Okay, we're on. >> Okay everybody, welcome to week 10 office hours. This is our oh sorry. Once again, welcome to week 10 office hours. This is our last office hour for the class. Thanks to everybody for hanging in for so long and for sending in all the great questions. I know that my, my voice is lagging a little bit from the video. That is because I am in a hotel, in Copenhagen. I'm over here for a week teaching a synthetic biology of photosynthetic organisms course at the University of Copenhagen. So, my internet connection's not the best but I think we get by today. So we got a couple questions here, a couple of technical ones. A couple of philosophical ones I'm going to start with the easier technical ones and then we'll save the, the philosophical ones for later. So let's start, let's see I saw a good one here. Okay, there's an easy one. 'Kay. This comes from Marcello Bees. What is the name of the algae that Professor Brian Palanick. Told us about in his video Nutrient Utilization and Re-Cycling Two, that grows well in waste water. Well, there's a number of algae that grow well in waste water. The two that Brian works on the most are Haematococcus and Nanachoropsis. So, those are two green algae. They're both salt water tolerant. And both of those guys do pretty well. in, in what's called the rapinate. So what the rapinate is, is so Brian's actually been growing his not in municipal waste water, but rather in the recycling from the sapphire energy oil extraction process. So, they do a process called hydrothermal liquefaction. In in which they take the algae, and they heat it up. High temperature, high pressure, not that high. A couple of atmosphere. A little bit above 100 degrees Centigrade. And when you do that, the algae decomposes into a soluble phase, and an oil phase. And then you extract the oil phase with a solvent. And then you recycle the water phase, and what's in that water phase, which is called the raffinate, it's loaded with phosphate and nitrogen, and that can be readily recycled back into the ponds, and what Brian found out is that many algae will eat that. And that some of them, over time, learned to actually like it and thrive in it, and so the one that you found out that, that turned out to grow really well, it's called madacacus, it's a green algae commercial strain that's grown today. And it seems to work pretty well, but so does nanachloropsus so, so do quite a few other ones vanillayella, tursielecta, is one that is often used in traditional waste waters, and that also grows well in raffinate as well, okay. Let's see. There was another easy technical one. Well there's, here's several on climate change. And we're going to get back to those in just a second. Okay, well here's one. It, it's a bit of an opinion but it's, it's probably a little easier one to answer than some of the others. And this one says. This comes from the forum and it says should the US government stop corn subsidize, subsidies for ethanol production, and how much do politics play into the continuation of the subsidies? So there, there's lots of different ways to answer that. First of all it, politics plays an enormous role in every subsidy that, that we pay payout. And we pay out quite a few of them, corn ethanol is not by any stretch of the imagination is not the only one to get subsidies. Many crops get subsidies, some of them enormous. No crop gets bigger subsidies than corn. Now corn ethanol used to get a 51 cent a gallon tax credit. But that went away in the end of 2012. I think everyone agreed that, that was really a bad idea. Obviously it stimulated us to use a lot more corn ethanol, but 51 cents a gallon going to the blenders, was not the best way to get us on the track to renewable fuel. Most of the life cycle assessments that I have seen recently. And life cycle assessments get better all the time. You know, so the first ones that came out with corn ethanol it didn't do very well. In fact many of them arrived at the conclusion that more greenhouse gases were put out by using corn ethanol, than by, than by using traditional gasoline. But, but people got better at analyzing what goes in and how much energy is really used and what. One of the things they didn't calculate early on was that once you distill you know the corn starch into ethanol what you have left over is the distillers grain. And that's very rich in protein, very high protein content. And that can be cattle feed, in fact it's very good cattle feed. So, the original life cycle assessments did not give any carbon credit for that. And, obviously, they should have. It's a product, it goes when you feed that to cows, you're not buying additional corn. So, corn improved dramatically when they put that in. And more recently, you know, [COUGH] there's been a little bit of flaw back and forth. But I'd say, by and large, corn ethanol still puts out less yield to than [COUGH] than traditional fossil fuels. Okay. However, the que, that's not what the question says. What the question says, should the government stop corn subsidies for ethanol? You know, when I talk to my friends, the economists, you know, Mark Jacobson or you know, any of the other ecorn, economist who, who appeared in this course, they