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Aaron Perry
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Chip Comins is the Founder and Chairman of AREDAY, a multi-day conference in Aspen/Snowmass, Colorado devoted to “The Great Solution:” global leadership in technology for sustainability and global transformation toward a carbon-free, equity-based energy and economic system. Citing the amazing healing capacity of Mother Earth, as indigenous wisdom-keepers have articulated all over the planet, Chip describes the 5 Verticals of Solution: (1) stopping the burning (of fossil carbon-based energy resources); (2) direct air capture (of excess atmospheric carbon); (3) soil regeneration (for further carbon sequestration); (4) ocean stewardship (plastic-free, non-acidified, unpolluted); and (5) youth leadership. Chip adds, in all earnestness that there’s probably as much a need, too, for a 6th vertical: spiritual awakening and consciousness regarding our human existence on this precious planet Earth.
The 16th Annual AREDAY Summit, which occurs August 14-17, 2019, will be featuring a major potential break-through technology for energy generation: the HERO (Hydrogen Energy Release Optimization) catalytic technology of Star Scientific. HERO is a remarkable “drop-in” solution that can theoretically be deployed in all of the 14,000 operating coal-fired power plants world wide. This phenomenal break-through equates to the overall improvement of utilities’ operating budgets, as opposed to the stranding of $ Trillions of dollars of “sunk capital” invested in the incredibly expensive coal generating and energy transmission infrastructures.
Wisely recognizing that, although necessary and essential to a good future, technological transformation will not, by itself, provide for the equally important social and cultural transformation that is also required. Echoing Chief Seattle’s famous observation, “We did not weave the web of life… we are merely a strand in it” Chip also shares the foundational expression of gratitude and stewardship ethos inherent in the Lakota expression: “Aho Mitakuye Oyasin:” “gratitude for all of our relations.”
Our human civilization and species are at a critical inflection point on planet Earth, and Chip Comins and the global leadership gathering at the AREDay conference are collaborating to solve and resolve our most pressing existential challenges. Visit areday.net for more information.
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Welcome to the YonEarth Communities Stewardship and Sustainability Podcast Series.
Today I’m so thrilled we have the opportunity to visit with my friend Chip Comins.
Hey Chip.
Hey, what’s happening here?
It’s great to have you on the show today.
Thanks for doing it.
Absolutely.
Chip Comins is the Chairman and CEO of the American Renewable Energy Institute, A-R-E-I,
and Founder of the R-Day Summit Expo and Film Festival.
He is President and CEO of American Spirit Productions and Managing Director of We Energy.
In 2009 he produced 13 official side events at the UNF CCC COT-15 in Copenhagen Denmark
and presented at the UNF CCC COT-16 in Cancun, Mexico.
That’s the United Nations Climate Gatherings.
COT-21 in Paris, France, 2015, and COT-22 in Marrakech, Morocco, in 2016.
Chip has produced and directed both long and short form documentary films for educational and broadcast television markets,
including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s Windpowering America,
PBS, Link TV, BET, and Discovery Networks.
The American Renewable Energy Institute advocates for the rapid implementation of climate solutions
using the latest breakthroughs in renewable energy, energy efficiency, adaptation, and resilient strategies.
In 2014 he produced the 11th anniversary R-Day Summit, accelerating solutions for the Great Transition,
featuring President Jimmy Carter.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was a keynote speaker at R-Day 15,
and Iceland President Olafer Grimson at R-Day 2016.
Chip is an associate producer on the 2015 film Racing Extinction,
and executive producer developing a new feature documentary, Carbon Negative.
Chip, it’s a real pleasure to have this opportunity to visit and talk with you today,
and I’m really looking forward to the information, the messaging, and some info about upcoming event,
a big event that you have to share today.
So let’s dive in and get going with it.
Happy to, I’m very happy to.
You know, I think with R-Day, I’ve been to a few of the conferences over the years,
and you have an incredible gift for convening some of the foremost thinkers, thought leaders, influencers, globally.
What this year do you think is most notable in terms of who’s going to be coming together here in a couple of weeks?
Right, thank you, Aaron. You know, we’re very proud of the fact that we started R-Day in 2004,
and this will be our 16th summit.
You know, we’ve started as a small street fair expo, and we just sort of evolved into the R-Day summit.
I’m very proud of the fact that once Chad Turner came in 2008, he came back five more times,
and T-Boon Pickens also, so while we’re not to the right or to the left, we’re actually, you know, right in the middle,
we’re not red or blue or green, the color of trees and money in the United States, which is pairing the economy and the environment,
which is so important.
This year, in August of 2019, August 14, 15, 16, 17, as I once say, through a Saturday coming,
we’re going to have 100 speakers from around the world that we’ll be talking about the great solution,
because we’re going to have to now aggregate all of our efforts to actually work together,
to rapidly stop the burning and start the implementation acceleration and the replication of all of the solution technologies
that we have on the planet, because we have now crossed the threshold of two trillion tons of anthropogenically forced carbon,
and that is collapsing the biosphere.
