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| 00:18 | hi somebody hi steven can you hear me thanks hotel room receive evening figure i'm in a hotel room this evening oh all right hope it's a comfortable one it's quite comfortable yeah yeah it's it's uh it's good but i'm just wondering whether i should plug my headphones in well i can hear you fine and clearly okay uh it's a question of whether you can hear me better if you're wearing the phone um well i've just turned turned you up so uh um i couldn't hear fine actually so as |
| 01:03 | long as it's not we'll just come try the headphones and see but to be honest it's more comfortable without okay and that seems to be what most people do that's what you're doing yep not not having to wear headphones uh i've spent spend a lot of money on a camera microphone combination which doesn't seem to give me feedback problems which is a big surprise to me i just thought it would have but some clever software it's looking for echoes all the time and it's getting rid of them so that they don't even get |
| 01:40 | started well you could have a microphone listening to you and sending what you're saying and also sending the opposite uh to your own loudspeaker that would work yeah i wouldn't be surprised if it's doing that but you probably need to have an intelligent gain of control to adjust it to not to not too obsolete might be learning all the time it might be trying it with this or that delay i'm sure there's a lot of technology behind the scenes any any news with that have they been in touch i mean we've got a very nice statement from |
| 02:25 | uh sean last time two weeks ago saying they're going to be drawing heavily on your knowledge of marine club brighton well that would be nice you haven't uh i haven't anything firm on that yet i've got to move my machine shop out of the university they gave me six weeks notice to do it and i can't find anywhere else to put it so far uh which is really very annoying and uh i've got a really um an amazing workshop which i've been building up since the 60s 1960s you you get very very fond of machines |
| 03:07 | and especially the things that you've made to use them with clamps and vices and things like that yeah so the universities are full of people who don't know how to make things uh they may be good at mathematics and things but they don't know how to draw how and the trouble is they hate people that can do it so it's a funny mix that they got of superiority over working classes who get their hands dirty and trying to feel superior to them and it's a it's a miserable thing yeah yeah they've never given me a penny to |
| 03:48 | buy machine tools and the space they gave me got flooded a few times a year um with what they said was surface water and one year they changed the color of their lavatory paper from white to pink and that was a bit of a giveaway how awful yeah they got sticky we [Music] cambridge i mean they have workshops don't they well the engineering department will have a good one i had i i did six years of research in cambridge before i came to edinburgh and i had my own machine shop there which i started and i still got some of the |
| 04:36 | tools and i moved that to edinburgh to make robots for artificial intelligence and then there was a a meltdown in artificial intelligence support and i moved to engineering from artificial intelligence bringing my workshop with me and now it's going to be crated up and moved i'm not quite sure where to but we've got uh the question of funding or just is just a question of funding or finding a space well both space is probably the most urgent problem but funding would follow that later on [Music] yeah just to find somewhere |
| 05:31 | so are you looking for somewhere presumably you're based in edinburgh or somewhere around edinburgh well i'd like to have it convenient for travel and i'd like to have it with big enough strong enough flaws to take away to the machines and i want to have it big enough that a group of spin-off companies that started off in my workshop and are now doing quite well we'll have room two we're trying to have an arrangement where a group of companies can have a group of apprentices who are jumping between companies to get a wide |
| 06:04 | range of experience and the we learned by accident how to train bright people to be very good at um designing and making and inventing and they're they're they're doing well at the moment so but they want to come back and use their machines that they learned you can get government grant and presumably trying to get government grants i mean well they've turned down all the grants i've put in for climate work um and now the university won't let me send out a grant application for climate work |
| 06:44 | the the the granting bodies now have an arrangement where they ration universities to the number of applications they can make and so the universities have to have a selection committee that decides which ones have got the best chance and they've voted me down amazing yeah well there's a lot of there's quite a lot of hostility to marine corps brightening in edinburgh university because they have put a really big effort into carbon reduction they sort of put a 10 million pound building in and there's 40 million |
| 07:20 | 40 people working there 40 research staff working in and they don't want to know about anything to do that might be called geoengineering you're only allowed to take get rid of carbon and this this is what robert tulips talks about every time we see him yeah and uh you know there's a couple of climate physicists who could help very very well but i've asked them and they say no we don't want to do don't want to yeah [Music] well let's see i don't even want to look at the look at the information |
| 07:59 | you know it's like not looking through the telescope too yeah sometimes it crosses my mind that you've sent information out you sent out some calculations yeah and uh i had a look at one of them it didn't take very long it was the theme of the boot in it um but i think there are other things that i probably should try to find time to just go over them and so at least you have one other pair of eyes looking at them well that would be useful but they usually just involve multiplying and dividing and adding i could just about |
| 08:39 | do arithmetic but somehow they get people saying that they couldn't understand those um [Music] well okay maybe move swiftly on them it's depressing decision makers don't understand how to do multiplication we're really bad job uh i said ah i did i've okay i don't know if we've got everybody here having a private chat i'm hoping we're getting some people from ccrc but i haven't seen any yet uh let's see who we've got we've just got four of us so far six yeah i can see six people can you |
| 09:19 | i said stephen piper hi glove hi bro uh who are the others i can't see any others that's it four of us i can see i see seven grant and brian of stephen and hi brian why is my computer only showing four people what's that brian sorry you may be only showing people who have their video on oh okay yes all right yeah uh i can see you now i'll turn mine off as an experiment no it says participant seven at the bottom i'm pretty sure that's what we've done oh yeah i can see that uh okay fair enough |
| 10:07 | um but it'd be nice to actually just see the faces uh hi grant i was trying to remember your name the other day grant yeah so beat me to it from this uh okay well uh fine so i'm gonna put it on so we can kind of get started start talking about what we're to talk about um i mean you might guess i'm in a hotel room at the moment to show more people you're rather dark i'm rather dark yeah i usually have a light right in front of me so if i bring this light up maybe that would happen okay uh so let's |
| 10:56 | share my screen okay i still haven't i won't go into all the fun i'm having rebuilding my computer keep on i've got to buy more bits um right new new here but i'm in the hotel i'm in colchester today so um right agenda so we've got uh sev speaking today method mediated cdr |
| 12:00 | no ggr sorry ggr gggog sorry yes yes yes um struggling to find there we go sorry ctrl shift make it big what am i doing wrong it's that okay uh anyway can you read maybe you can read that you can read that um yeah so that's sev do you have any news from brian on the on seaweed ryan um a couple of things to discuss i put two books in the chat okay i've been wondering actually uh or we can save with jane fonda agree genesis and please add uh robin hood to the subject line robin hood here like this |
| 13:05 | is that what you mean i'm having trouble seeing it hold on i've just been on the agenda brian talking about robin hood yes might as well include the two books as well they what two books listed in the chat two books the two points in the chat as in jane fonda and what was the other thing uh oh two books right and the two oh two books sorry got it two books books i've been wondering brian uh presumably you must have met did you meet elon musk i've met him uh when i lived in silicon valley um but not for this occasion |
| 14:00 | okay so i don't know if it's confidential but i'm interested to know how that's going you're you know well it's going well they're actually quicker at delivering the second million uh than any others and that's the second million of three million that'll be needed to build a fold hectare within 12 months wow okay right so so we have a one million dollar gap that we're trying to fill presently uh hence the topic of conversation robin hood okay right so we can get starting from the rich and giving to the |
| 14:37 | poor exactly right if you've got some paperwork um let me have it and i'll give it to dan wells at foresight oh very well okay uh thank you um we should pick that up offline i guess yeah yeah happy to follow up on that true okay so okay uh anything else to discuss anything else anybody would like to discuss or ask a question who's been thinking about something that perhaps we should all be thinking about so if you're talking about krill yeah i think that's part of this um that's okay i was reading up on krill interesting |
