Beyond Carbon Neutral: How We Fix the Climate Crisis Now

Samuel Goodman, Ph.D., chemical engineer, and author of Beyond Carbon Neutral: How We Fix the Climate Crisis Now. Dr. Goodman is someone who's fascinated with challenging problems, and climate change is something he's been working on for decades. His book not only boils down the problems we all face, but provides action items on how to get out of this mess with current technologies. He brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. Listen in and come away with some truly thought provoking ideas! DrSamuelGoodman.com
 

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Transcript

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 26 | Sam Goodman |

[Upbeat theme music plays] 
Female Voice Over 
[00:03] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!

Taylor Martin 
[00:17] Welcome, everyone. I have Sam Goodman on the podcast today. He has a doctorate in chemical engineering. He wrote this wonderful book called Beyond Carbon Neutral: How We Fix the Climate Crisis Now. He did a really good job writing the book. Once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down because he broke apart all the problems that created our climate crisis and then he dives down into each one of them per chapter so you can really get into the understanding of the problem, of one part of the problem, I should say, and then you can dive into the solutions that are already available to us today. That’s the beauty of this. He has basically spent I don’t know how much time, how many years he’s been writing this book, but he did a great job at breaking it all down and making it really digestible. Sam, this is a great book. Please tell our listeners a little bit more about your background, your history, and how you got to write this wonderful book. 

Sam Goodman
[01:16] Yeah, well, thank you very much for that introduction. I’m very happy to be here talking about this today. Let’s start at the beginning. I’m a Wisconsin native, grew up out there in the Midwest. I’ve always had an interest in climate change going back to the ‘90s back when the Kyoto Protocol was somewhat in the news. It never really went anywhere and never really saw a whole lot of traction even as up through high school. It got a little bit on the radar on the 2008 election but it was brushed aside as the whole 2008 financial collapse happened.

At that point, I was in college. I was trying to gear myself in that area. I was a chemical engineering undergraduate looking to get involved with sustainability and things like that. One of my first research projects was looking at biologically derived chemicals that you could use to replace inputs for plastics, so taking something that would normally come from oil and instead get it from something that you grow out of the ground, eliminating some use of fossil fuels there. That guided my choice of graduate school. I really wanted to focus on energy. When I started by PhD research, I really narrowed it down in that kind of sense. I did a little bit of work on that. I did some investigations into some new solar cell materials. They didn’t work out that well. Hey, you learn some physics along the way. I did a little bit of research into thermal electrics, how you convert heat into electricity directly, which is interesting, but not really a very scalable application in and of itself.

The major thing, though, I learned in graduate school was that I really don’t want to be in academia long term. I moved out from Colorado where I was studying out to the east coast. I’ve been in the Washington DC area ever since working on the intersection of science and public policy. You have the one end, the technical, how you make these things work, the science behind them, but just as important, as you mentioned in the introduction, is how you actually implement those solutions. Because you could have the best possible technology sitting in a box on a shelf, but unless there’s some force to make someone pick it up and use it, it’s just going to sit there.

Taylor Martin
[03:33] In your book, you mentioned many different types of technology and you drill down into wind, solar, geothermal. The one thing that struck me was that you didn’t just decipher the technology. You also deciphered the human condition, how we don’t have a very good system set up for shifting and redirecting this huge ship rod because we’re heading in this one direction that’s not really a good direction. We’re trying our best to get as many hands on that wheel to move it over so we can avoid this catastrophe or whatever kind of future we’re heading towards right now. Can you talk a little bit more about how you got to dive into all that?

Sam Goodman
[04:15] Yeah, so really the book is the culmination of a lot of years of thinking of these things. Of course, you read things in the news. You see different news reports. If you’re like me, you go into the academic side of it. You see all the papers coming out with all the wide-eyed claims about how this will be the magic bullet that will solve everything, and then six months later, it’s completely buried and nothing ended up happening. It was born of that cycle of frustration of really why isn’t this going on that really motivated me to dig into it and to just – part of it was to see is there even a solution that’s viable in the near term, like is there even hope for the future and what would that kind of trajectory look like for us if we actually wanted to reach it, not the journalistic flare for promoting these one off studies or minutia that end up not going anywhere, but if you really dig down into it, what needs to happen to actually reverse climate change as it’s happening right now? The book is me trying to work through all that. You really have to look through each individual solution to try to do that because there’s a ton of information out there. You could write 1,000 pages on any single technology. It’s really trying to distill that down to see how this could actually work and be deployable and scale quickly.

