Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Peter Byck: Thanks for being here. Wow, what a—I guess when they offer food, people show up, right? I had a couple of quick stories. The turkey idea—when we made our film Garbage, my, the guy who I made it with, his biggest fear was we were going to get a two-word review, “it is.” So then turkey—that’s kind of good.

Carbon Nation is a direct result out of seeing An Inconvenient Truth. I was lucky enough to see it at its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2006. I then took, I wanted to immediately make a movie about solutions. I couldn't sleep for three nights. I was waking up at four in the morning writing what I thought was policy papers for Al Gore to run for president in 2008. Clearly that wasn’t the case.

It took about a year to form our team, and our team is a fellow named Artemis Jakowski, who was doing clean tech investment from the 80s. He’s been doing this for a long time. He’s also a philanthropist. And his college friend is a fellow named Craig Sieben, who is an energy efficiency guy. He has a company called Sieben. It’s Sieben Energy Associates, in Chicago. He’s been on this world of energy efficiency for a long time. Then Karen Weigert, who at the time had just left McKenzie, had been at Harvard and Goldman Sachs. She got her MBA at Harvard Business School and she then during the film started working at bank called Shore Bank, which was doing inner city green investment, Chicago.

They went through some real tough times during the downturn, and now she’s the chief sustainability officer for the city of Chicago. She says that the film really helped raise her profile in Chicago, to help her get into the people who were making those decisions, to get her profile there. Clearly, she got the job. She’s doing a really cool job. They’ve closed, the two coal plants in Chicago, they’ve closed under her tenure. I give her credit for, at Midway, there’s a water fountain that has really clean, nice water for your water bottle, but you don’t have to hope that the thing goes high enough to get into your water bottle. It’s actually, it was there, the first time I saw it was after she got the job. It’s hers; I give her credit.

We started research right at the end of January 2007, is when I really started digging in. February, March, and then a friend of mine who is right back there with a little baby, Mary, and her husband James—James was a PhD candidate at the time here at ASU. Is it planetary geology, is that—? Yup. James said “Hey, Al Gore is gonna speak at ASU on April 2nd.” This was in 2007. “Would you want to come out and see it?” I lived in LA at the time. Cheap flight; I said “Sure!” I thought, “You know what? I’ll go ahead and borrow a friend’s camera. Let’s just start filming.” Cuz I’m going to interview people anyway, might as well interview them and film them.

So we started filming here, at ASU, on April 2nd, 2007. I haven’t been back since, so it’s really cool to close this loop. I had a meeting today with Michael Crow and Julie Wrigley, so it’s really nice to close a loop like that. The person I interviewed, besides James, was his—it’s not your boss, it’s your—? Academic advisor, Dr. Phil Christenson, who, I was talking about climate change and I asked him, “When did you first hear about climate change?” He said when he was a student at UCLA he was starting to see things coming across the transom and he just didn’t think it was possible. He just didn’t think anything humans could do would be powerful enough to affect this whole giant planet. Then he started studying Mars, and realized he was seeing causal effects on Mars. Because he could see it from a distance, he realized it was one complex system versus too big. Then he thought, well, wait a second. That can happen there, ah, hmm. Then he started really digging into, realizing we could affect the planet.

He taught me that Venus was twice as hot as Mercury, even though it’s twice as far from the sun, because there’s a whole lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. I thought that was a great way to start the film, off of Earth. There’s no politics—I don’t think—on Venus, and—yeah, I don’t know—and just to get it away, just to get it to physics. James was our scientific advisor. We actually, ASU was the beginning of the film and it actually, the thing we learned at ASU is the beginning of the film. Which is odd, for a documentary is never shot in sequence. How could you possibly know? Especially something that’s not like a historical documentary, where you know that was born then, he died then. Again, it’s really, really, really good to be back.

