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In this episode of The Climate Dad, Mike Smith discusses the relationship between human flourishing and energy access, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach to climate action. He challenges the idea of prioritizing energy access over climate concerns, arguing for a dual focus on improving lives while reducing emissions. The conversation explores potential collaborations with the oil and gas industry, the dangers of natural gas, and the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels. The episode highlights the importance of working together for a sustainable future.
Additionally, in this week's Small Waves segment, Julie offers a holiday eco hack: partnering with others for errands to cut emissions, save time, and shop mindfully. She demonstrates how small actions can drive a big change.
00:00 Introduction to Climate Dad Podcast
04:59 Climate Minute: Energy and Environmental Updates
11:39 The Role of Oil and Gas in Climate Solutions
19:07 Finding Common Ground in Climate Action
21:10 Small Waves
21:15 Introduction to Eco Hacks
22:00 Sustainable Holiday Practices
24:34 The Power of Teaming Up for Errands
Mike Smith (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome to episode 15 of The Climate Dad, the environmental podcast where we talk about and explain the news and science of climate change. I'm your host. My name's Mike Smith. I'm the father to two great kids. And I'm also the founder of Aclymate the climate solution where we help businesses without sustainability teams to measure, reduce, report, and offset their footprint without having to become a climate expert and with our expert guidance in net zero software. Today, we're going to be talking about human flourishing. But first, here's your climate minute.
The Trump transition team has nominated Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright to be the incoming Secretary of Energy. Liberty is one of the world's largest oil field services companies, executing something like 20 % of the fracking operations within the United States. And Wright is an oil industry evangelist. This nomination is having a series of downstream effects. One related effect is that analysts from Ristad Energy are now predicting a quote golden age, end quote, for liquefied natural gas or LNG.
Natural gas production in the United States has been growing for years, up from around 65 billion cubic foot per day in 2013 to over 100 billion cubic feet in 2024. And that's expected to continue growing in Trump 2.0. However, over the same time, the export of natural gas has rapidly grown, faster than the growth of production. As pipeline exports to Mexico have gone up fivefold to around 7 billion cubic feet per day,
and ship-based LNG exports have gone from non-existent prior to 2015 to 12 billion cubic feet per day. To show this outsized growth of export continuing, they're looking at it around 20 to about 20 % of the market share by the end of the second Trump administration. That's big indeed. Another effect of the nomination is that US offshore wind production, which has struggled to grow in the United States, even with Biden administration prioritization, is expected to continue to struggle further.
Bloomberg Green reporter Michelle Ma is reporting that one promising US startup, Keto Technologies, which has created a system for more efficiently building floating offshore wind farms, is going to start looking for an international home. CEO Sam Kenner is considering Scotland, France, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. This is a likely bellwether of the US losing the manufacturing capacity of this industry. Also relatedly, one of the climate tech winners in our new political environment is likely to be geothermal energy.
One unappreciated geographic advantage of the United States is how close the mantle of the earth is to the surface throughout the American West. Bluntly, we just have a lot of hot rocks. These hot rocks are valuable because not only do they provide warm springs for Westerners that enjoy getting out into the back country a little bit, but they also, this heat can be converted into usable energy by drilling into the earth. You don't have to drill as far down. And then,
Injecting a cool fluid down that hole and recovering the hot fluid back up a different pipe to run electricity producing turbines Since it is emissions free energy that can be used both day and night It has the support from Democrats and since it's a transition industry for oil and gas workers. It has Republican support a bipartisan group of Western legislature Let legislators from Nevada, Idaho, California, New Mexico and Utah I've introduced legislation to help drive this technology forward one's called the heats act
which removes permitting requirements from geothermal exploration. And the other is the CLEAN Act, which mandates more geothermal leases from the Department of the Interior.
A separate point here is that our clean energy transition continues to move forward outside of politics as well. With an organization known as IAG or the airline group that runs both British Airways, Aer Lingus and three other airlines has signed a contract for a 10 year supply with an American startup called Infiniium for sustainable aviation fuel or SAF. Last year, this consortium, IAG, used 12 % of the world's supply of SAF.
and Infinium produces SAF using renewable energy, waste carbon dioxide, and water.
