US, Lincoln started this with the National Academy of Sciences during the civil war to answer questions such as, we now need iron clad ships, how does the compass work if you just put a giant slab of iron next to it? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the world to get the scientists together and tell the policymakers and the public what we know and what we don’t know.
Rich Helppie:
When it comes to climate change-and again, I’m not a scientist-my understanding is that the models for climate change have been calculated and calibrated as far back as we can go. And that indeed the planet is warming. And even when you factor out all the natural potential causes, there’s still something there that’s absolutely being caused by mankind or humankind.
Richard Alley:
The basic picture, the air surface is warmer than it otherwise would be because of CO2, is figured out in the 1850s. The first calculation of the warming from fossil fuel, CO2, is by Arrhenius in 1896. The real modern understanding of the physics was worked out by the Air Force after World War II, when they were worried about things such as what kind of sensors should I put on my heat seeking missile. And it turns out the target of a heat seeking missile is the hot engine of an enemy bomb, or it admits infrared. And if you have the wrong sensor, the CO2 absorbs it. The sun heats the earth, the CO2 absorbs that too, the physics is physics-it’s physics. There’s not really anything we can debate or talk about on that. We burn fossil fuel. It puts up CO2. That has to warm.
Rich Helppie:
Well, we are going to dive into that today. The Common Bridge is this place where we discuss the issues of the day and the opportunities of the moment while exploring possible policy solutions. It’s going to be tough to keep it inside of our time window, but we’ll do our best.
Richard, just a little bit about your personal background, maybe for our audience, where did you spend your early days and your academic preparation, and what do you like to do today? I understand that there are some cat’s involved? And what your job is today?
Richard Alley:
So I’m, the folks took us to Yellowstone and I just desperately loved being outside. And so I became a geologist. Geologists work on minerals, they work on oil, they work on a lot of different things. And somehow I ended up working on ice, studied at Ohio State, went to Wisconsin, spent one summer with an oil company. I still trade Christmas cards with my supervisor, just great people. And I got into doing geology of ice in the ice sheets, and that involved going to the ice sheets and digging holes in the ice sheets and drilling holes in the ice sheets. And at some point I got, this is the snow that deposited during a summer, and this was during the previous winter, and this was during the summer, and this was during the winter, and this is how much it snowed that year. And I can do that for 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years. And now I’m a climate scientist.
Rich Helppie:
This is really the front line kind of things that we try to reach out on the Common Bridge. We’re going to talk a lot about climate change and some policy responses. I’m anticipating a lot of education and perhaps some ideas how we get out of this. Dr. Alley, several years ago, I attended what was billed as I point-counterpoint session at an institute of science, very well-known place. And both of the scientists agreed that the earth was exiting what they referred to as a mini ice age, near the end of World War II. And in my adult lifetime I’ve been told to prepare for the coming ice age. I’ve been told to prepare for catastrophic global warming. And now we’ve kind of got this broader definition, it seems, called climate change. So as a non-scientist, this is a little confusing to me. So is there a common definition of climate change? And everybody says, yes, that’s what it is?
Richard Alley:
So climate change is you expect something and you get something else. So the terminology gets a little funny. What we like to talk about is human cost climate change or anthropogenic climate change, because climate has always changed. It’s changed for many reasons. It’s especially changed because nature changed CO2. Some other things tweak it a little bit, but especially natural changes in CO2. Because climate has always changed we know that climate is changeable. Climate’s changed for many reasons, but we know that CO2 changing naturally was a huge control on that. Climate change has always affected living things so we know it’s important. That’s part of the understanding we use, and looking at so what are we humans doing? The past changes in CO2, some of them were burying dead plants without anybody eating them or burning them to make fossil fuels. And they were buried over a small number of hundreds of millions of years, and that lowered CO2 and made it colder. We’re taking that CO2 that had been taken out of the atmosphere, and it was taken out over a small number of hundreds of millions of years. We’re putting it up in a small number of hundreds of years, so we’re doing it a million times faster than nature did, and it’s going to reverse what happened and then warm it up.
