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In this episode of The Climate Dad, host Mike Smith introduces a new segment called the Climate Minute, where he shares key climate news updates. He highlights the rise of sustainable aviation fuel and the benefits of electric vehicles, and mentions how companies are abandoning certain sustainability goals.
Mike is then joined by Jonathan Bowers, founder and CEO of Path and Focus, to discuss the increasing importance of wildfire resilience. They explore personal experiences with wildfires and the innovative technology being developed for fire growth modeling. The conversation also touches on the role of fire suppression agencies, public tools for fire risk awareness, and the significance of indigenous practices in fire management. Ultimately, they emphasize the need for adaptation and collaboration in addressing the challenges posed by wildfires.
00:00 Introduction to Climate Change and the Podcast
04:08 Climate Minute: Key Updates on Sustainability
10:05 Personal Experience with Electric Vehicles
13:59 The Future of Electric Vehicles and Infrastructure
15:34 Wildfire Technology and Climate Resilience
18:03 Personal Experiences with Wildfires
21:08 Preparing for Wildfires: Community and Individual Actions
23:40 Innovative Technology for Fire Growth Modeling
25:53 The OODA Loop: Decision-Making in Wildfire Management
30:04 Operational Users of Wildfire Modeling Tools
34:29 Public Engagement and Fire Risk Awareness
39:51 The Future of Fire Management and Climate Adaptation
42:11 Finding Hope and Agency in Climate Action
Mike Smith (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to 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 is Mike Smith and I'm the father to two great kids. 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. All without having to become a climate expert and with our expert guidance in net zero software. Today's guest is going to be Jonathan Bowers of Path and Focus. He's doing some really cool work around wildfire prediction in our changing climate.
I'm also going to be modifying the format a little bit this week and moving forward. This is the end of our first season and I'm going to be introducing a new segment, our Climate Minute and that'll include all the week's top climate stories. So do make sure to stick around for at least that. I'll also be talking about the experience of my electric vehicle and why I think you all should potentially give it a try, even if you're a skeptic. Listen, share, let's get going.
All right, so let's begin with our new segment. Here's your Climate Minute. Starting off, sustainable aviation fuel, which is increasingly seen as a key technology for our climate future, is finding more and more in industry acceptance, also known as SAF. Major players in the space, startups in the space have been backed by even bigger players outside of it. The big example here is LanzaJet. It's backed by Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund. News of the week is the Wall Street Journal is reporting that a competitor to LanzaJet named Twelve
raised $645 million and that's to expand its work, including for its Moses Lake facility in Washington state. Next event, Bloomberg Green is reporting that several major companies have quietly abandoned their sustainability commitments in the faces of challenges around data collection and in the profitability of frankly just ignoring what their negative environmental impacts are. The report highlights Morgan Stanley's billboards in Times Square a few years ago about their announcements around plastics financing, but that
Morgan Stanley quietly shelved some of those goals based upon an inability to track their impact. Notably, they didn't abandon their climate commitments, which has shown some durability around those goals. In a related piece of work, Bain & Co. released a report this last week around CEO goals on climate, illustrating that climate retains importance even as it has lost its relative value amongst CEOs. Still important, just not as important.
The report goes on to highlight that the "Trough of Disillusionment" has hit these individuals perceptions even as climate goals take deeper and deeper effect. And they note about the comparative adoption of other technologies that have had enthusiasm, then disappointment, and then as they've gained widespread acceptance that they ultimately got on to be quite successful. So looking at that.
Finally, Bob Berwyn at Inside Climate News is reporting that the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration said last Thursday that the full loss of the glacier and much of the West Antarctic ice sheet cannot be ruled out over the next 175 years, and that based upon current projections from that loss and other glacier losses, the current baseline scenario would incur a sea level rise of about 6 feet by 2100. So by the time your children are in their retirement, they're going to be seeing
the seas will be about six feet higher. Obviously that has some major consequences for coastal cities. We're talking potentially the loss of New Orleans, large parts of Miami, pretty grim stuff. Thwaites it's noted by itself, we contribute about two feet and should the entire West Antarctic ice sheet fully melt, it itself would add about 11 feet to the sea level rise in those time periods.
And for those unfamiliar, the geography of the Thwaites Glacier acts like a cork holding back the loss of the larger West Antarctic ice sheet. And that was your Climate Minute.
So do you know what makes a car clean?
car wash. Here's your climate dad joke of the week, even if it's a bit of a groaner. I want to talk to you today a little bit about electric vehicles and their adoption. A recent article coming out from The Economist talked about how many people are currently favoring the purchasing of plug -in hybrids due to concerns about range and charging infrastructure, but that experts believe that these hybrids will ultimately fall away as infrastructure and prices improve, as the drawbacks to hybrids become relatively actually more of a disadvantage.