Taylor Martin
[05:35] Yeah, that’s one of the things I loved about how you drill down into each chapter. If we spent a good conversation on each chapter, we would be here all day. I thoroughly, like I said, I really was amped when I read that book. It was awesome. Let’s go ahead and do that. Let’s drill down a little bit. Let’s talk about solar. The price of solar is always going down every year. Now with supply demands where they’re at right now, I don’t know where it’s at or where it’s going to be next year. It got down to a point where it was more affordable. Everybody knows that solar is great because you get a lot of sun during the day. They can last for 30+ years. We just don’t know how long they can last because they can last so long, especially new ones we’re building today, but there is the duck curve. I was hoping that you could explain to our listeners probably better than I can the duck curve.

Sam Goodman
[06:26] Absolutely, and that’s really a foundational thing to keep in mind when you’re talking about all these different renewable technologies. It’s really best to draw the comparison to a traditional fossil fuel plan. Whether you’re burning coal, whether you’re burning natural gas, as long as you have the fuel there, you can do that any time at any level you want to meet the demands of the grid. It’s basically completely in our control how much electricity we’re generating from those sources. You contrast that with something like a solar panel. Obviously, you can’t get any power from it at night, and if there’s a cloud in the way, your power output drops. Those are things that are broadly outside of our control. We can’t really make a [inaudible] cell produce more power than the amount of light we’re getting from the sun. What happens is you see this in places that have installed a lot of renewable capacity. Southern California has run into this issue where during the day, it’s nice bright and sunny. You get a whole lot of power from all the panels they’ve installed. It really drives down fossil fuel use at the high point of the day such that it’s only nominally online, just enough to keep the machines running without damaging them. Then as soon as the sun goes down, all those fossil fuels sources ran back up and they take over because no more renewable energy is available on the grid. You’re stuck with this fossil fuel base load that you can’t really get rid of just by adding more and more panels onto the grid. You reach a point where there’s diminishing returns without an additional investment in energy storage. Taking that energy from when the sun is at its peak in the day, holding on to it so you can use it later that night so you can finally take off those last remnants of the fossil fuel infrastructure. That’s really the overview of what the duck curve is and why it’s a major impediment to moving forward.

Taylor Martin
[08:22] Yes, it is. When I first learned of it, I was just like – I just had an a-ha moment of, crap, that’s not an easy one to overcome. In your book, you talk about different ways of battery storage. Battery creation these days is actually in hyper speed, especially with all these electric cars coming out. You tapped onto an idea I never thought about where what if you went home and plugged in your car and your car worked as a battery buffer, if you will, energy buffer. I mean, I’m seeing more and more electric cars on the road. I bought one myself a couple of months ago, which I love, by the way. I thought that’s not a bad idea if you could have that. Because I mean, it’s like giving and taking, just using it as a buffer to hook it up to the grid when you get home, some of the energy you might have collected at work if you were plugged in or whatever your battery capacity is, you get enough cars hooked up to that system and have a smart grid that can help move things around, I thought that was a pretty good idea.

Sam Goodman
[09:25] Yeah, so batteries are definitely one of the enabling technologies because really there’s no other way to get cars to work in this type of civilization we’ve built. We’re very road dependent, and even if we switched over to mass transit, more light rail systems, even just getting around town in America, you do need a car. You need to divert those resources to building those batteries. The observation I make in the book is that all these – the best batteries based on lithium-ion technology, there’s only so much lithium we produce every year. You see some new grid scale installation, solar panels or wind turbines, that come with a bank of batteries to act as that energy storage. You’re really limited in the amount of total capacity you can build over a year. If you try to split it up, go to grid storage, go to cars, you’re going to run into material constraints and you’re not going to be able to do either one very effectively. You really need to prioritize those materials to one or the other. Since there’s no real other alternative for cars, that’s where it has to go.

The smart grid you mentioned, that’s a very interesting idea. It’s something you see quite a bit. It’s basically just as you explained it. You gave a very good overview of how it works. My concern, though, with that kind of approach is that it has to be very secure. I spent a fellowship at the department of defense so I have this kind of security aspect to how I approach certain problems. When I see you want to connect all these things over the internet, that gives me a little bit of heartburn just because you have cyber attacks going on that use these internet connected devices to launch massive attacks on all kinds of, not only infrastructure, but financial systems and all these deleterious impacts from these malicious actors. You really have to make that system very, very secure, not only at the inception, but throughout its entire lifetime. Because you buy a car for, I hope, like ten years at the very least to get the maximum use out of it before you have to replace it. You have to keep updating that security constantly to make sure it remains secure. That’s a major hurdle to overcome because there’s not as many incentives to keep older technology secure as you might think. You have a major operating system that’s only supported for maybe ten years whereas the solar panel has a lifespan of 30. There is a disconnect, I think, before we can fully implement the potential of something like smart grid to make that better to give us that buffer and help overcome the duck curve in that way.

