[00:00.000 --> 00:03.620]  Hello, here we are with Climate Hacking to Save the Planet.
[00:03.900 --> 00:11.600]  I'm your presenter, Greg Newby, and what you're experiencing right now for the next 20 minutes or so is a re-recording of my talk from HOPE.
[00:11.840 --> 00:18.040]  We have a wonderful crew of volunteers and a wonderful professional streaming organization, the Internet Society.
[00:18.720 --> 00:26.860]  And because of volunteers and because of some of the random things that happened in one of the first talks of the day, of the second day, we did manage to miss reporting.
[00:27.160 --> 00:29.980]  The live stream went out okay, and the talk in the room was okay.
[00:29.980 --> 00:31.680]  But we didn't have the recording.
[00:31.880 --> 00:37.120]  So here I am doing the first 20 minutes or so of Climate Hacking to Save the Planet.
[00:37.340 --> 00:39.580]  This was the first talk at 10 a.m.
[00:39.940 --> 00:47.420]  in the Marillac Auditorium Room at Hackers on Planet Earth, HOPE XV, July 13th, 2024.
[00:48.880 --> 00:49.940]  So who am I?
[00:50.040 --> 00:52.940]  This is just a brief extract from the conference program.
[00:53.200 --> 01:07.340]  I'm someone that's worked in a number of different industries, and we'll be talking today about how some of my background influences some ideas about what hackers might be able to do to help mitigate the current climate problems, the current climate disasters.
[01:07.960 --> 01:13.200]  This is the abstract straight out of the program, just for the record, and we'll proceed on with the talk.
[01:14.560 --> 01:21.680]  This talk is not to persuade you that climate change is real or that climate change is caused by humans.
[01:21.680 --> 01:27.700]  There are so many other resources, so many other activities going on on this topic that I'm not going to do that.
[01:28.060 --> 01:35.640]  What I'm going to do instead is focus on the impacts on the things that we're observing as people living in the world today.
[01:35.640 --> 01:45.100]  In other words, not focus on who or what or why is necessarily behind it, but focus on what can we do about the things that we're observing.
[01:45.300 --> 01:48.920]  If you want to learn more about what's behind it, here are a couple of resources.
[01:49.260 --> 01:55.060]  You can go all the way back just about 20 years and read this book, and there was also a movie called Inconvenient Truth.
[01:55.060 --> 01:56.760]  This was a pretty good book.
[01:56.900 --> 02:04.300]  It covered a lot of range, a lot of different areas, and what it was doing at the time was predicting what could happen.
[02:04.940 --> 02:24.180]  Fast forward 20 years to this year, and this is a compilation on the left side of essays, usually about six to seven, eight pages, by mostly scientists focused in their particular expertise area about all the impacts that we're actually observing, as well as some of the things that we can do about those impacts.
[02:25.140 --> 02:29.320]  So that's about all I'm going to say about some of this background material.
[02:29.580 --> 02:36.720]  What we're going to do instead is focus on some of the things that we can observe as people living today, and some of the things that we might be able to do about it.
[02:37.360 --> 02:41.040]  So what motivated me to bring this talk to Hackers on Planet Earth?
[02:42.480 --> 02:47.020]  What motivates me is to mitigate or avoid future climate disruptions and disasters.
[02:47.020 --> 02:55.200]  What can we do as hackers to improve our situation, improve the future for ourselves and our successors?
[02:55.480 --> 02:59.780]  Also to pursue innovations and opportunities, because there are some opportunities that are coming along.
[02:59.880 --> 03:00.960]  It's not all bad news.
[03:02.000 --> 03:06.640]  One of the things that HOPE does quite a lot is to leverage technology for societal benefit.
[03:06.640 --> 03:15.000]  So we like the tech, of course, and also perhaps, at least as importantly, maybe even more importantly, try to avoid the unintended consequences.
[03:15.240 --> 03:17.580]  Try to avoid the negative technology impacts.
[03:18.160 --> 03:21.780]  So that's what motivated me to bring you this talk today at HOPE.
[03:23.140 --> 03:32.520]  More broadly, what I'm hoping our activity jointly and individually might result in are longer lives for people.
[03:34.000 --> 03:35.900]  Better lives for people.
[03:36.600 --> 03:39.100]  And greater self-determination and opportunity.
[03:39.440 --> 03:46.620]  In other words, this is the good stuff that happens if we manage to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change.
[03:48.220 --> 03:54.580]  Unfortunately, there are a lot of massive forces that are guiding us towards complacency and delay.
[03:54.900 --> 03:57.260]  And we'll talk about why there's urgency momentarily.
[03:57.380 --> 03:59.160]  But let's talk about complacency here.
[03:59.160 --> 04:06.380]  There are all these reasons that we hear, sometimes without even realizing it, that push us towards inaction.
[04:06.620 --> 04:08.080]  That it's someone else's problem.
[04:08.220 --> 04:09.520]  Climate change is someone else's problem.
[04:09.620 --> 04:10.320]  It's the politicians.
[04:10.520 --> 04:11.220]  It's the companies.
[04:11.420 --> 04:13.000]  It's the world leaders.
[04:13.000 --> 04:14.180]  It's the third world.
[04:14.200 --> 04:16.200]  It's the recycling industry.
[04:17.400 --> 04:22.860]  We also are led towards thinking that what we do as individuals won't matter anyway.
[04:23.080 --> 04:26.320]  It doesn't matter if I take a plastic straw today instead of a paper straw.
[04:26.320 --> 04:27.720]  It doesn't matter whether I recycle.
[04:27.860 --> 04:35.300]  It doesn't matter whether I drive an electric vehicle or decrease my carbon footprint or eat less red meat.
[04:35.420 --> 04:36.360]  All these different types of things.
[04:36.840 --> 04:40.100]  And on the individual level, of course, that's true.
[04:40.420 --> 04:44.180]  On the collective level, what we do as individuals matter a whole lot.
[04:44.320 --> 04:45.340]  And that's not just behaviors.
[04:45.340 --> 04:51.080]  It's also trying to guide towards things like governance in the upcoming election.
[04:52.900 --> 04:57.660]  A really pervasive and insidious thing we hear is a technical solution is just around the corner.
[04:58.260 --> 05:00.460]  We'll mention carbon sequestration in a moment.
[05:00.580 --> 05:01.420]  Oh, that's the solution.
[05:01.620 --> 05:03.120]  Oh, we just need to recycle better.
[05:04.640 --> 05:12.460]  Oh, the problem is going to go away as soon as we figure out how to put chemicals in the atmosphere or put solar sails in outer space.
[05:12.680 --> 05:15.820]  And these will solve all the problems.
[05:16.000 --> 05:17.920]  And we'll talk about some of these during the talk.
[05:18.060 --> 05:18.880]  We won't talk about all of them.
[05:18.980 --> 05:21.360]  But unfortunately, a technical solution is not the answer.
[05:21.600 --> 05:24.260]  None of the technical solutions out there are ready today.
[05:24.260 --> 05:27.220]  And there's urgency that we're going to talk about.
[05:27.660 --> 05:36.080]  And none of the technical solutions can scale enough, can get big enough to really make enough difference to say that this is only the solution.
[05:36.240 --> 05:39.400]  We need multiple solutions when we're talking about climate change.
[05:40.180 --> 05:42.860]  We also hear we're just seeing natural variation in the climate.
[05:42.880 --> 05:45.080]  And I have a chart about this a little later in the talk.
[05:45.080 --> 05:56.320]  I think anyone that's experienced the last year or two years of living in the world, which is all of us, knows that we are in a highly abnormal situation.
[05:56.480 --> 06:01.800]  We're not having this problem because the earth is further from the sun or closer to the sun.
