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In this episode of The Climate Dad, host Mike Smith discusses recent climate events, the growth of electric vehicles, and the impact of political changes on climate policy. He explores the importance of personal responsibility in climate action, emphasizing the need for individuals and businesses to take proactive steps towards sustainability. Mike also encourages listeners to be aware of the changing political landscape that may affect climate initiatives.
The Episode transitions to the Small Waves segment with Julie Schneiderman, highlighting how small, actionable steps can lead to significant collective impact. She introduces the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and encourages listeners to focus on one goal, sparking meaningful conversations about sustainability within their communities.
00:00 Introduction to Climate Change and Recent Events
05:55 Political Landscape and Climate Policy
12:09 Personal Responsibility and Climate Action
14:47 Introduction to Small Waves Make Big Waves
16:22 Understanding the Sustainable Development Goals
18:04 Choosing Your Focus: Personalizing Sustainability Goals
Mike Smith (00:01)
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Climate Dad, episode 13, the environmental podcast where we talk about and explain the news and science of climate change. As always, I'm your host, Mike Smith. I'm still the father of two great kids and the founder of Aclymate, a climate solution where we help businesses without sustainability teams to measure, reduce, report, and offset their footprint, all without having to become a climate expert and with our expert guidance and net zero software. All right, let's get into it. Here's your climate minute. First, some weird weather.
On November 11th, Saudi Arabia experienced its first snowfall in recorded history. The Al Nafoud Desert will get as warm as 131 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, but typical November lows average around 52 degrees. The desert itself also only averages about 0.48 inches of precipitation per year. So having both enough moisture and it being cold enough for it to snow is quite unusual and as unusual as the record would indicate.
You can also find some crazy images if you look online of camels standing in the snow. In tragic climate news, at least 219 people have died in Spain associated with flooding from extreme rain. On October 29th alone, 12 inches fell on Spain's East Coast city of Valencia. The area received the equivalent of a year's worth of rain in about 12 hours. Other areas on the eastern and southern coasts also saw extreme rains and deaths. Spain has been under an extreme drought.
So this is a pretty clear illustration about how measuring precipitation shouldn't just be done in the aggregate in our warming world, and that we're going to have periods of long dryness interspersed with periods of extreme moisture. Now, some good climate news. You might have heard that electric vehicle purchases had been on the decline, but that common narrative is actually incorrect. Reporting from Inside EV and Rho Motion shows that electric vehicle purchases continue to grow. It was September, and then again in October of 2014.
2024 being the consecutive best months of all time for EV sales, with 1.7 million electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles being sold worldwide in October alone. Primarily driven by Chinese consumption of 1.2 million of the cars, where low-cost EV manufacturer BYD has rapidly climbed into the third largest car company in the world. But lest you think that this is just a Chinese-only trend, the US itself has seen a 9 % growth in EV sales year over year today.
with about 1.4 million vehicles being sold in the first 10 months of the year. Europe broadly is also seeing strong EV growth with the one spot of somewhat bad news being Germany, which has seen an 18 % drop year over year in 2024. But even here, there's a silver lining where the sales aren't down as much as projections were expecting after Germany abruptly ended its EV subsidies at the end of last year. Notably, those sales in Germany are down upon the year.
October and September are actually up as the demand has rebounded. And on that bit of good news, that's your Climate Minute.
Notably, though sales in Germany are down on the year, September and October are actually up as the demand has rebounded. And on that bit of good news, that's your Climate Minute.
Let's quickly talk about Aclymate, . If you're thinking about the ways to improve your impact on the planet, or maybe just your company is being required to report its footprint, we'd love to help you over at Aclymate, , where we have the easiest, most intuitive climate solution for your business. We'll give you a baseline environmental assessment, show you ways to reduce your carbon footprint, and we'll get you on that path to net zero. It will help your environmental branding to win new customers, and more importantly, it will keep your most valuable ones. It'll help you to attract and retain the talent you need from the climate generation.
and our green business certification program will help you complete a sustainability audit. Maybe you're just looking to improve those EcoVadis scores, or maybe you're looking to win other certifications like CDP, B Corp, or the Green Business Benchmark. Or maybe you're looking to purchase carbon offsets but need a reliable carbon credit broker. Well, at Aclymate, , we've got you covered with both a friendly climate accounting solution and also the best carbon offset program and leading selection of sustainable projects on the web.