will always tell you subsidies are really bad thing. Because that distorts the playing field. And then you're not making pure economic choices. So, from an economics perspective, absolutely, we should get rid of subsidies corn ethanol. The problem is we subsidize fossil fuel so heavily you know, we should get rid of those as well. But we don't. And the reason we don't is exactly what the second half of that question says. How much do politics play into the continuation of the subsidies enormously? In this country, for some reason. Well not in Copenhagen, I mean Denmark, but in the United States we have this idea, that you know, we're giving subsidies to these small little farmers, you know, that their livelihood depends on it, and, for most corn farmers that's completely untrue. Most of these are very large farms now. Many of them are corporate farms. They're not even individual farmers anymore. You know, but they're, they're a big voting block. There are 13 states in the United States, that are primary corn producers. And that gives you 26 senators and lots of congressman and you know, all politicians local, they make sure that those subsidies stay in line. So it's very much politically motivated it's probably not economically the best thing to do. But it's not a complete disaster by any of imagination, all right? I'd, I, I would make the argument that giving subsidies to fossil fuel is much worse. So I'll, I'll, I'll leave it at that and you guys can find lots of different opinions on this if you take a look around. Okay, here, here's here's another technical one. And this has to do with biodiesel. So the question, it says, this course says that biodiesel does not undergo decarboxylation. But renewable diesel does. Okay? I thought biodiesel is decarboxylated hydrocarbons or something similar. So why does renewable diesel need decarboxylation, but biodiesel doesn't, does not? So the difference between biodiesel and renewable diesel is, is pretty easy. Biodiesel is a transesterification of a fatty acid. So when you do that, you've got a carboxylic acid on one end of it, so that's a carbon with a couple, with a double bond Oxygen and then an OH on it, and so when you do that you have Oxygen in there, and that does a couple things for you. One it makes it unstable. And two, it has slightly lower energy density. So that is traditional biodiesel. Works fine in a diesel, you can put it right in, works no problem at all. Issue is a little bit of stability because of that oxygen that's in there. Renewable diesel, they take you know, fatty acids. Now free fatty acids and they treat those with hydrogen that's called hydrotreating, and when you do that, you drive off the oxygen, you turn it in, into water. And so when you do that and you get rid of all the oxygen, now you essentially have a, a renewable diesel that is identical, to fossil fuel diesel. And has the same stability can, can stay in your tank just as long tends not to cross-link. So, that, that's the biggest difference. And are they chemically different? Yes, they are, they are you know, not actually, not even that subtly. They're chemically different and almost all of the oil that's produced from Sapphire Energy at least and I'm sure from most of the other algae companies now, they all go through they high route reading and become renewable diesel, not biodiesel. Renewable diesel is completely compatible with diesel. You can blend it up to a 100. It's. it's indistinguishable, you just cannot tell the difference. So, that 's why most people have gone that way. It is a little more expensive, because you have to make the hydrogen. And and use that to treat the, the, the oil. Okay now we'll get into the more controversial ones. Okay, so this one says thank you Doctor Mayfield for a great course. If you had to summarize our global position today regarding the imminent changes that already cast in the next 20 years. And those they can still be remedied, what would you say? Okay so, you know, I know that especially the climate changed lectures over the last couple of weeks, over this last week painted a pretty dismal picture for the future of the planet, right. We're continuing to dump carbon into the atmosphere. If anything our rate has accelerated over the three or four years, in the United States we've gone down a little bit but worldwide we continue to put more CO2 into the atmosphere. That's in spite of the fact that you know, 97% of climate scientist say that that's causing you know, global warming. It's causing climate change. It's causing enormous problems. So that's the depressing part. The optimistic part that, that was also in this class, is that we have lots of different ways now to get renewable energy. You know I, I really, you know, when, when I look at California, and what we're doing. You know we're up to 20% renewable electricity now. You know, we're on our way to 30% renewable electricity by 2020. So we are doing really well in that front, right? And I think many other countries are adapting this as well. We're putting up windmills, we're putting up solar. I think we're actually on a pretty good track you know, right now to get renewable energy into our electric grid. So, you know, what, what can