[06:01.900 --> 06:08.140]  We're not having this problem because of an 11-year cycle or 100-year cycle or a glacial cycle.
[06:08.140 --> 06:14.400]  We're seeing problems because of excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
[06:14.400 --> 06:16.300]  We'll spend some time on that momentarily.
[06:17.480 --> 06:21.480]  People might also think that climate change won't impact them, that, oh, I'm wealthy enough.
[06:21.480 --> 06:23.460]  I'm not living near the shore.
[06:23.640 --> 06:30.640]  But it will, even if it only impacts your costs at the supermarket or only impacts your weather experience.
[06:31.060 --> 06:33.480]  There's an impact on everyone of climate change.
[06:35.180 --> 06:39.060]  When we talk about the risk being real and today, well, let's look at 2023.
[06:39.060 --> 06:48.240]  According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there were 28 weather and climate disasters in the U.S. that cost at least a billion dollars each.
[06:48.520 --> 06:54.780]  These included, of course, the extreme weather, but they also included wildfires.
[06:54.960 --> 06:55.460]  Those were huge.
[06:55.600 --> 07:00.000]  They also included crop failures and drought and things like that.
[07:00.000 --> 07:03.800]  So we're seeing a huge number of impacts right now.
[07:03.980 --> 07:14.740]  And what we have as an opportunity is to try to mitigate those by actions that we can take right now or that we can work towards in the fairly near future.
[07:14.740 --> 07:16.720]  Where are some of these impacts?
[07:17.160 --> 07:18.740]  Well, we've mentioned a few of these already.
[07:18.960 --> 07:23.580]  So more extreme weather resulting from climate change, hurricanes, thunderstorms, tornadoes.
[07:24.680 --> 07:25.720]  Ocean impacts.
[07:25.840 --> 07:28.980]  Sea surface temperature rises, sea level rises, acid increases.
[07:29.460 --> 07:39.680]  Those sea surface temperature rises, among other things, have an impact on the biosphere, on the ecosystems that actually suck down carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.
[07:39.680 --> 07:52.020]  What could be more important than that for our life, for our ability to thrive than the ocean helping to sequester carbon dioxide and produce oxygen?
[07:52.820 --> 07:56.100]  Other types of ecosystem impacts are also pervasive.
[07:56.340 --> 07:58.760]  So loss of habitat, extinction of species.
[07:59.000 --> 08:00.000]  So loss of habitat.
[08:00.000 --> 08:05.460]  We're talking about, for example, clearing of the Amazon rainforest to make more room for grazing of cattle.
[08:05.460 --> 08:14.460]  That's a major, major problem because the Amazon also is so good at producing oxygen and taking away carbon dioxide.
[08:14.700 --> 08:17.820]  But also we see extinction of species all around the world.
[08:17.940 --> 08:32.860]  And some of those, for example, the loss of bees due to pollution primarily is really impactful, not just on whether our garden is growing and our flowers are thriving, but on whether the foods we eat are pollinated effectively.
[08:34.360 --> 08:37.060]  We've mentioned extreme weather impact on wildfires.
[08:37.240 --> 08:40.540]  Wildfires themselves are amazing these days.
[08:40.780 --> 08:42.660]  We see such tremendous wildfires.
[08:42.860 --> 08:45.000]  And, of course, they burn built infrastructure.
[08:45.000 --> 08:49.160]  They're tremendously impactful on loss of life and property.
[08:49.160 --> 08:56.540]  They also put tons and tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere and reduce or increase the...
[08:56.540 --> 09:05.020]  No, sorry, reduce the albedo of the land so that the ground actually collects heat more than reflecting heat.
[09:05.200 --> 09:06.600]  So wildfire impact is tremendous.
[09:06.600 --> 09:10.300]  And this does come from things like extreme weather.
[09:10.560 --> 09:13.840]  Notably, lightning is a major cause of wildfires.
[09:14.440 --> 09:16.480]  We see a lot of pollution, air, water.
[09:16.800 --> 09:22.880]  We talked about water a little bit and ground pollution coming as a result of climate impacts.
[09:23.240 --> 09:25.560]  We see a lot of health impacts.
[09:25.740 --> 09:33.740]  When we talk about longer lives and being well for a longer part of your life, well, you can't have that if you can't breathe well.
[09:33.740 --> 09:41.600]  And asthma due to pollution, heat injury, such as a massive loss of life we've seen during heat events.
[09:42.060 --> 09:44.900]  Just this past summer, it was the Hajj in Saudi Arabia.
[09:45.280 --> 09:49.620]  A couple of years ago, it was the heat wave in Paris and the rest of France.
[09:49.820 --> 10:02.780]  So people are dying, actually dying, not just being injured by the impacts of longer, hotter temperatures, of the heat domes, and related phenomena.
[10:03.080 --> 10:07.560]  So what we're talking about overall, again, with the big picture, decreased wellness, decreased lifespan.
[10:07.860 --> 10:10.400]  So these are the impacts we want to try to mitigate as hackers.
[10:10.540 --> 10:15.740]  What can we do to avoid some of the negatives and work towards some of the positives?
[10:16.300 --> 10:18.920]  And one, I think, last slide here talking about the urgency.
[10:19.160 --> 10:23.280]  This is a pretty neat source, visual capitalists.
[10:23.460 --> 10:25.360]  They go out and take very good data sources.
[10:25.360 --> 10:28.740]  They cite the data sources, and then they do graphics.
[10:29.240 --> 10:37.580]  So number one risk perceived by these leaders in the World Economic Forum was extreme weather, 66%.
[10:37.580 --> 10:38.920]  This isn't in the future.
[10:39.040 --> 10:44.540]  This isn't the next 10 years, next 20 years, like they were talking about in the Al Gore book I mentioned earlier.
[10:44.780 --> 10:46.100]  This is for this year.
[10:46.420 --> 10:47.740]  And we're seeing it, right?
[10:47.820 --> 10:53.040]  We saw 28 billion dollar events in the U.S. last year.
[10:53.140 --> 10:54.660]  What are we seeing this year in 2024?
[10:54.660 --> 10:58.320]  So 66% say extreme weather is going to be a major impact.
[10:58.560 --> 11:11.920]  And by the way, the second item there, AI-generated misinformation and disinformation, we'll talk about momentarily because that is, among other things, impactful on the battle to improve our situation with regards to climate.
[11:12.900 --> 11:13.500]  All right.
[11:13.640 --> 11:16.800]  So let's get into a little bit of the science here, a little bit of what's going on.
[11:16.800 --> 11:30.540]  So the opportunity here, mainly, not entirely, but mainly is to reduce greenhouse gases, either reduce production of greenhouse gases or actually reduce the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are already there.
[11:30.760 --> 11:37.180]  And the biggest opportunity in terms of greenhouse gases, and we'll talk about exactly what those are and where they're coming from in a few moments.
[11:37.180 --> 11:41.580]  But the biggest opportunity for addressing greenhouse gases is energy production and use.
[11:41.820 --> 11:45.340]  So let's look at a chart here, and we'll talk about how hackers can help.
[11:45.800 --> 11:51.520]  So let's look at a chart here that's called a Sankey diagram, which is an energy flow diagram.
[11:51.540 --> 11:53.460]  This is from the U.S.
[11:54.840 --> 11:57.820]  Energy Information Administration, part of the Department of Energy.
[11:58.440 --> 11:59.320]  The U.S.
[11:59.400 --> 12:00.360]  has pretty good data.
[12:00.660 --> 12:03.600]  And as I said earlier, you might question some of the data.
[12:03.720 --> 12:05.120]  You might want to do some of your own analysis.
[12:06.180 --> 12:10.640]  I find it to be certainly very informative at different levels.