We started shooting April 2nd, 2007 and little side note—I met Richard Branson at a Kentucky Derby party—It’s not that much of a side note, actually—in 2005. When I met him, I knew I wanted him to be in a movie that I would make someday, but I didn’t know what it was going to be, but I thought at least I could ask him “Hey, would you like to be in a film I’m gonna make?” He was like, “Sure!” Cool. He had just won the Derby with a 50 to 1 horse. Right? Richard Branson wins at a 50 to 1? I got him on a good day. He gave me his email, his cell phone, his assistant’s email and cell phone. Right? I kept in touch with him. He let me keep in touch with him. I would email him about every six months and say “How’s it going?” blah blah blah blah blah. The night before I flew here, I emailed him and said “Hey, we’re going to start this movie on solutions to climate change. Would you be in it?” He said yes. Then, because I’ve seen things really tank out in Hollywood, when you say people are going to be in your stuff and they haven’t said that it’s okay to say it, I emailed him again and said “Can we tell people that you said you’re going to be in it?” He said yes.

Before I actually started filming, I had on my interviewee list Branson. Then we got Tom Friedman very shortly after that. Then we got Paul Hawkin shortly after that. In our presentations to people who didn’t know who the heck we were and what kind of film we were going to make and what we were doing, we could say these folks have committed to being in the film. Paul Hawken actually fell out, so I never got him. But he was actually very helpful, because he was on that list for about a year before it just didn’t, it just didn’t happen.

We filmed for three years. For the first two years, my uncle Phil and a college roommate of his from Harvard, I think they were class of 56, maybe 54, sent me climate denier articles, mostly from the Financial Times. The whole time I’m making the film, shooting the film. At first I was kind of pissed, cuz I really thought you had to believe climate change was real or you were just not thinking. Or you were bought off. Or something. That was my attitude. It was very much in the Inconvenient Truth world. When we made our film, we weren’t setting out to prove climate change was real; we were just starting from the supposition that it was real, and now what? We didn’t get into any, I didn’t have one interview about whether it’s real or not. Not one.

I actually just had my first one two weeks ago, in Berkeley. Cuz we’re going to make more media. This was a guy named Richard Muller. Anybody hear of Richard Muller? He’s the guy who was hired by the Koch brothers to look at all the data from all the scientists, I was told, to then show that it’s not real. He says that’s not the case, and he says he also got money from Bill Gates and other people. His deal was, he didn’t believe the data cuz it was, in his mind, cherry picking. He went and got in there, because he did it with his team, he now believes it, and he came up with the exact same conclusion that everybody had. I kind of pushed him on that a little bit, but I wasn’t 60 Minutes.

I just had my first interview about that four, three years after the film premiered. We go off, we start shooting the film, looking for solutions. The first year was really still research. Some of the pieces that I shot that first year were, did make it into the movie. But it was a year into the project and a few months, acutlaly, where we sat down with everybody and looked at all the footage we had and realized—I realized—that about 90 percent of the movie hadn’t been yet shot.

That’s a real kick in the gut, to have been working on something for a year, mostly out-of-pocket. We just started raising money from folks who really helped us out, but it was a long time. But that was the truth. What was really interesting was even though we weren’t interviewing people about whether it was real or not, we had a lot of people saying not only is it real, but we’re really depressed about it. A lot of that early footage wasn’t what we were aiming for, it was just information.

My editor, Eric, Mary, almost quit because he couldn’t leave the work at the office. Cuz it’s about Earth. I remember, I was just getting ready to go to Albuquerque, or Santa Fe, to do some interviews, and he said that he had talked with his wife and that if he wanted to leave the job then she was okay with that. He didn’t ask me! He had been on for four months. That’s the guy who’s got all the footage in his head. You cannot, that would have to be someone else for four months, to get to that point. So it was a real big deal.

I said “Just hold on a second.” We had scheduled all these really cool interviews, coming up. I said “Just give me a month. Just give me a month, and let’s see what happens.” At that same time, at the first year mark, my wife Krisna came on board as the fifth producer. She had never produced before, but I knew she was going to be really good at it, just by the questions she asked when I was doing jobs and stuff. Insightful questions that, how did you even know to ask that question stuff.