The New York Times and also Car & Driver are reporting that the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents 42 auto manufacturers, which sell almost all the vehicles within the United States, is urging the incoming political administration to keep EB tax incentives and emissions regulations. The group claims it can only be successful if, quote, stability and predictability and auto-related emission standards continue into the future, and that they've already invested billions
into EV research and development. Meanwhile, in weather and climate news, New York City had a wildfire in Prospect Park in November. That's pretty unusual. And though it's small by Western standards, the two acre fire was one of 271 brush fires that occurred in the city during the month and one of 11 wildfires, major wildfires that burned on the East Coast of the United States between Boston and Virginia. This is part of a worrying trend about increasing wildfires in the Eastern United States driven by more free...
droughts. And that folks was your climate minute.
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And it's going to help you to attract and retain the talent from the climate generation that you're going to need. Our green business certification certification program will help you complete a sustainability audit. And maybe you're just looking to improve those eco beta scores or CDP scores or win other certifications like B corporate green business benchmark. Perhaps you're looking to purchase carbon offsets, but you need a carbon reliable carbon broker. Well, at Aclymate we've got you covered with both a friendly climate accounting solution and also
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All right, let's talk about human flourishing and let's have the news guide our conversation today. And this is going to lead us to talking about oil markets, gas markets, fossil fuel extraction, engineering, and the needs and politics of energy. So starting with a claim that you're going to hear from a lot of people in the oil and gas space, including our soon to be secretary of energy, Chris Wright. And that line is about that energy betters human lives.
The company Mr. Wright currently leads is called Liberty Energy, and that company even published an investor-focused report called, quote, bettering human lives, end quote. You might even hear others say that they enable, quote, human flourishing.
There's a lot to pull apart here and we're going to get to it all, but let's start with an admission. Mr. Wright is right. There is a strong and direct correlation between quality of life and access to energy. One of the unappreciated stories of the past 30ish years has been the dramatic rise and rapid expansion of the global middle class. The World Bank estimates that since 1990, over 1 billion people have risen out of extreme poverty.
While China accounts for 800 million or about 80 % of this growth, another 200 million people elsewhere have done the same, predominantly elsewhere in Asia. From a perspective of human happiness and flourishing, this is, unalloyed, phenomenally great news.
And one of the key components of entering the global middle class is a drastic and significant increase in energy consumption. Things that you and I take for granted as Americans, even our working poor is our access to energy. You listening to me right now use energy at a level that the wealthiest people in history couldn't have even dreamed of. And that the people of the developing world think luxurious. A favorite factoid of mine is that your refrigerator as an American sitting in your home right now
uses about 10 times the electricity from the American grid that the average Nigerian uses in their entire lives from their grid. And frankly, who am I to tell anyone that they're not allowed to have a refrigerator?
Energy, to be blunt, has enabled human flourishing.
Now let's talk about how the talking points that Mr. Wright likes to share start getting pretty leaky when you look at it with a deeper analysis. The first and most obvious to me is that I doubt that anyone that subscribes to a America first mentality cares at all about the wellbeing of the Chinese people. The second thing is that during the time we've seen this spectacular growth in the middle class, we've also seen a scary growth in climate related emissions.
Did you know that in the past 30 years, humanity has emitted more than all of previous history combined? More than the Industrial Revolution, World War II, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, ancient civilizations in China, Egypt, Greece, India, the birth of agriculture, all of the Stone Ages, right on back to our earliest ancestors walking in East Africa's Olduvai Gorge, all of that combined.
We have emitted more in the past 30 years than in the previous 2 million. And that's just cooking our planet. This growth of human well-being in the present is threatening our future. Mr. Wright is willing to acknowledge that climate change is a problem, but it is parroting a new climate denial tactic, that it isn't as big a deal as energy poverty. It's as simple and it's really brutally effective because it preys upon a few human characteristics.