we do about that? We can buy electric cars, all right? We've been in the state of California and every place else in the world. Really bad about getting biofuels. California has done nothing. It's, it's, it's really kind of sad. You know, I go up and talk to the California Energy Commission quite often. We had one of the commissioners here in the class you heard her a couple weeks ago, talk. Very smart people working very hard. But all of their energy is going into renewable electricity. And that is not the, the biggest cause of CO2 into the atmosphere in California. That's our cars. So, as an individual, what are we going to do about that? We're going to get electric cars. You know as the old saying, if you can't beat them, join them. You know, I really wish we would do something to get renewable fuel, to get renewable gasoline and renewable diesel into the marketplace. But we haven't, you know, apparently that, that just is just apparently too hard to crack. And so we're not going to go down that route, at least not with any funding from the federal government, or the state of california. At least not now you know, maybe some day I'll meet Jerry Brown and have a little chat with him and point out that the California tax payers have put a lot of money into the coffers to get low carbon fuels and we should start working on those, and we're not right now. So, best thing I think you can do, buy an electric car. Certainly putting photovoltaic panels on your roof. If you're in an area that warrants it. That it, that is a great idea. If you're in a windy place, get a windmill. You know, I think these things would be kind of fun to have in your yard anyway. And and, and at least on the electric cars. They're more expensive to buy. But you will save money in the long run on those things, but many of you know in this class, I've said it many times, you know, I'm not looking for one now several of you have sent very nice emails giving me advice on them you know? I saw and liked, I have a friend whose got a Tesla, I really liked that car, but I just cannot spend 90,000 bucks, so my latest thinking is I'm going to lease one for two years. Honda has one called a Fit. You can lease that pretty cheap. So right now I'm thinking I'm going to lease the Honda Fit for a couple of years. Hope that Tesla comes out with their new cheaper version, which is apparently going to be still 30 or 40 thousand bucks, but hey, I can stomach that. I can't stomach 90,000 bucks for a car. I just don't care that much about cars. So that's my plan right now. Still happy to take advice. Anybody out there who's got an electric car. Fire me off some advice and and we'll, we'll see what I end up with, okay? So, that, that's number one. You know, the second thing is, and, and there's, there's another question below about this, we'll get to this in a minute. And that is, that, I know some people have said. Well, since climate change is going to happen, and the rest of the world is going to continue to dump CO2 in the atmosphere and, but really have an opportunity change that. Shouldn't we start thinking about mitigating the damage. And in some ways I feel like, well if we say that we've sort of given up this idea that we can reduce our carbon footprint to the degree that we don't have significant climate change, and I hate to give up on it right now especially with how fast. New technologies were coming online. But the realistic part of it is we do have doubt. We're already, you know, making some strategies now to medicate that. The biggest problem with that, and we talked about this with Alex Zane two weeks ago. Is that the people who are going to be hurt the most by climate change, are those countries. That don't have the money to mitigate the damage. You know, they can't move away from the coast. You know, and if it rains too heavy then they lose their crops, they don't have stuff stored away for next year. So it's one of the really sad ironies of this planet is that People who put out the least amount of carbon, you know, which are the bottom two billion, are the ones who are going to be hurt the most by climate change. So, that is really sad, all right? And I think on that one, all we can do, is you know, do the best we can as individuals, and then, you know, vote, and call your congressman, and call your senators, and tell them what you think. You know I've said this many times in class, I spend a fair amount of time going and talking to congressman, and talking to senators and, and universally they say the same thing. You know, never do they say, well thanks very much for your opinion, get out of my office, always what they say is, thanks so much for coming in, you know? We need to hear these things. We need to hear from scientists. But they need to hear from you guys, too. So, when you send emails, and when you call your congressmen in, and senators. It it has an impact, right? And then, if you don't like them, don't vote for them. And if we get enough people who don't like them, maybe we'll actually get some change, all right? So I'm going to leave it at that on those opinions right now. Let's see, oh here's one, right here, okay, so this goes along with that. This comes from Martin Crollin, why