[12:10.900 --> 12:15.640]  So what we see on the left side of this energy flow diagram is where does energy come from?
[12:16.260 --> 12:22.740]  And dominantly, we see fossil fuels accounting for 86.3 quadrillion British thermal units, which is the measure they're using.
[12:22.920 --> 12:28.600]  And the whole left-hand side of the chart is around 100 BTUs, quadrillion BTUs.
[12:28.600 --> 12:35.720]  So in other words, about 85%, 86% of all of the energy that is being used in the U.S.
[12:35.860 --> 12:47.740]  is coming from these fossil fuel sources, what we might call a non-renewable resource, because it takes millions and millions of years for new coal or natural gas to start appearing in the ground.
[12:49.040 --> 12:54.400]  So this is where the carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases are coming from dominantly.
[12:54.620 --> 12:56.760]  We'll talk about those in a little bit more detail.
[12:57.060 --> 12:59.760]  We see nuclear power down there, a little less than 10%.
[12:59.760 --> 13:02.840]  We also see renewable energy down there, a little less than 10%.
[13:02.840 --> 13:04.760]  And this is 2023, right?
[13:04.840 --> 13:05.820]  This is a contemporary slide.
[13:06.500 --> 13:11.180]  So in other words, what we see is most of the energy that's being produced, that's going into the U.S.
[13:11.300 --> 13:17.100]  systems, is coming from these sources, which fundamentally are producing greenhouse gases.
[13:17.420 --> 13:20.520]  On the right side, what we see is where is all this stuff going?
[13:20.620 --> 13:21.300]  Where is the energy going?
[13:21.460 --> 13:23.180]  One thing that's interesting is that the U.S.
[13:23.280 --> 13:26.440]  is actually a fairly big exporter of energy.
[13:26.600 --> 13:31.540]  So petroleum exports and other exports, including, for example, hydroelectric generated electricity.
[13:31.820 --> 13:37.800]  But what we see over on the right side, those sort of four prongs, is what we'll focus on for the next couple of moments.
[13:37.980 --> 13:46.740]  We see that most of the energy use, and you sort of guessed this, is going towards residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation sectors.
[13:47.000 --> 13:58.040]  And let me go back to one of my main points here, is we can't solve the problem by trimming just even a big proportion, but by trimming some proportion of just one of these areas.
[13:58.260 --> 14:02.440]  So in other words, if everyone's doing electric vehicles, okay, great.
[14:02.440 --> 14:11.360]  So transportation might go down in terms of greenhouse gas production, but that's only, you know, a little, I think a little more than a quarter of our total use.
[14:11.480 --> 14:14.940]  So decreasing that doesn't solve the whole problem of greenhouse gases.
[14:16.140 --> 14:17.520]  So what can we do?
[14:17.700 --> 14:23.160]  Well, a few things we can't do or that won't matter is cow farts.
[14:23.420 --> 14:26.120]  In other words, methane, solving methane is not enough.
[14:26.260 --> 14:26.660]  Why not?
[14:26.660 --> 14:36.040]  Because of this right here, agricultural use is only about 10% of where the greenhouse gas production originates.
[14:36.200 --> 14:40.520]  We see about 25% coming from electrical power generation, 28% transportation.
[14:40.520 --> 14:41.940]  There's industry and residential.
[14:42.160 --> 14:45.520]  So these are where the greenhouse gases are coming from.
[14:45.700 --> 14:47.760]  We'll talk about what those gases are momentarily.
[14:48.020 --> 14:52.620]  And on energy, electric power generation, where's that going?
[14:52.620 --> 14:55.020]  Well, it's those couple of prongs that we talked about earlier, right?
[14:55.320 --> 14:58.760]  Transportation, residential, commercial, industry, and then also agriculture.
[14:59.120 --> 15:04.700]  So what we see is that the greenhouse gases themselves are coming from diverse places.
[15:04.940 --> 15:08.320]  And the message here, again, is we can't find a point fix.
[15:08.520 --> 15:15.140]  So cow farts up here, just reducing the methane from the cows is great, worthwhile.
[15:15.140 --> 15:30.120]  No question that that's a good thing to do, but even if we manage to get rid of 100% of all the methane produced by agriculture, cow farts and everything else, that's only 10% of the overall picture, right?
[15:30.320 --> 15:32.920]  So again, the message here is we need multiple things.
[15:33.100 --> 15:35.120]  We can't say, oh, here's the one answer.
[15:35.120 --> 15:43.540]  So we just need to focus on, you know, fill in the blank, recycling or carbon sequestration or agriculture as places to focus.
[15:44.760 --> 15:46.840]  So finally, what are these greenhouse gases?
[15:46.960 --> 15:48.080]  Well, you're probably familiar with this.
[15:48.200 --> 15:51.220]  Usually what we talk about is carbon dioxide equivalent.
[15:51.220 --> 16:03.380]  Now, most of the carbon dioxide production, and this is again from U.S. Source Environmental Protection Agency, most of the carbon dioxide production, I'm sorry, most of the greenhouse production is carbon dioxide.
[16:03.620 --> 16:07.760]  So a little under 80% there in that chart.
[16:08.260 --> 16:11.160]  However, carbon dioxide isn't the whole picture.
[16:11.160 --> 16:24.300]  Now, carbon dioxide lasts for hundreds or maybe around 1,000 years in the atmosphere before it either combines and forms another type of molecule or precipitates out and, you know, ends up in the ocean or on the land.
[16:25.540 --> 16:31.620]  Methane, which is that CH4 in the upper left there, only lasts for around 12 years.
[16:31.620 --> 16:53.640]  So what we see is, yeah, actually, if we were able to address methane production, not only would that be impactful much sooner than reducing carbon dioxide, but also methane is actually more potent in terms of keeping the heat in the atmosphere as opposed to letting it dissipate out into space.
[16:53.640 --> 17:13.220]  So in other words, this is a place where soon, taking action soon is actually quite impactful because we can not only stop increasing the carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere, but if we focus on methane, we can have that quicker benefit as well as the larger footprint of decreasing methane.
[17:14.520 --> 17:16.280]  So those are the carbon dioxide gases.
[17:16.580 --> 17:19.260]  And so, once again, the big message here is let's not wait.
[17:19.420 --> 17:23.280]  We want to decrease things immediately because it makes things better immediately.
[17:23.280 --> 17:28.980]  And the example from COVID showed that in a real-world experiment just a couple of years ago.
[17:29.220 --> 17:38.520]  And conversely, not decreasing the greenhouse gases makes the problem worse now and into the future because we see that carbon dioxide last for like 1,000 years.
[17:38.520 --> 17:45.480]  So every carbon dioxide molecule that we produce and put into the atmosphere today is going to be there for quite some time.
[17:47.080 --> 17:52.940]  And the things that we don't put into the atmosphere or get out of the atmosphere will have an immediate beneficial impact.
[17:54.020 --> 17:56.740]  So what are some of the things that we can do, finally, as hackers?
[17:57.000 --> 18:01.400]  What we'll talk about next are some technical mechanisms for reducing pollution or removing carbon.
[18:01.720 --> 18:06.500]  I want to mention something I didn't have a slide for that's important.
[18:06.500 --> 18:10.660]  One of the technical mechanisms we hear about a lot is carbon sequestration.
[18:10.880 --> 18:23.020]  This is the idea that we can suck carbon dioxide or equivalent out of the atmosphere or, or and, we can somehow scrub the CO2 and equivalents from going into the atmosphere in the first place.
[18:23.020 --> 18:36.920]  So we're talking about, for example, things on the smokestacks of coal plants to make sure that the, the soot and other things coming out of the smokestack have all of the carbon dioxide equivalent removed and hopefully the particulate matter as well.