One, that framing things categorically into false choice. And two, including one of the choices to be the welfare of others. I mean, how can you resist the choice between something that might happen in the future versus a starving child today? as a father, this hits home. Nuance can be a real bitch. And the nuance is this. We have to do both.
as I tell my kid, thinking really means using nuance, not slogans. To secure our future, it isn't an either-or scenario. We must expand energy access to those without it. And we must stop polluting our atmosphere at such a breakneck rate. Failing to do both will fail to establish the basis of support for the policies and technologies needed to maintain successful climate action. And we'll also fail to mitigate the damage that we're all actively doing to our own future and that of future generations
To prioritize the present is to build a house upon a foundation of sand. Bluntly, human flourishing will end if we don't succeed. And for those who actually care about it instead of using it as a slogan, failure really isn't an option. So we have the problem in clear relief. We must both cut our carbon emissions and build a broad coalition while improving the lives of others. That leads us to something else.
we're going to have to work with people like Chris Wright. And that can seem very unfair that someone who can make money by dragging their feet should profit from the transition too, but it's unfortunately just a fact of what we need to do. So where can we work together and where must we stand apart? On the work together part, I think there's an opportunity to leverage the incredible engineering talent that oil and gas companies represent. I was at a conference last year here in the Denver area.
where a room full of oil engineers were talking about building the hydrogen economy and running pipelines across our country, the need for specialty steel to do so, and the process of scaling such a huge endeavor. And in one way, it was like really refreshing. It reminded me of the can-do attitude of our recent past and how much my own father enjoyed working in the oil industry because of the people doing the work instead of the environmental damage that was part of why he'd left the industry.
Anyway, I think hydrogen has a far more limited application than the funding into the ecosystem would suggest, but watching these people work how to do it with the absolute confidence that they could and would was a little inspiring. One thing that bothers me and I think is really a legitimate complaint is that we don't build big things in this country anymore. It costs so much, takes so long to do anything that we're losing. From our news story about manufacturing offshore wind towers,
with Aikido, we're going to lose that startup, a startup that our country founded and nourished to Europe or to Asia, even with a friendly administration from a regulatory standpoint helping them. That's not good for the climate. It's not good for the US. And I want to sit in more rooms where people are quietly confident that they're going to get the job done because they have a history of doing so.
And like it or not, oil companies generally do. So if we can get that attitude and that talent working on something more productive to our climate future, count me in. Hydrogen just might be one of them. Another is sustainable aviation fuel or SAF. As a former pilot, a trained engineer, and now a climate guy, I'm really skeptical that widespread use of electric planes will be coming into mass utilization within the next 20 years.
Also skeptical of using hydrogen due to the constraints around the need to pressurize it, chill it, and its lower energy density. So we're probably stuck with SAF for the short to midterm. And you know who's really good at that sort of stuff? Oil companies. That's why Infinium is creating facilities in Texas. Lots of renewable energy coming online quickly, and lots of engineering talent and distribution infrastructure. That's a pretty hard to beat combination.
A different place where oil talent might fit in is with geothermal energy. They know how to manage underground reservoirs, pump fluids, and of course, drill holes. As a matter of fact, they're practically the only people that do. And if we can transition that talent from pulling oil out of the ground to pulling heat, the world will be a better place for it. Renewables were always going to run into a problem based upon their intermittency, and there's always only been really two ways to solve it.
One is to overbuild renewables and also to build a lot of energy storage. That's going to require a lot of mining for batteries and manufacturing. Or two, we can build complementary systems to cover the gaps for when renewables aren't producing. That is either going to require a lot of fossil fuels, not good, can't use those, or increases in emissions-free sources like hydro or nuclear, which we all know there are challenges associated with them.
their environmental footprint and scaling, or we're going to have to create new sources of emissions-free energy. And while it will certainly involve some from little of column A and some from column B, geothermal energy is something that I've been personally excited about for years. I'm glad to have the oil companies moving into that space.
