Don’t think that your little bit doesn’t matter. Whatever each of us can do to reduce our carbon footprint, to help prepare for what’s coming, what unfortunately is kind of baked in with climate change, every little bit does matter.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program today, Terry tamerman, Terry has been on the show before. I really, I’ve always enjoyed talking with Terry about his broad range of experience. One of the highlights of his long and story career was he was the secretary of environmental protection from november 2003 through 2006 and served under Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was the governor of California for that period.

And he’s also gone on and run the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. He was in charge of seventh generation advisors written four books regarding the environment, as well as named vanity fairs 2007 environmental hero Time Magazine’s 2007 birthday edition featured him on the 51 things we can do section in 2008 and The Guardian ranked Terry number one. It’s top 50 people who can save the planet. So welcome to the program. You’ve got a lot to live up to there.

Well, thanks, Matt, yeah, especially that part about being someone who could save the planet. That prediction was more than a dozen years ago, and I’m not doing very well so far.

Well, it’s a challenging job, and I think it takes literally millions and millions, if not billions of people to kind of make this happen. And one of the things I’m heartened by is how many great people are out there doing tremendous work, and certainly you’re at the forefront of leading that charge at all to see your new position. Tell us and tell the audience a bit about what you’re doing it all to see and and why it’s so important.

Well, thanks, Matt. And yes, it does take a village, as they say, to solve these big problems. In fact, as my former boss, Arnold Schwarzenegger, likes to say, nothing major has ever been done without everybody getting involved and without a major movement, whether it was civil rights or independence in India with Gandhi and so forth, it always does take everybody getting involved. And so one thing I want to emphasize at the beginning of our conversation is don’t think that your little bit doesn’t matter. Whatever each of us can do to reduce our carbon footprint, to help prepare for what’s coming, what unfortunately is kind of baked in with climate change, every little bit does matter.

And on that note, I’m very excited to be the president and CEO of all to see now for the last three years here in the Port of Los Angeles. In fact, you can see behind me, I’m sitting in an office in these 110 year old warehouses that we have renovated into a modern blue economy hub. And that means we are hosting researchers and companies that are developing and and commercializing solutions to the climate crisis from the ocean, things like regenerative aquaculture.

So how can we grow kelp or other seaweed to sequester carbon, to provide food and fuel and even pharmaceuticals and industrial colorants and all kinds of other things, much more sustainably than we do today. We also work with renewable energy. We sponsored a bill in Sacramento last year to incentivize wave and tidal energy. Anybody who’s ever been in a strong surf you know how much power waves have and the tides, and so we know that we can harness that for renewable energy. And we lead a coalition of 30 companies that helped California identify how to do that, and now is implementing that law that we helped get to pass that will now incentivize getting these companies here and producing clean energy here.

We also have three universities here researching how to remove carbon pollution that’s already gone into the atmosphere, how to remove that from the ocean. Because about a third of our carbon pollution that’s gone into the atmosphere over the centuries has gone down into the ocean, has been absorbed by the ocean, making it more acidic.

We could talk about that more, but the point being, we now know how to remove a lot of that from the ocean. And one of the three University experiments not only removes the carbon, but produces hydrogen, green hydrogen as a byproduct, which is something we can use to decarbonize port activities and ships and other things. So we do a lot of work with hydrogen here at all to see. And then the last broad category is blue technologies, things like underwater robotics or underwater 3d concrete printing for underwater infrastructure.

Really amazing innovations. Bob Ballard, who found the Titanic, he has a workshop here, and he. Builds all of his underwater drones and robots and then sends it out to wherever his ship is to map the ocean and to find more titanics. So and importantly, we also do open houses here. So anybody who wants to sign up for our newsletter, you’ll get to know about our open houses six times a year and other public events where you can come and see all this.

And we have school kids who come through 1000s of school kids on field trips, and we work with community colleges on workforce training programs to build the workforce for these new industries. So it’s a really exciting, dynamic place and a great way to re utilize these 110 year old warehouses.

I’ve been down there a couple times, and it is an amazing space. I was down there the day that former Governor Schwarzenegger connected the power that was coming off your solar panels, which are enough to power 800 homes, which is pretty fantastic, just one, one old warehouse. So if we could do that around the state, we could probably, I think the governor had said that it could power pretty much the entire state off of putting up solar on these warehouses.