[18:37.260 --> 18:42.020]  The other side for sequestration is let's suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
[18:42.020 --> 18:48.900]  Let's put it under the ground, let's use it to make long-lasting building materials, like put it into bricks and things like that.
[18:49.060 --> 18:50.560]  And these are great ideas, right?
[18:50.620 --> 18:59.600]  All the ideas for mitigating climate are great ideas and carbon sequestration is a particularly technical one, a lot of engineering going on there.
[18:59.600 --> 19:03.040]  But it's not enough because it's not happening soon enough.
[19:03.260 --> 19:21.600]  The technical mechanism of carbon sequestration is not demonstrated to scale and getting to scale will take an awfully long time and also take a lot of scientific advancement and engineering materials science advancement that will just not be happening all that soon.
[19:21.820 --> 19:25.840]  So technical mechanism of carbon sequestration is not coming immediately.
[19:27.040 --> 19:30.760]  Let's talk about one of the other things that won't have the immediate impact that we'd like.
[19:30.880 --> 19:32.020]  We'll talk about recycling.
[19:32.260 --> 19:34.040]  We can't recycle our way out of this mess.
[19:34.160 --> 19:40.000]  The technical mechanism of making sure that materials are reused or properly handled is great.
[19:40.160 --> 19:40.660]  It's worthwhile.
[19:40.660 --> 19:41.620]  We should recycle.
[19:41.760 --> 19:42.720]  We should recycle more.
[19:42.880 --> 19:44.060]  But it's not enough.
[19:44.260 --> 19:55.260]  And it can't be enough numerically, mathematically, because the impacts of the human-generated waste stream are only a small portion of what's going on with climate change.
[19:55.840 --> 20:02.260]  And I want to talk about something that I didn't know until I studied up on this a little bit over the past little while.
[20:02.880 --> 20:14.020]  The idea of personal responsibility, the idea of a carbon footprint, is something that was invented by BP in order to try to let the oil companies off the hook.
[20:14.180 --> 20:20.680]  In other words, the oil companies want to keep generating profits, generating revenues.
[20:20.920 --> 20:24.980]  They want to keep taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere.
[20:24.980 --> 20:28.860]  And they want us to think, as individuals, that actually, that's not the problem.
[20:29.060 --> 20:32.320]  The problem is that we're taking that plastic straw instead of a paper straw.
[20:32.700 --> 20:35.380]  You know, the problem is maybe too much single-use plastic.
[20:35.540 --> 20:37.120]  Maybe we're not driving an electric vehicle.
[20:37.340 --> 20:39.780]  Maybe our thermostat is set too high.
[20:39.900 --> 20:44.420]  And so the oil companies invented this idea of personal responsibility.
[20:44.780 --> 20:48.120]  And again, recycling is not a bad idea.
[20:48.280 --> 20:49.120]  Everyone should recycle.
[20:49.240 --> 20:50.760]  Improving recycling is desirable.
[20:51.460 --> 20:57.640]  And at the same time, these oil companies want to keep making money as long as they can.
[20:57.800 --> 21:05.540]  And the idea of personal responsibility and personal carbon footprints is part of how they get that message across.
[21:05.860 --> 21:09.120]  So now we'll transition to the live presentation.
[21:09.120 --> 21:14.120]  And we'll pick up where we left off, talking about some of the economics and talking about some of the personal use.
[21:14.120 --> 21:21.560]  Thanks, everyone, for being part of HOPE, for being there in person, for being a virtual attendee, and for watching these videos afterwards.
[21:21.840 --> 21:26.500]  And we anticipate doing this again in 2016 and hope to see you then.
[21:28.220 --> 21:35.740]  Take an economics course, look up the present value of money, and you realize that the delays are golden.
[21:35.740 --> 21:42.320]  The delays are great, even if the long-term endgame is essentially foreordained.
[21:42.460 --> 21:47.460]  In other words, in the long term, yeah, there's not going to be as much oil in the ground, and we'll be using different forms of energy.
[21:48.020 --> 21:54.580]  Until we get there, there's a lot of bodies out there that want to make as much money as possible in the interim.
[21:54.860 --> 21:56.500]  So you have to question this.
[21:56.560 --> 21:57.820]  We'll talk about this with misinformation.
[21:57.820 --> 22:00.920]  So recycling is not the answer, but there are... I'm sorry.
[22:01.000 --> 22:02.620]  Recycling is not the whole solution.
[22:03.260 --> 22:08.700]  Recycling is great, and there's fantastic opportunities to improve the technology of recycling.
[22:08.880 --> 22:14.400]  And I didn't do a slide on this, but for example, robotic sorting of recyclable materials.
[22:15.760 --> 22:22.140]  To the recycling bin, and some municipalities have you sorting, some municipalities have you grouping everything together.
[22:22.340 --> 22:25.700]  Some have it sort of a rough sort, like paper in this bin and everything else in the other bin.
[22:25.700 --> 22:32.100]  And they go into what's called a MRF, a municipal recycling facility, and it has to get sorted.
[22:32.260 --> 22:38.360]  And a bunch of stuff gets thrown out, either because it's not clean or it doesn't meet whatever criteria.
[22:39.600 --> 22:45.460]  Maybe it's not the right type of plastic, it's not the right type of metal, or because there's no place to sell it.
[22:45.560 --> 22:47.360]  Where I live, there's no market for glass.
[22:47.580 --> 22:51.600]  So glass is not recycled, incredibly, because glass is very much recyclable.
[22:52.220 --> 23:01.000]  But anyway, wouldn't it be cool if AI and robotics could sort all that stuff instead of having humans do the job?
[23:01.160 --> 23:07.220]  Which dominantly, humans do the job, there's mechanics involved as well, but dominantly, that's a human job these days.
[23:07.520 --> 23:10.080]  So opportunity is sort your recycling.
[23:10.580 --> 23:14.860]  You know, figure out how to recycle, figure out how to recycle better, figure out how to recycle more efficiently.
[23:15.300 --> 23:26.980]  And at the other end of the process is, okay, once some recyclables have been sent off for processing, well, first of all, make sure they don't get burned or go into a landfill, because that's not the idea, right?
[23:27.220 --> 23:32.960]  But second of all, what technology can we apply to get usable materials out of those recyclables?
[23:33.060 --> 23:40.180]  In other words, put them back into the usable space instead of being in the trash space.
[23:41.500 --> 23:44.880]  Anyway, let's talk about some of these other opportunities with energy.
[23:45.140 --> 23:46.600]  First, and these are computing things.
[23:46.720 --> 23:48.960]  This is what I did a lot of in supercomputing.
[23:49.060 --> 23:57.340]  I did my master's in business administration with an emphasis in sustainable energy, looking at the energy use of these big monster computers.
[23:58.480 --> 24:02.800]  Computers are estimated to consume 50% of global energy by 2040.
[24:03.020 --> 24:04.580]  And I'm sorry, I don't have a source for that.
[24:04.700 --> 24:07.380]  So I should have saved the source.
[24:07.560 --> 24:09.200]  So I can't vouch for that 100%.
[24:09.200 --> 24:14.180]  But we know that data centers are huge monsters for energy consumption.
[24:14.460 --> 24:21.260]  Not only do they take electricity to compute, they take a lot of power to cool as well.
[24:21.360 --> 24:23.840]  We'll talk more about that momentarily.
[24:24.180 --> 24:28.700]  So we have opportunities to improve that with different technologies.
[24:28.880 --> 24:29.600]  I just listed a couple.
[24:30.000 --> 24:34.120]  So super cooling, miniaturization, not using energy at rest.
[24:34.120 --> 24:48.720]  We also have opportunities, and this was some of my MBA studies, for using fewer materials or for making sure the materials you use are recyclable or are sourced in ways that don't have some of the negative impact of mining and so forth.