| 15:28 | little chaps hmm well yes let's hear hear about that i'm still wondering how they can be deal migrators in a 24-hour day they actually um use ballast to sink down and i reckon they use the the krill oil which they're making on the way down as a light ballast on the way up so they're in fact using their digestive tract as a an aid to transportation wonderful that's fascinating i'm just still trying to understand what what do you do in a 24-hour daytime cycle are they still deal migrators and does |
| 16:09 | it apply south of the antarctic circle yes it applies wherever antarctica i'm not sure how much the arctic krill and and the uh temperate and tropical krill migrate but as the arctic areas are the the best for um both sequestering uh carbon and for um emitting methane which we want to stop happening i'm concentrating on the arctic regions so what i read on the arctic krill is that that they not only poop which is dense and sinks but they also have a sort of sick up mechanism where they spit out pellets of um silica |
| 17:04 | and other other debris that they've taken from what they've been eating and those two sink according to the article um right they also molt they melt many times in their growth thing and the the exoskeleton which they melt off is dense and sinks down pretty quickly right but i i note that they the eggs sink down to 3 000 meters and then they gradually migrate up as they go through that the global stages yes fascinating that's fascinating as well i didn't realize the eggs uh gestated at a depth of 3000 meters yeah |
| 17:45 | that is fascinating also it'd be great to measure the carbon to phosphorus ratio of the chitin um exoskeleton that sinks to uh 3 000 meters down well we see a nice surplus and also our sink rates are around a thousand meters a day but for macro algae we have carbon to phosphorus ratios well over red field they're probably around 500 to 1 so that means if you have to restore natural upwelling you get a net benefit when you have a krill sequestration so measuring the super red field ratio of carbon to phosphorus is an essential |
| 18:27 | demonstration that there's a net export right so not too much phosphorus lots of carbon getting uh exported down yeah higher c to p ratios are preferred to uh restore the biological pump yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah thinking 3000 meters is a good way to escape predators if you want them to stop eating your eggs [Music] yeah that's what i thought yeah the eggs are fairly defenseless they can't run away so being deep is good yeah i i wonder if some of these these things like that you've just been saying um |
| 19:11 | sticking up uh pellets and molting and laying eggs presumably that must be quite a large part of the life's large mass of the life cycle yeah they each lay over thousands of eggs the mature ones and so that's quite a sizable proportion of their body weight yeah so a carbon export of eggs yeah and i i do wonder how much of this sort of thing gets included in models of carbon export probably not not at all yeah um well if there's no other ideas of what to speak about we don't usually um you know that's just to go with what we've got |
| 19:57 | shall we okay so that's methanotroph mediated greenhouse gas removal i will kick off let's start i hope you've all read that three-page paper i i sent out all speakers notes um but how many people have read it how many people have read it we've got brew who read it stephen uh i think and i think that's about it i i read owen brian's raised his hand so the manager no manager he's muted yeah right okay well if we start with the theory i was on mute i'm on in a tunnel of focus uh on new york's draft scoping plan for |
| 20:45 | the climate act and so i have to wait until after july 1st but after july 1st i have a lot of good reading to do and i'm i'm saving it all looking forward to it okay um and i just ordered a copy of peter's book so i'll i'll just keep learning and and trying to play it forward thank you okay basic question in areas that we are emitting methane to the atmosphere is anyone here averse to the idea of providing the local methanotrops with the additional micronutrients they require to metabolize the methane |
| 21:33 | into biomass in their area or are we all all saying that that sounds like a good thing sounds like a good thing to me but i'd like to have a number for the ratio of the weight that we have to put in to the weight that that that they will multiply by two to get rid of i think that's part of that's in in that that that paper i wrote okay well next we need to consider a few other things first of all what's the optimal form and sizing of the supplementary nutrition uh so that it it can suffuse the water |
| 22:13 | column and indeed uh go into the vents and the the use below where the anaerobic methanotrops are doing their bit as the the methane comes out in tiny bubbles and partly dissolves now i currently prefer it done using pretty naturally my coated buoyant flakes with powdered preferably waste minerals being the the source of the minerals and with the possibility of customizing the the nutrient mix to what at the bottom of the sea or deep then there may be sufficient some of these micronutrients in which case we don't |
| 23:07 | need to supply them so we we take that out of the uh the coating on on the on the buoy and flex and just use the ones which are likely to be soon limiting so that that that improves your return on effort we should also then be concerned about what's the most economical uh mix and and i i reckon that a you don't want to have a patented thing you don't want to be paying license fees for this and you probably want to have one or a few standard formulations which you would only vary from in 30 special cases you know the more |
| 24:01 | standard you can make it the the better the uh the economics of production but otherwise it's good then we need to talk about the optimal method of delivery now delivery by using dusts dust can often be difficult and and hazardous to to uh to handle um you know being inhaled or going everywhere or exploding or whatever so i reckon that if you could have a a flake which it has a coating on it of of of a weak glue with those with that that that that fine powdered waste material is a good way of not having the dust problem |
| 24:51 | but also it's a particularly good way of helping to disseminate it very widely over the ocean you you you actually downloaded it can you go and mute some grunt yeah keep going please sir like okay um and if you if you're um uh spraying these pneumatically out the back of a box ship on either side maybe up into the air 150 meters or something like that you should be able to for those two sprays should be able to take a swathe of maybe uh half a kilometer and if you take if you are using if your vessel is going crosswind or cross current |
| 25:53 | then both the winds and the current will will probably widen that that that track uh quite a number of folds so in other words you don't need to have your ship going over every square square foot of methane mitigation but only over every maybe every couple of kilometers or something like that which is a very economical way of getting the stuff to where you want it and because you can change the the rate at which you're pumping out the flakes you can thereby change the concentration of supplementary micronutrients which |
| 26:44 | you're adding to both the sea surface the c column and the used below so it's a very nice way of of getting it not prop properly separated and doing the most good so can we just step back a minute um because this i'm just looking to see and brian's race meant put something in the chat the problem that we're solving here it isn't most me thing coming from uh not coming from the ocean it's coming possibly there's a worry of of coming from the shallow arctic um seas that's where most of us |
| 27:25 | are coming from now i thought it was coming from coal mines and wetlands and cattle and that yes yeah not yet from up there there is some but the flakes will handle um uh lakes where it's bubbling up from lakes where it's bubbling up from tundra which is melting and soils so yes you if you if you want to address some the cattle problem you feed them the special seaweeds which stop them burping out methane it it basically allows the cattle the cows intestines to turn the methane be emitted by one kind of bug into biomass food for another |
| 28:14 | so and for coal mines yes you need to seal them up and then you need to either spray your iron salt aerosols or you need to lead it through filters where it can be be uh oxidized um rice rice fields yes you should be able to use boil flakes um landfills the moist landfills you should be able to use boiling flakes um but there are some places where it won't be appropriate yes so if the the brian raised this we're thinking about methane coming off the shallow arctic seas but that's being produced from the seabed and then bubbling up through the |
| 29:02 | watercolor now we know that's happening because we've seen mcdonald's chicopas work and the videos that they produced so very large uh the methane emissions some are coming up to the surface but do you need to sink those flakes to get it done the idea is you with the coated flake the the the coating is um basically it is basically glued together by uh rice water glue and that dissolves pretty quickly in the sea and that lets the the fine powders of the methanotropic nutrients to sink down through the water column to the sea bed |
| 29:44 | while then leaving the ordinary buoyant flakes to do their thing for the phytoplankton okay so that that's that's the the way you you do it i interrupted you so so now that that's that's fine this is meant to be a sort of q a session and people putting their two bobs worth when they when when that when they can um well if we were happy with with with what i've said there um let's move over to the the ggr math uh sequence on the on on the paper now this this math is very very much back of a tiny envelope on or or or a |