Taylor Martin
[12:07] Yeah, I do like the way solar helps us branch out the need for – the problem with attacks. If someone was to attack our power grid if we have a power plant somewhere and they attack that, it shuts down that region of wherever you’re at, whereas if everybody had solar panels and more self-reliant and battery packs and whatever, then great, but again, you talk about the material limitation, which is totally valid. Speaking about solar, I think it was in your book you talked about how if we had multiple large solar powered sites across the United States, just using the United States as a point of reference here, you said that that’s something that we could do now. We could set that up and put solar paneled farms all over the place because it takes energy to push energy long distances so having more solar paneled farms all over the place. How likely do you feel like that’s going to happen in our current climate of policies?

Sam Goodman
[13:09] I think it’s – that’s one area where I think it’s more likely than potentially other things because it is a little more incremental and on a smaller scale. Say you’re a manufacturer that wants to green their process. If you’re a light manufacturing firm, you have a nice big square roof that you can throw a bunch of panels on, you can immediately see the benefit from doing that. You do have some pressure coming up to make that happen rather than relying on the downward macro policy to make that kind of transition happen. You also have state level initiatives, like these clean power plants from New York or California that really incentivize these kind of smaller scale installations. Really the solar panel installation industry employs several 100,000 people across the United States so it’s not something that’s really smaller niche anymore and really that can accelerate quite a bit if we have all the materials we need.

Taylor Martin
[14:09] What about wind? How is that in retrospect?

Sam Goodman
[14:12] Wind is a little interesting because you really only want to install wind when it’s a major tower, one of the big [inaudible] you see off the side of the interstate as you’re going through the corn belt or other flat areas of the country because that’s how you get the best power density because you can’t really stack those very close together. They need to be separated quite a bit to work at maximum efficiency. You run into a problem there because we’ve saturated the great plains with these already and not as many people live out there so you have to invest in the infrastructure to bring that power out to either coast. The natural alternative to that is offshore wind power. The wind offshore is much more intense, it’s much more consistent, and you can build the turbines much bigger, up to three to four times bigger than you would see on land. It’s a great option for those high population density coastal areas without having to build a whole lot more high voltage transmission lines from the interior of the country. The downside is there’s some opposition to doing that because it does alter the ocean view which is something I get into in the book. There’s only five wind turbines offshore in the entire United States off the coast of Rhode Island. When they tried to build more, it got tied up in a whole lot of protest and litigation from a very small subset of people who didn’t like having the views from their mansions disturbed in such a way. That’s more of a social barrier to taking that kind of action rather than any technical limitation.

Taylor Martin
[15:46] How about geothermal?

Sam Goodman
[15:48] Geothermal is an amazing technology because you have your solar, your wind, those all lead to a duck curve without storage, whereas geothermal, that’s basically a one-to-one replacement with any kind of fossil fuel plant that you’re replacing, only you’re replacing the coal or the natural gas with heat coming up from inside the earth. Basically, you pump water underground. If you’re in a geologically active zone, you’ll have a lot of high temperature rock that’s relatively close to the surface. As that water goes down, it picks up heat, and then you pump it back up to basically run a steam turbine like you would in any other power plant. You can do that at any capacity you want. You can run that 100% of the time. It works day or night regardless of the weather. It’s a one-to-one drop in replacement which makes the entire transition that much easier. The problem, though, is those spaces aren’t the most common here in the United States. You look at a country like Iceland. They’re able to replace most of their power grid because it’s basically an island built over volcanos. Really there’s only a couple of spots in the United States that’s really even amenable to that kind of construction. Mostly in the west, there’s nothing really on the east coast, no areas that are really viable for that. Unfortunately, it’s limited, but it’s very, very valuable in those places where you can because then you can divert the other renewable resources to the areas that don’t have it. That’s the top priority in the book. It’s a short chapter but because the conclusion I feel is very obvious.

Taylor Martin
[17:25] Yeah, and the problem as we have illustrated thus far you can’t have them all working at the level that you want. You can’t just ratchet it up, ratchet it down, and therefore you have to fill it. You fill it with what? We fill it with coal. We fill it with natural gas to fill in those gaps. In you book I think you said there’s 62% of our energy comes form natural gas and coal and only 17% comes from renewables. Is that right?

Sam Goodman
[17:57] That’s correct. There’s a long way to go.

Taylor Martin
[18:00] I had an architect on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. He spoke about how when they’re designing homes or buildings, really large-scale buildings, they don’t deal with 100-year floods. They’re looking at 1,000-year floods. They’re looking at massive, more tornadoes, hurricanes, they’re just looking at more extreme weathers. They’re already making decisions now to design because they know it’s coming. It’s a little scary to think of it that way, but I think it’s a realistic view. That freaks me out but that’s why I think I gravitate towards your book so much because you have realistic solutions that are technology we have right now.