She came on board and as she came on board our productivity really really went up. Because I was pretty much the only full-time person. My two friends in Chicago, Karen and Craig, and a friend in Boston, Artemis—this was their pro bono kind of thing. They weren’t film makers, per se, although Artemis now is. Krisna coming on board really helped, and she actually helped bring in some pretty substantial people that really became key characters for the movie. Eric stayed for a month and we got to the solution people and he stayed. He edited for 15 months. Full-time job, 15 months. I think he had two weeks off at Christmas and one week off in the middle of that, because we just didn’t have enough footage to keep him going.

Then I took it for another nine months. So it’s 24 months of editing with two fast editors. That’s how much work this stuff takes. It’s 250 hours of footage, 306 or something people we interviewed. Most didn’t make it. At one point we had about 90 people in the film. When we were showing it to our donors, they were, they said “Please. It’s just too many voices.” I was able to sort of peel away 30 of those people, so there’s 61 people in the movie, which still sounds like a lot, cuz it’s 84 minutes. Two of that’s a cartoon, so 82 minutes. And six of that’s in credits, so 77 minutes.

But it’s that many different voices, cuz we wanted to do something overarching. Each story we got to could have been its own movie, and that’s a little disconcerting when you’re shooting, cuz you realize that we were just sort of skirting things. We were just trying to get as much information as possible into the movie. Then people would see the film, and they’d say “Hey, listen, you’re gonna have DVD extras. So you’re gonna have to still keep pulling back.” My sister’s brain hurt after one of our screenings, and she’s smart. We kept having to actually, once we packed everything in, we probably peeled away not only 30 people but probably 15 or 20 percent of the stories. Just kept peeling back.

Speaking of my wife specifically, I knew I was going to take us to El Paso, Texas to do an algae story, and I had heard in west Texas the towns were being rejuvenated through wind farms. I said “We’re going to west Texas. See if you can find one of those wind farms.” She did, but what I also learned, after I’d landed in El Paso and we made the plans to be in Roscoe, Texas the next day, was that west Texas starts at Dallas and goes all the way to El Paso. We had a 500-mile ride, and she was pregnant, so I did all—I do all the driving, anyway. But, still.

Here’s the first person, this is when we knew we were on the right path. Is there anyone on lights, do you think? Do you think you could just flip them, just for the clips? Awesome, thank you.

That was summer of 08. In the fall of 2010, Cliff invited Krisna and our son Clay, who had been born—she was pregnant with him there—to be honored in the Roscoe Wind Festival. Roscoe’s a small place. That’s the kind of stuff I really like. To be honored in the Roscoe Wind Festival is really cool. A couple of weeks ago, I got really lucky and I was on Bill Maher. When I went home—I live in Louisville, Kentucky—someone recognized me at the pig show. At the Kentucky State Fair. I knew that when I emailed the producers out there to say “hey, listen, what just happened!” but they didn’t get it. They will never get it. Those things are what really worked for me.

Cliff lost his arm in a cotton gin 30 years ago. He’s just an incredible guy. When he was driving, I was filming him, and there’s a shot in the film where he waves to somebody. Right? I must have seen that shot a thousand times before it dawned on me that he’s waving to someone who’s driving the car that I’m in right now. I asked Krisna who was in our car trailing, and she had thought of it right at that very moment, when he waved, who was driving the car right now.

She found him, and what I didn’t know until after the interview, and I think it was well after the interview, was the interview wasn’t actually for sure. Even though I had driven 450 miles across Texas to get it, she thought that that was probably information that wouldn’t make me calm or nice. That’s exactly right. I’m glad I didn’t know that.