Rich Helppie:
I see, that’s a great explanation, one that I’ve never heard. I have heard about climate change models, and I know that there are a number of them out there. I’ve looked at some of them and they’re very complex-change a variable here or variable there, you get a little different outcome, I understand the retrospective measurement, so yet we’ve had climate change. Those models that try to predict the future, are there ones that are better than the other? Is there a standard for that about a particular climate change model going forward?
Richard Alley:
So any of us, you want to understand what’s going on, and then you want to put that understanding in the models and you want it into simple models, you want it into complex ones. You want different groups with different funding in different places. You want government and industry and academics and the military, if you can too.
You drive over bridges, it’s a wonderful Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. Dad, how do they get the level of load limit on bridges? And the father says, well, you drive bigger and bigger trucks over it until it breaks and then you rebuild the bridge. Well, no, they don’t. They take physics and then they build models and implement that. And I have a book from the early 1800s on calculating how to make bridges that stand up and it’s models. What’s the strength of an arch? What’s the strength of a plate? What’s the strength of a beam? And now we have computer models, but you always check them back against the old stuff to make sure it works.
For the climate you start with the basic physics. We are burning a lot of fossil fuel that makes CO2, the CO2 is going up there-in the US-at 16 tons of CO2 per person per year. So we’re raising CO2, that has to warm. How do we know the physics that goes into the heat seeking missiles? Before they launched satellites to look down at the earth, they calculated what they would measure and that you should see the energy going back to space and the divot where CO2 is keeping some energy from going back to space. They predicted this before it’s measured because they didn’t have satellites. Then you go build satellites, you look down and you measure it and there it is and it works. We can see this changing over time. Then take that understanding and you put it into really simple models. Does it work? Arrhenius did a one D model-just vertical average around the whole world and just do what’s going up-then make it a little more complicated, make it a little more complicated, make it a little more complicated, as you try to answer more questions. But always keep checking that. Does it match the physics? Does it match the simple ones? Does it match history? Does the predictions from when we were students come true, and they did.
Rich Helppie:
CO2-carbon dioxide-greenhouse gases, other emissions, just for sake of terminology, is it all one and the same, or are there gases that are more harmful than others? Or CO2, is that synonymous with carbon emissions as well? That’s what we’re really looking at measuring.
Richard Alley:
The language people use in public is a little loose. There are a number of…the earth sends up infrared and the molecules absorb, that can do something. A pothole absorbs your tire, where as a grain of sand or a mountain doesn’t. The right wavelengths that can make the molecule do this or do this, get absorbed.
Rich Helppie:
I see. Are there other gases or compounds that affect the climate, or perhaps pose other grave risks to humankind beyond CO2? Are there other things in there? I don’t know what-refrigerants or something-that we aren’t paying attention to?
Richard Alley:
The best thing we’ve done for the climate so far is the Montreal Protocol to save the ozone because those gases would have made a whole lot of heat and they’d have lasted essentially forever. And getting those down has actually helped get the whole warming down. Methane matters a little, nitric oxide matters of little, some others can matter. CO2 is so important because we put up so much of it because it will last a long time once we do.
Rich Helppie:
And that CO2 is really energy consumption. And so I would imagine the type of energy or the source of power, the number of kilowatts used, that’s going to drive the CO2 carbon emissions that is causing the climate change.
Richard Alley:
Absolutely. And the difficulty, and you know this as well as anyone, we desperately love the good we get from the energy. If you look at the people who have just had a power outage, they are very unhappy. In the United States, so you eat a diet, you burn it so you can do things. You’re sitting there thinking and being brilliant and doing things right now. The energy that supports you in the United States is a hundred times what you can do for yourself and me and everybody else. We average a hundred times our personal ability and it heats us and cools us and pumps our water and plows our fields and cooks. And we love it. And right now it’s a bit over 80% fossil fuel. So right now our well-being is fossil fueled.
Rich Helppie:
So when the term carbon neutrality is tossed about how is that measured? And if I’m generating carbons, because I’m consuming energy, how do I account for something to offset that? How exactly is carbon neutrality measured, in lay terms, and how does that work?