So I’ve asked some of my leading colleagues and friends to join us here in Aspen, Snowmass next month, to discuss this,
and to just go specifically to your question, what I’m excited about the most is that we’re featuring a new breakthrough technology called Hero,
Hydrogen Energy Release Optimization, what a great acronym.
And Hero is a new discovery that was only found in 2015, and it’s activated by Hydrogen and Oxygen,
but we now know that we can control a heat-releasing catalyst without burning anything,
and we can heat water at the same temperature that we use a coal-fired furnace to spin a turbine for our base load energy,
and also a gas-fired furnace.
And we know that a lot of our electricity comes from coal and gas.
And so this is going to be a remarkable RDA, because Hero is on display.
It’s a discovery out of Australia, a company called Planet Power Systems, Andrew Horvath is the executive chairman,
and we will open up the RDA Summit, focusing on this.
We followed by a morning of conversation around Hydrogen, what it is, why it is…
Remember, Hydrogen is the first element in the periodic chart, number one.
And H2O, that’s water, and this is the water planet.
So it’s very interesting that it turns out that we’re being offered this incredible technology
that could transform the entire energy system around the planet.
I’ll finish with that there’s 14,000 coal plants on Planet Earth, every one of them.
We could take out the coal-fired furnace, we could put in the Hero unit,
and we can still have our same industrial outputs at the same frequency and base load that we now have with burning coal and gas.
That means that we can maintain our same level of civilization, and manufacture our Teslos and our iPhones,
and all of those things that are taking more and more energy each year, especially with the advent of 5G,
which is going to put a huge pressure on the amount of electricity that we use as a civilization.
Chip, to me, so exciting, I recently experienced some presentations by the group that is sharing the Hero technology with the world.
And the fact that it is a potential drop-in for existing coal and natural gas generating infrastructure is tremendous.
This ultimately means that the utility, some of the major players that have invested billions and trillions in long-term assets,
actually have not only a very compelling climate solution, but also a very compelling economic solution to their operations.
The whole model is based on economics.
We know that the only way that we’re going to make a transition from fossil fuels to clean energy and all of the suite of renewables
is going to be that we’re going to make more money by burning less fossil fuels until we actually x them out,
and then we to burn zero fossil fuels.
And when we get to the portion of the podcast where we talk about the five verticals of solution, I’ll go into that.
But the reality is that the creator has an amazing sense of humor, because here at the 11th hour with seven and a half billion people on the planet,
having put two trillion tons of CO2 up in the atmosphere, we now have the keys to be able to actually accomplish the tax, and unlock that door that will allow us a clean energy future for our children.
For all the animals on the planet, for all the rest of the life on Earth, that right now we’re hammering hard.
Well, I’m really, as I’m sure you probably can guess, I’m excited to get into the five verticals of solution because there are a couple in there that are so near and dear to my heart.
But before we go there, I just, for our audience who maybe are hearing about a hero for the first time, would you mind just giving it a brief description as to how it actually works?
It just doesn’t need to be technical, this doesn’t need to be the Ph.D. version, but just so folks understand what we’re talking about.
I’m so excited about this hero technology that I’ve actually been down there to visit the hero labs twice in the last four months, and that’s Australia.
So that’s a long way to go, and let me tell you, it’s tiring to do that.
But I will say that hero is a catalyst in the, okay, so in the search for cold fusion, the company star scientific has been asked for about 30 years.
Which some people think is not even feasible, others think might be a good solution.
But they were getting very close to some breakthroughs, and the Australian government knew that, and they were keeping a very close eye on it, under the guidance of Dr. Stephen Harlov.
Now, Stephen Harvoth has passed on, but he passed his company in his knowledge on to a son Andrew, who was along at his elbow the whole time.
And in the search for a cold fusion, they went and started looking at muon fusion.
No, I’m not going to pretend that I can explain what that is, but to say that they discovered a heat releasing event by accident that actually once they realized they had something that was happening consistently,
they have now come up with four years later a catalyst that they can coat onto metals that actually allows for the consistent and constant heating of water to 700 degrees Celsius, which is a temperature that we burn coal at to spin a turbine.
Well, to heat water into a steam that then spins a turbine that then produces electricity that we transmit in a centralized distribution of energy.
So this is the grid that we’re talking about now, and how power is produced and transmitted throughout the United States.
And just a quick course of refresher, there’s three grids in the USA, there’s the Eastern grid, there’s the Western grid, and then there’s the Texas grid.
And they don’t really talk to each other very well. And most of the energy that we have for the production of electricity, which accounts for 40 to 50% of all the carbon that we burn.