What’s really interesting there, you saw Vickie Haines. She has a gift shop, her gift shop’s business went way up with more people coming to Roscoe. But her grandchildren came back into town because her son-in-law got a job working on the wind turbine home, at her home. That kind of piece of information, the positives that I keep finding as I keep peeling back and peeling back the clean energy stories, they just—as I’m peeling back and learning more, those positives still show up. There’s very few negatives. Even the one that everyone’s heard about, the wind turbines killing birds and bats, it’s actually not true. There’s a great piece on Science Friday a couple weeks ago, I recommend everyone listening to it. Many more birds die flying into buildings. Many. Than do flying into turbine wakes and things like that.

That’s the only thing I get from folks, that’s not even real. Who started that? Who started that rumor to get folks—what’s that? [indistinct voice] No, it’s not where the birds go. It’s actually—but you’re right. The first part of that’s exactly right. They have those lattice towers and those really, the birds just had a real tough time with. But once they became solid towers, the problem—so that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. The, it, above Palm Springs. Yeah.

When I was filming, I realized I didn’t like those, anyway, cuz they look just, didn’t look as good. So we didn’t use those, but I filmed some of those.

This whole idea of towns being rejuvenated, families being brought back together through a wind turbine, a wind farm. This was the biggest wind farm for years. Year. Just got superseded. This is just one guy who put 400 of his neighbors together to bank a big enough legal entity so that Aeon Energy could sign one contract. Cuz the neighbors to the south of the big, 15-acre, 15,000-acre ranch is, we’re just signing one contract. He had better wind. He actually did. He really did.

You look at that, and then, in Denver—he can stay. Okay.—in Denver, during the downturn, when it hit, the mayor, who’s now the governor of Colorado, Hickenlooper, he was gonna have to lay people off cuz they were, like everywhere else. He gathered everyone at City Hall together and said, all the employees, and said “here are the numbers, here’s how many people are here. I don’t want to lay anybody off. I don’t see a solution. Help me.”

Janitor raises his hand and says “right now you have the whole janitorial crew come in at five, maybe six. You have us work all evening and to one or two in the morning. What if you had us come in at two, we’ll do the quiet stuff. You will have to see us. Then at five or six when everyone’s leaving, we do the loud stuff, we’ll be done at eight. How much money do you save by not having to have the HVAC systems and everything running for us between eight and two?” It’s 25 percent of the day. They did the numbers. No one got fired. It was a great idea. Now there’s actually a term for that in the building maintenance-janitorial services called ‘day shifting.’

There’s, now the janitors are going to be home at 8:00 at night. They’re gonna see their kids, they’re gonna see their kids before the kids go to bed. For most kids, other than disgruntled teenagers, that’s gonna be good news. Then in the morning, they’re not going to be super-tired when their kids are going to school. What does that do for that family? What does that then do for the community? There’s no data on that, but I think logically we can assume that’s going to be a pretty big positive.

I wouldn’t be standing here right now if I didn’t have my grandmother in my life. She was a tremendous person who taught me to think about things like this, and here I am. I know how much it affected me, and you guys got a free lunch out of that, so it’s still good.

Then you look at the folks who manage buildings. They’ve got this new term, day shifting. Now they’re managing buildings to make them as efficient as possible because it’s a good business decision. One of the best ways to do that is remotely, so that you can manage a lot of buildings. Then you can find problems that are going on through your remote sensors and sometimes fix them without anybody having to go to the building to fix it. Or you know what the problem is, so when the repair fella, person, drives from the shop to the building, they know what to bring, therefore they don’t have to go back and forth a couple times.

That’s just saving money. But what I just heard, peeling away again, getting deeper, is that the most dangerous part of that building maintenance person’s job is driving to the building they’re going to maintain. Now, because someone wanted to save energy for good business decision, you’re saving lives. Literally. I never would have thought of that, when I thought of this stuff. Never would have crossed my mind. Every time I’m digging, I’m getting deeper into those things.