Now, today I want to talk about what you should be considering in the next few months in preparation for the change in political administration and how it will affect your relationship with the climate and the world more broadly. Let's start with electric vehicles. Here at Aclymate, , our Director of Customer Experience, Travis, led a small wave of people in his mountain town to lease EVs last month. If you've ever met Travis, you'd know that he's like this big, burly, mountain man kind of guy with a bushy beard.
He loves living at 10,000 feet, taking his kids mountain climbing, backpacking, mountain biking, you name it. Those activities typically require a truck or an SUV, and Travis and his wife had both. But he and his wife also have a long commute when they have to come into the office, which is infrequently in our case, but still happens. And their ex-urban lifestyle requires them to drive practically everywhere. So when Travis heard that he could lease a Nissan Leaf,
for 24 months for only $20 a month? He really couldn't believe it.
He had definitely heard me talking about how my big butt and my not very small children fit comfortably into our little EV, our Chevy Bolt. So Travis convinced his wife to take a test drive. They both loved it. And now they argue about who gets to drive it. And interestingly, they're also saving hundreds of dollars on their gas bill. Insurance, of course, went up, but it's more than worth it economically.
When Travis mentioned this to his friends, to his neighbors, and even the staff at his kids' school, they all went and leased Nissan Leafs too. So now there's this whole mountain town here in Colorado that used to be full of big pickups that now is full of EVs driving around. I mention all of that because if you were on the fence about getting an EV, or even just test driving one, now would be the time to do it. One of the pieces of the government that is a priority for the incoming administration to dismantle are around EV subsidies.
Since these can amount to several thousand dollars, waiting until January 20th of next year could put a really big dent in your pocketbook. Relatedly, after the previous Trump administration led to an offshoring of the US solar manufacturing industry, the vast majority of solar panels are now produced in China. The landmark climate bill passed in 2022, by the Biden administration, was called the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. And it's expected to be maintained moving forward.
Not because Trump loves it, primarily because 85 % of the investments and 68 % of the jobs coming from the IRA are in Republican congressional districts. That's frustratingly unfair, especially in the light of the fact that the bill received absolutely no Republican support in its being passed. But it does give the bill political resiliency. And in part, funded by these friendly incentives, installed U.S. commercial solar capacity
They saw whopping 30 % growth last year. However, a key provision of the Trump agenda is to institute tariffs on Chinese imports, which would drive the cost of installation up. So even if the IRA withstands political pressure, the interest in creating tariffs on Chinese goods will change that. If you're interested in having a rooftop solar and haven't done so yet, do not delay. It actually may already be too late.
but it would be worth contacting an installer. Separately, you can consider installing the panels yourself and having an electrician connect them. It's a pretty easy installation that people that are relatively handy should be able to do. And this can really drastically cut costs. One friend of mine from my flying days was able to reduce the time to repay his investment by installing his own solar panels down to two years. So even in a higher price environment for solar panels, doing it yourself may be able to really help you.
Now you might be wondering if panels are going to get more expensive. Won't electricity also get more expensive and change the economics of an EV? And the answer is, yeah, maybe, kind of. But the economics of maintenance and fueling an internal combustion car versus an EV, the economics are already so different and so great, I really wouldn't worry about it. And then public utility commissions will take a long time before there's any appreciable notice and price hikes. So I wouldn't worry about it, because I sure don't.
In any event, the IRA has helped to facilitate rapid growth in the green industry across the United States with the building of domestic EV and battery plants in North Carolina, the development of like domestic lithium mines in Nevada and a lot more. There may be a bit of a hitch as Chinese goods become more expensive and more domestic capacity can ramp up though. If you're thinking that Trump might make fuel prices lower for your conventionally powered vehicle, there's actually not a whole lot of evidence to support that.