are we giving up on clean nuclear then? Okay, so this is a really tough question I think many of you who listen to office hours before, that I was over in Japan last November. For Congress on renewable energy, and one of the ministers of technology got up and talked. And when you hear him talk about Fukushima, and that this is now a 100 year problem for them to contain it. So he said two things that were really startling to me. All right, the first one you said is that the core and reactor number three is not in containment today. It wasn't in November and it still isn't today. It melted through and it's someplace underground. It's the China syndrome. All right? It's not clear where that core is, and it's not clear right now, how they're going to stop it. The i, idea they were talking about then, and I haven't seen them execute on this yet, was they were going to drill three inch holes into the ground. And in a cone shaped arrangement, it was a quarter of kilometer around circle on the top. And then which going to go a kilometer deep. And then they were going to fill those with liquid nitrogen. And what that does is that, it causes what's called an ice dam. So it freezes the water, and then any water to get to it turns solid. And so, so you essentially make a, an, an enormous, frozen cone. And that would catch the the core before it, it, you know, melts down in. The, the greatest fear is, of course, it goes down and hits some aquifer and then starts, you know, the steam causes it to explode again, and in comes flying back out. So, it hasn't done that yet but apparently it still has the potential to do that. So that was the first thing he said. The second thing he said was, in Japan, when we agreed to put in nuclear power plants. We were told the possibility of an accident was one in 10,000 reactors. Right? And he said now that these have been out for 50 years. We know that real number is one in 400. So, you know, when you count up Fukushima and Chernobyl and five mile island and santa nofre, and all the rest of them, they actually have a pretty poor record of safety. So, they're new generations of nuclear power plants that are out there now, George Tynan talked about it, they could be much safer, they're not the old, I think it's called light water reactors that we have now. So it's a different style, but I think really, if we're going to go forward with nuclear power, I think that, to me at least, makes the most sense. The problem with that is, and the reason we haven't done that, or don't do that immediately, is then you have retrain, all of the people who run nuclear power plants now, to run that different style. So, are we going to go to that, yes, I believe we will. I think there's an opportunity to do that. Obviously, nuclear power does not put out one lick of CO2, [SOUND] so dog outside barking, that is not in my hotel room. So you know, bottom line, we're not going to give up on it. But right now, I'd say that there's not a lot of momentum pushing it forward. Prior to Fukushima in 2009. I think in 2008 and 2007 a lot of people were talking about that, that nuclear power going to come back. People in the United States were talking about that again, we were starting to think about getting permits to build some new power plants. And all that got put on the back burner in 2009. And we'll just have to see you know, what happens to that oh, over the next couple years. Okay, let's pick another question here. okay. Okay, this one says, from Mona Crowl, Professor needs to get an update. While in Fukushima. Martin happy to get it you know, I have not read anything since November, I don't know if they've got that in containment now, you know I continue to Google it, and, and look every now and then just see what the updates are. Certainly if you have some, email it to me, you can, you can grab my email, I'm, I would love to know about this stuff it was really sad when I was over there to hear this guys, and I would love to know that some progress has been made over there. And so, so if you have some news please, please send it my way. Okay so here's another question. It says thanks for the great course, I've enjoyed it tremendously. I have many classes on environmental sciences, this one is the best. Okay. But here's my question, I also think that we, we as individuals should always think about mitigating to some degree our footprint our carbon footprint I think he means. In addition to reducing our energy. So, you know, that is absolutely right. Look when, when I heard Alexs' own talk two weeks ago, and tell us that their goal in Nepal was to get five watts of energy per person, per day in the households. And I know that we used 10,000 watts per energy, per day. You know, sort of the, the overwhelming thought that hit me was it is amazing how much energy we waste in the United States, and this is true in Europe too. We just consume huge amounts. And I have to say eh, everyday I hop in my, you know, I don't know how much my car weighs, four thousand, five thousand pounds and drive that thing down the road, it just amazes me eh, every persons and individual driving in their car driving five thousand pounds of metal. You know, up and down the highway, and just what