So we have to talk about the other sectors of carbon release, the liquid fuels that burn in our automobiles, et cetera.
But on the electricity production side, we get it from burning coal, we get it from burning gas, natural gas, small bit of oil.
Hydropower provides a big chunk of it, a nuclear power also, which emits no carbon, but is problematic in other areas, especially economically.
And then a small bit of wind and solar, about 10% of the mix.
And so end geothermal, so leave out geothermal as an industrial application, but utility scale.
But the point is, is that we do these in a centralized power distribution method, meaning that the plants produce it out in the middle of nowhere, usually, because people don’t want to live around coal plants, and the unfortunate people that do are impacted heavily by the airborne particulates, not to mention the carbon that’s put into the atmosphere that affects all of us.
And that’s acidifying the oceans very badly and causing catastrophic collapse in a core reef, as an example.
But we also need to recognize that they then distribute the power over thousands of miles of cables.
These are the high tension power lines that we see crisscrossing our nation, and then step down to substations and finally it comes into the home and out your wall.
So that’s most of the energy in our country is delivered electricity, is delivered in a centralized power production formula.
Now we’ve been moving slowly in the last 20 years to a distributed form of energy, and that’s when you can actually have solar panels on your home and a battery pack in your house to store the energy.
And then you can become an islanded, and you can actually disconnect from the grid.
Although the majority of the solar in the home is actually grid tied and they print it back into the grid as a peeker power, but the utilities use in a mix of fossil and renewable.
I’m an advocate as a chairman of the American Renewable Energy Institute to a hundred percent renewable energy, clean energy from all different applications.
We just simply have got to stop drilling into the planet and pumping out the oil, the coal, and the gas that those days have got to be left behind in order for us to have a future.
So I’ll just tell you that I think that it’s amazing to me the healing capacity of Mother Earth if you give her a break.
And you just take your foot off of the accelerator and just let her breathe and stop cutting down the forest and stop pumping the carbon into the atmosphere and stop drilling into her guts and pumping out this gas and using up all the fresh water for this fossil fuel production.
And if we do that, the regenerative capacities are just simply amazing.
It’s so true. And, you know, your framework, the five verticals of solution, I think really speaks to this and indicates this healing capacity.
Of course, with the YonEarth community, one of the central and foundational things we’re focused on fits very nicely into your framework.
And we’re big fans of framework. I think helps us understand how to perceive complex scenarios and also how to act, how to organize and direct our actions and our activities within a complex framework.
So I just love that you’ve got the five verticals of solution and I’m really excited to share this with our audience chip and I’m hoping you could kind of run us through what are the five verticals and in each what what are some of the biggest opportunities we have.
Sure. So happy to do that, Aaron. And I’ll tell you that it’s all possible and not only that, but it’s something that we’re doing is happening and it’s happening.
So like my friend Jamie Redford’s film is called Happening and that’s what it’s all about. You know, and it’s about the transition from Boston to the middle.
So the first vertical of solution is in the electricity production sector. We’ve sort of already gone over that, but basically what that means is that we’ve got to stop the burning.
We’ve got to stop the digging and we’ve got to transition from burning the coal in the oil and the gas for the production of electricity.
And that’s where the hero catalyst can come in and that is seeing hero is seen as a market activator for the transition from a fossil to a hydrogen economy globally because we know that hydrogen can be, you know, we can get it.
We can store it. We can ship it. There’s lots of ways to do that.
One of the ways, by the way, is to use ammonia or NH3, which is one part, one nitrogen molecule, three hydrogen.
And that’s much easier to ship than pure hydrogen. And so we can, that’s a great storage medium.
You know, we can crack it and pull the hydrogen out of the ammonia. And then the atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen.
So it’s a non-issue in terms of that or the release of that.
So that’s the transition in the electricity sector. And of course, you know, utility scale solar and wind factor in because that’s been the largest sector of the electricity generation industry in the last 20 years.
First wind and now solar has come on very strong with the drop in prices of the solar panels. And that battery storage is being, you know, implemented around the world to give us some backup power.
But even that is not a long-term solution. Batteries are very toxic. They take a lot of rare earth elements. And on top of that, they have a lifespan of X amount of years. And then they have to be recycled.
And then you have to also look at how much carbon do we burn manufacturing solar panels, manufacturing the wind turbines, the blades, the missiles, and the batteries and all the elements.
And, you know, I mean, the cobalt that we get from the deep jungles of the DRC, the Congo, you know, there’s, there’s child labor that’s happening there. That’s just, that’s a terrific.
Okay, so we really want to be aware of the entire life cycle of how we get all of our materials and it closed circular system.
And the idea that we would admit no energy into the atmosphere is the point. We want to operate on a closed loop system where the energy that is used and the emissions that are produced go become the primary energy of energy.