| 30:39 | napkin at the dinner table it's it's um we were quite happy to be out by an order of magnitude or also in final but hopefully the swings and the roundabouts with with my estimates will largely even out so i'll just run run through the basically the the argument i'm making is that krill are a particularly valuable vector for sequestering carbon either carbon from co2 via the phytoplankton or carbon via the methanotrops by eating the methane because krill will eat both methanotrops and phytoplankton and |
| 31:31 | if if a krill uh gets a full tummy full and then dives down to about a a thousand meters deep every day during sunlight so it can be safe from predators if it then respires at depth and and poos and then comes up again slowly that that co-carbon measures material beats co2 or will being being excreted at a thousand meters will stay sequestered for hundreds of years okay and that's it can i just challenge you on that because as far as i know krill are like other bronze things and they have just a straight through tube gut |
| 32:25 | and most of the time food is just pretty much constantly transporting through it or or is there something that tells you that because it's about 20 of the body mass more like sort of five percent or so by my eyeballing of the average prawn well um i think looking at the pictures of krill guts you can see the the green phytoplankton in them and from that i estimated that 15 20 was about the right size bearing in mind also that as they sink down in the upper layers they're also adding in more of that marine snow so their |
| 33:05 | their tummies are getting a bit bigger or saying the same size as they metabolize what's in their tummies all right it may be that's the case and that's how they actually make their um their dive that they they compacted it in their in their guts and get denser and denser to go down and then defecate low down and that's and then some some crew we know uh migrate more than once a day but i'm quite happy if if experiments show that it's really only ten percent of the the body body weight you know |
| 33:43 | that these are these are the swings and roundabouts i'm talking about but i i estimated it could be as much as fifteen to twenty percent well i i actually when i went in read your faith this morning i went off to to look these things up what i forgave you was that i just went reading that the faces were actually dense and sank naturally as did the pellets so if they are just grazing all day and stuff's going through them then they're sinking a lot anyway so your your figure may be low if that is the case swings around about |
| 34:16 | you okay so good this is good the value of krill is that yeah the if you if you go through my maths i won't go through them all but basically it shows that if we harvest a ton of krill the with the expected lifetime of that krill had we not harvested it those krill would have um sequestered nine tons of carbon at sequestration depth so every time we take a a pill of krill oil um you're probably uh losing you know 50 grams of of of sequestered carbon it doesn't matter about catching fish but catching krill is a particularly bad |
| 35:12 | thing for humans to do we've already destroyed 80 of the krill stocks pre-1970 and we're going well on the way that chinese and whatever these huge huge uh fishing fleets which are fishing for krill are well on the way to to knocking out the entire population as we did with the cod fisheries off the ground banks now if that happens and it could happen by 2030 we are in real trouble basically all the baleen whales are going to die of starvation many of the penguins are and this priceless living vector for carbon sequestration |
| 35:58 | will be lost to us so i'm i'm saying oh you guys stop fishing for krill let let let the boy flakes make many more krill and and widen their their their habitat to the to the um actually to up to the edge of the temperate zone and then we could actually sequester much more cruel than what we did in in what happened in pre-industrial times but we've got to move pretty fast to do that you know it'll take a few years to get this up to scale and then uh if we stop fishing for krill it will have a almost the biggest and the quickest |
| 36:49 | effect of any forms of carbon sequestration that i can think of that's amazing yeah and so that's what's now all these things will need to be checked out by the scientists and the engineers but from what i can see there are no show stoppers and if they can refine my my estimates up or down and and get it out in a your peer-reviewed stuff we will have a chance of getting something done um maybe even at the uh the copted egypt i'm not quite sure how how fast the indian scientists are going to be working |
| 37:34 | or the cambridge scientists i'm hoping they'll work fast enough to have something out by then so in other words a paper and then some kind of uh i don't know a discussion with the authorities that to put it on the cop agenda is that is that what you're talking about yeah or even a side event if side event gets a good enough coverage that that'll do okay but that's up to them i i've got no influence on that on that whatsoever right did you see the reply from uh you was it uh i i'm sure she had but i |
| 38:14 | hadn't read i haven't read i didn't have time she just said that she can't be here on the meeting but she'll reply to you by email so she'll get back to you on email so the the scientists uh so i mean there's so many papers are there not papers around already where people have done this i think no bru just mentioned none that i've been able to find yeah and and when i when i've asked the uh the scientists at university of tasmania and that could they just tell me what the size of of the percentage |
| 38:49 | size of the cruel gut was i just haven't been prepared to come back with a simple answer so i'm i'm i'm not particularly impressed with with the the cruel scientists being interested in what could be a very important uh parameter well maybe they don't know they don't don't realize that there's a hugely potent potential they've got a special crew lab at tasmania where they have live krill you know it shouldn't be too hard to say all right let's fish out one of these little cool after a good meal |
| 39:25 | let's squeeze out its gut content and compare the two sides yeah i've done a lot of preparing of prawns and cleaning them and pushing the gut out and crayfish for that matter prior to serving them to see what's in the gut and um how large it is yeah of course if you catch them in a net they're likely to to express their their gut cognitives anyway there's an escape mechanism or just being squished so you you need to catch them very carefully so that they don't don't void their their innards first right yeah |
| 40:07 | you know phil boyd works there yes yeah i think it's csiro isn't it in tasmania yeah so i i have maybe i should try a bit harder to see if we can join some of these meetings um and he has uh certain deeply held beliefs that um we're still trying to understand uh what the scientific basis is of what of of dl migration of phil philboy's uh beliefs and so um anyway he he works at imas at the university of tasmania ims is don't hold your breath on getting him out yeah okay well but the the um cambridge scientists should be able |
| 41:10 | to go go back to them as one revered institution to another and find out you would have hoped yeah so so yeah some kind of um [Music] thing that gets everybody interested perhaps even a media article um you know about the potential of krill and i mean something's needed to kind of give them a bit of a nudge and say come on you might have i hope the wall street journal will come out with something they they've shown a bit of interest in some of my stuff okay all right i'm not sure that phil boyd is the place you'd like to start to be |
| 41:52 | commenting on this but no so maybe so let's forget phil boyd then um well so yeah so but is imas in i believe he's in tasmania isn't he phil boyd isn't he there he is now right um yeah so hundreds of others other other oceanographers may uh let's not get too stuck on phil boyd then yeah and fine yeah brian had some other questions in the chat actually he said while he was speaking we want to say a little bit more about what you've just said there about krill and dear because you another thing |
| 42:35 | brian was was asking at the beginning is you you said um you don't understand how this how they can migrate in 24 hours is that what i understood your question to be brian well if the day is 24 hours long and there's sunlight in the middle of the night how does a curl know to go up and down i see right that's that's another another question which the scientists need to answer and uh i haven't seen any answer about it but i i understand that they still migrate even in the middle of the day yeah that's that's what i'm not sure |
| 43:12 | about because there are a lot of deal migrators that come up at night and go down during the day i was assuming krill would be in the same category but um if it is day all the time are they just at the surface all the time are they still going up and down that's that's a question which i i don't know certainly in the in the spring in the autumn they'd be going up and down mid-summer to be answered by someone else i i suspect they may they probably have a circadian clock as we do and they probably continue but i don't know |
| 43:50 | okay and then another point from brian in the chat uh was about uh um the abyssal ventilation can you see that i've got the chat up on the screen i don't know if it shows it to you ventilation time of uh i haven't shared it so but anyway saying that you can see it on your own chat middle type of business which could be short yes yes it could be um but uh the abyssal the really deep stuff won't be um uh very short it's not it's not like it's coming up um every year although you will get some of the |