Another, I was fortunate enough to interview a couple of people you kind of referenced obliquely there, Ina Braverman from echo wave power, who’s got a company harnessing the wave energy. And Gaurav Sant, who has that company that you just described, that takes the carbon out of the ocean as well as creates a blue hydrogen.

So, yeah, really fascinating, incredible entrepreneurs working down there. So I encourage the public to go out there and check it out. Port of LA, I guess, sign up for Terry’s or the all to see newsletter, so you’ll get information about it and stay current, because it’s truly cutting edge technology going on

exactly. And we really do want people to understand it’s an ocean planet. You know, we often talk about the fact that 70% of the surface of the earth is ocean and 30% is land. But that’s a little bit misleading, because the 30% that’s land, what you see is kind of what you get. That’s how much space is available for nature or humans on land.

But in the ocean, it’s not just the surface. It’s deep. So I asked a researcher to tell me, if you took all the ocean water and put it on the 30% of our planet that’s land. How deep would the swimming pool be? And the answer comes back, five miles. So in other words, the height of Mount Everest on all the land, depth of the ocean, if we were to do that. And so it gives you a sense of perspective of how much ocean there is, not just surface that we can sustainably use, but we also must protect.

Yeah, it’s mind blowing. You kind of talked about it again a little bit with a phytoplankton essentially, that creates, I think it’s up to 50% of the world’s oxygen, and because of the acidification and heating of the ocean, we’re messing with that whole process that could be cataclysmic if we really screw it up any more than we already have.

Well, that’s exactly right. I wrote a book, and you were nice stuff to mention. I’ve written several. One was called watercolors, how JJ the whale saved us, and it’s a story of about 30 years ago, when I was the Santa Monica Bay keeper rescuing a baby gray whale. And I use the opportunity of telling that story, and by the way, it has a happy ending, I use that to tell the story of how it was predicted back then that by the time she was 50 and she should live to be about 75 so within about 10 years from now, that gray whales would be starving because ocean acidification is dissolving the shells of the little shrimp, like creatures that they eat, which is mostly in the Arctic.

So if they can’t get the volume of food they need that, it would lead to their starvation. Well, already, about five years ago, we’ve started to see and now we’ve seen more gray whales washing up on beaches in North America, emaciated and undernourished because of this trend. So it’s already having profound impacts on the food chain. And you might think, well, that’s just the whales, but this is the base of the food chain for all of us. And as you said, for even things like producing enough oxygen for us to breathe.

I had Captain Paul Watson on the program of Sea Shepherd and Whale Wars, and he was talking about how important the whales were for the health of the oceans, and that they’re defecating tons and tons every day, and that is creating fertilizer, essentially, for the ocean. So if we kill off the whales, we kill off so much more than just the whales.

Yep, in nature, nothing gets wasted, right?

So tell us a little bit about the things that you’re doing at all to see what’s the next breakthroughs that are being worked on there and and where you see kind of all to see the trajectory over the next few years.

Well, I’ll mention a couple. It’s really interesting to see right now, there’s a lot of pressure on ports and shipping to decarbonize, to move away from fossil fuels. And ships, of course, are very difficult to decarbonize because you have to change engines or build new ships, to burn different fuels or to operate on battery or some other kind of electric motor.

And if you are going to use other kinds of fuels, low carbon fuels, you have to have the fuels in each port that doesn’t do any good if, for example, a ship can get E methanol or ammonia in one port, but then it goes to the other port and it can’t refuel.

So that’s a very big infrastructure requirement. And there’s big international companies and the International Maritime Organization that are working on that transition, but the ports themselves are enormous sources of greenhouse gas emissions and localized air pollution that, you know, people might not always care about greenhouse gas pollution, but if you can see and smell the air all the time, and it’s causing lung cancer and harming your kids and your families.

You can definitely feel that. So getting the ports to decarbonize is important for all of those reasons. And here in Los Angeles as an example, we have 3500 pieces of equipment that just move containers around the port, take it off the ship, put it on the truck or train or vice versa, and those all have to be zero emission by 2030 because of regulation and the goals of the ports. So all of those are going to have to convert to either battery electric or hydrogen electric.