So that's the news article, but let me tell you about my own personal experience with electric vehicles. I'm an EV owner and I want to tell you how much I love my car. I'm not exactly the biggest gear head, even though I used to fly airplanes. Like cars have never had a ton of fascination for me. But I did have the good fortune to buy my EV back in 2019. It was just before the pandemic and kind of interestingly for the few months after that, I watched as the value of my car increased. Really weird.
Even now though, five years after I bought it, the Kelly Blue Book value estimated is still about 55 % of what I paid for it. That's pretty awesome for a used vehicle. Now, this isn't some fancy Tesla in Plaid, but let me tell you that my little Chevy Bolt EV is super, super zippy. It's faster off the line than any car I've ever had, including my first
car a Ford Mustang. It's even faster than the jet that I used to fly in getting started. Jets funnily enough are kind of slow off the line and obviously my jet was much faster at the top line speed than my my Bolt was. But nonetheless, it's pretty awesome that a used Chevy has so much zip to it. Well, why is that? The first thing is that electric vehicles have a few technology advantages.
One, there are almost no moving parts. The maintenance is practically zero. The whole system really relies on power just being delivered by wire instead of through the thousands of valves, springs, shafts, pistons of an internal combustion engine. Fewer things moving, so really fewer things break. As a matter of fact, even though it has brake pads, you rarely go through those either because like the electric motors work in reverse during normal braking to recharge the battery instead of losing that energy as heat and rotor dust.
So that's fun. Pretty much the only maintenance I have to do is to fill the washer fluid and to rotate the tires. Second, because there isn't a ramp up time for dumping fuel into the cylinders and for the pistons to fire when you press down on the accelerator, the acceleration is actually almost instantaneous. When I first bought the car, I chirped the tires quite a few times. Gone are the times when you lightly press on the accelerator in anticipation of an opening in traffic.
When it's there, you press and you go. It's just, it's pretty simple. Third, I wake up with a full tank or the equivalent thereof every day. I haven't replaced my trips to the gas stations with trips to a charging station. They're just gone. I get hours of my life back every year. I don't have to sit there and huff all the fumes and, you know, sit in the cold or the heat. Gas station trips just disappeared. I don't think of it as a trade -off for driving electric.
I think of it as a better experience than an internal combustion engine. Fourth, because there's less mechanical stuff in the car, it's actually more spacious. My Chevy is simultaneously the smallest and the most spacious car I've ever had. If you know me, I'm a big guy. My call sign in the Navy was TABB, which the PC version was. That's A Big Boy is what it stood for, T -A -B -B. I'm 6 '5", and I've never been described as anything other than a very large person. But I can't put
the seat all the way back in my little car because it would be difficult to reach the pedals. Even when I'm driving, my not small children or adults in the back seat have a ton of space in the back. There's just really not a question about leg room. I really enjoy driving it, so does my wife who's a more normal human size being or a human being. But we both angle to try to have that car on the day because we really enjoy driving it over our larger Ford Escape.
Okay, so maybe you're still skeptical and you think I'm just really excitable about new tech. And to that I'd say, no, that's actually my dad. He drove one of the first commercially available hybrids, the Honda Insight. That looks kind of like a little funny gray spaceship. He drove that for years. He loved that car. It served him well, but bluntly it had a terrible ride. It went through a lot of batteries. it was so funny looking.
It got my dad on the front page of the local section of the Idaho Statesman when I was a kid, which was my hometown newspaper. He's the guy that's willing to trade bad experiences and looking a little funny for new tech. Me? I need a reliable, affordable vehicle that gets my family around town and that doesn't have all the battery problems or the bad experiences. My Chevy Bolt does that.
The batteries in some EVs, like in Teslas especially, have been over a million miles now. My Chevy Bolt has 280 miles of range, so it gets me around town reliably all I need.
We did try a few hybrids when we were looking for this car and even though I was familiar with them, I really didn't like them. Why? Well, it's because they both need engines and batteries. And so because you didn't want to trade off, what you did trade was that they were heavy and they were cramped. They were sluggish to accelerate and they lost interior space. I wasn't worried about the range, especially since our second car was an internal combustion engine, a Ford Escape. And so the thinking was at the time that we could still use that for road trips.
And that experience is largely why I think hybrids will lose out in the long run. They're just not as much fun to drive and you have some serious trade -offs for them. Well, what are the trade -offs for having my little EV? First is my bolt's a two -wheel drive, so it's not great in the snow. I live in Denver and that's a concern. So as a result, we don't drive that bolt into the mountains in the winter. It's fine on city streets and other, there are other EVs. My sisters both have one, I have all -wheel drive.