| 44:33 | intermediate waters coming up in the upwelling every year the abyssal stuff should take a bit longer particularly if you um are expanding the the range of the krill habitat to going to beyond the polar front to top up to the temperate front that area basically takes in everything pretty much south of tasmania which is a huge area yeah i agree that would be a prime zone if the nutrients are high enough and there i think there are in the gradient there so that would be a longer sequestration i would imagine yeah a longer what there was that brian |
| 45:21 | a longer sequestration in the sub-polar front region uh like that mentioned just now but it stays down for longer it doesn't outcrop so quickly it's also further away from the antarctic continent where it upwells so it's got to travel a long way on the sea field before it gets to that upwedding place right so that's what you're talking about that's when when what you mean by ventilation time yeah yeah in the south pacific the ventilation time is much longer than in the southern ocean so in the south |
| 45:54 | pacific the abyssal waters have to pretty much go up towards canada before they're upwelled and then there's a indonesian true flow on the surface what was that last thing that indonesian through flow that's uh the different waters going from canada through indonesia to the indian ocean and so uh you're pretty safe if you're in the subpolar uh south pacific um but the actual southern ocean has a short ventilation time which is a bit of a caution to thinking carbon there okay so short will you say short do you mean |
| 46:32 | like a hundred years rather than several hundred years uh it could be decades it depends on the location and the context okay interesting southern ocean ventilation time but anyway but we're talking about methane here and i don't i as i understand it me saying there isn't a problem of me think coming out of places like the southern ocean or any abyssal ocean because uh methanol troughs don't have a problem of lack of nutrients in the deep seabed it's only these shallow seas that perhaps they could be increased a bit |
| 47:09 | shallow seas is is the area we should be concentrating on so yes the the the we will be concentrating on the southern ocean for uh sequestration from phytoplankton and via krill and in the arctic we'd be using the methanotrophs to to turn the methane into biomass all right so we're talking about two things and i've just jumped back to the other thing about the methanol and so it's really a different thing i thought there was some link between krill and methanotrox but i don't think there is really well |
| 47:46 | um cruelly methanotrophs okay amongst many other things though i mean for phytoplankton well it depends on on the uh how how dense dense they are yeah they they eat them as much as they would eat phytoplankton right if they're available okay they'll they'll get swept up by the little frondy things and and take into their mouths yeah so uh methanotrophs so the main i think so the issue number one is uh methane coming from shallow seas and methanotrophs boosting them with antares a little bit there um and then so the what's that so the link |
| 48:27 | between methanose in the shallow arctic seas and krill presumably but don't you want less krills to you don't want methanol getting gobbled up by krill no no you you want to have the krill eating the methanographs and then diving down you know 600 meters to to to stay out of uh of of predators and and then uh avoiding the the the speeder down there but these shallow seas they're not they're not they're only some of them few hundred meters isn't it yeah but a few few hundred you know a couple of hundred meters it's still |
| 49:08 | worth a a few years of sequestration yeah there's another lecture about deep water which is that you can get pressure to get methane to be locked into a clathrate uh and that means that there's a it's easier for it to come out from shallow seas than deep st deep sea ones yeah particularly when they're warming yeah so it's reduction of pressure and warming of temperature will release the methane from from a clathrate yeah so that that's why the shallow arctic seas are you know of concern and |
| 49:45 | and um and does anyone know how many is it 50 meters that methane bubbling up 50 meters is it depends on the temperature right and how much presumably the size of the release yeah yeah and and to to get the um to prevent the methane reaching the surface you want to have the methanotrops uh getting it before it reaches large bubble sizes therefore you want them right through the ooze as as deep as they can go and then you want them in the in the water column to take whatever dissolved methane is is is uh being released there right you're saying |
| 50:33 | bubbles get bigger as they go up i thought they were smaller they get they get bigger no pressure they get bigger with the lower pressure but don't they kind of disperse and dissolve as they go up not much methane is is doesn't dissolve easily in water okay right because it's not it does dissolve a little bit and that that's where where the methane methanotrops will would would eat it but uh with the big bubble no you you're not going to get much loss at all of methane for the you get saturated constant stream of |
| 51:08 | bubbles coming up as well okay yeah well so there's a paper i can send you which i wrote at the request of john nissen he said could you make a big sheet of plastic to catch the methane at the seabed and i said absolutely not no chance at all and i wrote a list of all the reasons why it would be impossible to do this and every time i wrote one down i figured out a way in which i get around it so we could put down several kilometers of plastic on the seabed and use it to channel the methane up to a particular exit pipes where we could maybe collect |
| 51:52 | it and either burn it there or bring it to shore and use it it's much better to burn it and let it releases as methane i can send it to you i still don't believe it'll work but i now can't prove that right wouldn't work uh and it might have some undesirable ecological effects on on benthic life that's what that is that's an objection you also have to have a way in which you can get it up again um but there's also worries about munitions on the seabed and wrecks and and stuff like that but it's it's it's |
| 52:29 | well it i believe it's impossible but i can't convince myself that it is it's probably more it's probably more infeasible economically than impossible um not really it's only a small fraction of the plastic that we're producing and you can produce it in a way where you can get it back again but look i'll send it to you and you could just you can decide whether it's complete absolute rubbish or whether it's worth looking a bit a bit further um yeah okay thank you yeah so so um |
| 53:02 | so where are we with all this then um well i've got i mentioned some uncertainties and opportunities uh with the uh with the idea one of which is is do do arctic uh krill also uh uh dvm um will there be enough cold water krill lift to to to to work with if we keep on reducing their numbers um and uh can both both bfof and mof be made to work safely and effectively and and how easy will it be to extend the range of of both forms of grill from the current uh uh frigid drones zones all of these need to be answered by the |
| 53:56 | by the relevant scientists but i don't i i believe that anti-crew should be able to grow in wherever there's frigid water but uh i that hasn't been been been proven yet i think possibly if if those waters were suitably nutriented yes they would be growing right up to the polar front and beyond but someone else needs to do that you said that they grow a lot of eggs a lot of very large numbers of eggs is there any way in which we could cut back on the predators that are eating those eggs and so we can have their population |
| 54:42 | expand rapidly i think let's simply have more of them laying more eggs rather than trying to stop eggs being eaten i i i hesitate interfering in in a natural cycle except to the limited extent of adding a bit of fertilizer sir i've just i've added a link to a paper on krill fisheries which is yes thanks i'll be looking at that later on well did you derive anything from it uh i'm scanning it as i'm looking at you and speaking to you at the moment there's a lot of useful information in |
| 55:22 | it um and there are various treaties over over the krill fisheries what everybody's signed up to expect tom do you want to have a have a word on on the cruel idea sounds muted she hasn't quite got got with us yet but been there for a while i see him come in um hi tom why are you making yourself a cup of coffee i go through expected effects and likely effectiveness and that but it's easy for you to read this all rather than for me to uh yeah to to speak on it so if you've got any questions on those |
| 56:20 | other other sections i've got um bring them up now really just a comment that uh if krill so you say krill live mainly in these frigid waters cold waters uh there are other varieties in other waters but uh the main populations are in the antarctic and the arctic but if we if we put enough uh phytoplankton into temperate and tropical waters we may well find their populations boom too yeah yeah in tropical waters i wouldn't expect the the um sequestration effect to be as good because you get a lot more microbial action there |
| 57:15 | in warm water so the the so phytoplankton would get just get metabolized by bacteria microbes before the krill before sort of things or salts or small zooplankton get to them yeah well certainly they're um their feces would yeah i offer a different um explanation there and that is they are likely nutrient limited in blue oligotrophic tropical waters colonel need a lot of plankton and plankton need a lot of nutrients and so you know that we've got plenty of examples of tropical shrimp doing very well and i'm sure that their poop sinks as |