Sam Goodman
[18:44] I’ve lived through one of those, not very catastrophic, but when I was in Colorado, there was a massive storm that caused one of those 100 or 1,000-year floods to just roll through where I was living. It was out in Boulder, Colorado so it’s right at the foot of the mountains. There’s a creek that runs through, Boulder Creek. Normally, it’s about 20 feet below the road level, but it was going over the overpasses for a day. It washed out an entire road such that people in the towns up in the mountains, they couldn’t get back down unless they drove three hours out of the way. It was like that for almost a year. It was a tremendous disruption that caused a whole lot of damage. That’s just one small area. We have more hurricanes. We have more tornadoes, like you mentioned. Not only that, but the storm surge is worse in the hurricane example because you have these more powerful storms because higher temperature puts more energy, more water in the atmosphere, which causes that much more damage further inland. These kinds of things are just going to become more common and more destructive as we go forward.

Taylor Martin
[20:00] What about – you mentioned the oceans. What about movement in the oceans in terms of creating electricity or power?

Sam Goodman
[20:07] Yeah, that’s the one I’m a little more skeptical of. The technology is not quite there yet for a lot of these technologies. The ones that are really proven, there are two good examples of what are called barrages. These are basically just a wide area dam that you construct off the coast on the ocean, such that when the tide comes in, it spins some rotors as it reaches its high tide point, and then when it flows out, it spins those rotors again to give you some energy. It’s a medieval principle. We’ve had mills and water wheels off the coast of Europe that work off this principle for 1,000 years. It’s just doing that but on a massive scale. There’s one in France. There’s a big one in South Korea. The issue, though, is we don’t exactly have a good survey of where we can build those because you need a good amenable piece of land to minimize your construction costs. One of the things I advocate for in the book is to do such a survey to see how much of an impact this could potentially have or whether it’s more of a wild goose chase. We don’t really want to waste the time or resources if it’s not viable. Technology is there. It just depends on the geography.

Other methods that are commonly in the popular science press are trying to capture the motion of waves, not quite there yet. There’s not really been a grid scaled demonstration because the power density that you get out isn’t the best. I mean, you imagine one of those hurricanes coming through and that just becomes so much more debris that litters the beach and you have to replace. That doesn’t make as much sense to me in the long term either. That’s unfortunate because there is a lot of wave power. It’s just not the most dense out there. There is one approach that I really like, though, that I talk about in the book. There was this test facility off the United Kingdom where instead of having a floating pontoon to capture the motion of the waves, it was more of a hardened structure that captured the waves as they break on the shore to capture the energy instead. That’d be a much more stable situation I think and that was actually connected to the grid and provided power for a number of years. That would be something else to look for as you’re doing this coast line survey of amenable locations, just add that into the mix.

Taylor Martin
[22:25] I want to skip back to the security part of it because what we’ve been building upon is, whenever you take all these sources of energy together and you have to manage it, there’s got to be some software. The security part, I really enjoy your security lens through all this. I want to say how can we make it work, but I think what you said earlier about always having to manage it, like Fort Knox, like a bank has to manage their security, I just don’t see a way of getting around that. I think we’re going to have to have a smart grid that is interconnected, but extremely secure. Now, I don’t know what type of technology. I’m not a developer. I’m not a programmer. Do you see any other way around that for the future? Because you can’t just, like I said, you just can’t pull a lever and just get more solar.

Sam Goodman
[23:17] Yeah, so I think – like I can’t speak to the specific kind of security protocols you’d use, but I think philosophically you can change your thinking about how you design such systems. Because let’s say you’re an equipment manufacturer right now. You make money whenever you sell a specific product. You want to sell as many as you can. You want to update it regularly so your customer keeps having to buy and refresh. That doesn’t make sense. That business model doesn’t make sense when you’re worried about security and making long lasting infrastructure. There needs to be some kind of force to change the paradigm of that thinking from quick obsolescence to really encouraging, or if you’re trying to make your infrastructure work, mandating that longer lifespan go into the design from the very outset. You’re focusing more on making a long lasting very secure device as your primary objective. That really requires a change in thinking, a change in priorities from what we’re doing right now, but I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible.

Taylor Martin
[24:20] In your book, you did talk a lot about politics and the hurdles we all have to overcome in that regard. With our politics so divided these days, I see us going in the opposite direction as opposed to what is needed at this current moment in time. Can you speak about that from your lens? Because I want to hear it from your point of view in terms of how optimistic or pessimistic of a viewpoint you might have on that.

