Brian Schwartz: This is Brian Schwartz with tech reads. Today I have Marc Cortez, the author of 'Climaturity', to talk to him a little bit about his book and enlighten us what it is all about. So Marc, welcome to tech reads.

Marc Cortez: Thank you for having me.

Brian Schwartz: So the title, 'Climaturity', you invented a word.  Can you share a little bit about what you mean by that?

Marc Cortez: Climaturity is a call out for a calm, pragmatic and transparent dialog about the climate, which is pretty much impossible to have these days.  We're stuck between the polar extremes, with one side screaming at the other side who isn't even listening, while most of us exist somewhere in between.  No one is telling the complete truth about the climate, and trying to find a path towards responsible climate policies and practical solutions was just elusive.  So I started to advocate for something down the middle aisle, where we talk openly about what we know and don't know, along real solutions that we can afford.  Climaturity became a rallying cry for this new approach. 

Brian Schwartz: And you had shared with me early on that your daughter had come to you kind of in a fear and that that really had an effect on you.

Marc Cortez: Yeah,  and maybe this is my DNA from having worked so long in the solar industry, where we were really careful about the story that we told. Early on we were just so proud of the narrative and felt like we were telling the truth and making an important and incremental difference.

We didn't overclaim, we didn't under under-claim, we were just telling people what alternatives would be. Now fast forward 20 years, and those messages have morphed into we're-all-going-to-die-by-Thursday.  And my daughter's generation is hearing these messages nonstop, literally hearing that she's going to die from climate change before she can grow up and have a life.   

I also hear it on campus where I teach Cal poly students, these young adults we're putting into the world feel so hopeless, like why even bother trying to build a life because it won't matter anyway.  We've got 10 years to reverse the entire planet's decline, so why bother?  

So these messages are just disheartening, and I got to thinking "how did we fail our children so badly?  How did we allow this to be the only message they're hearing"?

Brian Schwartz: Yeah. So the unintended consequences of your messaging. So why did you choose to write the book?

Marc Cortez: Well, that really motivated me to try to develop a new narrative, plus -- let's be honest -- we're not making any progress whatsoever on the climate.  We've spent trillions on so-called solutions that haven't made a dent, the rhetoric has gotten more divisive and apocalyptic, and the only tangible results are scared children and really expensive and ineffective climate policies.  Yelling isn't working, panicking isn't working, scaring children isn't working, throwing money at incomplete solutions isn't working, and our climate problem is getting worse and worse.  By all measures it's just not working, so we need a new way to approach it.

Right now the whole process is really just one side yelling at the other side, who isn't even listening. We've got proposed policies that are spending trillions and will have virtually no impact on the climate. So I decided to just come up with a different way to talk about it, because if we really want to solve this problem it's going to take all of us.

I want to have a reasonable and open dialog about what to do, one that require us giving up our kids' college funds to pay for climate solutions.

Brian Schwartz: ...just to see options being proposed. ­

Marc Cortez: Yes, very expensive proposals with no real insight into how they're solving the problems.

That's why I decided to write this book, as an attempt to start walking down in the middle saying we need people from both sides of political aisle. We need an open discussion. We need to complete all the half-truths that are out there and understand the limitations of what everyone's telling us.

Brian Schwartz: And would it safe to say that you discovered in your research, some self-interest that's working its way into the policies and the recommendations and the solutions that we're all paying for?

Marc Cortez: Of course. One of the advantages I have now is that I don't have a product to sell, even though I've had a product to sell for 20 something years.  Everyone is telling us their version of the story.

We like to demonize big oil, but I don't know one person who is not using the benefits of big oil. Not one.  You can't make any solar modules without lots of oil, you can't make windmills without lots of oil. Fossil fuels are part of our every day life, part of our modern world, and it's not going anywhere soon.  So why can't we just acknowledge that and come up with a real plan? 

I see stories about how certain energy sources like solar are the cheapest. I know from my background that it's just this tiny little slice of time, this little snapshot, where that's true.  Most of the time, like when the sun goes down, it's not true because a billion dollars can't even power one light bulb when there's no sun. So there are all of these half-truths are out there, and if you stagger them around together you can't get the true story. No one knows what the real story is, how bad it is and what some of the solutions are.

Brian Schwartz: Are we actually in the world of climate change? Are we doomed and heading towards this direction of no return?