[24:48.720 --> 25:09.060]  We see a lot now from, believe it or not, Amazon, I'm sorry, not Amazon, I'm not sure how good Amazon is, but we see a lot from Microsoft and Google about having greener data centers because they're co-locating their data centers in places like Midwestern Washington state where the power is green,
[25:09.200 --> 25:16.040]  where you're getting hydro power in that case, and in Arizona where you're getting solar power, for example.
[25:16.040 --> 25:28.340]  So the green story for data centers does exist, but even then, that computer has a ton, tons in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent, of embedded energy.
[25:28.500 --> 25:34.520]  So the energy use during the life cycle is one thing, but the energy use in production is something else.
[25:34.680 --> 25:40.720]  So a lot of neat opportunities for computing, which I wanted to highlight because, first of all, that's an area I've worked in and I think is really cool.
[25:40.820 --> 25:41.340]  It's a lot of fun.
[25:41.340 --> 25:49.760]  I've worked in supercomputing for about 20 years, and also because I think it's an area where people here might be able to innovate.
[25:50.100 --> 26:06.060]  We've heard some talks now about things like quantum computing, things like the supercooled computing use Josephson Junction, which is also in the quantum computing space, rather than a regular transistor.
[26:06.300 --> 26:07.760]  So there's some neat opportunities.
[26:07.760 --> 26:19.360]  Let me mention another factoid, this is just a fun thing, I didn't do a slide for it, is fundamentally, the fundamental building block of a modern digital computer is a what?
[26:19.580 --> 26:21.280]  What type of electric circuit?
[26:22.020 --> 26:23.440]  A transistor, right?
[26:23.620 --> 26:23.920]  Exactly.
[26:24.060 --> 26:24.600]  Everyone knows.
[26:24.820 --> 26:26.020]  What do transistors do?
[26:26.100 --> 26:28.800]  They take in two signals, they send out one signal.
[26:31.400 --> 26:44.660]  If two electrons go in, and one electron goes out, you're wasting, in a sense, you're wasting that electron, or more precisely, the electron that doesn't go out is heat.
[26:44.860 --> 26:46.220]  It goes out as waste heat.
[26:46.580 --> 26:55.160]  So fundamentally, at a physical level, when you're computing digitally, you're taking in energy and you're sending out heat.
[26:55.160 --> 27:05.660]  And that's why data centers use so much power beyond what it takes to run the computers, because they also have to cool that stuff.
[27:05.820 --> 27:17.460]  So I wanted to mention that, because it's a fun little factoid, is that not only do you have opportunities for cooling data centers more efficiently, and having less, you know, sort of containing and reusing some of that heat.
[27:17.460 --> 27:27.800]  So, for example, historically, some of the first computers, back at, I think it was the University of Pennsylvania, where the big computer was in the basement, it was heating the facility above it, right?
[27:27.820 --> 27:29.200]  You were reusing that waste heat.
[27:29.340 --> 27:32.640]  So there's some neat opportunities for what do you do with the waste heat.
[27:32.720 --> 27:36.880]  But there's also neat opportunities for what do we do beyond transistors?
[27:37.040 --> 27:38.620]  What about photonic computing?
[27:38.860 --> 27:43.620]  And these Josephson Junctions in a super-cooled environment.
[27:43.620 --> 27:55.820]  So, neat opportunities, I believe, for fundamental research, and of course, some of that is not only like computer science or computer engineering, some of it is also materials science, materials engineering.
[27:56.840 --> 28:00.480]  You know, how are you going to make that chip, or how are you going to manufacture that thing at scale?
[28:00.480 --> 28:04.000]  So, anyway, a lot of cool opportunities in computing.
[28:04.020 --> 28:14.660]  So I wanted to highlight that, because I think it's kind of appealing to the hacker folks like us, and also an area that's ripe and available for improvements.
[28:15.040 --> 28:16.440]  All right, let's talk about some other stuff.
[28:16.460 --> 28:19.300]  We talked about some computing opportunities.
[28:19.500 --> 28:23.220]  Let's talk a little bit about green energy production, storage, and transmission.
[28:24.360 --> 28:27.080]  And this is, unfortunately, this is one of the things that won't work.
[28:27.080 --> 28:27.880]  I wish it would.
[28:28.220 --> 28:30.120]  Like, we love the technical solutions.
[28:30.300 --> 28:30.880]  Of course we do.
[28:30.960 --> 28:32.060]  I love the technical solutions.
[28:32.260 --> 28:34.720]  So one of them is, well, there's a lot of sun in space.
[28:34.880 --> 28:35.940]  You know, it's very bright up there.
[28:36.140 --> 28:44.780]  What if we put up this monster solar plant, a solar panel, that collected energy from the sun and beamed it down to the earth?
[28:44.900 --> 28:49.640]  And you use a type of antenna and a frequency, so you're not, like, cooking people.
[28:49.720 --> 28:50.780]  You're not sending down lasers.
[28:50.780 --> 28:51.800]  That would be dangerous.
[28:52.280 --> 28:56.240]  You use rectennas to receive the microwave radiation.
[28:56.540 --> 29:02.820]  This is how big it would have to be to be the scale of maybe a few power plants, right, compared to the Eiffel Tower.
[29:03.000 --> 29:05.060]  So is this something we could do today?
[29:05.800 --> 29:06.240]  No.
[29:06.540 --> 29:09.140]  Is this something we would be able to do in the near future?
[29:09.700 --> 29:11.640]  No, not really, right?
[29:11.720 --> 29:12.400]  Not very likely.
[29:12.560 --> 29:19.100]  The engineering challenges can be met and probably will be met over time, but this is not a near-term solution, right?
[29:19.100 --> 29:34.920]  So solar collectors in space beaming down to earth, great science fiction topic, theoretically possible, but outside of the bounds of what we can do, both in terms of payload, getting rockets full of stuff up to whether it's geosynchronous or low-earth orbit.
[29:35.120 --> 29:39.480]  It's probably going to be geosynchronous because you have to beam down to fixed antennas on the earth.
[29:40.320 --> 29:44.620]  And also in terms of material science, what are we going to make this sale out of?
[29:44.620 --> 29:51.780]  And this article that's just from this last month in IEEE Spectrum, IEEE is the Institute for Electronics and Electrical Engineers.
[29:51.780 --> 29:54.120]  It's an organization I've been a member of for about 20 years.
[29:54.260 --> 29:57.440]  It's the world's largest professional organization, very reputable.
[29:58.720 --> 30:05.440]  This particular article from their magazine said, oh yeah, and by the way, it'll take like 10,000 space launches to get this thing up there.
[30:05.560 --> 30:07.220]  And what do space launches do?
[30:07.700 --> 30:10.060]  They burn fuel, right?
[30:10.060 --> 30:16.600]  So in other words, we're going to be putting a heck of a lot of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere with each one of those space launches.
[30:16.800 --> 30:28.680]  And when we're doing on the order of dozens to maybe 100 or so space launches per year, that's a different situation than if we're trying to do thousands of space launches in a short period.
[30:28.900 --> 30:30.780]  So yeah, this unfortunately is not the answer.
[30:31.080 --> 30:32.740]  We do want to increase renewables.
[30:32.860 --> 30:33.540]  This is just a chart.
[30:33.540 --> 30:43.900]  You've seen something like this before, I'm sure, where wind, there's wind, there's solar, there's other forms of renewable energy.
[30:44.140 --> 30:45.820]  And we want to increase all of those.
[30:45.940 --> 30:48.860]  So there's an opportunity, again, from the hacker's perspective, what can you do?
[30:48.960 --> 30:52.940]  Even at the local community level, you can say, hey, we're in Montana.