Richard Alley:
So eventually what we hope is that we quit changing the composition of the atmosphere and let it behave in a natural way. And that means that if we’re putting up CO2, we have to take down CO2, or we have to quit putting it up. And probably many people think the easiest way is to quit putting it up. Others say, well, we put it up, but let’s take it down. You can come down by growing more trees, but eventually trees die. You could take it down by pulling it out of the air and pumping it under ground, but it’s a big undertaking. And so the goal of eventually not changing the composition of the atmosphere means either don’t put it up, or take down what you put up and there’s various ways to do that.
Rich Helppie:
So when I think about the impacts of climate change and those inventories-wide ranging rising sea levels, bigger storms, wildfires, respiratory diseases, the impacts in Texas and throughout the south of these very, very unusual cold periods and snow-are those all linked because of this additional carbon in the atmosphere?
Richard Alley:
Mostly. So the particular question of whether this cold outbreak in Texas is caused by us is one that is under debate now. So there are certain things that are just nailed. We put up CO2, it makes it warmer-there’s no serious discussion. When it gets warmer, the ocean warms and warmer water takes up more space, that raises sea level, this happens. If sea level is higher and the hurricane comes in, you get more flood, this happens. There’s no serious discussion about that at all. There’s other pieces that are not nailed yet. And the question of whether, as the land warms more than the ocean for good physical reasons, the Arctic warms more than down below for good physical reasons. The coldest air masses today are warmer than when we were kids, but that air mass in Texas, which is a little warmer than it would’ve been 50 years ago, also normally would be in the Arctic. And the Arctic is ridiculously hot right now because that slightly warmer air in the Arctic has moved out to Texas to be ridiculously cold air for Texas. And it is possible that in warming the Arctic more than the lower latitudes, we’ve weakened the circulation, which has allowed it to stagger off more. That’s maybe more likely than not, but it’s not a pound on the table near certainty yet.
Rich Helppie:
That is fascinating and something I had never heard before. Would a similar process affect the amount of wildfires that we’re having in California?
Richard Alley:
Fairly clearly wildfires are always, you need a match. And if we didn’t have broken power lines or illegal fireworks or whatever it was, there’s fewer matches, nature still has lightning, so it can set fires, but we set more of them. You need something to burn and that depends on forestry history. And a lot of it depends on, did you build your flammable house out into the borderlands or not. But it also, it burns fastest when there’s a lot to burn and is really dry. A hair dryer or a clothes dryer has a heating element for a reason, it dries it out faster. And so when you make it really hot with CO2, you dry things out faster, you get conditions in which you can have fires burn more hot. So our fingerprints are on fire in many ways, not just climate change, our decisions about forestry, our decisions about where to burn and our decisions about shooting off illegal fireworks are all in there, but the climate is in there too.
Rich Helppie:
And of course the random knuckle head, like the Hesperia fire where someone just thought it was a good idea to start one, that too. So you mentioned forestry management and that is something that I’ve started doing some reading on as a way to mitigate some of the impacts on climate change. What things should we try and do we know yet how well some of the responses have worked?
Richard Alley:
So I’m not a fire expert.
Rich Helppie:
In any part of the climate change, I know there’s been various proposals of more energy efficient cars, by way of example, international accords, any insight into how those responses are doing and perhaps how they might be adjusted to be more effective?
Richard Alley:
So some of it works brilliantly. So we are getting more gross domestic product out of a given amount of energy than we used to. We’re doing better on the economy with less energy because we’re being smart. We could be a lot smarter. So there’s a lot of low hanging fruit on conservation, that when people run the economics, it pays for itself. So the investment is a good investment. I talked to some folks at up in Utah, I was talking to some folks at a university and they had convinced their board of trustees to put some of the investment money into conservation on campus. And they told the board, we will pay you as well as your investments do. And they paid better. So they put the money and they saved the energy and they had money left over, they could do other things [inaudible]. So there are places and times, we have fixed some things at Penn State. When I first got here, you go into the men’s room and the heat was on full blast and the window was open in this one building because you couldn’t turn the heat down. And what do you do, you open the window in the middle of the winter. And you don’t do that now because they have saved the money, they’ve dropped the energy use. And so conservation works, being smart about it. There are, and again, I’m not an expert on this, but you will find places in the US where, if you’ve just had a disaster and the flood wiped you out, to get help, you have to rebuild where you were.