We wanted to make a film that my uncle Phil would appreciate. We wanted to make a film that was big-tent, apolitical, no blame, no shame. That’s actually a Cherokee, native Cherokee phrase that a buddy of mine taught me. No blame, no shame. I really like that, cuz I was blaming somebody a lot then. He said, “yeah, listen to this expression.” That’s the way we wanted to do this.

In all fairness, in the first first first first first filming, we shot here for a couple days and then we went to a conference in New York. A lot of people there were pretty upset with the Bush administration. It was in 07. I had, in our very first long trailer, a bit of a Bush-bashing section. I sent it off to Chicago and Boston and Karen Weigert looked at it. She said, “You know we can’t do that.” I’m like “what do you mean!? Blah blah blah blah.” She goes “we can’t do that. What’s that going to give you? What’s your endgame? How’s that going to help it?”

It took me about a week. My liberal ways and my being mad at the administration, it took me about a week to realize how right she was. Now I can’t even imagine having that section in the movie at all, cuz of, again, what’s our endgame? Where do we want to take this? I always like to give her credit for that, cuz that was a really big shift, early, in this ship sailing, of what our approach is. It really was about a big tent.

We were looking for people like Cliff, who were just regular American folks who regular American folks would relate to. It’s a positive story. We then got this guy in Alaska named Bernie Carl. Bernie is a force of nature. I’ll let Bernie speak for himself here. He’s working on geothermal. Here we go:

The reason I asked him that—I’ll take that applause—I’ll tell Bernie about it—[applause]—the reason I asked Bernie that question, cuz again I was in this sort of “you gotta believe climate change is real, blah blah blah” and there’s a picture of him with Bush in his office. He’s a big Republican supporter of Senator Markowski and that’s Bernie’s world, that’s who Bernie is. I asked him the question “do you”—that he answers there. At first his answer, like my uncle Phil’s mailings of climate change denying articles, it pissed me off. I was like, I—then I realized. Wait a second. If this guy’s revolutionizing geothermal power and he doesn’t think humans are causing climate change, yet he likes clean air, he likes clean water. He hates waste. If you have a smoke stack, great. Just nothing coming out of it, thank you. He’s a recycler, industrial-scale. They make a mistake at the airport, he gets all the tiles and he makes good use of it. He has a hydroponic garden that runs all year long in Fairfax, or outside of Fairbanks, at Chino Hot Springs. Every single thing in there is a recycled something. He’s the kind of guy I want on my team. But everyone was coaching me to not let him on the team. We have this big doorman from LA outside the club saying “if you don’t believe in climate change, you can’t come in.”

I realized, wait a second. That’s a huge mistake. Cuz there he is, doing his work. Bernie gave me a really big light bulb moment. What was really interesting was right after I interviewed Bernie, I heard a wine grower speak, he was in Leavenworth, Washington. Washington state, up in the Cascades. There’s a little river that runs through there and his goal was to not have any of his growing pollute that river. He didn’t want anything that he did to make that river anything but clean. He didn’t think humans were causing climate change.

That’s when I really realized okay, something’s up here. Cuz I met him right after I met Bernie. Then as we were making the film, we were keeping even more people in mind. During the film making process, I said Eric Driscoll, our editor, worked for a year and the reason he stopped was one, we ran out of money to pay him and two, I moved our family back to Kentucky. We were living in LA. By moving back to Kentucky, I now am in a area that’s not in the bubble that LA certainly is when you’re talking about climate and all these things. I was not in the bubble at all.

I had a really cool experience, my cousin’s son was a senior in high school and he asked to show a rough cut of the film to his class. They showed it over a two-day period. I went in and talked to the class after the second day. This one kid was like, it was a section on electric cars. He was saying “I’m never driving electric car. Never.” I said “why?” Again, thinking, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. But, hey, why? He said because he works on engines. He likes them rumbling. He likes that. It makes perfect sense to me. I actually wrote a piece of narration in the film to match where he’s coming from, so I could say “Hey, I thought about you. You might not like electric cars because of this, but I’m digging it, because of all these other things.” That was it. When you can say “hey, I thought about you” in your communication, it really, really, really really helps. Because you like it when someone thinks about you, in anything.