And the challenge is getting the equipment manufacturers to make these fast enough. I mean, it’s difficult to get the charging infrastructure in and so forth, but we know how to do that. If we can charge a Tesla, we can charge a piece of container handling equipment or a forklift, but it’s getting the equipment manufacturers to build those fast enough. So one of the things we’re doing here is a company called us hybrid is going to locate here and retrofit existing equipment.

So you can just take the diesel motor and the gas tank off of the piece of equipment and replace it with a hydrogen tank and a fuel cell and an electric motor. Now you’ve got a zero emission piece of equipment that will last another 20 years. So that’s very exciting is harnessing old technology to become new again. We’re also this carbon dioxide removal work I mentioned, I think is really important, because we do need to draw down.

I think most experts agree that, whether it’s through direct air capture, and there’s a lot of companies you may have talked about on your show that are doing direct air capture, where they’re trying to pull CO2 pollution back out of the atmosphere and then sequester it in the ground. But that’s very expensive and energy intensive, and you have to do it in a place where you have a geologic formation, where you can sequester the CO2 underground, where it’s not going to come back up. But with ocean carbon dioxide removal, and the ocean, as we talked about, is all over.

You can take the acid or the CO2 out of the ocean, and you can sequester it in very a number of different forms, as calcium carbonate, which is basically like a clam shell. It’s the same material can be used for building or other kinds of things. And you can do it much cheaper, so that it makes it more effective. If you’re trying to sell these as carbon credits, or find some other way to finance the removal of that carbon.

And then I’d say the third area that I’m really most excited about is the work that’s being done with kelp and seaweed, because we have here a great researcher, Dr Sergei newston from the University of Southern California, who is not only learning what you can do with California kelp, but with seaweed from all over the world. And he’s then cross breeding different strains, so that you have seaweed and kelp that will withstand a warming ocean or a more acidic ocean in the future, so that you can grow these as crops, and then you can, as I mentioned, extract more food, more fuel, fertilizer, animal feed, human feed, et cetera, et cetera.

And then those intellectual property, that kind of things that he’s innovating turns into products and companies and services right here at all to see, so we can see the direct result of research. It’s not just theoretical. It goes into practice right away. And that’s very exciting.

That’s a lot of stuff. And I’ll try to comment about a few of those things, one of them being the 3500 pieces of equipment that are being changed over to hydrogen as a hydrogen car owner, which I can credit you and Governor Schwarzenegger for kind of creating the possibility for that by creating hydrogen infrastructure around the state is a great thing.

I am a little concerned a personal loss of a few hydrogen filling stations around the neighborhood. I’m kind of wondering what’s going on with that. Maybe you can tell us, if you have any insight as to what’s going on.

Well, I do. My wife and I both drive hydrogen vehicles and have for. Several years. So we’re very dependent on that same network. I’m fortunate that between here and San Pedro when I come to work, and Playa Del Rey when I go home, I pass four stations. So if one of them is busy or out of fuel, I can go to the other. It’s a little inconvenient at times, but not too bad.

But I do know your point. We’ve had trouble with a couple of the stations getting their supply of fuel to variety of reasons, but it’s finally being fixed. So the true zero stations that were not getting fuel from, I think it was Lindy or one of the other companies out in Riverside because of a technical issue that is just weeks away from being fixed, and those stations will come back online.

We also have, there was a slowdown in the deployment of news stations, but that’s now picked up again, and I’d say this year we’ll probably get 10 more here in the Los Angeles region, and quite a few more the shell stations. Shell decided to move out of the retail hydrogen business. They’re going to move more into trucking. But that’s good news, because if you have large volumes of hydrogen fuel to power class eight big 18 wheeler big rig trucks, that’s going to be fueling stations along the interstate highways where a car could go and fuel up as well.

So it’s going to, it’s going to increase the volume of hydrogen available for the transportation sector, but we’re we’ve got about a year, let’s call it two years, to turn that corner to where the station network becomes more reliable and where we learn a lot from let’s call it the mistakes we made before I know that

the IRA Bill had put a lot for these hydrogen hubs and wondering whether or Not the trucking industry is going to go in that direction, whether or not other industries, such as freight trains, will go in that direction. And something closer to where you’re saying ships going more in the direction of potentially using hydrogen power.