Rich Helppie:
I’ve seen that happen up close and personal. And we all looked at New Orleans being rebuilt again below sea-level, which didn’t seem to be up there in the top five ideas. We’ve conquered some environmental matters in the path, like air quality and water quality are certainly better. And you made mention to the ozone layer and the ozone hole. Are there any parallels here about policy actions? And one that comes to mind is the Biden administration has isolated the power sector and transportation, and urged all countries to set what they term nationally determined contributions targets every five years. So when you look back at some of those things that have worked, and you look at what the Biden administration is saying going forward, is this the right approach? And I ask this because when I think about my kids and my grand-kids I want to know, is it possible to turn this around? And I’ve read some that we need 10 to 40 years to take effect and are these immediate actions, longer-term changes? I’m trying to frame expectations about what actions can we take? Can we get everybody on the same page vis-a-vis how to nurture the climate that sustains us all?
Richard Alley:
I’m sitting here in an all electric house in Pennsylvania, and we’ve been colder than Texas has, and it’s working great. You will find across the board a lot of people think that we should be looking at more electrification. Right now solar and wind in most of the nation, most of the world, are dirt cheap. You can build them cheaper than you can operate an old coal plant, for example. So you can build new and run cheaper than you can keep operating an old coal plant, they’re healthier, but we don’t really know how to use that yet as efficiently as we could. And so you start thinking about interconnections. So if your electric goes down, can you get some from somebody else or not? You think about security of your computer systems, you think about security-the wind turbines in Pennsylvania ran through the cold fine, the wind turbines in Texas didn’t, that’s because decisions were made about efficiencies and whether you cold proof them or not. And the gas in Pennsylvania ran and the gas in Texas didn’t too. So the decisions were made there as well. So you start looking at, can you build ways to use this incredibly cheap energy that we can now get and make it as convenient as what we had? So our system of gasoline, of coal, of natural gas, of oil, is fantastic. It has been built over a couple of centuries. It has been built with help from the government. So lamp fuel in the 1850s had some whales in it, and it had some bio-fuels in it, camphene-and that’s alcohol and turpentine. And when the civil war broke out, they put a big tax on alcohol, and they did not put a big tax on kerosene coming from the new oil wells in Pennsylvania. And this kind of decision after World War I, there were people in Michigan and Illinois selling generators to go on your windmill. So you bought a windmill so you could water your cattle. And now you could get a generator and you could have light at night. And then Uncle Sam arrives with a wire from rural electrification. And why should you buy a wind generator when Uncle Sam can connect you to a coal plant or to a hydro-electric dam? And so we’ve made all these things that helped make something that was brilliant and wonderful and worked for us. And now we have to learn to do it again in a system that will last essentially forever.
Rich Helppie:
I love the point that you’re making there, because we have spent some time on infrastructure. We’re going to spend more time on infrastructure. We can see first hand the effects of infrastructure failing. And when you think about solar in homes and wind in homes, there’s also a -for lack of a better term-national defense angle to this because what’s the first thing that an enemy attacks in a modern society, it’s the communication and the power grid. Well, if it’s all dispersed, there’s really not much of a grid to attack by some thinking there. And also, you touched on it, there’s really no such thing as a free lunch. And I’m a big-I love Newton’s third law right now. So electricity from cars has to come from someplace. We’re going to be splitting an atom, we’re going to be burning natural gas, burning coal, turning a hydro dam, maybe geothermal, we need silicon and materials for solar panels. We need to mine precious metals for batteries. We need concrete for windmills, there’s fracking and groundwater and earthquakes. In your work with some of these big international groups do they, and/or to what extent do they account for the cost side of moving to what looks like cheaper, cleaner electric production?