an enormous waste of energy. So, what we need to do is, is we need to get much more efficient at the energy we use. Almost every study I see says that in the United States, without decreasing our economy or our standard of living one bit, we could easily cut our energy in half. And if we cut our energy consumption in half that, that would go a really long way to, to reducing our carbon footprint, right? And so it's sort of a combination of getting much more efficient. You know, people complain when, when, when oil is you know, when gasoline is $4.50 a gallon the way it is right now. You know and I know I'm pretty well off and you know, lots of people in the United States are but I honestly believe that, you know, gasoline should be six or seven bucks a gallon. What we should be doing is we should put an enormous tax on that, because that will give the people the incentive to become much more efficient. But we have that, a tax neutral fee, right? Which means, yes you pay more in taxes, but, we, we, we rebate it, you know, rebate it back to you in some other form. So, it simply gives you an incentive to conserve energy, but it's not, you know, in the end it's not more dollars out of your pocket. So, you know, that's what I would like to see happen. The economists, by the way, love that, all my buddy, my hard core economic buddies tell me that's exactly the way we should go. But we haven't got around to doing that yet. Maybe someday we will. The, the problem is, and, and I think this is what Mark Jacobson brought up last week. You know, the problem is every time we raise taxes, you know, that money seems to, you know, just vaporize into the, into the government. And it's never obvious to us what Our taxes go up, but nothing seems to get better, right? And, I think there's some truth to that. So we, we have to be really transparent that this is a revenue neutral tax meaning the money that we pay for gas comes right back you know, in some, in some other form back to people, so its not just you know a tax that just gets to government payer. Okay, okay, Martin says, that's the great thing about these live chat, Martin says you've got it, I have three years worth of daily reports from around the world and I will summarize and send those off to you. So thanks very much, right. And, you know, I, I, I'm okay. Here he says the ISAM is a waste of time and money, there are other solutions. Yeah, I don't know that they ever did the ISAM, that was just what they were talking about in November. And I thought that it was the craziest idea I had ever heard, too. You know, but that was what they were talking about at the time. So, you know, I, I'm simply telling you what the administered technology guy had told to us. But apparently ISAM is used. In the United States up in Hanford, nuclear power plant. So there, you know, the Hanford plant was one of the sites that we made nuclear weapons. There, there are ponds up there that we filled up with nuclear radioactivity and some of that was leaking out, threatening to get into the Columbia River. And and they built a dam there, the Department of Energy did, an ice dam like that. And apparently once you freeze it solid it's actually a pretty good insulator. So it's not the enormous energy sink that you'd think. You sort of, make you know, permafrost. And then it's actually, apparently not so bad. Okay, let's see. 'Kay here somebody wrote back and said gas is $2.89 in New Mexico this week. [INAUDIBLE] Okay. It's not in California. I'm not in California this week, but it was $4.25. Wait a minute, it was $4.25 when I left last last Saturday. I know that your gas in New Mexico is cheaper than ours. Okay okay, let, let's, let's grab another one here. And it says, just this morning on NPR, it had a feature story on how climate changed has caused the farms in North Dakota to switch from planting, planting wheat to planting corn. Yep, that's absolutely true, in the last two decades. There has been an increase in average rainfall, they're two to three inches. Yeah, so so it, well, I think we've talked about this. You know, climate change is, is, is a bit uneven. and, and for every bit of damage, that it causes to one group, it could be a benefit to somebody else. So they can now plant corn in Canada. Which traditionally was wheat and something called rapeseed. Which but now it's warmed up enough that they can plant corn. So I did not hear the NPR story on planting corn in North Dakota, but that does not surprise me. You know, the, the growing season is moving farther north. And, and you know, many of people have made this comment before, but the higher the CO2 in the atmosphere, the better it is for plants. You know, productivity can go up. and, and, and that's true. So, you know, I, I, what's the expression? You know, it's an ill wind that doesn't blow someone some good. So, you know, climate change. Is, much easier to adapt to when you have significant resources. So in the United States, so for example, you're a farmer in North Dakota. He simply switches from growing wheat to growing corn. It's not so easy to do in some countries. If you have a traditional crop that you grow to feed your family it's not always that you can change doing