So our next car will likely be that. Road trips, I have to admit, we're still mostly doing them in our Escape. We could do them in the Bolt, but we just haven't, mainly because it's our around town car and we think of the Escape as our road trip car. But we've committed that when we need to replace the Escape, we're going to look for something that's an EV with all wheel drive and the range that we need to make those road trips a little bit easier. Have you ever thought about electric vehicle charging? Well,
For us, we didn't even install a special charger in our home. We just use the level one charger that plugs into a normal electrical outlet. Even though it takes about 40 hours to go from a completely empty discharge battery to a fully charged one using that level of charger, you just come to realize like how much a car sits around. I've only had to take our car to a level three fast charger twice because we couldn't keep up. Like I was driving so much that like even with the plugging in, I was still running out.
Compared to what I was doing in gas station visits, that's like a super easy trade. If I drove more, I probably would have installed a level two charger. It would have cost about a thousand dollars and there were some rebates from the power company and from the state government. But like I said, we just didn't even need to spend the money. Had we had that kind of charger, it would have taken us about seven hours to go from empty to full. So effectively every night you go home, go to bed, plug it in, wake up fully charged. Much better for those of us that drive a little bit more.
What about finding chargers on the road? Done that a little bit on some of the road trips. It's really not as hard as you'd think, but they're just not as easy as gas stations yet. And that's a yet. I use a few different apps to find places to charge. They're good. And the chargers are almost always working at near places I'd like to be. So it's not really that much of a trade -off. It does help that I live in a city. They're much easier to find all over Denver, Boulder, and other cities that I've visited. I've rented them when I've had to travel for work.
But it is much harder in really rural areas. There's just not as much infrastructure there. That infrastructure is improving. One of my favorites is a company called Voltpost, V -O -L -T, post. What I really like about them is that they have a technology that you just plug into street lamps that effectively makes every street lamp a charger. They're growing. I would expect a lot of things like that to continue to come out. Anyways, when it's time to replace our Escape, there will be a little trade off on road trips.
I love taking road trips and the charging will never be as fast just based on technology as a gas and go. But here's a few things. For short weekend trips, I'll maybe make one stop that weekend with a car having like a normal battery range, especially if I can plug in at the Airbnb or hotel I'm going to. I may not have to stop at all. Harder, of course, you know, for the backpacking trips that my family likes to take where, you you park the car at a trailhead and then come back out.
But in those cases, I'll probably just plan the post -hike burger that we get to be near the charging station. But for the really long trips, which we do every couple of years, and like the great Western road trip, I'll probably still just rent a gas engine car. I save so much money and time on running my EV, it's easy to just justify the expense of rental every couple of years for those long trips. So that's what I have to do. Plus...
And this is a big plus to me. I never have to get emissions testing again.
All right, a couple of things to ask you all. One, one very tiny thing that you can do about climate is share what you're learning from The Climate Dad Go to your podcast app right now and like, rate, review, and share. It costs nothing but maybe 30 seconds. It'll help me keep growing my audience and helping to get the word out about things that we can all do on climate. And two, if you're feeling the upset of inaction or the pain of being required to report your footprint, we can make that all go away for you.
We'd love to help you over here at Aclymate, where we have the easiest, most intuitive climate solution for your business. We'll get you a baseline environmental assessment, show you ways to reduce your carbon footprint, and we'll get you on the path to net zero. It'll help your environmental branding to win new customers. More importantly, it'll keep the most valuable ones that you already have, and they're probably making you report anyways. It'll help you attract and retain the talent you need from the climate generation. And our green business certification program will help you complete a sustainability audit.
and win certification with CDP, B Corp, EcoVadis Green Business, Benchmark, and more. Why not pump up those EcoVadis scores? And if you're looking to purchase carbon offsets but need a reliable carbon broker or carbon credit broker, we have the best carbon offset programs and the leading selection of sustainable projects on the web. Now, it's time to meet with today's guest, Jonathan Bowers of Path and Focus.
Mike Smith (15:34)
All right, folks, I'm joined today by my friend, Jonathan Bowers. He's the founder and CEO of Path and Focus. Path and Focus is an innovative tech company that's operating within the fire space, specifically wildfires, and helping to resilience around wildfires and identifying where these wildfires are coming in our changing climate. As many of you know, I have a background in wildfire and forestry, and I've been really excited about this conversation. Jonathan, welcome to The Climate Dad
Jonathan Bowers (16:01)
thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Mike Smith (16:04)
Yeah, so tell us a little bit about yourself. What's your professional background?