Richard Alley:
All the time. I mean, this is huge. And it’s fairly clear at this point that we can build a system that will supply as much or more energy for cost, which is similar. Right now people usually say maybe 1% of the economy, more expensive, but we’re in more and more of a looking at it being cheaper. That we can actually build a sustainable system that is cheaper than the one we’re using now, because the drop in price of wind and sun has been so spectacular. But with this big activation barrier to get over so on the other side, we can have a system which is really, really nice, but it’s difficult to get there. And so how do you do that? What are the incentives? I served on a committee with a fellow who won the Nobel Prize in economics for building tools that allow you to ask what’s the best path of broad investment versus consumption now versus targeted investment. And that sort of work says that if you get the right pricing on fossil fuels, usually in some sort of zero sum game, so you put a tax on it and then lower some other tax something like that, or give the money back to people, that if you right priced fossil fuels, we’d get there.
Rich Helppie:
Right, tax something, get less of it, obviously the risk of a regressive tax. But I think there’s a lot of avenues there. And sometimes when I think of it, I hear these kind of two polar extreme points of view. One side you have people say, look, humankind has endured things like this before. And the earth is somehow magically going to heal itself-so that’s a minority. And then you have others one side saying, well, look, it’s too late to do anything, we’re going to be losing the food supply soon and that the climate is so compromised at this point that we can’t possibly get out of this. And they’re saying, we’re going to do everything we can, even if it creates a lot of hardship. So one side-do nothing, and somehow it’s going to go away, the other side-do everything and maybe it will go away at some point generations down the road. Do you deal with this type of thing in your work, or is it you’re more looking at the hard science part of this?
Richard Alley:
So I’m mostly a scientist, but I talk to people, and so I have heard both of these and the reality is almost always somewhere in between. So, no, we’re not doomed, the earth will go on, life will go on no matter what we do, but we sort of care about us and the other things we’re used to. And it’s very, very clear that if we take efficient response to this, that we’re better off. And that’s what the Nobel Prize in economics was, you build tools and the tools say that we’re hurting ourselves economically because we’re not getting the right price on our energy system at this point.
Rich Helppie:
Since we’ve tiptoed out onto that thin ice of looking at the political system, which is failing at a fairly shocking rate, John Kerry is now the Special Envoy for Climate. Any idea what that is and what he’s supposed to do and how we’re going to know if he’s succeeding or failing or someplace in between?
Richard Alley:
No, that’s the short answer. It is, so much of what the government does is make the regulations, make things work, get the roadblocks out of the way. But a lot of it is communication. A lot of it is getting along. I am sure that the portfolio now is very large, very interesting and very complicated. You couldn’t imagine worlds if the US, for example, had decided that we are not going to participate internationally. You might imagine a world at some point where people put up trade blocks against us because we’re not participating. It is widespread in the literature on this that people would say, once more than half of the world’s economy agrees to do something they can say to the rest of the economy, you do something, you participate. If you want to tax your gasoline, great, the money’s yours. If you don’t, we’ll do it to everything that goes into and out of your country and we’ll keep it. And if most of the world’s economy got that far then it might be difficult not to participate. So is it wise, ultimately, to be internationally engaged? I think most of the thinkers in this field have said, yes. I can say, I’m not the international person [cross talk].
Rich Helppie:
Exactly. Envoy to Climate. I’m like, okay, where do they have their meetings? But that’s why I’ve asked the question. And I’ve looked at economic models over the years about kilowatt consumption and growing economies with big populations, like India and China, they’re saying, wait a minute, the United States, you burned a lot of fossil fuel. You put a lot of CO2 building your economies on cheap fuel. We now need to build that for our economy. And now you’re telling us that we have to make investments elsewhere. I don’t know if you have a view on that or the Paris Climate Accords, or something even more recently about shutting down the pipeline, but still moving the fossil fuel through on rail cars and trucks, which some people say pollute more and are riskier. Have you given any thought to those policies? And if that’s not in your area of expertise, we can move on from there.