that. Right, you know, switching from, from wheat to corn is you know my, I don't know, but my guess is you know it's still the same tractors and you have to learn some new tricks but. So yeah I, you know that, that is ab, absolutely believable, and I'm not sure that's a benefit from North Dakota. Wheat you get more per bushel than you do from corn but corn you tend to get higher yields so you know maybe, maybe that will work out better than, it certainly working out better for Canada, no question about that. Okay. Let's see. We're going to go through a couple more here. Yeah, well, here's a question. We sort of started to answer this already. This comes from Jim And he says, if certain change in the climate are already set, and their impacts predetermined. Would the smart long term investment be, in adapting to the reality of a new coastline? And weather patterns and focusing on essential resource shortages like power and water. That's what we're going to do. Right I, I, I'm not sure that I would say that that's smartest long term strategy, but it's, it's absolutely the one that we are going to do. We are going to adapt to this you know, I don't know how much the coast lines are going to change. You know, still the numbers I see say you know, maybe, maybe ten centimeters to 20 centimeters by, by the end of this century. Although I will say this I don't know if I told you this, you guys this story or not. Two years ago, we met with Exxon executives. They came out. And one of the, you know, deans at UCSD asked him. He said you know I heard that Exxon now builds all of their drilling rigs, you know, a meter higher. Then they had previously. And the vice president of Exxon looked at him, he said yes that it's public knowledge, we've, we've said that we, we do build our platforms now a meter higher. And I looked at him and said God, that, that must be expensive. That must be, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars to a rig. And he said, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, said, I can't tell you the exact number but it's you know, it's many hundreds of thousand, millions of dollars. To, to you know, extend a rig up three feet. And I said, and you guys have 10,000 rigs. He said, yes we do have 10,000 rigs. And I said, well that's billions of dollars. Why would you spend billions of dollars to make them a meter higher, I, I've never heard any reports that say we're going to get a meter of climate change in the next 30 or 40 years. Which is how long a rig, an oil rig stays around. And he looked at us and he said well I can tell you this, Exxon has the best climate scientists in the world. So, when they tell us to build them a meter higher, we listen to them. And that was really kind of alarming for me, because I have never heard anyone other than him you know, imply in any way that it could go up that much. But I always say, if you want to know the truth, follow the money. See where people are spending their money. You know, if the guys at Exxonare spending, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per rig. They don't do it lightly. So, back to your question though which is, shouldn't we just litigate this and then, you know, worry about water and power. Okay, in this country that's what we're going to do. All right. But there's a lot of places on the planet where they simply do not get that option. And it's not just a matter of the, you know, the, the coastline being higher, it's a matter of that some places where you're going to get drier, and as they do, like the drought in California we have right now, no idea if that's directly related to climate change or not, but everyone predicts we're going to get more droughts, and they're going to be more severe. We'll get a higher number of droughts, and when we get 'em, they'll be more severe. So we're going to spend an additional eight billion dollars this year in California to try to come up with some water storage solutions for that. So we are already starting to mitigate this. We're also spending money on power, we're also spending money on water. The problem is if you live in Pakistan you know, where they're now getting record floods again this year. So it's not that every place gets drier, some places are going to get wetter, they're going to get more rain. So it's those parts of climate change and the people who can't afford them. And what do you do about that, right? You know, again is it just tough luck for you guys? You were born in the wrong country and you don't have enough money to fix your problems I, you know? I would hate to think that that's the way we think. You know as either people or country, so. Instead what we're going to do is we're going to think about way not to let climate change wreak havoc and we're going to do that by getting renewable energy. And we have given you guys lots and lots of really good ideas in this course and you're going to send us more. Right one of the last videos that you should have seen came from Travis Johnson. Travis is the producer of this MOOC and Travis put out the challenge to you guys, to tell us how you're going to lower your carbon footprint and to tell us what your local solutions are. All right? I'm going to continue to work