The primary energy of the next system and you just go around the circle and nothing is emitted into the atmosphere.
Yep. So that’s the first vertical of solution. Second vertical first is stop the burning. Stop the burning and the media transition and the utilities scale of the electricity production sector.
Most of the burning we’re doing on that on that vertical is the coal and the gas. Moving over to the, okay, before we move over, I want to mention that the liquid fuels that go into 1.5 billion cars, trucks, and buses has also part of that vertical and that we have got to stop running our vehicles on gasoline.
And we need to replace that with green energy. Now there’s a company up in Canada called carbon engineering that Bill Gates has been funding and they pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
They mix it with hydrogen again hydrogen and they have a green fuel that can replace gasoline in the car that you drive today with the ice motor, which is the internal combustion engine.
And so we know that we can do this now, even though there are emissions out the tailpipe, this is not something that’s coming from inside the earth. So that’s considered to be carbon neutral because those gases are already out in the atmosphere or pulling them out and they were reusing them within the system.
The second vertical is the direct air capture conversation. And this is about the fact that since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the human race has burnt into the atmosphere,
the answer progenically forced about 2 trillion tons of carbon. And that’s all in, you know, burning everything. And that’s a function of two things. That’s a function of population and it’s a function of economic growth.
So it took all of human history to make 1 billion people and that was about the time of the Revolutionary War in America, 1775 thereabouts. But the population went from 1 to 2 billion by 1900 in 125 years of doubles.
And between 1900, the time of Teddy Roosevelt and today, 119 years later, it went from 2 billion to 7.5. And that’s the point. So we’re on an exponential population growth curve that has actually exploded. I mean, when I was born in the mid 50s, there was approximately 3 billion people. Well, now there’s almost 8. And that’s only in, you know, 63 years.
So the point is that the human race is driving this great burning of fossil fuels. And the other interesting point is that of the 2 trillion tons, half has been burnt since 1985.
So what are we going to do about that to solve it? We know that we have technology called direct air capture that can actually pull the carbon out of the atmosphere, these invisible gas. And we can store it back in the ground. So we’ll never leak out again. And that is called global thermostat.
That’s a company in New York with Peter Eisenberger and Graciela Chopininsky funded by Edgar Bronfman, the Canadian billionaire. It’s also called climorx, which is in Geneva, Switzerland, run by two young co CEOs that employ 100 people and have plants already operational today. And their money comes out of the Swiss government.
And that we as a third company that’s operational called blue planet, which is in San Francisco. And what they’re doing is you’re pulling the carbon out of the stack and they’re putting it in concrete. And they have a contract with the San Francisco International Airport in the city of San Francisco right now deploying.
So as the key to that vertical is pricing carbon, we must have a carbon tax or a price on carbon. And when we get to that place, that’s going to change the economics of solution radically and globally and drive this forward.
So the fifth one is close lockener. He’s the grandfather of director capture. And he’s the guy who is now set up down at Arizona ASU and his technology is very, very potent. Basically, it looks like trees and it has to do with the surface. It’s a kind of like these pine trees around us here. And we could deploy these and cover deserts with this this tech. And it just takes a part in one of the atmosphere.
Now, what do we do with the carbon? That’s where we go to look at CCS carbon capture and storage. But a lot of these texts are dubious.
The biggest carbon market in the world is enhanced oil recovery that the fossil fuel companies take the carbon, they pump it back into an old oil well and they get 30% more oil out of it.
Well, first of all, that’s the wrong direction. And secondly, we’re not sure if that carbon is going to be sequestered down there forever. Maybe it leaks out again. We have to be sure about this.
So I’m not a big fan of EOR enhanced oil recovery, but I am a big fan of all of the other things that we use for carbon.
We can use carbon to make parts for airplanes and bicycles, carbon fibers. We can use carbon for bubbles and soda pop. But of course, you know, back here we get back out.
We can use carbon for regenerating soils. That’s a big, big deal. That’s another vertical we’ll talk about.
But we can also use it to just basically, it’s a wonderful thing that we have to basically have what comes out of our mouth, what comes out of burning out of the tailpipe is a useful product in so many ways.
Until we can find a market mechanism and put a value on that carbon, it’s always going to be a problem.
There’s a new breakthrough in sequestration that is called carb fix. They discovered it in Reykjavik at the Heli Shidi geothermal power plant where we’re pulling carbon out of the atmosphere demonstrating it on site.
And we’re pumping it down into the ground, a mile down into the ground, and we’re mineralizing the carbon onto the salt rock. So it becomes mineralized, so we’ll never leak out again.
We’re turning the carbon into rock, basically.
Okay, so I’m not really a big fan of all the carbon products that we can come up with because there’s many, many.