Absolutely. So the trucks that routinely called on the port, which I think is about 20,000 they have to be zero emission by 2035 so that’s not too far away. And again, the original equipment manufacturers are starting to produce battery electric and hydrogen electric 18 wheelers, but they’re going to have to turn them out even faster to meet the demand. And part of that, of course, is the fueling. And in the case of battery, it’s fine if you have a battery electric truck that’s just going, let’s say, from the port to the warehouses 10 miles away and back, each one, pulling a container back and forth, and then can recharge at night.

But for long haul trucks that maybe go across the country, or for operators that run 24 hours a day, they can’t afford to have the truck sitting there for several hours recharging a battery. And if you are long haul, those trucks have batteries that take up about 25% of the cargo capacity of the truck based on weight. And if you want more range, you need more batteries, which is more weight, so battery electric is not going to work for a lot of the 18 wheelers, and so that’s why there is a push toward hydrogen electric and much more infrastructure already in place for fueling those, and companies bringing those to market the ships.

Different story that’s probably going to be things like E methanol made from hydrogen, or ammonia, made from hydrogen, which can burn in conventional ships today, so that you don’t have to transition to a completely different type of vessel. But there’s other vessels, like, for example, we’ve got a project that’ll be happening here with curtain maritime, which is one of the biggest tugboat operators, and tugboats in ports are one of the biggest single sources of air pollution because they’ve got big old dirty diesel engines.

And if you’ve ever watched tugs pushing big ships, it’s kind of like when a truck starts from a dead stop, there’s a big Huff of black smoke while that engine gets up to speed and torque. And the same thing is true with tugboats, and they’re one of the biggest sources of pollution in a port, and not just the ships.

So those are potentially being converted to battery electric, that that does work in some cases, and hydrogen electric, or as Kurt Marine is doing here at all to see a hybrid so where they can plug in and get some of their power from a battery, but it will also have a hydrogen fuel cell, and both will power the same electric motor, but it gives them more range faster refueling, so they don’t have to spend hours just recharging a battery. So it’ll be a really interesting plug in hybrid, hydrogen hybrid. That’s

fascinating. Great Work on that front, because I think all these little moves make big moves possible, and the infrastructure starts to come into place. Hydrogen becomes more normalized in the economy, and start people start to see the tremendous benefits of of a hydrogen economy, which doesn’t need as much in the way of batteries, there’s not as. Much battery storage needs when you have a hydrogen fuel cell versus just a an electric vehicle.

Exactly. And many people misunderstand that battery powered vehicles. They call those electrics, and then act as if hydrogen is some kind of a different thing. Both are electric vehicles. People really need to understand if it’s powered by a battery or by hydrogen, in both cases, it’s an electric vehicle. So what’s under the hood looks exactly like a Tesla in either version.

The only difference is, how do you power that electric motor? And in a battery, it’s obvious the battery is providing the energy with a hydrogen fuel cell, as you well know, it’s the tank of hydrogen converted to electricity on board the vehicle by a fuel cell, and that’s what powers the electric motor. But both are electric and zero emission.

So we’ve had a big political sea change in November. What do you see coming down the front from Washington? Is it going to affect you? Or what are your thoughts kind of moving forward?

Well, it’s hard to know, as we sit here today, still a few days before the inauguration, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going to affect people in an administration that is the last time around, was noted for its inconsistency. And I think the same thing is true here. A lot of bluster, a lot of I mean, are we really going to invade Greenland and take over the Panama Canal? It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s rhetoric.

And you know, when I talk to Republicans in and out of the state, and even people affiliated with Trump, they understand that things like roofers who are putting solar panels on an American roof, that’s a job you can’t outsource to another country. So solar panels. Solar is not a bad thing. Electric cars are not a bad thing. I mean, Elon Musk, obviously, is very close to President Trump, and has the biggest electric car company in the world right now, so he has a lot at stake in making sure that charging stations are deployed.

And the inflation Reduction Act last year, had a lot of money for that sort of thing, and I would imagine some of that’s already baked in and and even though Trump’s administration may be anti environmental on some things, something like that might still happen again. It’s good American jobs. Takes a lot of electricians and infrastructure workers to put in charging stations. And then, of course, the vehicle prices themselves are coming down.