Jonathan Bowers (16:08)
Yeah, I mean, my background is not that abnormal. Computing, I grew up with computers, had a knack for it, pursued that through university, had my first job in the public sector, working for a public school district, but quickly realized I wanted to do my own thing, be an entrepreneur, and have been doing software development in some form or another for the past two decades now. More recently,
focused in climate and data visualization and big data and all that stuff.
Mike Smith (16:42)
So Jonathan and Path and Focus are located in Kamloops, British Columbia, which is a fairly forested part of the world. I would imagine that's some part of like, how did you make the jump from just general tech into climate and wildfires specifically?
Jonathan Bowers (16:50)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah, it's a great question. mean, one of the things we've been doing over the past decade and a half or so is as a software agency, we've been building software for other people. We had a project with Avalanche Canada to help them build a weather data platform, aggregating a bunch of weather data from all sorts of weird sources that they get weather from, and really started to understand the power of reactive
data visualization and graphs to help these forecasters craft the forecast that they need to do really quickly. And because we're in Kamloops, which is right next door to our provincial operation center for fire, there seemed to be an interesting opportunity there to just explore leveraging that capability of weather data and data visualization into wildfire. And so we just felt like a natural
progression and we, you know, I have some people on the team that have either exposure to fire personally or have fought fires and just felt like a, like a thing that we wanted to put some energy in. and now it has been like a real calling, driving, driving us forward to, try and make a difference.
Mike Smith (18:03)
There's a really interesting community of people that care deeply about wildfire, and that community is really growing in my experience. My own personal experiences, people, long -time listeners know, happened with a wildfire that I experienced as a child. I've noticed that as people care, they tend to care a lot more about climate when they start choking on wildfire smoke. I think there's kind of this memorable San Francisco, know, having a, essentially not having a day one day because there was so much smoke that the sky was clouded out.
Jonathan Bowers (18:24)
Mm
Mike Smith (18:34)
But it's getting even more direct and more impactful in a lot of ways. Here in Colorado a couple of years ago, had, it was a December morning, everybody woke up, it was kind of a windy day, and by the end of the day, a town in Colorado had mostly disappeared, Superior, right here in the Front Range, and it kind of shocked everybody, and that was because of wildfire. So I think this is becoming a lot more personal. Have you had any personal experiences with wildfire?
Jonathan Bowers (18:59)
Yeah, we, so this is kind of an odd story. As a kid, I think I was 18. We were put on evacuation alert in BC. There's just a couple of different stages of evacuation. We weren't fully evacuated, but we needed to get ready. And my dad has a funeral home and we lived right next to it. So we had to sort of figure out how to deal with that. And then last year, 2023 in BC,
And in Canada was one of the worst years we've had, or no, it was the worst year we've ever had on record. People on the East coast and the States will know of all the smoke that we sent their way. But yeah, very, very devastating. We've had been on alert a number of times, ready to evacuate. We had the lake that I grew up on, one of the communities burn this year or last year. And in another community where we also spend a lot of time, the fire just clear jumped the lake.
just jumped across the lake and started burning some homes on the other side of the lake, which was not something I think a lot of people were expecting to have happened.
Mike Smith (20:03)
Yeah, we're starting to see a lot of extreme fire weather in that case. Like here in Colorado, we had the East Troublesome Fire a couple of years ago. And historically, when wildfire fighters are fighting fires, they look for natural breaks, lakes are an example, rivers, roads. And if they don't have them, then they'll try to clear them. And the East Troublesome Fire, it had never happened before. It jumped the continental divide.
Jonathan Bowers (20:06)
Yeah.
Mike Smith (20:26)
went from the west side of the divide to the east side of the divide. And it was just because of blowing embers, there was enough wind, and the fire was generating its own weather. You also see, like, people have been having a lot of these experiences, not just Superior, Colorado, but also Paradise, California, which was famous in the news a few years back. There's some really vivid images out of Fort McMurray in Alberta, where people were trying to escape through the flames. Fairly major city in northern Alberta. All brought about by climate.
Jonathan Bowers (20:47)
Hmm.
Mike Smith (20:56)
So... Okay. So, fire's scary. But what's... You know? But that's a primal human thing, right? So, okay, so what do I do with this?