We can put it into plastics, other things, replace the plastic, you know, iPhone covers, whatnot. But really what we need to do, because there’s some, I mean, if we have to take out one trillion tons or 1,000 gigatons, you know, the amount of products that we’ll get out of that are about that big.
So we’re still going to have to store the majority of it back in the ground, so it doesn’t leak out. And that’s why carb fix is very promising because it works along the Atlantic Rift, which runs from the North Pole to the South Pole.
It splits right through Iceland, and we know technically that we can take gigatons, put it back into the ground and mineralize it in the form of the salt rock.
So we’ve got to know that we can do this. So that’s vertical number two.
The third vertical of solution is that we have to, we have to basically make a transition in our, In the way that we think about how we produce food, animals, we know that one
fifth of the CO2 or the methane comes from cutting down the trees to grow the
animals to feed the people. Billions of cows and pigs and chickens all over
the planet. While I don’t think it’s likely the human race is all going to
become vegan, I do think that we can become much more smarter about how
we produce our food. Yes. And that goes directly to the restoration of the
earth’s soils that can sequester gigatons of carbon. So while we can put a lot of it
down into the salt rocks, we also can put a lot of it into the soils of the
planet and soil restoration, which connects to community-supported agriculture,
which connects to vibrant localism in terms of resiliency, in terms of how
communities can become self-sufficient using island energy or distributed
energy from renewable energy in combination with soil regeneration. So it’s
very important to think about how these solutions all kind of act together
and that while there’s no silver bullet, there’s lots of silver buckshot that
can work in consort and in collaboration and in strategic partnership with each
other. Yes. I’d like to talk a little bit about the vertical of solution that
has to do with the ocean. Before we go to the ocean, I just want to insert
interject a couple of quick comments about soil regeneration. Sure. So this is so
central to the work we’re doing at the YonEarth community. We’re coming out
very soon with a community mobilization kit which folks could use in their
own communities, their own church congregations, their own business
complexes, whatever it might be. And we’re utilizing the biodynamic soil
activation preparations and already we’ve been doing these events all around the
country. One of the things I find to be so potent about what this helps us do
is at the community level, at the individual level, at the level of a park like
this one we’re sitting in or a yard, a garden. We can go into direct
collaboration with the living biome, the living biosphere of the soil and help
trigger a sequence, a cascading sequence of biological phenomena that build
more soil. And one of the stats that blew me out of the water I came across when
I was putting together the soil stewardship handbook is that if we increase or
let me say as we increase soil carbon by 10% worldwide, that equates to a total
capture of all the fossil carbon we’ve released since the beginning of the
industrial revolution. And as we’re looking at carbon cycle on the planet, of
course that tells us there’s a whole lot of carbon in soil relative to the
amount of carbon in atmosphere. And certainly in some areas we have the
potential to do three, four X, that’s that’s not 10% that’s 300, 400% increases in
soil. In other areas it might be much less than 10%, but the point is this is
something we can engage in any of us, regardless of background education,
locality, age, you know, from two-year-olds to 92-year-olds, we’ve been doing
these events with folks from all backgrounds and ages. And it’s also a fun way
to come together in community knowing we are working now to heal the land, to
heal ourselves, our our relations. And I’m struck by that that quote from
President Franklin Roosevelt, he said, a nation that destroys its soil, destroys
itself. And there must be a quarrel area, a nation that heals its soil, heals
itself. And we all know, I think in this country, we need a lot of healing right
now. Be sure to, we’ve never lived in a more divided America than we do right now.