| 57:59 | fast as the other guys group so yes the opportunity is really to have an adequate nutrient supply and that's where our deep water irrigation can be beneficial yeah yeah yeah so all these ideas that the big thing to me about this we whenever anybody says you know any sort of fertilization um is going to sequester uh carbon the answer comes back no no it gets uh metabolized um on the way down and this we still don't don't really know and so we're we're all just trying to speculate the answer is that it brings back the |
| 58:42 | life to the ocean and i i take you back to that um map of the old whaling grounds and the abandoned grounds in the pacific now for those whales to be in there any numbers the food had to be there and when you've got a lot of life circulating the system works so the the the whole point of the fertilization by point flakes from my perspective is your nursing ecosystems back into life you don't aim to do this continually you do it over a number of years and regenerate it and then it should start taking care of |
| 59:18 | itself if you've done it over fishing yeah i'm absolutely 100 with you on that term i i think what i'm talking about is is uh the carbon sequestration element of of that that people will say well very nice you know you're getting all the life back and you've got a restored ecosystem fantastic but is it having an effect on uh co2 absorption by the ocean by the ocean's surface and if so how simple the simple maths of it is if you were to restore life on earth to the amount that there was 10 000 years ago |
| 59:53 | and everybody's pretty clear we've reduced it by at least half that's 550 gigatons and it's constantly it's there in circulation that's enough to take you down to 300 parts per million great answer yeah can and even if if the tropical krill do grow in numbers because we've added two phytoplankton numbers then their diel migrations will sequester uh large amounts of carbon at a thousand meters so this is pretty controversial what we're saying here seems pretty controversial against the the received wisdom you know |
| 1:00:39 | the accepted wisdom of oceanographers who say and tom i wish tom would speak up actually because this is what what we see from tom this is the purpose of these discussions that someone like tom can say no no you're all wrong this and this is why that any group of scientists want to avoid embarrassment by people asking the questions that they can't answer and they also want to defend their particular in-group against attacks from ignorant outsiders uh this is true i think for science it's certainly true for industrial things and |
| 1:01:18 | i've had two cases where a brilliant idea which we tried to get people interested in and they absolutely rejected it and we managed to get past this and start new companies that really have been successful one was about how to make waves in wave tanks and another one's about how to control big hydraulic pumps but the first thing you must do any big organization is to defend it against um the the attacks from outsiders and so it's the king herod effect um in fact king herod is exactly what it's all about |
| 1:01:56 | and you have to get inside them maybe because there's one particular good guy there who's willing to let you in but uh it's it's a hard thing to do to get past uh any any in any field that's why disruptions normally come from outside the field yeah because they they they destroy the previous market and and normally the the current market owners defend their current business model and and technology against all things even though they would be better if they took them out the classic example is none of the |
| 1:02:38 | manufacturers of electronic valves ever went into transistors same with the battery technology now all of the uh the chemical batteries stick rigidly to that and they're not interested i the way i attack this particular problem is to always go back to the baseline challenge the baseline and so if you've got a fisheries guy that says my baseline is 1970 because that's where the data is good from you say ah but what if we take the baseline at 8 000 years bc ah we don't know but that's possible i i find this really i mean i'm not i'm |
| 1:03:22 | not from oh good evening robert good morning robert uh surprisingly because i thought the way that science i mean i'm not i haven't been in the science community i mean this is my experience of scientific community um mainly these meetings um uh i thought the way it was supposed to work is scientists uh challenge each other and when a paper gets accepted as this is a new you know proven we've measured this that uh they're supposed to get the sort of accolades from them how it actually works is science |
| 1:04:00 | advances funeral by funeral and the old oh guys with the old ideas die off the younger ones are prepared to take on the new ideas yeah the radical ideas are always a great fight against the establishment every time nice yes i hope you're not inciting uh some nasty action there [Laughter] so um well so it's it's um not the wall street journal or or bus basically as far as the client is concerned by the same thing if they don't publish your uh you know article sev and we're going to be stuck waiting for funerals |
| 1:04:43 | well hopefully the ccrc will will say this guy hasn't published himself because he hasn't been able because he's not a member of a august thing we'll take the is a little bit will and they can be ideas invented here yes we'll put him at the end of the of the list of authors and that yeah so i'm hoping that but because i haven't patented this stuff and because they can see some of the benefits that they will run with it as their own ideas and their own work which it will be largely okay but we all know that it came from |
| 1:05:18 | you but also i mean franz has been certain i'm surprised he's not i don't see him here this evening i think he's very busy with a lot of things um but he's been saying this to me he can't prove it but he's he's just been saying this for years to me that oceanographers have a lot of things wrong um and uh and i say well yeah but they they they all say the same thing and so that's why we're wrong you know 90 or 99 gets metabolized in the ocean and then out comes that we're talking saying |
| 1:05:51 | ventilation or outcropping it it or outgassing we usually use that term it comes back out of the ocean again but everybody here seems to be and tom we can't we're not hearing from tom uh seems to be saying no it gets sequestered by fast sinking pellets which is exactly what franz has been saying um from poops and now he's um sicked up pellets and and eggs as well and krill and malts and all things like that not molds yeah because the cruel krill actually take it down very fast you know to have to have something sinking in four hours |
| 1:06:27 | down to a thousand meters is very very fast yeah hmm yeah yeah but that's right yeah we can do some simple math on that yeah so i mean this is uh we've just got one we're going to get to brian's um items on the agenda um um was there anything you wanted to talk about robert this evening or hear about i i just wanted to mention that i'm uh i'm going to europe on saturday so i'm going to berlin uh my uh my other area of interest you're a little bit quiet um bro uh robert i don't know if |
| 1:07:06 | you can get a bit closer to the microphone if i can work out how i can uh we can just about hear you we can just about hear you so keep going okay um so i'm going to europe on uh saturday for the uh to berlin for three weeks for the general assembly of the world student christian federation and which is the other area of my interest so uh just uh prepared with with that um just uh just to say on your comment about that science advances one funeral at a time that that goes back to the um structure of scientific revolutions the |
| 1:07:46 | book by thomas kuhn in in the 1960s which introduced the concept of paradigm shift and so it's it opens up for climate change uh the question of what sort of a paradigm shift is needed to uh save the climate and um and that's a that's a philosophical and cultural question as much as a scientific one absolutely yeah i'm with you on that yeah brian you've raised your hand yes robert if you're in berlin check out the green tech festival we'll be presenting there near the end of this month i believe it's around the last |
| 1:08:26 | week of june green tech festival great thanks brian yeah it'll be in berlin and i think there'll be a lot of speakers there and a lot of climate um action folks and we'll be doing just a few minutes a discussion and of course a panel one or two other events as well all right great i'll look it up thank you my pleasure i can put you in touch with uh bart ohr who's been working with us since 2021 and he's from the netherlands and he'll be presenting there great thank you um i was going to say uh i think uh |
| 1:09:08 | chris vivian if he was here he might disagree with what was saying um but um but i had an email from brian from uh from chris his wife died very recently uh so we don't he said don't expect to see him for a few meetings so i said my condolences about that and support him when he when he's able to come back with us again um uh tom are you there before we move on if if not we'll we'll move on to the other item on the agenda which was uh this one here um [Music] from brian robin hood and two books you |
| 1:09:50 | want to talk about ryan yeah i'll start with the two books um i just got a recent recommendation from sir david king and that is read genesis by george monbio mobile uh he is a writer for the guardian what what's the question again a writer yeah but what's the title of the book for genesis or something free genesis 2022. |
| 1:10:16 | got it sorry thank you yeah not to be confused with uh george church's regenesis 2020. okay right okay thank you second book is what's so great about that book well how come it's highly recommended i think it it's thoroughly researched technically and yet presents in a way that's highly accessible to uh the common man as it were given that uh monbio is quite a writer for uh the guardian right so it's what about sort of climate restoration sort of thing is it it's about uh feeding the world without |