Richard Alley:
So, you know, you and I used to have to stand next to the wall to make a telephone call. And we dug up big parts of Utah and Arizona and Chile to get copper so that we could connect every wall unit in the nation so that we can talk to somebody on the phone, through a copper wire. And you know darn well that a lot of the world is never going to do that. They’re going straight to cellular, the heck with this. There is a vision that a lot of the world may not need to dig up coal oil and gas, especially since they may not have much of them, when they do have wind and sun and they might go straight to something that’s sustainable. And, you can look at that as say, well, yeah, there’s a learning curve. You could look at that and say, wow, what an opportunity to be the people who build the electrical grid that allows them to do that. That’s a big market.
Rich Helppie:
I believe France was getting 75% of their electricity from nuclear. Certainly when nuclear fails, it’s beyond catastrophic. I don’t think we’ve built a new nuclear plant in the United States since 1973. And we want to prevent countries like Iran from building nuclear capabilities. Is nuclear over, or is that part of the future?
Richard Alley:
I think we don’t know. So I can tell you in my personal experience, that if you get a room full of people who are looking for solutions and you bring up nuclear, you’re going to spend the rest of the hour talking about nuclear. It always takes over the discussion. My gut feeling right now, the nuclear plants are having real difficulty maintaining an economic run. So keeping a nuclear plant running costs about the same as building and running a new renewable system. And so building new is not anywhere close. I normally tell people that if I were in charge, I would abdicate instantly. But if I were in charge, I would have nuclear engineers in our universities looking for ways to make it work, but that we’re not really shovel ready at this point because the people who knew how to build those nukes retired, and now the difficulty of putting another one in somebody’s back yard, in the things that you raised, right now, it’s not economically competitive.
Rich Helppie:
The pandemic has affected everything. Has there been change to the issues, or the thinking, or the theories regarding climate change or indeed policy responses, since the pandemic? Any additional burdens or maybe silver linings?
Richard Alley:
So I think it pretty well showed us, you mentioned earlier, the people who say we’ve got to panic and do everything we can to stop, the shutdown from COVID was it didn’t do that much to CO2 emissions. Simply us sitting home is not going to solve the problem. The problem is going to be solved by, I think, inventing our way out of it. But the sort of, if you just behaved yourself and didn’t burn so much we wouldn’t have a problem, I think COVID pretty well proved that that’s not the answer.
Rich Helppie:
So there wasn’t a big drop down. I had a climate environmental scientist on early on in the podcast and they said, well, we’re on an airplane diet and said, the counter argument was that’s only 10% of the carbon emissions, 10% is pretty big number. And I think we’re driving fewer miles, but ostensibly, we’re generating carbon doing other things than moving around by flying and driving.
Richard Alley:
So we lowered emissions, but not enough to really make a difference. So we’re still raising CO2 in the atmosphere. We’re still emitting. And so I think that the teaching moment of we invent our way out of this one, we don’t suffer our way out of this. We invent our way out of it. We can have cheap power now, and so we just need to invent how to use that cheap power. I suspect that the vaccine is really important because it is easy in a world where we yell at each other and we have troubles getting along, it is easy to imagine for a moment that we can’t solve problems and we can.
Rich Helppie:
I’m with you on that. I’m a perpetual optimist-always got one more idea.
Richard Alley:
And how fast they took a 10 year process for a vaccine, or 15 or 20, and my wife was about to get her second shot. You know, this is doable and how fast this was done. I think it’s a good jumping off point to know that we can get together and solve these things.
Rich Helppie:
Absolutely. And I’m hopeful that we can maybe punch a hole in this thing in the next two or three months, we’ll see.
When we think about the climate change, what are some of the best policies that could be enacted? And I think I already know you’re going to tell me that there’s a bigger risk in doing nothing than perhaps even attempting a policy that doesn’t work. But if we think about policies that we should be implementing as a nation, as a world, what would be some good examples and some bad examples?
Richard Alley:
So, and again, I’m not going to tell you what to do. So anything that I now suggest is somebody else’s idea, it’s not mine. I have things I like to do, but I’m not going to tell you what they are. But what people in general say is to make electrification easier, to make it easier to ship electricity around, there’s stuff way down in the wonky weeds. Does the model building code that people base their local building codes on include the new house having a plug-in for your electric car in the garage? It has something that says, no, you’ve got to isolate your garage from the house so that you’re not going to get carbon monoxide poisoning if you leave the car on. So it’s built for fossil fuels. Is it also built for an electrical future?