Jonathan Bowers (21:01)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's so funny. Like fire is scary. I still, I still run into people who I think need to have the fire there in order to actually react. Like there's so much resistance to planning and being prepared. But I think there's a lot of things that we can do to be prepared. There's a ton of, there's a ton of work that you can do as a homeowner, just around your home to reduce the fuel up against your property. And then at the more civic or strategic level, there's
fuel mitigation work that can be done to just reduce the Chances that fire develops into that sort of high intensity fire at your doorstep in terms of you know fighting these fires I've been listening to some of the experts This just doesn't seem to be a lot that we can do to actually fight these things because like you said, they're jumping continental divides They're jumping lakes that you can't We can't fight that we can't stop that so
How do we be more resilient towards it? How do we understand where it could go? Where are the risks? And what are some of the small steps that we can take to reduce the impact that it's going to have on our lives? hopefully, some lives, save some property if we can, but ultimately just learn to live with this new reality that we find ourselves in.
Mike Smith (22:28)
within the conversation in the public at large, there's a, you people tend to be very categorical. They tend to think about like, we need to just like cut down more trees or it's just climate. It's probably some mix thereof. And so like people talk a lot about fire adapted ecologies and that we need to thin the forest to about a 1900 fuel state about where it was prior to
lot of involvement by people of European descent that had moved to the area and more towards like what had been historically happening with First Nations and Native Americans populations in the management. But for me that always seemed like it was missing the mark because we don't need to go back to 1900. We're never going to get there. We're going to a 2100 state, right, which is like where is the climate going to be in 76 years rather than where was it 124 years ago?
And so I think that's what's innovative about what you all are working on there is it's not a projecting about fire has to build in the modeling of our increasingly warming world and the fuel states of the forest that we're in. Hopefully, could you talk a little bit more about the tech.
Jonathan Bowers (23:40)
Yeah. so what we have started building is a platform that helps people model fire growth, faster and more efficiently and with a lot more ease than, has typically done in the past. ultimately when, when you talk with any, predictive services unit, that's, that's the unit within governments that sort of try to predict where fire's going to go. they look at fuel data, they look at weather data, weather forecasts.
They put them into these things called fire growth models, are just these algorithms that compute those inputs and produce burn severity maps on the outside. Where is the fire going to burn? And this process can be long, cumbersome, difficult to do. You have to be a bit of an expert in order to work some of these tools. And so what our platform is aiming to do is to just make that as close as possible to pushing a button and getting
getting out these fire growth models. So when an organization might typically be able to run several hundred of these things in a season, we want to enable them to run hundreds of thousands, if not millions of simulations and create more of a probabilistic outlook on where fire could go, either fire on the landscape, because there's actually a fire there and you know that it's going to go somewhere, where could it go? But even theoretically, if a fire were to start here, where
is the likely pathway that it's going to lead and what infrastructure is that going to affect. I'm just generally trying to just bring more data into the hands of people that need to make decisions to do some of that fuel work, that fuel mitigation work, and try and reduce some of that risk.
Mike Smith (25:25)
me a lot of, there's a guy named Colonel John Boyd in the US Air Force back in the Vietnam timeframe and he invented the concept of the OODA loop. Have you ever heard of that? Yeah, an OODA and the OODA loop is Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. And so the idea is like a key component in tactical employment of assets in the military, know, like in a wartime scenario.
Jonathan Bowers (25:36)
No, and Oodaloop? Okay.
Mike Smith (25:53)
is that you need, it's the speed at which you can observe, know, orient yourself to the new reality, make an appropriate decision and then act on it. And then seeing how, so speed of decision, of observation decision -making is key to tactical success and military employment. It's not like actually all that much difference. I studied a little bit on like how to do like a disaster response with FEMA in my Navy Reserve time. There's a lot in wildfire and like how they fight fires. it's...
the OODA loop in action. And so I hear that you're creating a tool that helps people to decide and act faster as fires are emerging. Do you think that's a correct description of what your software does?
Jonathan Bowers (26:36)
Yeah, I think so. think that's definitely one of the aspects that we try to solve for and aim to help with is just the pure time and effort that goes into executing these fire growth models can be quite cumbersome. And if you get it wrong, you just got to start over and do it again. it's finicky. There's a lot of data manipulation that needs to come into place. And you need either somebody on the team that knows how to do that, or you have to figure out how to do that yourself. And it can take.
You know, even, even an expert, can take 30, 40 minutes to produce, produce a fire growth output. And then you have to share that with somebody. So this is like big, big gap between, deciding you need to like do some modeling and actually getting those results back. And there's a lot of manual steps in the way of getting, there's a lot of manual steps in the way of you getting to that, to that answer.
We want to put that process in place so that in some cases those models are done in the morning before you even show up at work. We've just automatically processed the growth models and given you a whole selection of things for you to decide what to do with, where to prioritize your time, and in the cases where you need to do more modeling or get more understanding.
you can execute those things really quickly and at scale so you don't have to do one and then wait and then do another. You can do hundreds at the same time and have that answer earlier so you can communicate that out to whoever needs to make decisions on that, whether that's you or somebody else.