I was getting these lessons, these small lessons, big lessons, as we were making the movie. One of the things that I read in my early research, before we started shooting, was I learned how big our defense budget is. At the time, it was around 700 billion. I think it’s closer to 900 billion right now. What I read at that time was if you took all defense budgets on earth, from every other country, and put them on a scale, and doubled it, you’re not going to get to what we spend on defense.

I thought wow, there’s gotta be a lot of room there to put some money into renewable energy, then. My partners, because we didn’t wanna have this political film, they were kind of nervous by me thinking like that. They’re, they didn’t jump on that bandwagon of that kind of thinking. What happened was, about a year into the filming I interviewed a guy named James Woolsey, who’s the former CIA director. At the end of the interview, he said that he had worked on something called the Defense Science Board, and it was a paper called More Fight, Less Fuel. It’s an incredibly interesting paper about the energy use of the DOD and that no one really knows how much energy the DOD is using. No one’s in charge of the energy that DOD’s using, therefore there’s incredible waste in all those things. In it, he’s talking about, we need to go towards renewables. All the stuff I was hoping to hear.

What was really interesting about that paper, that was published in the middle of 2008, right in February. That was the second paper this group had done. The other one had been released September 5th, 2001. In the 2008 paper—bless you—it kept saying “like we said in 2001, like we said in 2001.” I realized that the first one didn’t get seen. What if this happens to the second one? We’re a small film, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we better put this in our film, because then we can help be a megaphone for what we think is a pretty cool idea.

We started digging into what that meant. What is the Department of Defense doing, for real? We got to go to Fort Irwin, in California. That’s where every army personnel is, all army personnel is trained before they went to Iraq and Afghanistan at that time, both wars were happening. They have a fake Iraqi village. My sister thinks that I was lying and that I actually went to Iraq, but this is—they actually get amputees and Hollywood makeup people and they put arms and legs and they really try to make it as visually and audibly and smell as much as they can. They have food cooking. It was really kind of a cool thing, so that’s where we did this interview, with a guy who’s a former Army colonel. I think Dan Nolan.

I was kind of happy that my tax dollars were starting to go that way. It was for a lot of reasons other than climate. I saw the Secretary of the Navy speak a year ago. His name’s Ray Maybus. He was a Republican governor, former governor of Mississippi. He was telling stories about how the Marines are working on getting solar power to the front lines, versus the diesel, so you don’t have to get the fuel there. I heard something, I think it’s one out of four people killed in these two wars are bringing fuel to the front line. Amory Lovens, the fellow with the mustache who was just in there, has a story where in the Civil War, when you had a supply train going to the front, half of the supplies were to feed the mules pulling the train. This isn’t a new issue, it’s just a different type of fuel.

The Marines are using solar, and they took fire in Afghanistan at this one battle site. A mortar hit the solar panel, so a whole lot of fuel didn’t catch fire. A whole lot of shrapnel didn’t go out and injury people. The left, the part of the solar panel that was still left was still emitting electrons. We’re in such early, early days with solar technology. Imagine 30 years from now that a material’s developed that’s solar, 58 percent efficient, and it’s just rubbery and it can be blown at—now, that’s a defense application, right? But the Defense department’s needs really come back on us. Again, it’s our tax dollars. They needed a microchip, they were very expensive, they needed them, they built a bunch of them, and all of a sudden the microchip becomes cheaper and you know all that happens there. GPS. GPS was a military need. I’ll talk about land use in a bit, but this GPS thing blows my mind.

Farming, there’s a lot of fertilizers put onto the plants, and there’s a whole lot of issues about the benefits versus the cost of those fertilizers, but there’s this one technology now, satellite planting. I forget what the exact term, but the, through GPS they know exactly where the seed’s going in, so then they know exactly where to put just this drop of fertilizer. As opposed to spraying the whole field. Cost, just all these things go down. That’s GPS.