Rich Helppie:
I would take it one step beyond that. I mean, when you think about the automotive model, all we did was take the horse and carriage model and put an internal combustion engine. We had a stable, we have a garage. We bought feed, we buy gasoline. We had to clean up after the horse, we just blow our emissions into the atmosphere. Moving beyond that, inventing our way out, do we all need to be owning a car? Could it be an app? What didn’t we cover today that perhaps we should have discussed?
Richard Alley:
Boy, I don’t know, you’ve done a-you’re very good at this. It’s fun chatting with you.
Rich Helppie:
Oh, this is-I’m having a ball and I’m learning like crazy.
Richard Alley:
So it’s, the big picture is very clear. We love fossil fuels. They have been fantastic for us. We have to get off of them, we’re burning them a million times faster than nature saved them. We can’t have a sustainable world on fossil fuels, even ignoring climate change. We can now have cheaper energy than anyone’s ever had, but we’ve got to figure out how to make that work for the people doing what they want to do. And the broad outlines of that are there. We know it’s possible at this point. We know enough about this, but getting from we know we can do it to this is how we’re going to do it, and this is the company and these are the patents, and this is the startup that’s going to do it, we can look at this as a challenge, we can look at this as a burden, we can look at this as fantastic opportunity in the new markets for the future.
Rich Helppie:
If someone was listening to this podcast or viewing this YouTube, what action or actions could people take today that would have a positive impact?
Richard Alley:
You vote. There’s a fascinating set of maps. And you ask America, is the climate changing? And people say, yeah. And are humans causing it? Yeah, pretty much. So, are you worried about it? Yes, some. And then you ask them, do you want to look for solutions? And it’s a hundred percent everybody wants to, one hundred percent. And then you ask them, are you talking to your neighbor about it? And nobody is. So you talk to your neighbor and then what I think is you look for the win-wins in whatever you’re doing. If you’re an engineer or [inaudible], you’re a great situation. You can do things. If you’re a business person, if you’re a student who’s going to go out there, you will look for the win-wins, where you can do your job well and bend it in the good direction. And then if you’re really concerned, you can’t stop yourself, you’ve got to go do something, you can’t solve it all-pick something, just pick one thing. And if everybody picked one thing, we get from the bleeding edge to the leading edge. And so you vote, you get educated, you talk to your neighbor, you look for win-wins in your job. And then if you really want to do something else and whether it be getting a bike-so Brian is behind the scenes making this work. And he and I were talking about bicycling, because we love to bicycle, but we don’t want to get run over by somebody who’s texting [inaudible], I think.
Rich Helppie:
Right, exactly. And I do see a lot of green shoots with cities of all sizes becoming more bicycle friendly. And that, of course, is carbon-free and it’s those little steps that we can take and we need to be smart. They shut down a lot of the bakeries in Los Angeles several years ago because the bread baking process produced methane. But I don’t think people want to give up bread, but maybe there’s something that could be put on the stacks to scrub it. That to me is the kind of thing we need to be thinking about.
Richard Alley:
We can figure that one out.
Rich Helppie:
I personally like bread, so there’s that. Dr. Alley, any closing thoughts at all?
Richard Alley:
Thanks again to your listeners. Thanks to you and to Brian. It’s great that you’re doing this. We can solve problems, we can solve this problem. But we need to pull together on it and take it seriously.
Rich Helppie:
This is the Common Bridge where we look at the issues of the day, we look at the opportunities of the moment, we discuss solutions. We can do this. We need our political parties and our political system to be responsive. We need our news reporting to actually start reporting again, and we can make this a better future. This is Rich Helppie today with a special guest from Penn State University, Dr. Richard Alley. Rich Helppie signing off on the Common Bridge. Thanks for joining us.
You have been listening to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge. Podcast recording and post-production provided by Stunt3Multimedia. All rights are reserved by Richard Helppie. For more information, visit RichardHelppie.com.