Sam Goodman
[24:50] You have to be optimistic, otherwise you just give in to despair and disengagement, which doesn’t do anybody any good. I mean, you look at the data. I’m a scientist. You look at the data and you’re like, well, we haven’t done much so far, so I’ll extrapolate that out and say we’re not going to do anything so it’s pointless, but that’s not a very healthy way of thinking. I have to be optimistic when I look at these things. Really, the main bottleneck is that we have for 150 years built our civilization around these fossil fuels. There’s a ton of inertia behind them, both in money and the capital used to extract them and power our entire society. Look at this from the perspective of an oil company. You have the rights to reserves, which have a certain value. You own refineries. You own the extraction equipment. You own the distribution system. All of those things currently have value and provide you with money. Once you transition away to renewables and leave fossil fuels behind, suddenly all of that is worth nothing. All the future profits, all the financial instruments that are based on all of those different assets that are now worthless also become worthless. You have this massive in-built inertia against taking the kind of transformational change that would really move us away from climate catastrophe.

That percolates through the political system as well, because if you own an oil company, of course it makes sense to make certain contributions. It makes sense to, through different kinds of advocacy groups, put your perspective in front of lawmakers to make sure that your needs are high on the priority list. It’s really that kind of combined inertia that is the major stumbling block to get over as we get through this. There has to be a political change from a different direction, because renewables, we’re getting more of them. As you mentioned, it’s like 17-odd percent of our grid, but they don’t have that 150 years of inertia and money behind them to really be able to overcome fossil fuels yet at this point. What that takes is more of a ground up approach. If politicians are focused on these, excuse the pun, these well-oiled constituencies for extracting fossil fuels, you have to threaten them at the point of their job. Ultimately, we still have elections in this country and you can have pretty big impacts on that at especially the local and the primary level. The general election, that’s a kind of a wash at that point. Where you really gatekeep who’s in the halls of power is at the lowest possible level. Turnout is always incredibly low in primaries. It’s also incredibly low at local and even state elections. If you have a highly motivated group of people to get involved and take over that apparatus at the very bottom, that naturally percolates up because that gates who is even eligible for the higher office, who gets that institutional support. It really depends on a much more mass popular movement to elevate the right people into those places and then keeping them accountable once they’re actually there. That’s really the only way to overcome the inertia that largely, once you’re in a seat, you don’t want to change what you’re doing. You want to put in the least amount of effort for the maximum reward. You don’t want a campaign. You don’t have to raise – you don’t want to raise funds for a primary. That is a very real threat for a lot of these individuals that it allows a much smaller cohort of people to have an outsized impact on the end result.

Taylor Martin
[28:32] Yeah, I completely agree with you on that. On your book, you mentioned you dove into breaking down how one side sees it this way and the other side sees it another way. The democrats might have it more on their radar with the green deal and the republicans might have it in terms of what the science says and follow the science. They just throw their hands up of what the science says, you have to listen to the science. From both parties view, whichever side of the aisle you’re on, you see them wanting to do something but they can’t do it because they don’t have the political will, or as you just illustrated, the people behind them are not pushing them strong enough and the people with businesses and the moneys that are taking us down the wrong path, they’re the ones that are deciding where we’re going. It’s going to get to an influx because the way I see our future headed climate wise, things are going to have to change.

Sam Goodman
[29:31] I think you’re seeing that a lot more as we go into the future because we’ve been in this gridlock situation for 40 to 50 years even at this point where you get elected, you have power, but nothing really changes. You have this built-up level of frustration where, for the general population, you’re still living on the margins. Most Americans don’t have $500 in their bank account. They’re living paycheck to paycheck. These compounding things keep happening, whether that’s due to climate change or the pandemic. Nothing really seems to be happening so you keep building up this bottled frustration. The concern is, without an outlet, that’s just going to explode eventually. That’s not a situation anyone wants to be in.

Taylor Martin
[30:19] Yeah, [inaudible] that’s what you just described right there.

Sam Goodman
[30:22] Exactly.

Taylor Martin
[30:23] Let’s figure out the solution. How do we solve this planet? How do we solve this problem? Yeah, again, going back to voting. We have to get people excited about it. You mentioned in your book, you broke it down to three different things. We have to get the federal government. We need to get businesses. We need to get the individual. All of those people that are listening to this, you are an individual, whether you are in a business or in politics. We all need to do our part. I love how you sum it up at the end of the book where you say we all have to do our part. No matter how small it might be, we all – it adds up and gets us to a better end in line. I think that was great to say, but again, I am an optimistic person, but the more data I read and the more I see, and I’m trying not to just look in the dark corners of the web, but the more I put what I try to have as a balanced understanding, it’s not looking good.