on biofuels. I'm going to continue to work on renewable energy. I'm going to try to make these things available to as many people as I can. I'm going to distribute this MOOC all over the world, and we've already done that. But we, you know, and sometimes, okay. That, that's what I'm going to do, but we also need to do individual things. My individual thing this year is going to be to get an electric car. And maybe next year I will put foldable tags on my roof. But if, if everybody does that, and we all chip in, then the problem is absolutely surmountable. You know, the, this is not something that we can not fix. If we put our minds to it, we can do this. One of the other great things that the Vice President of Exxon said when I asked him. I said, are you worried about the depletion of fossil fuel, and running out of reserves to sell? Or are you worried about climate change, as a company? And he said, no, what we are worried about is that humans only operate under two modes, they do nothing and then they overreact. And right now, on climate change, we are doing nothing, but at some time, we are going to overreact. And when they overreact, we know they're going to take it out on Exxon. Right? And so he was saying that in sort of a, not a cynical way, but he was saying that as a way to say that, you know what they're really worried about is people's over reaction. But another way to put that is that, you know, it's sort of the straw that broke the camel's back. You know, people will put up with a lot and not do anything about it. But at some point you just say this is too much. When I grew up in Los Angeles, as a kid we had horrible air pollution. And eventually, you know, in the, in the late 60s and early 70s, people said, you know what, we've had enough of this. And we put in much tougher standards. For emission for our automobiles, and that greatly impacted air pollution in Los Angeles. And in not too many years, in half a dozen years it was noticeably better. Okay. And I think we can do the same thing on climate change and on renewable energy. You know, right now we're still sort of saying. We're still in a bit of the do nothing mode. Part of that is a response to the down turn of the economy in, in 2008 you know it was all jobs, jobs, jobs. Many of those have come back now. Maybe not all the great ones we had before, but many of them have come back. So I think now people are starting to think about it, so you know let, lets don't lets not over react. But let, let's, let's all act together in a positive way and and I think we can do something about this, come on. Okay. Okay, here is another one on climate change. This is an opinion one but I am going to read it anyway because it's our last one. Climate change creates a greater threat to human kind than did world war II. Governments did not hesitate initiating fuel and food rationing. And there was no public outcry. What has changed that our government are so reluctant to fund renewable energy? Yeah, the number 1 thing that has happened, is, we are now on a 24/7 news cycle. And, and, the saddest thing, for me, is the lack of leadership in Washington DC. But I can tell you from talking to those people, that what, they tell me is, they say, you know, Doc, the problem is if we were to put a tax on gasoline now, we would be voted out of office tomorrow. So, you know, we love to blame our politicians and say, you know, the government isn't doing what they should be. The truth of the matter is, the people who actually step up, we all vote them out of the office. So, yeah, how do we change that? We change that when we start electing people who make tough decisions, and stick with them and support those people long term. Right? You know, the, the problem is not them, the problem is us. Right you've got a vote, you know, you, you've got vote for the people who make those tough decisions and you've got to stick with them. Right, and and then hope we get some people in, in, in the government with some backbone right. But again you know the news stations it's now you get to make up anything you want on the news. You know, it, it, it's all about who can, who can make the most dramatic claim. It doesn't have to be true or not anymore. Just make a big dramatic claim and that will get you lots of viewers, and get people riled up and that's what the news has now become. So, in, in many ways, I think, you know, sort of the downfall of Western civilization. Has been cable news, right, I mean that, I realize that's a slight oversimplification of it, but in many ways I honestly believe that's what it is. But it's not just that, it's that we watch cable news and go along with it, right? That for, for me, that's the really sad thing but anyway, Craig. Sorry I didn't really answer your question. But, you know, I don't know why governments are so reluctant to do it, other than those people get voted out. Okay were going to answer one more question then we're going to call it a day, because it's a quarter to 11 and it's our last day. So, let's find one last good one to go off the air with. oh. Here's one. Okay, Martin. Martin's on a roll. Martin says, that's why I'm going to buy an electric cart. Here's what Martin says, I'm going to