[30:53.180 --> 30:53.960]  It's windy.
[30:54.300 --> 30:56.000]  What if we had a wind tower?
[30:56.260 --> 30:59.760]  Maybe this is something you can advocate with your local energy collective.
[30:59.760 --> 31:14.180]  Maybe you can even bring it to the, what up in Canada, where I live, called First Nations here, the Indian tribes, the tribal communities to use some of the land to create renewable energy.
[31:14.360 --> 31:16.160]  Same thing with water.
[31:16.360 --> 31:23.700]  There's opportunities for dams, hydroelectric, that we see on the map that, you know, there's gaps that can be filled.
[31:23.700 --> 31:38.000]  So this is something that you can do not only as a technology-oriented person, maybe even as someone that's ready to do a little social engineering and try to get your local energy cooperative or your local government to do something that would help to fill in this map with renewables.
[31:38.200 --> 31:40.960]  But it's also something where there's technical solutions.
[31:40.960 --> 31:45.360]  So can we make residential scale windmills, for example?
[31:45.780 --> 31:58.520]  Can we make a small stream or a small river generate hydropower without, you know, negatively impacting the fish and the water flow, these types of things?
[31:58.680 --> 32:01.060]  So there's actually a lot of technical opportunities there.
[32:01.240 --> 32:04.780]  I want to highlight nuclear power is not the answer.
[32:04.780 --> 32:06.780]  This is something that we're hearing quite a lot.
[32:06.900 --> 32:26.880]  And as someone that remembers very clearly Three Mile Island from the mid-1970s, Three Mile Island disaster was sort of a near disaster, but it was a watershed moment in power generation, especially in the United States, but also worldwide, in that essentially nuclear power construction stopped.
[32:27.200 --> 32:29.200]  And previous to that, it was what I said.
[32:29.320 --> 32:34.520]  It was like, oh, yeah, and this is going back even to the 50s or 60s before I was born or aware.
[32:34.780 --> 32:41.940]  But the message was it'll be too cheap to meter nuclear, too cheap to meter, right?
[32:42.180 --> 32:44.120]  In other words, you just wouldn't even get a bill, right?
[32:44.260 --> 32:46.060]  That turned out to be completely false.
[32:46.280 --> 32:50.280]  Nuclear power plants are multi-billion dollar operations, major operations.
[32:50.280 --> 32:51.600]  They produce a lot of pollution.
[32:52.020 --> 32:53.160]  Plutonium is a problem.
[32:53.620 --> 32:55.020]  You know, uranium is a problem.
[32:55.460 --> 32:57.160]  Mining of uranium is a problem.
[32:57.180 --> 32:59.160]  But regardless, it's not too cheap to meter.
[32:59.520 --> 33:02.040]  But following Three Mile Island, how many...
[33:02.040 --> 33:03.980]  That was 1976, I believe.
[33:05.060 --> 33:10.920]  1978, and there were a couple of power plants that were in construction, going online since then.
[33:11.500 --> 33:18.560]  So, even if you think nuclear is good, and I've actually come around, and I think there could be some benefit to nuclear power.
[33:19.860 --> 33:21.560]  And certainly, the safety is a lot better.
[33:21.720 --> 33:23.420]  You have Chernobyl, you have Three Mile Island.
[33:23.420 --> 33:28.540]  But overall, the safety is quite a lot better than it had been, and Fukushima as well.
[33:29.000 --> 33:34.240]  And compared to other forms of electrical generation, okay, it could be part of the mix.
[33:34.240 --> 33:35.300]  And it is part of the mix.
[33:35.400 --> 33:39.080]  We saw almost 10% in the energy flow diagram in the United States.
[33:39.840 --> 33:43.700]  But the thing is, again, how soon can we expect the changes?
[33:43.720 --> 33:45.180]  Remember my urgency slides?
[33:45.180 --> 33:47.320]  We want to start doing something now.
[33:47.500 --> 33:51.500]  So, if we want to get a nuclear power plant online, how long does that take?
[33:51.620 --> 33:54.320]  The answer is decades, in many cases.
[33:54.680 --> 33:55.200]  Decades.
[33:55.460 --> 34:03.000]  So, how many nuclear power plants, how many new nuclear power plants have actually come online since 1978?
[34:03.000 --> 34:04.500]  And I'll give you a hint.
[34:04.920 --> 34:07.800]  Until 2013, the answer was zero.
[34:08.220 --> 34:15.200]  There was not a single power plant in the United States, not a single one, that went from planning to operations.
[34:15.360 --> 34:18.140]  From 1976 to 2013.
[34:18.720 --> 34:20.040]  Okay, isn't that astounding?
[34:21.000 --> 34:24.400]  How many of you think have come online since 1978, including a couple?
[34:24.600 --> 34:24.720]  Two.
[34:24.880 --> 34:25.480]  That's the answer.
[34:25.720 --> 34:26.240]  Thank you.
[34:26.420 --> 34:27.120]  Someone knew the answer.
[34:27.300 --> 34:27.620]  They were both...
[34:27.620 --> 34:28.340]  And they're actually...
[34:28.340 --> 34:30.400]  They're like part of the same complex.
[34:30.400 --> 34:35.660]  So, you could even count that as one if you wanted to, because they went through the same permitting process.
[34:35.940 --> 34:39.320]  So, again, I've come around personally on nuclear power.
[34:39.480 --> 34:41.880]  I think there's something there that could be beneficial.
[34:41.880 --> 34:44.700]  I think the safety concerns can be addressed reasonably well.
[34:44.800 --> 34:46.220]  I think the storage costs...
[34:46.220 --> 34:49.640]  The storage concerns can be addressed, at least to a reasonable extent.
[34:49.840 --> 34:58.560]  But practically speaking, when it takes 10 to 20 years for a nuclear power plant to come online, costs billions of dollars, we're not going to nuke our way out of this.
[34:58.580 --> 35:00.020]  It's just not feasible.
[35:00.020 --> 35:01.240]  It's not reasonable to expect.
[35:01.460 --> 35:06.040]  So, this is a place where the technical solution, as appealing as it is, is not going to be the answer.
[35:06.060 --> 35:07.260]  In this case, almost at all.
[35:07.420 --> 35:16.260]  But even if you were bringing on several nuclear power plants, because there's always some that are in process, it's not going to be enough to reverse some of the trends that I've seen.
[35:16.660 --> 35:17.800]  Let's talk a little bit...
[35:17.800 --> 35:20.800]  This is fun about misinformation and disinformation.
[35:20.800 --> 35:41.460]  We've heard so many talks about this at HOPE over the years, and I'm not the huge expert on this, but I wanted to highlight this because in the energy industry, we talked about BP and the other oil organizations trying to, you know, essentially trying to deceive us into either complacency or a
[35:41.460 --> 35:46.800]  feeling of helplessness or a feeling, as I've had on my earlier slide, a feeling that it's someone else's problem.
[35:46.900 --> 35:48.020]  It's nothing that we can do about it.
[35:48.200 --> 35:50.800]  There's a lot of misinformation or disinformation out there.
[35:50.980 --> 36:02.800]  So, briefly, I'll characterize misinformation as something that's easy to understand, or to think you understand it, easy to share, often with no sources, and often with some catchy words, some catchy headlines, right?
[36:02.980 --> 36:03.420]  Misinformation.
[36:03.740 --> 36:06.600]  In other words, something that is not correct.
[36:09.460 --> 36:14.340]  Correct information, scientifically, you know, well substantiated from authoritative sources.
[36:14.800 --> 36:16.100]  Well, there might be multiple sources.
[36:16.280 --> 36:17.380]  There might be multiple data types.
[36:17.480 --> 36:19.020]  It might take some analysis to understand.
[36:19.300 --> 36:20.960]  There might be a less catchy headline.