The US is already the world's largest oil producer and his, quote, drill baby drill, end quote, rhetoric mostly applies to opening more federal land to drilling, which would take time for those leases to be approved, more time to get into production. And even when or if that should happen, since the price of oil has components of both being market driven and run by the OPEC oil cartel, which is outside the United States, any effects on fuel prices would probably be pretty marginal. That's.
Damaging public lands for marginal gain isn't a great policy for a whole host of reasons, but it probably won't have much effect on climate or your pocketbook. Paradoxically, this is one of those places where EV growth will start to make a dent. Though peak oil demand is projected by Goldman Sachs to occur in 2035, it's already starting to shallow. And that also includes a whole range of distilled products ranging from jet fuel to asphalt to plastics. Peak gasoline
consumption, however, is expected to occur far sooner in 2028. And because we're so close to the peak, there's very little growth happening right now. We're near peak already, and there aren't many substitute uses for gasoline. It's a specific distillate that there aren't other uses for. So expect there to be long-term downward pressure on gasoline coming not from expanded production, but from the purchase of EVs by reducing demand.
Maybe you're concerned about the regulations affecting businesses to reduce their footprint. Well, I have to say that's a mixed bag. The Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, finalized a rule earlier this year requiring public companies in the United States to report their Scope 1 and 2 emissions which are the emissions they're most directly responsible for. But nobly, they did leave out all of the supply chain and product use related Scope 3 emissions. It was already being challenged in court, so it hadn't practically gone into effect anyway.
and though the incoming administration will almost certainly try to end this reporting requirement, there was no real requirement to reduce emissions anyways, just to report them. Though the US regulation may fall away, most of these companies that are affected by this regulation are already being required to comply with more stringent standards from their business operations in California, Europe, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. So I wouldn't expect any well-led company to scrap their emissions goals. As a matter of fact,
If your business has not already been asked to report its emissions, I would expect that to happen very soon, as those regulatory requirements that still apply all include reporting emissions from supply chains. Of course, we'd love to help you get the jump on that here at Aclymate, . Now, again, this isn't to say that there won't be negative consequences of the climate from Trump 2.0. There definitely will be. I think the primary one will be the loss of American leadership on the subject. We're the world's largest historical emitter.
It's number two, current emitter, and we have the political and economic heft to steer the world the right direction, if we should so choose to. However, failing to do so will slow our progress, a consequence from which we will actually never really recover, because decisions made now have lasting and permanent effects. This isn't to say that our disappearance from the world stage on the subject will steer us in the wrong direction, per se. As you've seen, there's really already too much momentum.
but just that we'll miss some of our goals. Moreover, I worry that we'll be ceding leadership to others, both in the manufacturing capacity, like our experience with the off-shoring of solar manufacturing and China's now burgeoning EV production, but also because other countries will be the ones at the table setting the terms. And if you're not at the table, you're on it is one of the maxims of business. Now, if this all makes you feel a little overwhelmed or hopeless, I'm here to tell you to knock it off.
As I tell my kids and as most parents do, we learn more from our failures than from our successes. We failed because we assumed everyone else would work on the problem. Now you know that they won't. So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to make decisions that reflect your values? Are you going to buy and vote with the climate and your future in mind, your children's future? Are you going to live the example you want to see in the world?
I used to hear in my time in the Navy that, quote, everyone's a leader. In my younger days, I hated it because from a logical standpoint, if everyone's a leader, no one can be. And I think the people that know me know that I'm pretty left-brained, so logic is what tends to drive me. But from a mindset point of view, it was actually pretty golden because it meant that everyone, from the highest admiral to the junior most sailor straight out of boot camp, is expected to lead by example.
That could be you.
Now, if you listened to Julie's small wave segment last week, you should already have identified what your climate action sweet spot is. Use it to get started right now and listen to Julie's small wave this week to take the next step. But before we get to it, Julie and I want to hear from you. Go to Aclymate or send an email to theclimatedad at aclymate.com to submit a question for us or the show. Again, 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 our team here at Aclymate, . We'll get you set up with the best, most affordable, and easiest climate solution out there.
I'll be back next time with a breakdown of all things climate and with another guest. 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 it is Julie Schneiderman of EcoStiks and your Small Wave of the Week.