| 1:11:00 | destroying it okay okay thanks i think i'll i'll get that then there's a lot of recommended books i i have no intentions of getting but that certainly i read his uh column pieces and they're they're always good and well thought through thank you brian yep the the other one uh second book is uh all we can save which is to some extent about the um social movement of climate activism and i would say also the um psychology and psychological stress of climate workers yeah so it's something i'm actually part of a climate workers |
| 1:11:40 | circle which uh you know i think there are stresses upon those who are living with the grim reality of what we're doing to the planet and uh you know i think recognizing the psychological stress of those realizations some people call it uh ptsd pre-traumatic stress disorder so we may all be suffering from this new form of ptsd and uh all we can save is narrated by jane fonda and other writers it's narrated pretty well uh on the audiobook and uh i'm finding it to be pretty compelling to really discuss the um |
| 1:12:23 | narratives and the history of many climate activists over the past uh third of a century right can you give me that name again i'm just downloading your audiobook all we can save well we can say thank you who's that going well i'm not sure but jane fonda is one of the narrators okay so anything anything that includes barbarella gets my vote right exactly something to do with james yeah she's quite a reader i would say and uh i'm enjoying the book so i thought i'd pass it on thank you third topic is oh go ahead |
| 1:13:07 | look please brian please the third topic is uh the moral potential uh and moral hazards of playing robin hood and that is what are the moral repercussions of possibly taking fossil fuel finance to regenerate a healthy climate is that morally justified or not and is it how is it different than um let's call it investment or divestment from fossil fuel companies uh every time i think about this they have enormous power the fossil fuel companies i was in a meeting the other day when with a financial guy saying that 99 no 90 |
| 1:13:57 | of all the finance refinancing and new borrowing and investment going on at the moment is in fossil fuels uh that they have all the power so whenever we say oh we should do this or do that with the fossil fuel industry we're living in a fantasy but they rule the world um and uh this is i'm sharing my opinion here and how i see it um but we've had we had someone who was an engineer for bp on in these meetings um so about a year ago he was here for several months that was andy meacham he now works for a hotel chain looking |
| 1:14:32 | after their pump so he's doing the same still looking after pumps now managing teams of people that look after pumps and he was saying that they there's a they're just people like the rest of us some of them are very technical they do understand about climate change they have their own form of stress which is that they're they're the work they know that the very work that they're doing is you know destroying is counter productive to what they prefer to be doing but this is where the money is then |
| 1:15:01 | they've got kids to bring up and mortgages to pay um but but there are that have done some that have done extremely well and that they would like to give back um but it's very difficult for them to where do you give back and you you give money back to something but you're immediately told oh no you're evil you know we don't want your filthy money go away so but none of these people uh seems to want to make blue-green hydrogen from natural gas that's the way they can keep their business model they just change their |
| 1:15:35 | their output to a a zero emissions one but i'm glad you brought that up sev because i i don't really get this about changing natural gas into uh hydrogen to me you'd want it to go the other way because uh hydrogen is extremely difficult uh energy source it leaks yeah but you know you do it on site if you're if you want to make green steel you you take the natural gas on on site use renewable energy to split it you've then got hydrogen which you can use immediately in your blast furnace or |
| 1:16:10 | in your petrochemical place or whatever and you've got a valuable nano carbon product which can make the the cost of that hydrogen very very low right but how much nano carbon can you sell it doesn't sound like a a high volume product uh you want to put slappy granite is pretty good and at the the last level you can simply use it as biochar and the biochar has got almost an infinite you know you could put a kilogram of biochar under a square meter of agricultural land and there's an awful lot of square |
| 1:16:52 | meters right so you can split natural gas and you get sort of carbon elemental carbon out of it do you yes yes i see my rock is the company doing it yeah right uh okay now that so that's the bit i missed you just get elemental you don't get co2 you get elemental carbon yeah no co2 at all and how does it how does it it's just uh what you feed energy in from when you feed it you put a plasma torch into it right and and that the plasma torch is uh powered electrically from say solar voltaics or wind power |
| 1:17:33 | and that that heats the the methane up to uh such a level that it dissociates i see i see right right and it's uh but presumably quite a lot of energy goes into that and to do yeah the the parasitic loads of about 15 to 20 but it's um it still makes sense and the hydrocarbon companies the people that brought the next bit of investment into high rock we found the first bit through um easy power they've since attracted a good good deal more in nice and there's there's plenty of time when you've got more wind energy than you can |
| 1:18:17 | use electrically yeah you can use huge peak surplus well that's it i mean the electrostatic storage in these physical batteries um potentially once taking the gaseous carbon because you heat it up in the plasma arc to about five to six thousand degrees c um spin it off turn it into sheets of graphene and you know those you wind into what's the super capacitor but it's uh it's electrostatic storage on those graphene sheets and frankly we can take any amount of that to back up our renewable energy generation |
| 1:18:54 | um so the um the guys at what's now in a cap um have now produced laminate sheets um which are needed meter square about four millimeters thick and they've got an energy density of 350 uh watts per per kilo which is pretty damn good they're expecting to go to 400. all right is there a data sheet or something about that bruce the last one i sent to um wade allison and various techies they just said that this is a bit strange difficult to understand well yeah i mean just go on the most of the tech stuff is |
| 1:19:35 | on the kilowattlabs.com website yeah that's where i went and then all of the the the various units are there and then there's the um uh wrl is the associated company which again you'll find a link to on that website which is doing the um the solid state stuff on the on the sheets but there's over 20 000 units out there in the marketplace now can you use the sheets as panels for car body yes yeah that's kind of cool audio this is structural energy storage which is burning wings of an airplane fuselage airplane |
| 1:20:17 | um it's powering for the problem is i've already seen some of the pushback from the electrochemical battery guys yeah and replace uh the chemical batteries with uh the supercapacitors so you don't need to use expensive lithium or whatever yeah exactly you massively reduce the carbon footprint of the material recharge a million times without degrading i mean if something really works then uh you know for example photography is that his you know kodak dug the heels in didn't they look look what's happened to them yeah well |
| 1:20:55 | exactly complete dinosaur um the railway to the future of the car um yeah which was a financial times um a conference that was put on and we had elon musk there talking for an hour and a half he came on immediately after the laugh from uh in a cap had spoken um and when challenged about it he said well we don't need to do this because we're so far down the line with what we've got we're basically dissing it but it may have massively invested in his in his various forms of lithium a lovely quote |
| 1:21:32 | from alexander graham bell i truly believe that one day there will be a telephone in every town in america yeah you have to think big don't you yeah if it really works it takes off it's how you can't stop it exactly as long as it's you know safe and and it's where it's this huge investment it's the difficult thing because you've got this hump to get over safety is a rude illusion [Music] for safety will take down civilization we should not uh pretend to have uh infinite safety nor should we be sought |
| 1:22:16 | after but i just i just caution us to avoid you know seeking uh absolute safety yeah because it's a false illusion it's a false illusion yeah yeah what does safety mean in a in a ukrainian world yeah right yeah it's horrible so yeah like carbon emissions i mean it's just a bally [Music] oh and the whole point of all we can save is we are driving off a carbon a climate cliff and you know people are having intergenerational anxiety and and uh you know they're they're having trouble continuing life as usual i mean |
| 1:23:02 | that one of the chapters without too much spoilers is interviews in miami where the real estate prices on the coast are four million dollars for a condo and they're pretty much just continuing the party you know it's just like you get a 30-year fixed mortgage on a condo that's going to be underwater in 30 years yeah well i tell you what shook me recently i was invited by interbrand to attend a focus group they did in london the integrated massive branding company that did do these things so um there were 28 30 people were brought in |