Alright, enough of the love fest. Where must those who are concerned about the climate stand apart? First, don't buy the argument, essentially any argument about natural gas. It is a dangerous climate pollutant, it leaks like crazy, and even if it were perfectly captured and transported, it still ultimately gets burned for energy. Perhaps a little background will help. Every oil well in the world
has a mix of natural gas and petroleum that comes up, with North America's mix being particularly naturally slanted towards natural gas. It's been said that the US is the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. Now, since the product has low economic value, the gas is often burned at the well hood, and this is called flaring. This is happening so much that the light pollution of the oil fields in West Texas can be easily seen from space. Worse than flared, though, is when it's just vented into the atmosphere.
Natural gas is just the product name, the brand name if you will, for methane. And methane's a dangerous climate pollutant. It's about 25 to 85 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, depending on your timeframe. So any methane going into the atmosphere is awful for the climate. And at the scale of this industry, it's a disaster. And though regulations have tightened upon the venting of methane, it still happens a lot.
Increased export capacity would help to change the economics of building the pipelines needed to capture this methane for more productive uses than flaring or venting. But the economics means that the pumping of oil will probably never be dependent upon the price of natural gas, but actually upon the price of the petroleum that's pumped up with it. And those prices are dependent upon things like OPEC, gasoline usage, and the need for feedstocks for plastics and asphalt. Methane is mostly just a margin builder or a distraction.
Even when it is shipped for export, it will remain difficult to ship. The gas will be required to be compressed until it is liquefied, becoming the liquefied natural gas that LNG stands for, which means it must be kept really cold, colder than 250 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Even still, the gas will boil in the tank. It will leak in the conversion into a liquefied natural gas and out. And that
leakage and the expanding gas from the boiling is often just vented to the atmosphere, which at its core is just a big methane release. Even total, even the most efficient systems in place lose about 0.2 % of the gas into the atmosphere. It's just a mess. And at the end, it gets burned. So even if you're managing to avoid all the climate warning emissions of the production and transport of the methane, you still get a lot of climate warming emissions from burning it.
Not good.
Now I've been focusing on climate for a while and people have been saying for decades about how natural gas is a bridge fuel to our climate future. And it was true. Natural gas has largely crushed coal consumption within the United States and other industrial nations. But it is no longer a bridge fuel. The pathway to decarbonization has just gotten much, much steeper. Because we've delayed for decades doing this work,
We've gone from needing to reduce emissions by about 2 % per year to over 8 % per year. In skiing terms, our delays caused us globally to have gone from skiing the bunny slope to now needing to ski a black diamond. The time for bridge fuels has passed, which is why the results from COP29 are so disappointing. The world cannot allow developing nations to access the cheapest form of energy they have because it will harm us all more in the long term than it will help them in the short term.
And before you talk about the industrial world being controlling and telling them what to do, the developing world also knows this too, which is why they're some of the loudest advocates for sustainable development capital.
Anyway, we're going to have to find ways to work with people we disagree with politically, even people that have actively sabotaged climate progress. I don't love it, but it's the reality we face. So let's advocate where we can for common ground and make a little progress. And let's stand for the truth and resist the lies that would lead us astray.
here are the three big takeaways you need to take away from today's conversation. One, human flourishing requires both access to energy and climate action. It's not an either or, it's a both.
Two, working with oil workers on climate related engineering projects where they have the skill is valuable and it should be supported. This includes things like SAF, hydrogen and geothermal energy. And three, do not accept arguments about natural gas being a bridge fuel or that we need to expand fossil fuel production in any way. The benefits they mostly provide in the short term will be accrued to the already wealthy and
All of us will be paying the substantial cost for eons.
Now, before we wrap up with your Small Wave of the week, we want to hear from you here at The Climate Dad. Go to Aclymate.com or send an email to TheClimateDad at Aclymate.com to submit a question for the show. As always, Aclymate is spelled A-C-L-Y-M-A-T-E. If your business needs help measuring, reducing, reporting, or offsetting your company's climate footprint, please reach out to my team here at Aclymate, and we're going to get you set up with the best, the most affordable, the easiest climate solution out there. Thank you all for listening.
be back next time with a breakdown of all things climate. Make sure to subscribe to The Climate Dad where you get your podcasts and to share, like, and comment on social media. I'm Mike Smith. You've been listening to The Climate Dad. And here she is, Julie Schneiderman of EcoStiks with your Small Wave of the week.