Marc Cortez: I think we know that the planet is warming. It's not warming by 20 degrees, but it's showing that in general, things are warming up a couple of degrees. Certainly not tragic. I look at the entire 20th century where the world heated by one degree, and humanity prospered just fine. In fact, we've doubled in population and cured hundreds of diseases and it's not fatal. One degree is not going to destroy the planet and it's certainly not going to make humanity extinct. So we know that temperatures are rising. We can show that CO2 is rising as well, we can show correlation between those two and the jury is still out as to whether or not one causes the other.

Plus, it makes logical sense that with 8 billion people on the planet we are having an effect on it. But our ability to adapt is extreme, and there aren't billions of people heading towards their imminent death because the climate is turning against us.

Brian Schwartz: So some reassurance, I appreciate that. And so are we getting, is, is anyone out there really giving us a clear story of what is happening with the climate change?

Marc Cortez: There's a couple.  There's a Danish economist named Bjorn Lomborg who's produced of a couple of films and books and has been putting dollar numbers to a lot of these solutions, which I appreciate.  In practical terms, if the goal is to save humanity, then there's a lot better ways to spend our money.

Roger Pielke writes about energy policy and the IPCC, typically in Forbes magazine. 

Michael Shellenberger is a reformed hardcore environmental activist who's now a nuclear proponent, who often writes for Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.

Brian Schwartz: Got it. So. Can solar windmills, electric vehicles, all these solutions that we're spending billions of dollars on solve the, you know, help solve this problem. Of global warming, which you're not arguing doesn't exist. It's whether or not those are the things that will have an impact.

Marc Cortez: That's the question with all of these things is what's going to help?, Will solar help?  Of course.  Will windmills help? Of course. Will EVs help? Of course. Will they help a lot? No, and there's lots of reasons for that.  Solar was always meant as a supplementary power source, it was always meant to be plugged into the side of te existing grid to just help give it some flexibility and some cleanness if that's the right word. But now it's being promoted as climate salvation and you know, how can a resource that works only 30% of the time be something that you can rely on?

It's not a replacement, it never will be. So people say, well let's add batteries, which means we're digging up the earth for a different type of energy, just replacing one type of depleting resource with another. 

Look if we solarized the planet, if we switched everyone over to EVs tomorrow, would we meet any of our goals? No, we wouldn't even come close. And the math is really simple. So that's what frustrates me about a lot of this and why I started down this path, which is that dollars matter, dollars per CO2 reduced matter.

We have to be having that discussion. If we spend $2 trillion on electric vehicles, will it get us towards our goal? Almost not at all. The best thing we can do for that is just driving less.

Brian Schwartz: Public transportation is a good alternative.

Marc Cortez: Yes.  Oddly enough, the best thing that happened to the climate was COVID. In 2020, we cut our emissions as a country by 11%, 15% in transportation.  In one year we did what 45 years of aggressive climate policy couldn't do. We did it in months by just using less stuff.

The cheapest and quickest way to lower emissions is through conservation.  Turn off lights, drive less, use less stuff, don't replace that TV. Find ways to not do more.  And imagine if governments had policies in place to incentivize us to save resources, to actually pay us to conserve electricity and water.  Utilities already do this when they're anticipating heat waves and such that could cause blackouts, so the mechanisms are already in-place.

And then there's hundreds of natural solutions like trees and carbon sequestration that we just are completely ignoring. And in terms of the dollar impact they're much better and easier to implement.

Brian Schwartz: So if lowering CO2 is the goal, and you touched on these a little bit, what solutions are the best?

Marc Cortez: The goal of all our climate activities is temperature mitigation, and by proxy, CO2 reduction.  We need to lower total CO2 levels.  So conservation is the quickest and fastest way to do that.  Energy efficiency is also important, helping buildings use less resources. Then there are the hundreds of natural solutions like reforestation and agrifarming and soil replenishment that all capture and sequester carbon.  Then we need to be developing and deploying carbon capture technologies as quickly as we can. 

The main problem I have with massive decarbonization is that it still continues to add CO2 into the atmosphere.  All energy sources emit CO2, so replacing capacity at a coal plant with solar, for example,  can potentially reduce future CO2 emissions, but solar still has a CO2 footprint and therefore increases total CO2 levels.  That's where we get into this funny climaccounting gray area, where we replace some bad energy source with something better that might yield benefits over time -- but those savings vary based on dozens of factors and we can never prove them.  There is no such thing as a neutral energy source -- solar, wind, batteries, coal, gas, nuclear all have CO2 footprints -- so the idea of replacing one energy source with another and hoping to lower total CO2 is fiction. 