So even if some of the incentives, the tax incentives, are removed, there are still state incentives. And the price itself has just come down. And when you look at the cost of operating electric vehicles, it’s much less than gasoline or diesel vehicles, because, as you know, it’s two and a half times more efficient. The electric motor, whether it’s powered by hydrogen or a battery, is two and a half times more efficient than an internal combustion engine, so less maintenance, less cost for the fuel.

And so I do think in some ways, much of our environmental work to address the climate change issue is baked in, but that said, we don’t have time to take our foot off the gas, if I can use a mixed metaphor here, in the sense that every day that we waste, that we don’t try to reduce our emissions, is going to make our future worse, and we’re seeing that in real time now with the fires here, with the Floods that occurred in North Carolina a few months ago.

This is not a red state or a blue state issue. Climate change is happening everywhere. There was a piece on the news about a month or two ago from a woman in Oklahoma who lost her home to an unseasonal tornado, and she had just rebuilt from unseasonal tornado one year earlier, almost to the day. And this is Oklahoma. This is in the middle of a red state. This is not California. So this is happening everywhere, and insurance rates are going up in some places.

You can’t even get insurance. My sister lives in coastal Florida. You can’t buy private insurance in coastal Florida, you have to be insured by the state pooled insurance because private companies can’t afford it. So this is real. It’s economic, and I think, you know, even this administration will have to recognize that to some degree.

But like I said, we don’t have time to stop making progress toward reducing our emissions, and we are going to, unfortunately, have to spend a lot, and this will be no matter who’s president is going to spend a lot cleaning up the mess. President Trump has seems to have some kind of a antithesis with the state of California and Governor Newsom, but I’m sure when the state of Florida gets hit by even stronger hurricanes in his four years in office, the next four years, he’ll be right down there with a federal checkbook helping the state.

And you know, there’s no question that the cost of responding to climate change is only going to increase and will only get worse if we don’t keep taking real action. So I again, I think the real risk is not any short term lack. Lack of regulations or other rollbacks that the Trump administration might impose, but it’s the lack of forward progress that we’re going to regret.

Well, I think kind of the brilliance the IRA was that it put a lot of the money into red states, and so, for instance, I guess Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district has got a very major green economy facility in the district, and that’s true for many other districts throughout the country, and so I think it’ll be very difficult for them to carve out those benefits once hundreds, if not 1000s of jobs are at stake in in various districts around the country.

Well, that’s right, and obviously Trump won’t run for re election. At least we don’t think he will. Constitution would forbid it. But there are a lot of people in swing districts, or even in very red districts, who, as you said, supported him and supported the Marjorie Taylor greens of the world, and if all of a sudden their elected leaders are turning against them just because their job is so called green that’s not going to help Republicans in Congress.

So I do think that, you know, two years from now, and of course, the re election campaign for members of Congress starts one year from now, so in a very short period of time, there’s going to be a lot of those debates going on in swing districts or places, if, in fact, as you say, good jobs have been taken away from people that thought they had them.

Yeah, I don’t hear it as a top of the agenda item to cancel the IRA, because I don’t think they have the political capital. They may not have the votes. I mean, they just, you know, there were 1718, Republican Congress men or women that said, Don’t do this, and that’s the margin between up or down.

So I mean, if they don’t have the votes, it’s just not going to happen. I think they wouldn’t necessarily repeal the IRA. As you say, there’s a lot of things in there that Republicans wanted and voted for. I think the administration simply would direct, for example, the Department of Energy not to go ahead and spend money that Congress had authorized.

And, you know, there have been lawsuits in cases where money like that, that was allocated but not spent, lawsuits by potential beneficiaries saying, wait a minute, you don’t have the right not to spend this Congress awards money, or, you know, allocates money, passes a budget, and it’s up to the administrative branch to effectively give it out and make sure that it’s spent properly.

But you can’t not spend it if it’s been allocated by Congress, and those lawsuits have generally been supported. But of course, takes a long time to get through the courts, and even then, you can kind of go slow with with a process you can say, Okay, well, we’re going to give the money out, but the 30 day process to apply is now 90 days. And the, you know, 60 day review by the public is now six months. And you know, you can stretch things out and make it harder to get that money out the door. It’s like you mentioned the hydrogen hubs.