[36:21.100 --> 36:22.840]  There might be something that's a little bit more nuanced.
[36:23.440 --> 36:26.500]  And the soundbite maybe won't get that story across.
[36:26.500 --> 36:28.000]  Maybe there needs to be some explanation.
[36:28.580 --> 36:33.320]  So, in other words, the misinformation can sometimes be like junk food.
[36:33.480 --> 36:38.920]  You know, it's like easy to eat, easy to consume, but maybe it's not giving you everything you need to have the full nutrition picture.
[36:39.080 --> 36:42.060]  Same thing with correct information versus misinformation.
[36:42.940 --> 36:44.640]  Disinformation is a bigger problem.
[36:44.660 --> 36:48.880]  And unfortunately, and now it's relevant leading up to the U.S.
[36:48.940 --> 36:54.360]  elections and elections elsewhere around the world, disinformation is funded at the state level.
[36:54.360 --> 36:56.620]  And it's good.
[36:56.840 --> 36:58.360]  Like, they're good at this.
[36:58.840 --> 37:18.640]  There's organizations that are very good, very effective, very skilled at misleading you, and more importantly versus misinformation at potentially persuading you either to share stuff that's incorrect or even to internalize and take views, which are not necessarily your views and not the views that
[37:18.640 --> 37:25.000]  you would take by, as intellectuals, studying up on your own, looking at the data on your own, but might actually stick.
[37:25.260 --> 37:26.560]  They might be emotionally appealing.
[37:27.480 --> 37:32.560]  And then suddenly you're making decisions, taking actions in the real world as a result of this disinformation.
[37:32.940 --> 37:34.180]  And again, that's a whole other talk.
[37:34.360 --> 37:35.840]  There's a couple of talks that HOPE about it.
[37:36.560 --> 37:43.980]  What we see with disinformation is that it's crafted to look like legitimate information.
[37:44.860 --> 37:47.740]  It's easy to share, as is misinformation.
[37:48.280 --> 37:50.580]  The sources might be deceiving or incorrect.
[37:50.740 --> 37:52.700]  In other words, there are lies in disinformation.
[37:53.660 --> 37:56.800]  Misinformation might be, well, you know, I'm not doing the whole story.
[37:57.060 --> 38:09.260]  Disinformation is information which is either twisted or inappropriately presented or incomplete, but geared towards persuasion and often crafted towards micro audiences.
[38:09.260 --> 38:16.860]  In other words, with things like Facebook and Google, you can get an ad, which is for a very, very narrow demographic.
[38:16.940 --> 38:23.980]  And we've heard of state-level actors, Russia and China, especially North Korea to some extent, and some other state actors.
[38:24.140 --> 38:25.200]  And by the way, the U.S.
[38:25.200 --> 38:27.160]  is far from innocent in this.
[38:27.520 --> 38:36.980]  But we hear of state actors that are targeting specific lawmakers with disinformation and trying to influence them or specific corporate folks, you know, opinion leaders.
[38:36.980 --> 38:42.100]  And these are also likely as misinformation to create an emotional response.
[38:42.400 --> 38:44.620]  I'm going to go through this next section pretty quickly.
[38:44.780 --> 38:46.520]  But again, I thought this was instructive.
[38:46.700 --> 38:51.740]  And it goes back to my saying that stuff is good.
[38:51.900 --> 38:52.960]  Doing something is good.
[38:53.140 --> 38:54.300]  It's certainly better than doing nothing.
[38:54.480 --> 38:56.060]  But there's no magic bullet.
[38:56.240 --> 38:57.520]  There's no magical thing.
[38:57.880 --> 39:01.520]  So electric vehicles are a flashpoint for some people.
[39:01.680 --> 39:04.000]  There's a lot of concerns, some misinformation about it.
[39:04.180 --> 39:06.800]  So some misinformation might be that EVs pollute more.
[39:06.980 --> 39:09.020]  And I've seen that headline.
[39:09.280 --> 39:15.740]  I've seen that headline that electric vehicles actually produce more greenhouse gases than gas vehicles.
[39:15.980 --> 39:18.900]  Not true, but there's a grain of truth to it.
[39:19.480 --> 39:23.240]  Disinformation is something like, oh, it's just a government overreach, right?
[39:23.340 --> 39:32.660]  So in other words, getting you to take this intellectual, emotional stance, which is unfortunately based on incorrect information.
[39:33.480 --> 39:37.720]  And the correct information, which we'll talk about, is unfortunately more nuanced.
[39:37.860 --> 39:39.000]  And this is the way it goes sometimes.
[39:39.200 --> 39:41.460]  This is a visual capitalist diagram.
[39:41.860 --> 39:44.740]  The left side is electric vehicles.
[39:44.820 --> 39:45.520]  The middle is hybrid.
[39:45.600 --> 39:47.440]  And the right side is gas or diesel.
[39:47.660 --> 39:58.900]  So just comparing the left to the right, especially, we say, hey, look, during operation, I realize it's a little hard to see, but in the middle there, basically what it says is, during operation, electric vehicles produce a lot fewer greenhouse gases.
[40:00.120 --> 40:00.480]  True.
[40:00.860 --> 40:02.280]  Or, you know, fundamentally true.
[40:02.700 --> 40:03.900]  Defensibly true, right?
[40:04.300 --> 40:07.100]  And this is based, as you can imagine, on a number of different assumptions.
[40:07.100 --> 40:08.880]  How long do the vehicles last?
[40:09.080 --> 40:10.360]  And how much fuel will they take?
[40:10.460 --> 40:11.260]  And how much are they driven?
[40:11.500 --> 40:16.000]  So, you know, there's a little bit of a leap of faith in here as to whether you want to trust the source data.
[40:16.120 --> 40:22.700]  But on the whole, the idea that I'm presenting here, at least, is that electric vehicles do, in fact, produce less greenhouse gases.
[40:22.840 --> 40:23.400]  But wait a minute.
[40:23.500 --> 40:25.020]  The truth is actually a lot more nuanced.
[40:25.500 --> 40:28.760]  The first thing is, I've mentioned this a couple of times, embedded energy.
[40:28.980 --> 40:31.140]  These are made from metals.
[40:31.480 --> 40:34.000]  There are rare earth minerals involved.
[40:34.260 --> 40:42.760]  You're building vehicles off and out of steel and other components that take electricity, water, and so forth to do the smelting, right?
[40:43.200 --> 40:48.460]  So there's a lot of embedded energy in these vehicles.
[40:48.680 --> 40:55.200]  And batteries are worse for embedded energy than a steel engine, right?
[40:57.100 --> 41:05.220]  So the further detail is that, yeah, okay, over a lifetime, maybe the bubbles there are a pretty different size.
[41:05.660 --> 41:22.400]  But in terms of production, yeah, actually, if you look on the top bubble there and the one underneath it, there's actually a whole lot of energy that goes into electric vehicles compared to, or more than, and compared to a gas-powered vehicle.
[41:22.400 --> 41:33.000]  And you can look at other costs of embedded energy or other byproducts of the manufacturing process that we might care about a whole lot, and we might even care more than the carbon production.
[41:33.260 --> 41:47.840]  So things like species loss, habitat loss, things like the indenture-tude and the terrible regimes in places like Congo that are doing mineral extraction.
[41:47.840 --> 41:56.680]  So there's a lot of bad stories behind production that are not just counted in terms of, like, carbon dioxide equivalent.
[41:57.380 --> 42:12.160]  So the bottom line, though, again, this is the story I just wanted to tell, especially because it's relevant to the talk about electric vehicles, is that the bottom line, when you add up all that stuff, is, yeah, electric vehicles are better, at least in terms of lifetime carbon dioxide under the variety of assumptions that went into the data here.