Adaptation doesn't get talked about much as a response to climate change, but it's a realistic approach to handle it.  It doesn't spend trillions to try and lower CO2, it acknowledges it will rise at some level and that humanity will adapt.  Every species adapts to climate fluctuations already, and we're no different.  A great example is New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2017 and killed thousands; in 2021 Hurricane Ida slammed the city but caused 150 deaths.  What changed?  They rebuilt the levee system after it collapsed during Katrina, which prevented further deaths with Ida.  Instead of relying on trillions to lower global temperatures, New Orleans adapted to their local conditions.

Brian Schwartz:Youintroduced me for the first time to this concept of climate credits. This whole world, I didn't even know exists, but is driven by politicians and public policy.

And I don't know how many people understand how climate credits really work and how companies are being given incentives and how they can purchase credits from other companies. But is that an example of where the politicians and the policies are just sending us on this trajectory? In the wrong direction.

Marc Cortez: It depends on where it is. The idea with climate credits is you can buy someone else's right to pollute. This is typically when governments decide they're going to regulate their emissions, they put a cap and trade like we've done in California.

Brian Schwartz: They penalize you financially if you pollute too much.

Marc Cortez: That's cap and trade. You're allowed to emit a certain amount of CO2 from your operations, and if you go above that you're penalized. So the way that you get around that is you buy that excess pollution space from other companies.

I personally am in favor of financial markets like this, because it starts to put price tags on climate change. It gives companies financial incentives to emit less, which is a good thing.  So it can work, but like everything, it just depends on the implementation and who oversees and manages the program.

Look, people have to be able to make money at it. Making money is not a terrible thing. We're not going to completely gut the entire economy in order to reverse climate change, it's just not going to happen.  People have to have jobs, things ave to make financial sense. So I personally don't care about demonizing oil companies because I've seen what happens when they financial attention on solving problems. If you can show them a way to make money by pulling carbon out of the air, watch what happens. Watch all those resources get focused into actually making things better.

Brian Schwartz: So, wow. And are there companies out there that part of their business model is literally the climate credits that they can sell to another company? I mean, is that baked into their bottom line? And I didn't realize that business owners are potentially getting a little more money on the side that didn't even exist before,

Marc Cortez: The biggest one I can think of is Tesla.  Since they produce only electric vehicles, they're given carbon credits and yes, they can trade them to other companies who need them.  In 2021 Tesla earned more than $500 million in carbon credit revenue.  It's a huge part of their business, one you don't hear much about.

The global carbon trading market set to be one of the hottest industries here over the next 30 years, for all these reasons. It has potential to be fraudulent, like any other financial transaction, but it's getting a lot of attention right now and it's a viable business.

Brian Schwartz: The goal for California at a very high level is to get to this place called net zero, right? I know even in I San Louis Obispo, they want to get to get to net zero, this unimaginable goal, where essentially we make zero impact on the environment.

Is that a realistic goal?

Marc Cortez: Whether or not it's a realistic goal depends on the solutions they're going to implement and the amount of money they're going to spend.  We certainly won't get there with public EV charging stations and green-painted bike lanes.  But even if we find enough money, I question whether or not it's even the right goal.

Net zero has become synonymous with climate salvation, but think about what it really means.  Net zero means that we're going to zero out the growth of our CO2 problem, not eliminate it.  It just means we're going to slow down its growth over a long period of time, and with a great deal of expense.

I call net zero the avoided donut fallacy.  Imagine your doctor said you had to lose 100 pounds or else you'd suffer severe health consequences.  You're used to eating 20 donuts a day, so you decide to stop eating those 20 donuts a day.  Great!  But did you get skinny from doing that?  No, you just stopped yourself from getting fatter.  You can't avoided-donuts your way to slimness, you still have to lose those 100 pounds.

Net zero is the equivalent of avoiding those 20 donuts per day.  Even after we spend the trillions and the decades it will take to get to net zero, we still have to lose the weight; we still have to remove total CO2 from the atmosphere.  That's why net zero is, in a sense, fool's gold:  it makes us think we've hit the climate jackpot when, in reality, we still haven't solved the problem. 

Wouldn't a better strategy be to not stop at net zero but actually go carbon negative?  Microsoft has committed to doing just that.  They've committed to actually removing all of the carbon they've emitted since their company beg in the 1970s, not just stopping its growth in 20 years.  That's a real commitment. How and whether or not they get there remain to be seen, but I applaud the commitment.  That's what it's going to take.