$8 billion worth of hydrogen hub money that went to many states. California was one of the beneficiaries. And you could imagine, again, the Trump administration trying to pull back the money that’s been awarded to California, because most of it has not been actually given out yet. And again, you probably get sued over that, but all they have to do is slow walk it. And obviously this is another example of where we will regret that sort of thing, because we’re losing time of making progress, of taking things like hydrogen as a lower carbon fuel and making progress with it, and we just don’t have time to waste.

The other point related to this is that we could take the initiative and be the leaders in the hydrogen economy, and be the technological leaders and leading the world in this technology which would benefit American industry, American jobs, I guess. What’s your take on former Congressman Lee Zeldin, who has been picked to lead the EPA, and what your thoughts are as to what he might bring to the table?

Well, he’s got an anti environmental record, but he has no experience in anything to do with environmental regulation, so like other Trump appointees who are just unqualified for the jobs they’re being handed, it’s going to take a long time for him to get up to speed. He’s going to be very dependent on the incumbent staff there and under secretaries or other people around him, and I think a lot will get controlled by the White House, by staff around Trump, and by the Chief of Staff and so forth, because you’ve got people, I mean, like Pete hegseth, who is being nominated to run the Defense Department.

And sure, he was a soldier, but he knows nothing about how to run the Defense Department, and in four years, couldn’t possibly learn it fast enough, so you’re going to be having other people making the decisions about how that agency gets run, and you’re going to have figureheads at the head of these agencies. So Zeldin, I think, is just another example of somebody who’s just unqualified and will blather around for a while. But once again, there’s the lack of action.

One that I think is the bigger risk if he’s told fire certain employees or don’t hire vacancies because we want to hollow up government and don’t enforce rules that industry objects to, air pollution rules, climate rules, simply don’t enforce them.

That’s a pretty easy directive to implement, so I think that’s the bigger danger is not so much who’s the figurehead at the head of these agencies, but this whole project 2025, blueprint for how to hollow out government and just make it more business friendly and to take away the safeguards that government provides us for our health and safety, that’s the real danger.

So going back to something more kind of local. Here, can you discuss, maybe some of the collaborations between all to see and other organizations or institutions, other than the stuff you’ve already referred to?

Well, I’d like to mention, and this is going international, not local. We do work with a lot of local organizations and universities, but we are now trying to essentially franchise all to see all over the world. Our mission as a nonprofit is to get climate solutions from the ocean at scale, distributed as fast as possible, because of this sense of urgency that we have about the climate crisis.

So our idea is, what if you had an all to see in many other countries, where, if we identify some promising wave technology, we could immediately share those companies and that technology with a dozen or two dozen other locations who could then find ways to adopt it in their location.

You’d obviously get these companies to grow faster, these technologies to be distributed, the solutions to the climate crisis to be deployed much faster. If you want to sell a billion hamburgers, you franchise McDonald’s. So if we want to get all of these climate solutions around the world, we need to essentially franchise all to see. So we’re talking to people in Rio de Janeiro in Durban, South Africa, Barcelona in Spain, Mumbai and India, numerous other places. I was just in Croatia.

The prime minister of Croatia was here in San Pedro because of the large Croatian American community that’s here. And as a result, he came to all to see and was really taken by it. He said, I’ve got a big coastline. I’ve got a big aquaculture industry, that fishing industry that’s been hurt by overfishing and pollution. We need what all to see is doing in Croatia.

So I went over there with others, and we’re going to try to set up an all to see affiliate within their Institute of Oceanography and fisheries. So I think that’s really what’s exciting, is partnering globally with other people who understand that the blue economy really is our future.

That’s a brilliant idea, and kudos to you for thinking of that. What are the next steps on that process and how you’d be funded through governments or private donations? How do you see that rolling out?

Each one will be a little bit different. There are some of those that we’re talking to, like, for example, in Croatia, where there is some government funding and some EU funding for these kinds of business development hubs that are sustainable, in this case, the blue economy. And because there is an existing Institute, they have a beautiful building, and it’s right on the water.