Not even in the Civil War was it this bad, it might be. And remember in the
Civil War there was, you know, probably, I don’t know, 100 million Americans, if
that, maybe 75. Well, today there’s 350. Yeah, you know, I mean the popular
relative of the whole population. So it’s in our media continues to
exacerbate that every day, you know, no matter what news you choose to watch. But I
believe that, you know, we’re all Americans. And it doesn’t matter what color of
our skin or what our religion or what our political affiliation, you know, we’re
all Americans, you know, as my good friend, Winona, Lucke likes to say, you
know, we might have come, come over here on different boats, but we’re all in one
boat now. And out about that, indigenous wisdom. Yes. And that’s a really, you
know, interesting point is that our day is, you know, some people say our day,
some people say air day, some I like to say our day, like every day is American
renewable energy day. But if you look real closely at it, you’ll see that it’s,
you know, A-R-E-D-A-Y, and that’s a red day. And our day actually literally was
born out of my work with the tribes up in the Northern Great Plains, working,
making films, and really working on the issues of social and economic justice for
those who deserve it and need it the most. Yeah. Yeah. It’s such a beautiful and
deep connection in it. For me, it strikes so deeply, Chip, that when you’re
convening our day, and I want to make sure we’re giving a quick plug for folks who
want to see more information, there’s great video resources, recorded
resources, you’ll get a rundown of all the speakers. Go to rday.net and you’ll
check that out. And you know, you’re bringing together so many technical experts,
you’re bringing together so many economic experts, thought leaders, brilliant
people. And it has this heart-centric foundation that I think probably has a
very deep and direct tie to your work with Indigenous and First Nations. And
that, that heartfulness, I sense, is so essential in this times. In these times,
you know, we may resolve all the technical challenges, but not resolve the
challenges of the heart, the challenges of culture, the challenges of
relationship that are really at the core of these complex global
situations that we’re talking about and dealing with. So it’s I think a real
testament chip that there is that that heart at the center of everything
you’re doing. Well, thank you, Aaron, to note that we always have had the
Indigenous perspective, the spiritual perspective in the R.D. context and
in the summit. We invite in spiritual leaders from Indigenous area, whether
it’s Lakota or maybe a tribe in Mexico or Hawaiian or where have you, to bring
in the Indigenous wisdom, which of course is how do we live in balance with
nature and that, you know, man did not, you know, weave the web of life he is
only but a strand in it to quote chief Seattle. And that we must go to our
Indigenous relatives and elders for to get that wisdom now that we need it so
badly because that’s what renewable energy is. You know, that’s what that’s how
the universe is comprised. You know, Mother Earth, what does she do? She takes the
energy of the son, father son, and she converts it through photosynthesis into
oxygen and perfectly sequestures the carbon. You know, what is it that we
become when we pass away? We become the coal in the oil and the gas. That’s what it
is. It’s all the old life that’s now dead for 500 million years. It’s the
trees. It’s a phytoplankton. It’s the animals. Oh, and it’s our grandparents. It
is us. I am that. Oh, money, putt may own in Sanskrit. I am that I am that. And
that’s what that that mantra means. In fact, you know, here’s the metaphor, you
know, we we have Mother Earth who is a living breathing being just like you and I
and we drill into her and we remove the oil and the coal and the gas, which is
the ancestors of all life itself. And we burn it in a very short period of time
150 years for what? For for short term power and money. And we use it and that
allows us to exponentially, you know, grow our population in my opinion. That’s
the main driver. You know, the two hockey stick graphs attract is the carbon and the
human population growth on an exponential. And they each drive the other. But that
but the point is is that and that all things are connected, you know, whole
metakweas and all my relations. And in that connection from the smallest, you
know, microcosm of the atomic structure of an atom to the soil under our feet
that E.O. Wilson, the great biologist will tell you has trillions of cell life
moving forms and the entire earth is a fabric of life that is interconnected
and moving just like all the cells in your body, the trillions of cells in your
body that are dying and regenerating on a daily basis, interacting with your
blood and your bones and all the other physical structures. But that’s connected
out to everything else in the world and that and the indigenous intrinsically
understand this and always have for tens of thousands and perhaps millions of
years however long we’ve been around. And that we have the wonderful
opportunity now that we have deconstructed the fabric of the world to
actually understand that and put it back together. I think that that’s one of
the marvels of modern science and technology, when Albert Einstein
figured out E.E.E. Who’s MCSquared and everybody else figured out everything
else. It gives us you know a hundred years ago we were you know riding around on
horses and buggies. And now we’re using iPhones and computers and
Teslas in order to, you know, move ourselves through the world. So, you know, if
time is looks like anything in my view it looks like a
and it goes like this and now we’re down here
at the crack of the whip and everything’s speeding up
like that.
And so I know I’ve sort of segmented
into some philosophical understanding,
but I think that it’s really important
to add that element not to mention
the spiritual aspect of solution.
Because if we don’t have that,
which might be considered the sixth vertical,
which is we have to be able to understand
what we truly are because after all,
there are only spirits having a physical experience.
And while we can’t contemplate not being here
and it seems like it turned to be while we are here,
it’s not.
And it’s a very short period of time
in the scheme of things.
And in fact, Earth’s life cycle itself
is a short period of time in the grand scheme of things,
which is predicted to be about four, five billion years
total, right?
I love it, Jeff.
Well, let me, before we get to the oceans,
which is next on the list,
let me just give a couple quick shout outs.
This is the Winers Community Stewardship
and Sustainability Podcast Series.
And we are having a fabulous experience here
in this park, up high in the mountains.
We are spirits having a physical experience.
I like to say we’re spirits having
a neuro biochemical experience.
And it’s a delightful day,
chips speaking with you.
Chip Comins, the Chairman in CEO
of the American Renewable Energy Institute,
as well as the founder of the R.D. Summit,
which is the 16th annual, is coming up,
August 14th through 17th in the Aspen Snowmass,
Colorado area.
You can get information to register,
to join, to check it out at rda.net.
That’s A-R-E-D-A-Y.net.
And I’d like to give a shout out to our sponsors
for the podcast series.
Thanks for all of your support
for making all of our community mobilization work possible.