Julie Schneiderman (21:16)
Hello and welcome back to Small Waves, where small waves make big waves through collective collaboration for a better planet. I'm Julie Upcycled and I'm here to share simple, actionable eco hacks to weave into your daily busy life. First, let's do a quick recap of recent episodes. Over the past few weeks, we've explored some fun and impactful ways to build sustainability into our routines.
We talked about finding our climate sweet spot with Dr. Ayana Johnson and the UN Sustainable Development Goals for an opportunity of focus. And then we moved on to nature cleanups for birthdays, holidays, or just Sundays to promote community sustainability and connection and to decrease waste. These are just some of the ideas aimed to help to connect you with the planet in a way that feels natural and achievable.
This week, we're shifting gears to focus on the holiday season, a time filled with love, joy, and unfortunately, a bit of extra carbon emissions, waste, and excess. But don't worry, we've got an eco hack that keeps the spirit of the holidays intact while cutting back on our environmental impact. This idea came from my friend Sawyer, who loves sustainability just as much as I do. The concept is simple but powerful.
Instead of running errands alone this holiday season, burning gas, navigating traffic, and juggling your to-do list, team up with a friend, family member, or neighbor. Simple, right? But here's how this individual eco hack can collectively create an impact. One, you're saving on carbon emissions. By carpooling your errands, you're cutting down on the number of vehicles on the road. Fewer cars means fewer emissions.
which is huge win for the planet. You're also reducing traffic congestion and you're decreasing wear and tear on the vehicles. When you're out and about, support local businesses. Prioritizing small businesses are often more sustainable and you're keeping your dollars in your community. Plus, you're likely to find unique gifts that mean way more than mass produce items. You also have the potential of minimizing packaging wastes rather than buy online.
where you can have excess plastic and packaging and boxes and impact, choose to shop at stores that have reusable bags or opt not to have a bag or see if they have any kind of eco-friendly wrapping paper or take it home yourself and wrap it in some newspaper or create your own custom eco-friendly wrapping paper.
You can also, by doing this together, you're spending quality time together, which gets so much harder and harder during these crazy and hectic days. You could turn these errands into an opportunity instead of a chore, you're gonna be able to connect with friends or family. Grab a cup of coffee, bring your reusable coffee cup, share a laugh, and make the experience fun. You're also gonna encourage planning and efficiency. Get together and talk about your route and talk about the impact, perhaps.
figuring out how you can reduce by choosing a route that feels good and sustainable. And so you're figuring out how to go from A to B in the most sustainable way. Make it fun. You also promote mindful consumerism when you're out and about and you're talking with your friend, your neighbor, or your partner.
Talk about the gifts that you're buying, what the gift is, who it's for, how it's gonna be impactful, how long do you think it will be until it ends up in the landfill? Do you think they can be used or recycled? These are the kinds of things that you can think about while you're shopping that will help change it and maybe think about your shopping decisions. Lastly, it reduces stress and waste. I know holidays can feel super overwhelming.
which often leads to impulse buying and also forgetting some of our sustainable tools we already know, like bringing reusable bags and water bottles and thinking eco-friendly minded when in fact, when you're feeling stressed out. With a friend, you're more likely to stay focused and prepared, reducing waste like single use plastics, doing your outing. You can have an accountability partner. So as you plan your week, think about who you could team up with.
Maybe it's your neighbor, your partner, or even your kids. Sharing holiday errands isn't just good for the planet, it's good for the soul. So thank you, Sawyer, for this thoughtful and impactful idea. It's a perfect reminder that eco-friendly living is often just about doing things together. If you have any of your own eco hack suggestions, please let us know by finding us on Instagram and TikTok. That's it for today's Small Waves.
If you found this episode helpful, share it with a friend. It's one more way to build those small waves into big waves. Until next time.
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