And so they don’t need to start over with 100 year old warehouses like I had, and have to raise $35 million to renovate them, and spend three years doing it. And in other places, like in Rio de Janeiro, they actually have older warehouses that they want to repurpose in the port of Rio de Janeiro. We have our first affiliate up and running in Kearney, New Jersey, which is the port city of Newark, and they, too, have older warehouses that they’re renovating and programs that they’re putting in place very similar to ours.

And so each one will be different in terms of the funding will come from private donations, some, you know, government money, and certainly getting the public involved. And certainly when some of these companies are successful, we hope that they will also be a revenue generator for these kinds of hubs, we’re working on an investment fund with an investment advisor that could help us direct capital from investors into these companies so that they can grow faster to meet the demand we’re trying to create.

That also is brilliant, to create the synergy of all these different things. Now tell us a little bit about what’s the relationship between all to see California and all to see New York. Is it part of one entity, or is it a true franchise, or is it just a loose affiliation?

Right now, it’s more a loose affiliation. I mean, if they’re going to use our name, we obviously want to have a written agreement, and some, you know, some kind of standards of operation and quality standards. But in the case of I’ll use Croatia as an example, they have an Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography.

It’s very similar to Scripps, for those who are familiar with what Scripps, Institute of Oceanography does here in California, or the Woods Hole Institute on the East Coast, which is mostly research. And learning about the ocean, studying these things, but not any way to commercialize what they find in the blue economy, whether that’s with new energy sources or aquaculture or other things. So there you have an existing infrastructure, both, as I mentioned, the building, but also the people. So in their case, we’re just exchanging companies and research opportunities together.

And then, you know, form follows function. We’ll figure out what are the functions that translate and what are the things that are most exciting for each party. And by the way, I should say, unlike McDonald’s, where they tell you, you got to use this hamburger and this milkshake, we learn from all of these other places, we are gathering great information on blue economy, innovation and research from all over the world. So it’s a two way street.

So again, we’ll figure out in each case, what are the best next steps for the first year or two working together, it might just be on one issue, on on, you know, say, a particular kind of aquaculture or exchanging wave energy technology companies and helping those build or it might be a workforce training curriculum.

All of our curriculum that we use for workforce training with community colleges is available online, open source in English and Spanish, and we can start translating that to other languages, so each one will be very unique, as opposed to say, a true franchise, where you say, Here’s the menu, and you have to have all the menu items in your location.

That’s great. And even, even a true franchise, you go to McDonald’s and in Tokyo, and it’s a little bit different than McDonald’s here. It’s a great idea, and the collaboration makes a lot of sense. And it’s certainly an investment fund that funds these things is very important to get them off the ground. You have all these researchers and university folks that have great ideas and they need some money to get them really going.

So kudos to you for doing that. From your extensive experience in leading various environmental initiatives, what key lessons have you learned about driving effective climate action within large organizations and at the governmental level?

I think the number one lesson is collaboration, that no private enterprise can’t do it. Government alone can’t do it, investors alone can’t do it. The recipe to Climate Solutions at scale, I’ve always felt it comes in three parts, policy, technology and finance, and those things have to work together. So for example, in California, when Governor Schwarzenegger and I were in office, we passed the million solar roofs initiative, and our goal was to get a million California rooftops covered with solar we estimated we would generate about three gigawatts of energy.

And just to give you a perspective, we have about 50 gigawatts in our grid in the entire state. So three gigawatts would be about 8% more, and we were hoping that we would bring the cost of installed solar down by 20 or 30% and this was back in 2006.

Well, 10 years later, we celebrated the millionth roof, and it turned out that those million roofs now generate nine gigawatts of energy, three times more than we originally had hoped for, and that we brought the cost of installed solar down 70% and that’s just because of the size of our market, but it was putting the policy in place first to give people incentives to do this when the cost was a little bit expensive and and perhaps wasn’t clear exactly what you were getting, and so on. And then the technology, of course, had to be there.

Solar got better over time, not just the panels, but the Balance of System, as it’s called, you know, the racking systems, the installation, the Transformers connecting to the grid, and all those things, and then the finance, because investors won’t come along for something that isn’t proven. So by having the policy and the technology right then you can attract the investors. So those are the three things that you’ve got to have working together. Any one of them by themselves, can’t do it.