As the Department of Defense is pushing this program, Ray Maybus, who’s also taking about, he wants every vehicle, every machine, everything powered in the Navy by 2020 by biofuels that aren’t from food source and that aren’t grown on arable lands and that are produced locally. It’s just insane, what he’s asking for. Which is a good thing. Because it’s those insane things that everyone says you’re wrong are usually the things that really come out to be pretty cool.

That’s every tank, every helicopter, every ship. Cuz his point of view is, you wouldn’t want to be letting the countries we’re getting to fuel those things now, build them, why would you want them to be fueled by them? He also things that using fossil fuels at all, oil, whether it’s from the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of Hormuz is a national security problem, because it’s going to run out. Why wouldn’t you want to develop fuels that you are in control of their abundance? That’s his point of view. I never heard him mention climate at all in that conversation, which is very interesting.

Now I’m tracking, we’re continuing to film now, a film about the Department of Defense is definitely one of our films. We’re going to make short films this time, not a feature, cuz that takes so long to go, front to back. Gonna make 10-minute films. The general who was running Fort Irwin then is now running Fort Bliss in El Paso, so I went back to El Paso. His goal is to get El Paso, the, Fort Bliss net zero energy waste and water. That’s the army’s goal right now, for all their bases. The other services are doing the same thing. Right now in the US, our bases are all being, they’re working on the technology, the planning—these are all cities. Each one of these bases is a city, so as they go through those headaches, of which there are many, and they get through these thing—how do you make a smart grid? What is a smart grid? What are you talking about? Sounds good. What is it?—and all these things. How do you power something with just renewable energy, when it’s just sunny in the day and windy at night? How do you do that? Do you have a natural gas plant as well, to give it, to give you that base load? All these things. That technology is going to come over to the cities, and it’s going to come over into our world.

Again, to me, I like those tax dollars being spent. But I’ll tell you, I have met so many people from the armed services that have retired and that are working on renewable energy projects. They know that they were just fighting a resource war. They know that. They tell me that. It’s interesting. The folks who were right there, what they want to do when they’re done is work on renewable energy. Again, that’s pretty interesting.

A note down that road, which I never, ever would have thought of, I was invited to sort of be a fly on a wall at a conference, a round table in Chicago last spring. A conservative German, the conservative party in Germany has a foundation that brings factions who don’t agree and can’t talk, certainly can’t meet where they are, to neutral sites around the world to sit at a table and try to find some sort of positive something, some sort of common ground. I was at a round table with the German folks, Palestinians and Israelis. The subject was clean energy.

They said, the Palestinians and Israelis that I met that day said that when they’re working on, at the time it was energy efficiency projects, energy efficiency projects, they got along fine. There was no conflict. Then I did a lot of work for the State department over the spring, where I spoke at embassies and ambassador’s homes and colleges and they’re sort of pimping me out because I had a good American story and the good thing is I was telling the truth. I was fine with that.

I was in Belfast, and I meet some folks from Belfast, from Northern Ireland, who tell me the same story about when the Catholics and Protestants in Belfast are working on an energy efficiency project, retrofitting their community centers, that there’s no animosity at all. That’s something that I’m looking at right now, cuz that’s, I mean, I’m glad families get put back together, cities get rejuvenated. But is it really, is there really a peace electron? I’m hunting that right now, because that would be pretty amazing. I’m getting these stories, right, cuz I’m out there, so I get to get these stories.

That one I was pretty blown away by. The idea that the army bases are now going net zero energy waste and water is pretty astounding. You guys know water is obviously a huge issue. There’s a group out of northern California, it’s called the Marin Carbon Project. You’ll have to see the movie to see their story, but their story’s so much further along than what it was on our movie. Basically, a rancher named John Wick and his wife, Peggy Rathman, they had a ranch in Nicasio, Marin County.