Sam Goodman
[31:21] Yeah, well, there’s a couple of good points you raised there that I want to talk about. The last one, it is possible to, as the youth say these days, doom scroll and just see the constant negativity that just zaps your will to really do anything. I had a conversation with a friend of mine recently. She’s like, “You wrote this book. It’s a very depressing topic when you get down into it. How do you keep from going nuts?” Honestly, you need to have something that allows you to disengage and think about something completely different. Whether that’s turning off the news and just looking at something on trash, like I watch Dr. Pimple Popper and Storage Wars, things that aren’t political but about – watch something and be entertained and at least not think about it for a little bit. Have other projects that aren’t related to climate change to give myself a break so when I come back to it, I’m more refreshed. I can think about it more clearly. I don’t have that impending sense of doom that’s really limiting my emotional capacity to really deal with this. You can’t focus on 100% of the time because you won’t do yourself or anybody else any good because of that.

Then the work of the individual, so I think the comparison I made in the book is that you could be the perfect person, you could recycle perfectly, use all your reusable bags, drive an electric vehicle, and it won’t offset a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a coal power plant’s output. Really, that’s the personal responsibility angle of it I think is misdirected because it’s always towards our consumption, our behaviors, what you buy at the grocery store, are you a moral person because of where you shop, whereas your personal choices like that don’t really matter. They’re really constraint. Because I mean, so many industries are consolidated into a handful of big players that your personal consumption choices really don’t matter, especially if you’re talking about something that’s a natural monopoly like the power grid. You can choose to consume more. You can choose to consume less. You can’t really consume in a way that forces your local power company to switch to renewables. The only way to really do that is through the collective actions. That’s you as an individual going out there, searching for others who share your concerns and share your values on this particular topic, and using that to try to build momentum and something that’s larger than any single person. Because whether that’s encouraging someone to get out to vote, which is a basic action that’s still relatively small, but it all adds up because it all involves pushing these ideas into the norm and into the mainstream which then normalizes it and makes it more towards the baseline assumption.

As an individual, you can do that through your social network. That’s something that you have a lot of power over because personal relationships matter so much more than an impersonal relationship through a TV screen. Whether that’s through family, friends, you’re much more likely to trust someone who you otherwise have a relationship with, someone you have an emotional attachment with. You can approach those conversations in a very nonthreatening way as someone, as a loved one, as a friend that is much more easily to translate and cut through a lot of those other barriers than you might otherwise have if you’re just looking at arguing talking heads on a cable news show. That’s what I get at when it’s like individuals can have a massive impact by essentially – I don’t want to use a virus metaphor given the current situation, but by spreading those ideas and helping to coalesce these larger movements throughout society.

Taylor Martin
[35:14] Sam, you’re running for office, I hear. [Laughs]

Sam Goodman
[Laughs]

Taylor Martin
[35:20] Yeah, exactly. That’s the problem. People like you and me, it’s like I don’t want to run for office, but I think we need better people trying to get into office to make these changes. I think the climate landscape before us is going to demand us to put that climate change higher up the ranks of importance of political matters. Because it’s always been there, but it’s always lower down below. I think right now it’s inflation and something else. I don’t know. It’s not climate change.

Sam Goodman
[35:57] Probably Ukraine at this point.

Taylor Martin
[35:58] Maybe but it’s not climate change. I think over these coming years, that part is going to go up, up, up and it’s going to hit the top. I just hope that – when I see these maps I got from – I think this is from the New York Times. I got a map that shows me, if you live in this part of the United States, 50 years ago you could have a possible chance of a fire. Now in 2022, the map shows much more ground covered to show that you could have chance of a major fire outbreak. We’ve had major fires here 11 years ago in Austin, Texas. That was unheard of. We had a drought. We were really low on our water reserves. That was a long time ago. I appreciate the optimism and the deciphering of that and giving us tools on how to get around that, but again, showing the solution of getting into social media and getting the voice and the message and propping up proper politicians to help us move us out of this. What are some technologies that you’re optimistic about in terms of the future? I know that you talk about technologies that are current and valid and already proven, but what about ideas that are stretching out into the future?

Sam Goodman
[37:18] There’s always the big one that people discuss, and that’s fusion. I’m personally a bit skeptical about fusion. I don’t know if it’s even possible to make that. That’s always going to be on my back burner. Something, though, that I’m very interested in and something that really rekindled my interest in climate change solutions about ten years ago after a bit of a lull was alternative nuclear reactors. Reactor is based on thorium and these different, basically completely different technologies than what we use currently. It’s not a permanent solution because we’ll eventually burn through all that fuel, but they can really make use, make better use, out of what we’ve already mined out of the ground, including a lot of the nuclear waste that has and continues to accumulate globally. It does it in a much safer way. They don’t really melt down in a way that you’d see from Chernobyl or Fukushima. They’re much safer, much more reliable. They just need a little more technical innovation to get us over that final hump for full deployment. That can slot in and be helpful in a lot of different ways. That’s one of the technologies that I’m very much interested in.