These include Patagonia,
the International Society of Sustainability Professionals,
the LIDGE Family Foundation,
Waylay Waters, Earth Coast Productions,
Purium, and the Association of Walder Schools
of North America.
Also, a huge thanks to all of you
who have joined our monthly giving program.
You can join if you haven’t yet already
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You’ll see a link to the Donate page.
You can sign up to give whatever amount works for you
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When you do so, you will receive an exclusive code
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resources as they thank you for that support.
And we are having just a full and rich conversation here.
Chip, my notes are about to fill up two whole pages.
I see you’re showing the visual, the front-back cover
for the upcoming R-Day from competition
to collaboration.
I love it.
I love it.
Thank you.
Yeah, I think that we’re going to have
to collaborate in order to come through this period
that we have entered.
The Hopian sisters, they prophesize this time.
A great change, a great transition.
But they also said that when the river rises
and you find yourself in the middle of the river,
look around.
So you was in there with you.
It could be a good time.
It could celebrate.
It could be a good time.
Indeed, really.
It is.
It is.
Yes, it’s very exciting to be alive at this particular time.
And I’m very grateful for being here now.
Be here now, as Ram Das likes to say.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the ocean
and the fifth vertical of solution.
Because the ocean, in reality, this
should be called the planet ocean.
It’s 78% ocean.
And as President Kennedy once pointed out,
the composition of the ocean exactly equates
the composition of our blood.
Same elements.
We come from the ocean.
The ocean is where life first originated.
It’s where the phytoplankton began
to interact with the sunlight and created respiration.
And so that the earth is breathing being just like you
and I, respirating north and south, winter and summer.
And that the issue of abundance that we talk about a lot
really is about how, look at nature, look what it does.
It provides.
It doesn’t ask for return.
It just gives.
And then it gives a little more.
It’s actually a concept in the indigenous ways
of seeing, it’s called give way, give, hyphen way.
And what it means is that you give.
And then you give the original, give a little push.
And then you’re in the universal cycle.
That’s how gravity works.
That’s how the sun works.
That’s how the planets work all around the sun.
And now you’re in the cycle of the universe
or the way or the doubt or the tongue of the ocean.
And so when it comes to the ocean, it’s so important.
And my dear, dear friend, Dr. Sylvia Earl
is one of the most important advocates
for the oceans on the planet.
And who is known as her deepness,
because she has the deepest dive record for any woman
and of any human, really one of the many of anybody.
It has been advocating for the health of the oceans
for the fish and the sea.
And that we’re taking out so many fish
to feed the human population.
Now it’s questionable whether or not certain species
are going to survive and that whether or not we’re
going to, that basically now it looks
like there’s more plastic in the ocean than there are fish.
So in terms of the verticals of solution,
we’re going to have to stop farming the ocean
the way that we have been and treating it
like an endless supply.
When Amory Lovens and his then-wife Hunter Lovens
and their colleague Paul Hawken wrote a book called
Natural Capitalism, the fundamental premise
of natural capitalism was that we weren’t being honest
on a balance sheet.
And we weren’t accounting for the natural materials correctly.
And so the trees and the fish and the water and the natural
resources, we consider, capitalism considers them
as an endless supply, including the atmosphere
that we can pack as much garbage into the atmosphere
as we like.
And as Al Gore has said over and over,
we’re treating the atmosphere like an open sewer.
And we’ve just got to stop because the feedback loops
are now coming fast and furious.
And we know that the disrupted cycles of the weather,
the temperature is rising on the planet.
Global warming is a real thing.
It is being forced by the humans.
This is not natural background variation, no matter
what anybody thinks.
That’s what the science indicates.
99 out of 100 scientists say that.
And yet one scientist has given equal voice
on any newspaper or television talk show,
our newscast, which is really, really unfortunate
and the greatest service.
But it’s confusing a lot of people.
I was just two days ago talking with some friends
not too far from here.
And what’s happening in popular media around this discussion
is truly causing a lot of confusion among the populists.
It really is.
And people are being lied to.
And they’re saying that science doesn’t matter.
And really science equates to physics
and physics equates to truth.
So saying the truth doesn’t matter is, well,
that’s one step away from a totalitarian
authoritarian dictatorship, right?
We don’t want that.
So let’s pull ourselves back in.
And the good people of the earth and the good people
of America and around the world are going to stand up.
And they’re going to have to follow
in the footsteps of the youth.
But before we get to the youth, because we need
to finish on that piece, you know,
YonEarth and the entire incredible youth movement
being led by people like Greta Thunberg and Chutezcott,
Martinez, and so many others.
I want to finish on the fifth vertical solution,
which has to do with the ocean.
And that means that we are going
to have to develop the technologies,
because we don’t have them yet.
We have technologies for all the others.
But we don’t know how to take the acid back out of the ocean.