| 1:23:42 | and they've been cherry-picked to be a focus group nice broad mix the level of ignorance in respect of climate change and what was coming from the general public is just colossal they have no idea and indeed the people who are organizing it really had very little idea um you know i mean i had to throw in a bit of reality here and there but i it was it was an eyelid for me because you know we all talk knowledgeably all the time and our peer groups are reasonably knowledgeable once you step outside of it most people most companies have no idea |
| 1:24:21 | of the situation we're in yeah it's very much about continuing the party until you know what is it nero is rome you know until ron burns to the ground yeah well thing birds yeah so i think these books are helpful i'm just wondering about a book that lists these uh so many solutions that we talk about or or um potential solutions promising solutions sorry grant you i think you've had your hand up for a long time and i've only just noticed again sorry that's thank you sorry for the earlier |
| 1:25:00 | interruption i've going back to uh something i learned about communication relating to the challenge to interact with the fossil fuelers obviously the process that we had generated required energy from fossil fueling and so we thought about it for a long time in one of the communications i had with somebody in the in that industry i first searched for a level of relationship with him and i started that and got made some progress with him it's come to nothing but my first question was do you have any grandkids |
| 1:25:51 | that's where we are related on a human plane before our prejudices and our silos and the protecting of our existing knowledge base and our colleagues those things are all very real but we are human and that is you know the fossil fuel engineers are not sitting in some caves somewhere surrounded by horrible animals they go home and they spend time with their kids and they as brian mentioned they suffer similar stresses related to what we're facing in the way of climate change so there is a a need for communication with these people on a |
| 1:26:44 | a level of let's solve the problem rather than you caused it perhaps we should realize that the current gen generation of managers and people of influence in the fossil fuel hierarchy did not start this thing as we are the inheritors of the inattention of our forebears they are in a similar situation and to find the secret to being able to communicate with them at that level is is a huge challenge i have been trying to get talking about ignorance unawareness lack of awareness i've been trying to communicate with my |
| 1:27:35 | local state senator and it is a struggle and he's the sponsor of several pieces of legislation in california relating to climate reaction and you know california says we're going to restore the climate and their current plan as well we'll just have to speed up the rate of emissions reduction yeah and so i'm i'm banging my head on that one my next i know he doesn't have grandchildren but he does have children but i've got to get to talk with him and that's the challenge here thank you |
| 1:28:18 | yeah thank you grant very good point and it's uh worth keeping that in mind and this is what uh jim hansen said in his book which he actually called storms of my grandchildren right and he says in his book that the whole thing took on a different uh feel to it um when his when he his grandchildren were born um and actually only last weekend that's just a few days ago i met this uh guy who's not interested in climate change um particularly um and uh my wife says he's a bit of a dog um but he but he's professor of english at |
| 1:28:59 | tokyo university and he or retired now anyway but he said he's met his grandson for the for you know first time since he's been abroad and was completely surprised how the uh you know the sort of visceral reaction this is my grandson wants to spend time with him very important to him in a way that was surprising and shocking um cares deeply about his grandson who's now eight months old so i think you make a very good point there um grant perhaps that that should be talked about a bit more in books and in our conversations |
| 1:29:39 | uh yeah thank you yes uh manager you've had your hand up for a while yeah um let me see if i'm off mute i don't know we can hear you we can hear you fine manager oh yeah can he loud and clear um i have uh well i just want to say that i've talked to hundreds of people here climate activists and others but i travel in circles with hudson valley climate activists and most of them are open to hearing about this every once in a while i'll hear some you know conspiracy theory feedback or um some negative reaction but |
| 1:30:32 | um your camera went off the manager but we could still hear you okay okay that's it with your back again that's good all right let me just do one thing here okay um and i just want to say first of all um grant and i don't agree on on some things but we listen to each other and that's what we've got to get the whole world to do um and i have a quick grandson story my little grandson is four years old he loves underground he he quickly outgrew having memorized every dinosaur and now he's into underwater creatures |
| 1:31:19 | he would have loved the conversation today he can identify just about every underwater creature he can find and before they they just left for europe for a month to visit uh other parts of the family and um before he left he asked me to watch um a film or a video uh with him and it because he wanted to see all the underwater creatures and it was about the oceans as a carbon sink so he he's four years old he heard that entire narration and with his eyes wide and listening and in the meantime he's pointing out to |
| 1:32:07 | me um you know the phytoplankton and every little critter and which live in the deep sea and which live at the surface and um so i think we've got a junior climate scientist in the making um but these are critical times and learning to talk to people at whatever their point of entry is really critical especially the scientific community because there's going to ultimately have to be some form of a science engineering financing municipal government collaboration and that's why i'm hanging in there and |
| 1:32:53 | trying to learn as much as i can uh because i really think we have to promote that so thank you for listening and i i just wanted to share about my little junior uh oceanographer grandson thank you wonderful to hear that uh manager thank you i was just thinking these meetings they begin very serious technical like a technical discussion and then they they become rather more human towards the end we feel we talk about these human stories and we sort of talk on a more human level rather than sort of very serious techies |
| 1:33:29 | what was i going to say i like human level there's a question how are we all coping burdened with this knowledge because i mean i find i have to work mentally really hard to deal with it and stay point what's everybody else feel oh they're huge stresses that take place over periods of months and years especially when you give up your day job and you know go jump on this as a full-time activity um you know you're living uh you know one contribution to the next so uh you know we've kind of we're all in uh |
| 1:34:07 | giving up our day jobs and doing those full-time i have an overwhelming passion and i've had it for years which has involved me in the work that i've been doing i want to communicate an optimistic future to a younger generation and i'm still looking for how to do that i'm depressed around the progress or the lack of progress and i'm dealing i'm not uh medically depressed but boy i have to work hard to fire myself up to to believe that there is a future for my grandkids and their children yeah |
| 1:34:52 | and i see their cynicism my i have a 22 year old and his uh i re asked him so a couple years ago are you going to have a family no yeah that to me is tragic they know about the problem that comes from knowing about the dismal future then yeah yeah yeah but kind of what i'm seeing the the as people become words the stress levels and the young getting higher all the time as i said this year focus group um one of the questions asked is how stressed you feel about climate change if you feel not stressed go to the right and if you feel |
| 1:35:37 | stressed go to the left i walk to the left and out the room and miles away from everybody why are you over there i said well do you really want to know if you don't want to know walk out the room um why do you want to put the hand up that didn't want to know but know it is it is shocking and varied but it's it's kind of tough to deal with one thing i don't um identified or thought uh going back a long time actually is part for a long time with the climate change the only way to seem to get anyone to |
| 1:36:13 | listen or to do anything was this sort of finger wagging um you should drive less fly less you know and preferably stop breathing as well because you're breathing out co2 yeah and and so everyone got this guilt trip and and it was like you know sorry can you just say that over there somewhere you know it's easy to avoid the whole thing and it's uh sort of painting people as evil the evil ones that's the evil ones over there it's as a was it um that you or sev or someone here in the last 20 minutes said |
| 1:36:52 | it was you might be knew that we arrived in this that the problem was originally burning of well bonfires by people thousands of years ago releasing energy um and then you know james what with the steam engine and it's just mushroomed uh since then um there is but there's this problem of knowledge and trust as i see it so there's a huge to me optimism in molten salt reactors um and i got an email i have an occasional uh interaction with the business guy there business development guy and they've got a |