Other things to look at, unfortunately, for some of these technologies, we’re really running into fundamental barriers, like there is a physical limit to how efficient you can make a solar cell. There’s a couple of ways to get around that but they’re very expensive, require more exotic materials that aren’t really that scalable. If there was a way to – if you’re looking at the [inaudible] chart where they track efficiency, where you stack multiple junctions on top of each other, if you can find a way to do that efficiently and scalable-y, that would be a great thing because you could take a solar cell that’s maybe 20% efficient and suddenly it’s 40% to 60% efficient. You need that many fewer panels to have the same number amount of impact. That would be great. For wind turbines, we’re also at our physical limit because the materials that they use, you need progressively stronger materials as you make these bigger. The bigger they are, the more power they generate, the more efficient they are. We’re at the mechanical engineering limits for a lot of these different critical things. That, again, I’m not really sure how you overcome that. I’m not a mechanical engineer by training but that is a definite limit that would be great to see overcome because every wind turbine you make is that much better.

There are some alternative battery materials but nothing really on the horizon that’s that exciting to me personally. Lithium is really the way you have to go just because it’s the smallest element that can fill that role so you can’t really make anything more efficient than that space wise. A lot of innovation, though, is going to happen in the chemical space because we have this entire infrastructure that’s built around oil, distilling petroleum products and all the downstream elements of that. All of that would have to be replaced if we go to a fully renewable power grid. There’s a ton of interesting chemistry that has to be discovered to make that happen. That’s something I always like to keep an eye on. In that same vein, we have a lot of other processes, like steel manufacturing, that are responsible for an outsized amount of carbon emission, something like up to 10% of global emissions come from refining steel from making aluminum and cement. Making alternatives to that kind of process is also incredibly interesting because they enable that final transition away from the kind of greenhouse gas emissions we’re currently doing. Even if you fully switch over to renewable electricity, that’s something you would still have to do. That’s something I’m also very excited to be looking at in the future. Those are some of the major things that I’m looking at.

Taylor Martin
[41:08] What about carbon capturing technology?

Sam Goodman
[41:12] Yeah, carbon capture, I work my way to this in the book, but it’s still the most efficient way to do it is with nature just because – the comparison I use is you’re trying to bake a cake, you need a cup of sugar, but to get it, you have to boil water. It’s sugar dissolved in water, except there’s only a half cube of sugar per gallon of water. You have to boil a lot of bathtubs before you’re able to get enough sugar to really make anything of consequence. That’s the fundamental issue with a lot of these artificial carbon capture technologies. It takes a ton of energy. It takes a ton of materials, a lot of capital to install. It’s not something you can really do quickly or efficiently. That doesn’t make as much sense to me, whereas you could have nature suck up the carbon for you. Plants are very good at capturing sunlight and carbon dioxide to make themselves grow. An easy alternative would be to just let some wild area grow, clear all the brush, burn it, and then you can sequester that stream of higher concentration carbon in a more efficient way.

Taylor Martin
[42:21] I like to give back to organizations that are planting trees. One of the printers that we use for our business plants a tree with every job. I just donated on a previous podcast to the Haiti Tree Project where they’re trying to plant more trees in Haiti because they’ve just been decimated by natural and human conditions that are there. I want to get back to the optimistic part. What are some things that we can hopefully see coming into our futures that aren’t dismal?

Sam Goodman
[42:52] Yeah, so the tree planting, that’s an interesting one because you see it a lot. Certainly planting trees is an unambiguously good thing. You want to do that. There’s certain ways to go about it to make it more effective and that really depends on – unfortunately, you have to do more homework into how they’re measuring this, because a lot of trees that you plant don’t actually live that long if it’s not done in a proper way with proper forestry. That’s something to be on the lookout for as you’re examining this. Just unfortunately one more thing we have to do. If you’re looking to make a personal choice to start cutting down, one of the best things you can do is reduce meat consumption. This is something I talk about in the book a little bit, which is a little bit culturally sensitive because meat consumption is very ingrained in the American psyche. In a lot of places, the reaction isn’t necessarily too amenable to them. I understand that because I still eat meat. I still make pulled pork from time to time. It’s delicious. I don’t want to give that up. You can cut out certain portions of that with the new substitutes, like the beyond the impossible burgers, these different kinds of textured vegetable proteins that require massively lower amounts of inputs to actually bring that to market. This ties into carbon sequestering. I’m getting to it.

When you look at the amount of land it takes to bring, say, a pound of beef to market, it requires a substantial acreage of corn. That corn requires a whole lot of fertilizers which are derived from fossil fuels to actually bring it to market. It depletes the soil and all these other bad things, whereas when you switch to something like a vegetable-based “meat,” that requires much less land area. You’re allowing more of that acreage to potentially return to nature to start soaking up carbon and storing it in the soil, rebuilding that kind of ecosystem and environment to actually hold on to that carbon more long term since it’s no longer needed to be under cultivation. On top of that, the legumes, your peas, your lentils, those things, those plants require much less fertilizer input because they are much better at taking nitrogen out of the atmosphere into their roots to grow themselves. Corn can’t really do that. You need to apply your urea, your ammonia to do the same thing that these other plants just do on their own. You have a lot lower inputs. You have a lot less land intensity to get the same amount of calories. That then allows you to start shifting how your agricultural land is used to really change the use of it so it’s more focused towards mitigating climate change rather than putting the steak on the grill.