She’s a children’s book writer. Good Night Gorilla, Ten Minutes to Bedtime. You guys gotta get those books if you don’t have them yet. She’s fine. She’s doing great. Her dad invented the Post-It. Her dad started Amgen. She’s doing fine, she’s doing great. She doesn’t have to do anything. Yet when they learned about climate change in 07, they have dedicated their lives to figuring out solutions. What happened to them was they bought this ranch, and they though cattle is bad, get those cows out of here. Within a year, the ranch was dying, because the cows and the grasses evolved together over hundreds of thousands of years and something good was happening while the cows were there.

He studied it, he looked into it, and he realized we don’t know enough scientifically about what’s going on here. They started funding science at UC Berkeley around a lot of issues, but one of them was what is the cow poo and the grass and the hooves and everything else doing for grasslands? Then they were also looking at compost. What happens when you put compost on soil?

The first paper just came out. The cow paper’s coming out soon, but the first paper’s about compost. They took two plots, one in Marin County and one in the foothills of the Sierras, the western side. They put a half-inch of soil, a half-inch of compost, just regular old compost, on the land and see what happens. They’ve measured it. Now they’re in year four. Basically, in a nutshell, the way we’ve been farming and grazing, we’ve been harming the soil. When the soil’s not at its best, its expiring carbon. When the soil’s healthy, it’s inhaling and retaining carbon. Healthy soil retains enormous, enormous, enormous, enormous amounts of carbon. Enough so that this is exactly how I get to sleep at night, knowing all this stuff that I’ve learned.

This is, because we have too much CO2 up there right now. Even if we stopped all carbon emissions right now, we’re still screwed, scientifically screwed. This is gonna be the thing, this is scalable removal of CO2. It’s pretty astounding.

The first paper came out with the compost, basically they knew the soil had this much carbon. They knew they put in this much carbon, now there’s this much carbon in the soil. More than they knew, see what I’m saying? The forage goes up by 40 percent, on average, and the water per hectare they’re seeing 27,000 gallons of additional water stored in that soil. These are mind-numbing numbers.

Just to take it a little bit further, I’m out now in front of the scientists but I’m kind of with John Wick, so John, you’re with me right now. These numbers are going to be reflected in the way horses, I mean the cows and the manure and all that stuff is going. When you have grass-fed cattle and grass-finished cattle, so they don’t go to the feed lots. They’re not fed corn. Then you have incredible chances of making your grasslands the carbon sinks that we need to save our butts.

China sent over 16 agriculture ministers to John’s farm this year. If all the cattle growers in China do this technique, we’re looking at they can then absorb the extra CO2 that we’re putting up there annually right now. The difference of what the earth can absorb and what we’re putting up above that. This is big stuff. It’s early days on the science. What I just said is probably not something that anyone at UC Berkeley wants me to say, but I just said it.

Now they’re also working at something else where they’re looking at composting human waste. They’re doing a test right now where they’re getting waste from the Point Reyes National Park, or state park, facilities, the toilets. Mixing it with straw. It gets to 180 degrees within a day, through the bacteria in there. It’s killing all the pathogens. At UC, at Lawrence Berkeley Labs they have this thing, a thermophile. A thermophile. It’s a little chip that reads something like 80,000 different microorganisms, the DNA of. They’re really seeing what’s in there.

It’s also breaking down all the pharmaceuticals that are in our waste streams. That’s a big issue right now, cuz we’re just excreting pharmaceuticals and just the estrogens from birth control are changing the sex of fishes along the western seaboard, and crazy stuff. But this is actually working, and it’s using one sixth of the water. Then the resulting compost is now an asset. It also is a way to recycle phosphates, because those are being, pretty much from what I understand, phosphates have pretty much been mined, so where are you going to get more phosphates? It’s crazy cool stuff that the Marin Carbon Project’s doing. We’re going to be filming them as well.