| 1:37:34 | uh so what's optimistic about it is uh the capital cost is way way way down so the problem with nuclear powers is just too expensive it's not going to save the planet because it's far too expensive but their molten salt reactor is the capital cost is sort of about 20 percent or potentially less i mean i don't know haven't built one yet but they think it'll be so simple and inherently you know safe enough when we talk about safe and huge margin of safety um but um who's going to trust somebody saying |
| 1:38:07 | this thing's safe it's got it's made with the n-word you know new nuclear and who's got the budget to to have some big campaign just to say that and the media much prefer to keep on frightening everybody because that's how they make their money uh so these are these there are a number of huge problems that that's one of them um this actually it's been a wonderful evening for me this evening because i hadn't realized so many people uh scientists actually think that ocean the oceans are a strong carbon |
| 1:38:41 | sink and it's not you're not getting ninety percent of of uh sinking carbon uh uh re-mineralizing so that's a piece of important knowledge so i i suppose i just keep going by saying it's an interesting question i've got to keep going back i must confess it's in his heart it's hard i just think oh maybe i'll just do something else now no no no no you can't do that i can't do that so so it's but it's it's actually it's what keeps me going is the people you know |
| 1:39:14 | you this this group of people friends is expecting me to get something done um that that's what keeps me going actually it's just those those close connections not not the idea of climate change but the fact that there's someone is expecting me to do something so i better do it i think brian has a question yeah brian please yeah right well um i think we've touched on some really important topics uh this book all you can save all we can save is really about dealing with a younger generation that is not planning to have families |
| 1:39:50 | necessarily there's a higher suicide rate depression and anxiety is a major concern all this to say we're now living in a world where we've lost about a third of all the market value of uh in the stock market a quarter to a third sorry it's out of nowhere it just yeah a quarter of all the market uh capitalization you know where with marine permaculture we're going to need capital to scale and a quarter of all the market cap is gone from major stock markets most of the market capitalization more |
| 1:40:28 | than a trillion dollars in value is has been lost in recent weeks in cryptocurrencies and one of the few industries that's at an all-time high is oil and gas so if you're looking at capitalization in 2022 or 2023 you're looking uh to you know a lot of folks you know if they're if they're billionaires and they lose a third of their wealth then they feel very poor and they don't give up give very much so it's a bit of a concern philanthropically so i would come back to the question uh what are the you know what is the |
| 1:41:01 | acceptability of taking uh fossil fuel contributions and using them to regenerate a healthy climate is that acceptable or unacceptable it's acceptable okay i'd be interested in managers perspective because she works with so many climate activists in new york and others manager you might be on mute we can't hear you say again please uh interested in your perspective on the acceptability of accepting fossil fuel contributions to try to regenerate a healthy climate it's a bit of a robin hood scenario as |
| 1:41:46 | i'm describing it yes and i've heard that um discussed before what i'm clear about is that um the thought leaders that climate activists turn to are very focused on emissions reduction so i think that there is possibility um if everyone really acknowledges how serious the amer the climate emergency is to recruit all stakeholders uh including the military which i don't hear a lot about but in terms of [Music] you know right now the military is embroiled in war and um defense and sometimes offense and so forth |
| 1:42:48 | but um those are parts of our society that if we all acknowledge the crisis um could be rewarded for being part of the solution um but i think it's a and i've heard folks um acknowledge this that it's the fear is that reaching out to or involving um an industry that ultimately in its current state would [Music] be phased out anything we do to prolong that and prolong the burning of fossil fuel and the associated emissions will um would not be acceptable so um i put a lot of faith in uh |
| 1:43:53 | conflict resolution mediation um and even uh what um i'm not thinking of the word but um what happened in south africa what's the term for apartheid well no uh following apartheid uh the term anyway um reconciliation thank you sometimes my brain freezes up but um i i just think there's a possibility and um it's a long shot uh i have to say that being on these calls every time somebody is finger-pointing i cringe and um we all do it and you know from the people that i um affiliate with the fossil fuel |
| 1:44:52 | industry is the enemy um but if we make enemies we're not gonna come up with solutions and i'm in it for my grandson um and i don't want him saying to me why didn't you knew why didn't you do anything and i've been trying to do things for 30 years um and it's a real uphill battle i will still try because i think that that fits into the listening of the surrounding community they know that you know i spend my days and nights um working on climate solutions so i have a certain level of trust and for |
| 1:45:44 | example i have three interns and they're young and i'm trying to figure out i would like to engage them and have them do research if they want to really look at this realistically and and for by this i mean the climate science and if people really understand the climate's a lot science they're going to be better prepared for and more open to considering solutions that are beyond just emissions reduction which i am convinced is not enough um so uh uh grant has had his hand up for a while okay thank you for asking |
| 1:46:32 | oh thank you manager that's really helpful over to graham you know muted grant i've been so fascinated by managers inputs that i thought i had forgotten what i wanted to talk about but the institution of the military as it exists in the profession of every country that has one and the institution of an energy producing uh organization such as a fossil fueler are linked with ours it is their future what is it are they that are they looking into what is going to be a major drain on the us military in the next decade |
| 1:47:29 | is that they're unable to buy any new toys because they're having to replenish and replace their waterfronts and their ship repair facilities and taking care of skirmishes and defense situations that are as a result of climate change it's our joint future that's what we're dealing with thank you absolutely yeah and if this book i'm holding up is is backwards but this is the ministry of defense global strategic trends out to 2045 which was the um royal united services institute um i was involved in that particular think |
| 1:48:19 | tank process where they were considering global threats um and a lot of them know at a very senior level but it's this ability no it's the inability to comprehend what's really happening it's just too big an issue for very many people to deal with unless you sort of trained their minds into it and brought them up to face in that reality i mean 2045 is too far out um i tend to start the conversation i think you know unless you're planning to live less than the next 10 years you really need to know what we've got to say |
| 1:49:03 | you know because talking about our grandchildren and going i'm like a son of 20 and a daughter of 16 grandson of seven about nine and granddaughter of six but people can still say well it's awful it's gonna be our kids problem or our grandchildren's problem hard to say hit them between the eyes and say no you're going to experience this you know it's coming down the line very fast you need to think about it and you need to think about how you're going to vote in respect of this because the i always come back you know |
| 1:49:38 | people say what can i do and i say vote for the guy that understands the problem don't worry about recycling plastic bags you want to do something that really matters put the right people in power yep goodbye grant thanks for being with us here in a couple of weeks thanks sir bro thank you yeah um yes we've been going for uh aaron three quarters everybody so let's call it a night there shall we or a morning uh i was gonna say collaboration uh leave a leave aside coercion and bring in collaboration that was my my my comment |
| 1:50:20 | um wish us luck this week and our presentations to one or more fossil fuel companies yeah good luck yeah good luck best wishes brian yeah best wishes brian yeah good luck oh thank you we'll see how it goes yeah they're not evil they're not evil they're part of the solution if they want to be i'll send the link out there do you want to speak yeah go on i just want to speak a friend of mine um teaches the natural step um some of you may remember the natural step for businesses was a way to promote sustainability including |
| 1:51:00 | emissions reduction and um he spoke to a conference of um the fossil fuel industry and they were very receptive and so you know i can i can reach out to him and uh mention this and just see if if he has any suggestions not for an upcoming meeting but for moving uh forward it it's terry gibbs from the um alliance for sustainability and he trained with paul hawkins and some of the founders of the natural step um thank you manito that would be really helpful and i'd love to hear back on that later this month i think that'll be |
| 1:51:49 | highly relevant to our negotiations yeah i'll reach out to terry i'll put that on my to-do list thank you manager okay then thanks everyone so weeks have a great couple weeks good luck brian oh thanks so much see you in a few years let's travel cheers you |