Welcome to Small Waves Make Big Waves, a podcast dedicated to creating powerful ripples of change for our planet. Here we are going to explore actionable bite-size habits that build up to massive collective impact. It's about sustainability that fits into your life, inspiring connections and taking measurable steps towards a better future together.
I'm your host, Julie Upcycled. I'm a passionate advocate for sustainability, creativity, and community collaboration. I'm also the founder of EcoStiks, Women in the Water, and Stick and Stuck Creative Studios. I focus in part on empowering others to upcycle their lives and choices for themselves and for the planet. I believe that when we're connected to ourselves, we're connected to the planet. When we connect to the planet, we're connected to ourselves. Through this podcast, we'll dive into quick
easy climate hacks, share inspiring stories, and connect with incredible guests to show how small changes can lead to big results. Together we'll prove that the little things really do matter and that our planet is in our hands. So let's make some waves. Last week we discovered our climate change sweet spot. We used Dr. Ayana Johnson's Venn diagram approach. I hope you guys had a chance to do that and to talk about that with your friends.
This week, what I thought we would do is kind of take the next step. I know when I found my sweet spot, so that's great. Now what do I do? Remember, this is a podcast about actionable steps that we could do collaboratively. And so what I thought we were gonna do today is we are gonna talk about how we can transition that sweet spot into interests and ideas that...
we can focus on. So I know if you're anything like me, a busy mom with lots of ideas and lots of things that are going on, sometimes I can get overwhelmed with how in so many topics of how to contribute to climate change or our community and sustainability. So maybe we need a little bit of focus. And so one of the things that tools that I used in this discovery is I had loosely heard of the United Nations 17 SDG goals.
years ago, kind of in the back of my head. I recently learned more about them at my environmental class, steward class that I took at the Community Environmental Council. And then now it's been a topic of many conversations for many of the conferences that I go to, including back into the promo industry just at a recent promo conference. So.
What I want to do is share these 17 Sustainable Development Goals with you and the importance of them and why, and then encourage you to pick your one and focus on that one and then use it as a topic of conversation with your friends and family and community to then stray away from our traditional, hey, how's it going? What are you doing? And start getting into some really interesting conversations.
So there are 17 Sustainability Sustainable Development Goals. They're a universal blueprint. They're adopted by the United Nations in 2015. You can learn more about this online and get some more information. So the main goals is we're trying to find a balance between social, economic, and environmental sustainability. There are 17. I'm going to briefly run through them.
You can find out more. I'm just trying to get your mind stoked about different ones that you might want to focus on. And again, I encourage you to pick one, which is going to be hard, but just pick one. One is no poverty. Two is zero hunger. Three is good health and well-being. Four is quality education. Five is gender equality. Six is clean water and sanitation. Seven is affordable and clean energy.
Eight is decent work and economic growth. Nine is industry, innovation and infrastructure. 10 is reduction, sorry, reduced inequalities. 11 is sustainable cities and communities. 12 is responsible consumption and production. 13 is climate action. 14 is life below water. 15 life on land. 16 is peace, justice and strong institutions. And 17 is partnerships for the goals.
So again, there are 17. And so what I would suggest is you, by pursuing the SDG goals, what they plan on is that governments, businesses, and individuals to come together to create change, which is exactly what we're all about. And again, I picked for mine, I chose 14. That kind of makes sense, right? Life below water because of my passion of the ocean and specifically ocean plastics.
So for me going forward, I really want to resonate that this is my main goal that I'm going to be focusing on. I can be a bit of a squirrel and get distracted on a lot of different things, in which case sometimes I feel like I'm not making as big of an impact. So I am going to pick one. And so I'm going to encourage you to do the same thing. And like I said, maybe at your next friendly get together, family dinner, conversation, you can maybe make it a game. Guess what friend you think is going to be their SDG goal.
Learn a little bit more about it. Then as we go through this next episode, we're going to dive into how to take this SDG goal and turn it into an actionable community action. There's your three-minute hack for small waves make big waves, and we look forward to seeing you next time.
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