Mike Smith (28:05)
That's interesting. I didn't even think about it that you could do like essentially a Monte Carlo simulation of projected outcomes associated with certain
Jonathan Bowers (28:14)
Yeah, that's, mean, it's one of the, one of the pieces of feedback we've gotten from a potential customer early on is they, and they're, they're a suppression agency. So they will take weather data in and always, you always need to put weather data into these things. But the problem with weather forecasts is they don't account for the fact that some of these fires are quite intense and can drive their own weather. And so they'll have their own weather forecasters producing, you know,
alternate forecast to say we, you we think the wind is actually going to shift at 10 because the fire activity is so intense. It's going to drive that. they'll, they'll craft new weather data that they feed into these models to see, okay, let's, let's see what happens if, if that were true, let's make it even more extreme. What happens if, if the forecasters were wrong and it's, it's happening sooner and more, you know, with higher speed of wind and higher temperature, lower humidity, model all these things out, try to get something that, that
like shows us some picture of what could possibly happen. That's one of the goals we try to do. And if we can do that on a fire that's on the landscape now, we could also do that for fire that is just potential and theoretical. And what are some of those extreme conditions under which that fire could lead to disastrous outcomes? And then make some decisions around that. And where do we prioritize our effort?
Mike Smith (29:35)
So this is not purely an academic exercise, actually. You're a company. You're doing this for a customer. And this is where startups exist, right? Is to take the theoretical and to make it into something real, to make it act from academic into operational. So who are the operational users of this? You talked about a fire suppression agency. So what is a fire suppression agency for the listeners at home? And then I guess who are some of the other customers you might be helping?
Jonathan Bowers (30:04)
Yeah. So, I mean, this isn't one of our customers, but people will know what CalFire is, right? Like they're responsible for putting out fires and dealing with wildfires. so that's, that would be a suppression agency. They deploy a number of resources, firefighters, tankers, helicopters, bulldozers, all of this stuff to try and stop fires from causing damage or manage fires anyways. so that would be a suppression agency. Those are the types of organizations that we're looking to service.
We're also looking to democratize access to these kinds of wildfire modeling tools so that other smaller organizations can also benefit from those capabilities. So pushing some of that capability down to smaller organizations like municipalities, indigenous communities, and then also recognizing that if we can do really robust probabilistic modeling,
and look at fires that aren't even on the landscape, but the potential for landscape or the look at fires that have potential to start and where those could lead. There's a strong, I think alignment with the insurance space and trying to create more opportunities for more people to get insurance. We know that the markets, particularly in California are pretty awful for getting insurance. How can just having more insight and understanding into where the risk is.
can we create more opportunities for more protection for people on their property.
Mike Smith (31:35)
Yeah, we covered on a previous episode, I think it was episode seven on insurance and the fact that like in certain areas, flood risk because of that people like the insurance markets are starting to collapse in Florida, in California because of wildfire risk. There's a lot of like uninsurability associated with a lot of these properties. And that may be even faster than government action is actually going to change behavior in a lot of ways. But for a lot of people, is this first of all, it's their home, right? They want to be there like this is.
Nobody wants to be forced to move because of potential environmental catastrophe. And so giving a little bit more fidelity to that, I think, is really valuable from the business standpoint, but also from a peace of mind. Do you have a product or something that the general public can engage with just to see where their fire risk is?
Jonathan Bowers (32:24)
Yeah, yeah, great question. We do. It's sort of where a lot of this got started, is we built a little tool that took data that we found, basically, sort of open data from the government that they were producing, very inaccessible, just basically like a series of CSV files. And we transformed that into something that people can visualize and look at on a map, made it very fast, very easy to access. So we have a tool called Lens that we allow
basically anybody to use. It focuses mainly on Canada, but there's some application in North America as well. And it's just a tool to just give people access to understanding what is going on with fire. How is fire moving? What is it doing? It's not a tool to make emergency life and death decisions based on, but it does provide some insight. And a lot of people were using it.
like I said last year, to just understand like what is this fire doing? Because it's really hard to sit back and abstractly look at smoke coming up over the hill and have a sense of what's going on. And when you use lens and you can look through a timeline of hot spots and see fire sometimes just explode, I think it gives you a better appreciation for what is going on and the difficulty in actually trying to stop this thing.
It is massive and it just seems to grow like a bacteria just eating its surroundings. and it's, it's a awesome in a, you know, maybe in a negative way, awesome thing to look at. Cause it's just so powerful.