That’s a lot of gallons of water out there.
And you talk about all the oceans of the world.
But the ocean is becoming a certified.
And it’s forcing the collapse of the coral reefs
and the great barrier reef in Australia,
which has lost half of its corals in the last 10 years.
And that is something that’s happening.
The oceans are the biggest carbon sink
for all of these pollutants that we’ve been put up there,
because carbon is a pollutant.
And it’s now becoming over a certified.
And it’s affecting literally the ability of oysters
and clams to make their shells.
And it’s going to the entire food chain.
So that’s something that humans are very, very smart.
And we’re working on it.
There are some bright spots.
We’re looking for learning how to actually
were developing special species of coral
that are our heat resistant.
And we’re repopulating coral reefs.
That’s happening.
There’s going to be a lot of breakthroughs in that.
Additionally, perhaps one of the most difficult problems
is that we’re going to have to take the oil, which is the plastic.
Remember, the plastic is oil.
We’re going to have to pull that back out of the ocean.
Problem, of course, is that since we
began creating plastic since the late 60s in earnest,
a lot of that old plastic that’s in the ocean breaks down
and it becomes microscopic.
And that’s becoming distributed all throughout the water.
So that’s a very difficult problem.
But I believe that we’re going to develop technologies
that we don’t have yet that will bind up
and attract back in to be able to extract out so that.
I mean, eventually, we know that the Earth
is the greatest recycler of all.
And that, in fact, we’ve already
seen in the last 500 million years
five great extinction events.
And without going through all of them,
I will say that the one that happened 263 million years ago,
that killed everything on the planet
down to 4% of all of it, the ocean and land.
But the shark swam through it, it’s 1 million years old.
And that the Earth always will regenerate itself.
And so that’s just the way it is.
And so we can rest assured that Mother Earth knows best.
Right.
Well, that’s fabulous, Chip.
Well, Mother Earth knows best the wisdom that helps us
think in terms of future generations, several seven
generations, et cetera.
I think kind of brings us around to the youth movements.
And you’re tracking so many amazing potent, growing youth
movements out of planetary scale chip.
I know you’ve invited several of those youth leaders
into the upcoming R.D. conference.
And could you just tell us a little about what’s
happening with Chess Scott and some of the other leaders?
What’s happening right now?
Sure.
OK, so we’re really excited that, first of all,
let me start with a Slater Jewel Kempker.
So she’s a woman.
Now she’s 27, but she’s been making a film since 2009.
She started in Copenhagen when I was there doing my thing
at COP 15, producing a film called Youth Unstoppable.
And now that film is almost finished.
It actually is finished.
And we’re going to screen that.
And that’s documenting this growing youth movement
been going back 10 years over the past 10 years.
And she went to COP 16.
And she went to COP 15 in Paris as well.
And she goes around the world focusing.
That’s a really, really important film.
But she’s going to be joined by Chutest Scott Martinez,
who might be the single most recognizable of the youth
leaders in the United States.
He’s an Aztec young man who is written a book.
He has appeared on Bill Maher on HBO.
He has been in some Leo de Caprio documentaries.
He has a band that’s quite something
he is the youth director of the Earth Guardian
non-profit organization that is Mom Runs tomorrow.
And they’re part of a national movement.
And in fact, he’s one of the plaintiffs
on Julianne versus the United States.
And so we’re very happy that the executive director
of our children’s trust, Julia Olsen,
will also be joining us to give us updates.
This is the lawsuit that the youth have filed from many states
around the country, including Colorado,
against the United States government,
that they’re not protecting their future
by allowing this continued burning of carbon
into the atmosphere, what I call the great burning,
to continue.
And so we’ll be having that discussion
and we’ll be looking to the youth leaders.
And by the way, Chucheska will be joined by another indigenous
17-year-old young woman named Shea, X-I-Y-E.
And she is from Shea is the daughter of Mandahi and Geraldine
Batista, who work with a Karenegor, actually,
over in New York City at the Union Seminary.
And she’ll be coming to lend her feminine perspective.
So I love the balance of male, female, indigenous youth
coming together, both are 17, both are indigenous.
Both are leading.
Shea is becoming actually quite an international leader
as well.
And Chucheska is as well.
And both of their names start with X,
so we’re calling that double X.
Love it, double X.
March the spot.
Yep.
And really looking forward to that,
that whole track at the R-Day Summit.
Cool.
This is great, Chip.
And just another quick reminder of any of you
want to check out, R-Day.
Hopefully you can join us.
Go to R-Day.net.
Chip, it’s been absolutely wonderful speaking with you today.
Thank you for taking the time to visit with me
and share your messages with the Y-Earth community.
My pleasure, and thanks so much for having me.
And we’re going to do this.
We’re doing it.
We’re doing it.
We’ll put it in there in a moment.
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