By the way, in our donut scenario, installing solar or switching to EVs is like going from eating 20 donuts per day to 5, then taking credit for saving 15 donuts.  Either way you're still 5 donuts fatter tomorrow than you are today.

Back to your original question, are net zero realistic goals?  Maybe after decades and great expense, but they're the wrong goals.

Brian Schwartz: You know what I wonder? We can do everything right here in the U S which we have control over, but ultimately we are all impacted by the actions of China and any other country that is struggling to get their economies under way is not being playing by the same rules.

So ultimately that seems like a losing game. I mean, is there anything we can do to counter the negative impacts that other countries are dumping into the

Marc Cortez: I would love to see the U.S. lead this with a brand-new approach.  Again, this is why I wrote this book, to try and begin a different dialog about it all.  We need only do we need a collective policy, but also a collective ethos, one that's based on truth and transparency~~.~~

So I would love to see us do this as a country. Just say, here's the way we're going to tackle this, we're going to be open about it, we're going to talk about the limitations of climate science, what's real, what's not.  Here are the things that we're guessing at, here are all the options that are available to us, the pluses and minuses.  Is it really an emergency?  If so, then why isn't anyone driving to the emergency room?  And if it isn't, quit saying it.  Hell, we all have collective boy-who-cried-wolf-syndrome anyway.

Here's how much money we think we can reasonably spend and then create a real model that we can look at and say, all right, developing nations, here's something that we can report. Because developing nations, they need...

Brian Schwartz: ...guidance. They need a...

Marc Cortez: blueprint.  Developing nations are not going to give up oil.  They need reliable energy, something they can count on, so a total reliance on intermittent energy is never going to happen.  They need a reasonable path to prosperity, and us First World nations are the only ones to give it.

We need to create a blueprint that's manageable and doesn't require a complete reversal of everyone's way of life in order to make it work. I would love to see us work towards something like that.

Brian Schwartz: I also think having full disclosure, as far as, you know, if you have a self interest in something that you're recommend.

It needs to be transparent to everybody because you have to question the policy should be being made by people have there's no bias and full disclosure is means you kind of lay out all of your cards. And then we know for sure that you're coming from a place of truth, because I think what's ultimately happening is there's just a lot of bias that people carry into this conversation that they don't even realize they have.

And I think you talked about implicit bias and. Yeah.

Marc Cortez: Look, we all have biases, I know I certainly do. 

Brian Schwartz: I do as well.

Marc Cortez: My view on energy options is we need them all.  I mean, oil is not going to anywhere in our lifetimes, and for those who have this need to rid the world of fossil fuels then I invite them to quite using those products today, just like you would any other product you don't like.  It's certainly your right to do that.  But to expect that the world will follow you is a bit ridiculous, don't you think?  if you, I. Tongue and cheek joke. I'll say everyone who needs, who hates fossil fuels.

It takes a lot of oil and gas to make products that use less oil and gas. Every single thing that we have - shoes, clothing, food, the microphone that this is being recorded on - is made with oil. We need it forever. And so it's not going away and it doesn't need to, but that doesn't mean we can't make a cleaner transition.  But is all this yelling and screaming fear-mongering helping?  My belief is that it's grinding climate progress to a halt. 

We're not killing our kids. We're just not, they're going to be able to have kids.

Brian Schwartz: It's, they're putting the fear into everyone to force a change, but they've gone too far as you've seen with your own daughter that and your students that it's just having an added effect that I don't think the people building this narrative realize.  The Al Gores of the world that, you know, built a very big platform off of this that ultimately the ripple effect of your gloom and doom the world is coming to an end are having on our younger generation because we're not going to be here.

And I hear, I actually hear this from older people, like, well, I'm glad I'm not going to be here to have to deal with this problem. What do you do if you're someone young who hears that?  I mean, you're like, well, screw you, thanks for leaving this mess for me.

Marc Cortez: Thanks for killing us. You know, writing the book itself was actually eye opening in a lot of ways, because I did a lot of research and uncovered that these are actual strategies.

This didn't happen by happenstance. If you're wondering where the media got this from, I can show you the blueprint. There's a labeling guide that says here's what you should call people. If they don't agree with you, you're not allowed to say climate skeptic, they have to call you a climate science denier. This is Columbia university's journalism school, here is the blueprint.

Scared kids can't be the goal, scared kids just leads us to all this ineffective stuff. Okay. You don't want to force people to choose between their college education and saving the planet because guaranteed, everyone's going to put their kids into college. It'll never happen. So how about reasonable stuff that will actually make an impact, with results we can actually show.