Mike Smith (34:02)
We have an employee here at Aclymate who lives up in the mountains, literally lives at 10 ,000 feet. But every so often there's a fire that kicks off somewhere around there and he's not the most productive employee those days because he's pretty darn nervous about what's going to happen to everything he owns. that's a pretty major stressor. So a little bit of peace of mind there. I can see how valuable that would be from...
Jonathan Bowers (34:08)
well.
Yeah, yeah.
Mike Smith (34:29)
platform. Thanks for providing that to the public. I'd like to maybe switch gears a little bit and talk about, okay so we've been talking about the tactical of how your software can help people deal with fires that are happening right now, but I'd like to explore about the idea of
Jonathan Bowers (34:31)
Yeah, yeah. Thank you.
Mike Smith (34:45)
how we adapt to them builds resilience. Like there's an adaptation. There's certain things that we can do to the landscape now, potentially building codes, municipal users, et cetera, that might be able to change those behaviors. But also to think about like, how does this fit into the larger question of mitigation? So talk to me about like what you know about like wildfire in our warming world and
What are the feedback loops that are going to be happening on that that will cause this behavior to become more extreme?
Jonathan Bowers (35:16)
Yeah, I mean, I'm not a, you know, certainly not the fire expert, but we definitely pay attention to a lot of experts and have had lots of conversations with folks. you know, wildfire basically needs two things. It needs fuel and, weather, to make it do bad things, do destructive things. we can't control the weather. so what can we do with fuel? and you know, you mentioned earlier about indigenous and first nations communities.
using fire to help manage that landscape and just reduce the fuel that's out there so that when that big fire does come, there's less to burn. So there's a lot there. And again, I'm not an expert in that field, but there's a ton of experts out there and there's a lot of local knowledge that exists within these Indigenous communities. And particularly in Canada, there's been sort of this history of
lack of collaboration and this sort of more colonial attitude towards Indigenous communities. I think that that is changing. There's definitely seems to be an air of change where they're looking to engage with these leaders more collaboratively and bring them into the process. But I think there's still a lot to do. At the individual homeowner level, in Canada, we have this program called Fire Smart. There's just a bunch of resources that you can go and like a checklist of.
You know, do you have a pile of wood stacked up against your house? You know, that's not a great place. Do you have a bunch of cedar trees within a certain zone of your house? There's a number of programs that both, you know, Canadian government and the US government have produced that help people understand what are some of the really small steps that you can do to reduce that risk. One of the stories that I've heard from a
from a firefighter, he was a senior fire behavior specialist and just recalling some of the times where he's out in a neighborhood trying to stop a fire from burning down a town. And he said, if he sees a house that is protectable, is defensible, they'll put in some efforts to it. They will do some triage because there's only so much they can do. So if you've got a house, given two choices, house with a bunch of cedar trees and a wood.
wood roof and a bunch of wood leaning up against it versus another house that doesn't have any of that and maybe has a hose out there that he can see and he sees a spark, he's going to go and try and put that out, just make the job easier for the firefighters when they're out there. But generally just like reducing the amount of fuel that is bringing that could potentially lead fire to your home or to your community.
Mike Smith (38:07)
I think a lot about like the thing you said is we can't control the weather, but we kind of are, right? By changing the climate, we are changing the weather, right? And so we're changing the circumstances there. so defensible space, 100%, land management practices often informed by like indigenous practices. Awesome, let's do that.
Jonathan Bowers (38:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mm
Mike Smith (38:29)
But there's also this deeper responsibility, just like you can partner with the fire agency by making your home more defensible so therefore they can defend it. I think you can also partner with yourself, frankly, and being part of the solution for reducing the worst effects that are going to come to pass. One of the projected outcomes of climate already being experienced is something known as aridification.
which is that a warmer air can hold more water, but typically doesn't because the relative humidity goes down and therefore it sucks more moisture out. It does change the landscape in the form that the ecologies of the forest that we have in current locations are probably not adapted to being there in the future. And so we have to think about ideas around assisted migration of forests from.
generally further south and lower elevation to further north and higher elevation in very broad strokes. Because the aridification is here to stay in almost everywhere. Even when we do get, if we have similar amounts of moisture falling, it's going to, again, projected and experienced outcome of climate change is that rain or snow is going to happen in faster and heavier bouts. And so the ability of the landscape to actually hold that moisture is going to be different as well.
Jonathan Bowers (39:46)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Smith (39:51)
And so that was kind of where I was going with the 2100 fuel state or the 2100 state that we need in the future. Like our climate will be different than what it was in 1900. And so we can be informed by the indigenous practices that pre -existed that 1900 state, but also we're entering new territory. We don't know where completely like where we're going.