[42:14.300 --> 42:20.860]  So, okay, so 30, whatever it is, about 35 compared to about 55 of their units there.
[42:21.060 --> 42:26.320]  So it's tons of carbon dioxide equivalent that are used.
[42:26.760 --> 42:30.040]  So, all right, but that's only about 25%.
[42:30.040 --> 42:32.580]  So the 25% is great.
[42:32.720 --> 42:34.200]  There's nothing wrong with 25%.
[42:34.200 --> 42:41.260]  There are other reasons why electric vehicles are good because they're putting less, you know, the roadways are quieter and there's less pollution going in, stuff like that.
[42:41.260 --> 42:51.640]  But, again, the take home here, if everyone was driving an electric vehicle, if all trucking became electric, would that solve the climate change problem?
[42:51.820 --> 42:52.800]  Well, no, right?
[42:52.880 --> 42:53.500]  It's not enough.
[42:54.940 --> 42:57.920]  Okay, and we have to wrap up here momentarily.
[42:58.420 --> 43:01.720]  So, opportunities here are misinformation.
[43:01.720 --> 43:02.700]  They're kind of obvious.
[43:03.080 --> 43:09.660]  Improve education, include improve personal information hygiene and also improve technical mechanisms.
[43:10.240 --> 43:11.540]  So there's opportunities.
[43:11.820 --> 43:13.600]  Modeling simulation could be a whole talk.
[43:13.600 --> 43:16.560]  I love this area and I don't have enough time to talk about it.
[43:17.800 --> 43:24.540]  Modeling simulation is where we sort of see what's going on and more importantly or equally as importantly, we see the impact of what we could do.
[43:24.980 --> 43:26.640]  So what if we put a wind tower here?
[43:26.780 --> 43:30.360]  What if we were to reduce emissions by X percent?
[43:30.580 --> 43:36.360]  What if we were to sequester, you know, these many tons of carbon dioxide?
[43:36.360 --> 43:37.460]  So you do modeling.
[43:37.640 --> 43:39.680]  First part of modeling is observation.
[43:39.680 --> 43:46.280]  This is one of the charts you might have seen before, seeing how anomalous the last 18 months have been in terms of temperatures.
[43:46.640 --> 44:04.940]  I'm not going to dwell on that, but actually measuring that stuff, putting up the weather balloons, the radiosons, the remote sensing, which is another cool area where the satellites are helping to identify what the temperatures are and give that into a weather forecast or a longer-term climate forecast, fantastic opportunities for the technically-minded.
[44:09.340 --> 44:20.540]  And again, I don't have time anymore to dwell on this, but with more computational power comes better accuracy, and there's also multi-physics, and there's also data structures and algorithms.
[44:20.780 --> 44:28.480]  So for someone that's in the computing area, there's a ton of stuff to be done, and this is a fun area, trust me, to work in.
[44:30.180 --> 44:33.460]  Almost the last one here is affecting social change, raising awareness.
[44:33.760 --> 44:35.280]  Again, being vegan, great.
[44:35.420 --> 44:35.940]  Go for it.
[44:35.980 --> 44:36.380]  I'm vegan.
[44:36.560 --> 44:37.500]  Been for a long time.
[44:37.800 --> 44:39.440]  Not enough, right?
[44:39.860 --> 44:40.520]  Not enough.
[44:40.680 --> 44:43.280]  So evangelizing is fine, but it's not going to be the solution.
[44:43.560 --> 44:45.520]  The cow farts, as I said, are not the problem.
[44:46.020 --> 44:47.460]  And again, there's opportunities here.
[44:47.580 --> 44:48.300]  There's food science.
[44:48.460 --> 44:48.920]  There's agriculture.
[44:49.200 --> 44:50.040]  There's transportation.
[44:50.400 --> 44:51.420]  There's decrease of waste.
[44:51.580 --> 44:57.280]  There's genetically engineered crops, figuring out how to get cocoa to grow in other places.
[44:59.000 --> 45:00.280]  I'm going more quickly now.
[45:00.580 --> 45:01.580]  Response and resiliency.
[45:01.840 --> 45:02.940]  We saw this.
[45:03.080 --> 45:08.200]  This is Superstorm Sandy, where the power was out in New York City for a number of days.
[45:08.440 --> 45:09.360]  And so what happened?
[45:09.520 --> 45:16.340]  Well, the technology community came together, and they said, hey, we can trade shifts riding this bike, and we can charge up our cell phones, right?
[45:16.480 --> 45:17.960]  So hackers are part of a response.
[45:17.960 --> 45:19.760]  There's a lot of ham radio going on here.
[45:19.900 --> 45:23.780]  Every time there's a disaster, the amateur radio folks come to the rescue, right?
[45:23.780 --> 45:24.320]  Every time.
[45:24.540 --> 45:26.540]  Better than NOAA and quicker also.
[45:27.360 --> 45:30.460]  Or better than emergency management and quicker.
[45:31.640 --> 45:36.560]  A couple of things we didn't talk about, just to let you know that I know there's broader stuff that we didn't focus on.
[45:36.660 --> 45:40.680]  There's biology opportunities, ecology, geoengineering.
[45:40.900 --> 45:46.600]  We talked a little bit about the sunshades, but there's a lot of other opportunities in here, and they're all cool, and they can all help.
[45:47.020 --> 45:54.360]  Often, as we said on the early slide, there might be a technology downside, and the question will be, well, does the upside outweigh the downside?
[45:54.700 --> 46:01.960]  And so I encourage you to look into it, to pursue some opportunities, to visualize where you might be able to help, to contribute to discussions.
[46:02.260 --> 46:09.660]  If you're growing up, or you have someone in your family that's growing up, maybe this is an opportunity to say, there's a place you might want to work as a career.
[46:12.340 --> 46:14.480]  And that's what I wanted to encourage.
[46:14.900 --> 46:22.200]  Corey Doctrow, who's one of our speakers here at HOPE, has a blog, and he wrote about good news for climate change.
[46:22.300 --> 46:29.600]  He's optimistic, and he's pretty well-balanced, so he's not just optimistic about technology solutions.
[46:29.600 --> 46:33.800]  He's also optimistic about the social solutions.
[46:33.800 --> 46:39.000]  He's optimistic about solar punk becoming more of a dominant idea.
[46:39.000 --> 46:41.780]  So you might want to read that as another spin.
[46:42.140 --> 46:43.640]  This is my last slide.
[46:43.820 --> 46:47.860]  This is from someone that founded 350.org, Bill McKibben.
[46:48.320 --> 46:50.320]  And then again, this is just a fun statistic.
[46:51.140 --> 46:56.260]  We put a lot of effort into the status quo.
[46:56.520 --> 47:00.800]  In other words, to burn fossil fuel, we have to move it around the globe.
[47:00.980 --> 47:06.940]  And those ships moving around the globe are burning fossil fuel, and they're putting pollution into the atmosphere.
[47:06.940 --> 47:17.880]  And if we just stopped or decreased the use of those fossil fuels, we wouldn't need half those ships, because all they're doing is moving that carbon around anyway.
[47:18.080 --> 47:19.460]  So that's the end of my talk.
[47:19.660 --> 47:23.120]  I did manage to use up all the time without time for questions.
[47:23.120 --> 47:26.200]  I think you've seen me during the conference.
[47:26.400 --> 47:28.780]  I'm happy to talk to people one-on-one.
[47:28.920 --> 47:50.580]  And I do hope you give some thought to how, as a hacker, you have an opportunity to contribute to mitigating, addressing, finding some solutions at various social, technological, industrial, commercial, community levels towards helping with the climate change problems.
[47:50.900 --> 47:52.860]  So thanks and enjoy the rest of your HOPE.