Taylor Martin
[45:38] Yeah, I do like to have a steak now and then, but I have to tell you, I have minimized my intake of beef dramatically. Whenever I do have a hankering for one, I have that beyond meat or miracle meat, whatever it is, there’s so many different products that are coming out that are really good. I have a pasta dish I make for my family every once in a while. These meatballs are plant-based and they’re wonderful. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that. Because I mean, I’m already seeing more of it in the aisles of my grocery store. I have my local grocery store that’s a little bit more health conscious, but the product offerings are much larger than they’ve ever been. They’re pretty tasty.

Sam Goodman
[46:20] Yeah, they’re good enough for a lot of applications. They’re not completely replacements. You can’t do a filet mignon with that kind of style. We need to wait for potentially cell cultured meat to exit the development stage but it’s good enough for burgers, meatballs, things like that, chicken nuggets, something you want to throw in the microwave to feed your kids and just get on with your day.

Taylor Martin
[46:42] Exactly, I totally agree. What are some other things that you want to highlight on this podcast? I’m going to pass the mic over to you if you want to speak out to our audience because there’s just so much in your book. We’ve touched on a lot of it, but there’s so much more in there. What are some final thoughts you want to leave our audience with?

Sam Goodman
[47:01] Right, so I think running down the main ones, we have the technology to do this now. You see a lot in other books, other publications talking about we need these silver bullets to really be able to address things. If you come away from my book with one message, that is not true. We have all the tools we need. It’s just a matter of gaining the will to actually use them and do this necessary transition. Along with that, there is not going to be a perfect transition. There’s always going to be tradeoffs. I talk about a lot of these throughout the book, whether that’s on a personal level changing your meat consumption, whether it's on a societal level how we deal with environment, how we do tradeoffs between taking action on climate change versus preserving certain environments, to how we view the political systems and the institutions that really govern our ability to make progress on all these different things. There will be no perfect solution and we have to be prepared for that. We have to be prepared to make those kinds of conscious tradeoffs to ultimately reach the better end state.

Ultimately, I want my book to instill a sense that, yes, there is still hope for overcoming this problem. Really going into the book, that was my goal to try to find out for myself. Is there still hope for this? Is there still time to implement things that will actually make a difference? Coming through the other side of it, I do believe there is. It’s important not to fall into those depths of despair and just tune out and just give up on the whole operation because it is still possible if we work to make it, if we’re willing to move forward and do these things. There is historical precedent for doing something on this scale. My grandparents, when I was a kid, they brought out their old ration cards from World War II, which was a massive societal disruption, a massive mobilization of every aspect of our civilization to conquer a common problem. This is not out of the realm of things we’ve done in the past and it’s not out of our realm of possibility now. The main thing to remember is that there is hope. We can do this. We just need to choose to do it. I think I’ll leave it with that.

Taylor Martin
[49:15] I think that’s awesome. Sam Goodman, the book again is Beyond Carbon Neutral: How We Fix the Climate Crisis Now. I love that ending. I actually felt a little better just hearing that come out of your voice. Sam, thank you for being on today’s show. How can our listeners follow up with you or connect with you on LinkedIn or Twitter?

Sam Goodman
[49:36] Absolutely, well, first of all, thank you, again, for having me on. It’s been awesome being able to speak with you here today. I really appreciate it. If you’d like to hear more from me, you can go to my website drsamuelgoodman.com. I’m also on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me on there. It’s linkedin.com/samuelgoodman. I’m on Twitter @GoodestSam. You can also reach me by email at drgoodmanmedia@gmail.com, happy to connect and engage on all these platforms.

Taylor Martin
[50:08] I just want to reiterate one thing I said at the beginning of this podcast. It’s an awesome book. I highly recommend you go out there, get it, read it, digest it. It’s really well written. I love how you brought your personal part into it and then you just rolled right into our problems, into our society, into solutions. It was really well done, Sam. Well done.

Sam Goodman
[50:30] Thank you. If you’re interested in looking in the book, I’m on all the major online retailers. We’ve got eBooks, paperbacks, hard cover, and I’ve recently released an audiobook version. Feel free to check those out, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, everywhere you would find books online.

Taylor Martin
[50:45] Excellent, thank you so much, Sam. Over and out, everybody.

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[50:49] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.

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