What thoughts do you have about that?
Jonathan Bowers (40:17)
Whoa. mean, that's a, that's such a big, it's such a big question. mean, there's a couple of like really small thoughts just, just to add to your point, right? Like this, this cycle of fire and weather seem to reinforce itself too, right? we've just had a number of years of bad fire here in BC. and then followed by this atmospheric river that just
deluge of rain. some of some of the reports that I was reading pointed to some of those washouts and floods were were because of burn scars. And the fire rips through this rips through this ecosystem, essentially burns up all the fuel burns up all the trees, that's what's holding the ground together, but also creates this hydrophobic layer and the rain just kind of just washes right off of it. There's no there's no capacity to absorb that. So just like this, you know, fire creates just
bad conditions and it's just this reinforcing negative cycle that just feels like an awful thing.
You know, like the world that we find ourselves in is scary. It feels like there is this level of anxiety that exists. But I also have some faith in humanity. I think we've done some really interesting things despite all the horrible things that have happened. And if we can just collaborate on...
solutions and be part of a solution. think there's a way through this.
Mike Smith (41:46)
feel very similar. I feel that like nothing makes you feel better like having a sense of agency, like that you can be part of the outcome there even if it's some small part there of it. And I've noticed as people work more and more in climate they they come to climate because they're feeling a little overwhelmed and that there's like this this big problem that needs to be tackled and they're right.
But they stay in climate because they ultimately find that like they're part of the solution and they become more optimistic about the future You know a couple little factoids to throw out there from a climate perspective When I started in climate
we were on a pathway to pretty apocalyptic scenario. That was the base case scenario. In the last few years, the global, we've essentially reached emissions peak. It goes up or down a little bit from one year to the next, it's starting to steady out. It's not a cause to celebrate, but it is a cause for maybe a little turn of optimism that we can do better on this as we move forward. And I think a lot about the idea of...
On a per capita emissions footprint, the United States and Canada in a very similar space, the per capita emissions is somewhere around like what it was in the 30s. There's a lot more Americans than there were then and Canadians too. So as a result, our total emissions are much higher, but our per capita is roughly equivalent to like when 20 % of the population didn't have running water in their homes.
Jonathan Bowers (43:12)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
wow, okay. Huh.
Mike Smith (43:23)
Right? You know, and so like, so we've actually made a lot of progress. It's just kind of hidden sometimes. And so it's not cause for despair. This is deadly serious, but we shouldn't despair. Like we need to get to work because the wildfire itself is a derivative of the larger problem. And the larger problem is aridification driven by a warming climate.
Jonathan Bowers (43:30)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike Smith (43:48)
Okay folks, so Jonathan Bowers has joined me today. He's with Path and Focus. You can find them at pathandfocus .com. If you'd like to learn a little bit more, is there any other way that you'd like people to reach out to you, Jonathan?
Jonathan Bowers (44:01)
Yeah, I'm just a little bit active on Twitter or whatever it's called now, at the JonoTron. You can talk to me there. But yeah, the website is a great place to find out what we're doing and what we're up to.
Mike Smith (44:16)
Got it. So if you're a government, a municipality, an insurance company, or you're just interested in kind of knowing what your own fire exposure, make sure you go to pathandfocus .com or hit Jonathan up on Xitter and we'll take it from there. Jonathan, thanks for joining me.
Jonathan Bowers (44:35)
Thanks so much for having me.
Mike Smith (44:41)
Smart guy, isn't he? Anyways, to wrap up, I want to hear from you. Go to Aclymate.com or send an email to TheClimateDad @ Aclymate.com to submit a question for me or 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 our team here at Aclymate. We'll get you set up with the best, most affordable, and easiest climate solution out there.
Mike Smith (45:08)
also want to thank you all for joining me on my first season here of The Climate Dad. Now that this is episode 10, we're going to be closing out season one, but I'm really excited actually about where season two, and that's going to be coming very shortly, is going from this. I've learned a lot along the way. A couple things that we're going to be introducing. First, we're going to be seeing weekly podcasts. We'll be changing the format so we have interviews one week and then there will be educational material the next. So make sure you tune in every week for The Climate Dad moving forward. Two.
We're going to have semi -regular interviews, people that will be joining us on a more routine basis. And then three, we're going to be including some new segments. You saw one today, having the climate minute. We'll be doing a lot more things like that.
Mike Smith (45:49)
Thanks again to Jonathan Bowers for joining me and thank you all for listening. 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. Again, my name is Mike Smith and you were listening to The Climate Dad.
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