white coat my roof. My electric bill was 389 last month even with our cooler weather. Yeah. So, you know, it's funny. In, in, in in many cities now, you're required to, to paint your roofs white. Especially if you're a big office building, because that reflects so much more of the hea, of the sunlight, you know, back up into the atmosphere, so it doesn't heat your house. And there, therefore your air conditioning bill is lower. So Martin, I'm going to challenge on this one too. You're going to send me information about nuclear power? Send me some information if you can find it, or give me link that tells me how much my energy bill would be saved, because I think that's probably pretty good thing to do out here in California as well. Okay let's see. [SOUND] What last one are we going to close out on? We're going to close out on this one, because these are my favorite guys, the Navy guys. 'Kay, here's the question, any thoughts on the research being done by the Navy and Park on creating jet fuel similar to diesel from saltwater? I'm going to answer that one. Okay. I, I think they both return CO2 less water to the ocean, which I believe at huge quantities could help the air. So there was an article a little while ago that the Navy was going to make jet fuel from salt water. You cannot make jet fuel from salt water. That was a gross simplification of we are going to grow algae. In salt water and pump CO2 into it to capture the CO2 and then we're going to extract the oils from that and make it into fuel. But somehow the part about actually using algae to convert sunlight in CO2 into the fuel got lost, in that article and it gotten written up as if the Navy had some secret new way to make diesel out of salt water. There are no hydrocarbons in sea water. 'Kay? So that, that, yes they were going to make, they were going to grow algae in seawater. But what I want to say about the Navy, and the reason we're going to close out out on this one, is because the Navy has really been forward thinking on this one, and they continue to be. I was just at a bioenergy meeting a month ago. And you know one, one of the admirals got up to talk about how the Navy is still pushing forward with their marine fleet. They're still pushing forward with renewable fuels. You know, these are the guys who took us from you know, wind power to coal power. You know, from coal, and, and, and, at, at the time, whe, when the United States Navy was shifting from wind power to coal power many sailors throughout the world, told them they were crazy to bring fire on board a wooden ship. That that would absolutely, you know, be the worst thing the navy could ever do. Well that worked out pretty well for him. And then they went from coal to diesel, and that turned out to be a much higher energy source. In the meantime they switched from wood to steel. And then they went from you know, from from co, diesel to nuclear. And so they have led the charge in, in every single conversion from one energy source to another. And, and these guys are again, they're the ones who are going to lead this. You know in, into the renewable sector. And, and they do it for completely selfish reasons. They are not doing this to be great environmentalists, they, right? Their, their, their doing this because of two important things. Number one trans, fuel costs. Are, are their number two costs after salaries. So, it's, it's the number two cost of any, anything they spend. And, and it kills them when the price of it goes up. Much worse than it does the rest of us, all right? Number two, transportation of fuel is one they are very vulnerable, and that's where they lost most of their marines, in transportation of fuel, right? And then number three, climate change. When you have climate change, you disrupt people's lives. If you disrupt people's lives, they tend to cause trouble, and when people some place on the planet cause trouble it's always the marines and the US Navy that have to go straighten that out. So, for those three reasons they're making a significant commitment to this. And you know, I, I, listen, thank God for the United States Navy, right. They, they keep the world safe and they're going to, they're going to takes us to renewable fuels, so more power to them. Okay, listen I'm going to end it right there, thank you all for staying with the class to the end. Remember that Travis has challenged you to send us some ideas on how you're going to reduce your carbon footprint. And to send us ideas that you guys have for renewable energy projects. That that your doing in, in your community or your country right, we'd love to hear about it you know? We're, we're going to go back, and then also send us all of your comments on the course, you know this is the first time we've run it you know, we, we, the feedback that, that we got said the video lectures were great. And that you really appreciated all the different experts we brought in. You know, but Travis and I plan just to make this even better for next year. And you know, we're, we're going to do that when you guys send us some really good ideas on how we're going to improve it. So, once again, thanks very much for the class and you know, go out there and make less Thank you.