We’ve seen great technology that dies on the vine because it can’t get started because of permitting, or because investors think it’s too nascent and too risky, or governments won’t allow it, or or are not smart enough to incentivize it in some way and and so I think by getting those three things working together, that’s how you can accelerate the the solutions.

So what advice would you give to young professionals who are looking at starting their career and being involved in the environmental sector, particularly those interested in marine and ocean conservation.

Well, I would say, first of all, depending on what stage of your career you’re in, volunteer, start by looking for organizations like all to see like others that work in the environment, in the space you like, if it’s the blue economy, or on land somewhere, and learn, learn about what the opportunities are. What’s driving this change?

What’s driving the problems we’re trying to solve, because then if you go into private practice or government or investment, you’re going to have that deep perspective and understanding of what the problem is and what the solutions are. And then I’d say government gets a bad rap, but there’s a lot of great people. When I was secretary of the California EPA, I had 5000 employees, and I can tell you, not one of them was there just to get a paycheck and a retirement. They were the hardest working people I’ve ever met, and just really underappreciated.

They were all there because they wanted to make a change for the environment. So government at any level, city level, state level, federal opportunities, if you have that opportunity. I think to go into government service is a great thing. And then, of course, the finance, there’s really great opportunities, more and more money going into the green and the blue economy. I was just talking to someone today from Amazon, and they were talking about how all the big tech companies, because of AI, are building more and more server farms, all of which need more energy and more infrastructure.

And that there’s trillions of dollars that are going to be invested in that sector in the next few years looking for the most energy efficient and renewably powered AI servers. And so that’s something which can again be, you know, a service to the environment, as much as as you know, cleaner fuels or more sustainable food supply.

So I’d say, depending on where you are in your career, consider getting involved in the movement itself, so you really learn that at a deep level, and especially in your own community, and then consider what your professional life looks like. But there’s a way to be involved, no matter what you’re doing professionally. Every company today has environmental goals, and even with this current administration, where you see some companies backing off a little bit, they’re still there.

The goals are still there. And every government has similar goals to decarbonize and certainly to save money by being more energy efficient. Who doesn’t like that? And that reduces pollution as well. So I think if you put your green and your blue glasses on, you’re going to see opportunity.

I think that’s a great answer. And I’d say the silver lining that I saw from the last trump administration was that the states and local level and individuals kind of kicked their environmentalism up to another gear and started to say, well, we’re not going to wait for Washington to fix this problem.

We’re going to get out there and and and California and many other states did the same, many localities, and progress was made, even though there wasn’t a lot of leadership from Washington, from your vantage point, what’s one environmental policy shift that could significantly benefit the ocean’s health?

Well, you know, certainly anything that facilitates this ocean carbon dioxide removal, which is still a new technology, but things that will help us do that more efficiently, and that might even be something like collaborating with utilities that already have water being pumped through their system. So we have a lot of power plants, for example, on our coasts that are pumping sea water for cooling and then sending it right back out into the ocean. So that’s water that you’re already spending energy to move.

So if you then ran it through a carbon dioxide removal process and sent it back out into the ocean, you wouldn’t be having a carbon footprint for that water movement, but that would take cooperation, collaboration with whatever government entity owns the power plants. So there’s opportunities like that. But I’d say, interestingly, one of the most consequential things that government can do is to start focusing on waste.

Now that’s not just the blue economy, of course, although we’re trying to deal with a lot of waste, plastic and other garbage that gets into our oceans. But I think the idea of ending the concept of waste, we have technologies today that can effectively recycle 90% of what currently goes to a landfill. Humans are not very good at separating stuff. We’re only about 37% efficient in the US. I think the most efficient economy at separating recyclables is Denmark, and they’re about 65% but technology can harness over 90% of what’s going into landfills and turn that all into material that can be reused.

So getting governments to ban certain kinds of characteristics of things, construction debris or electronic waste or whatever, ban those from landfills incentivize the companies that will take that material and do something with it. Right now, we do a lot of recycling of plastics, for example, but much of that ends up in a landfill anyway, because it’s too expensive to turn it back into raw material when the oil companies are subsidized by our government and are producing oil that gets turned into virgin plastic.

So people that make things, it’s just easier to work with Virgin plastic than recycled and there’s no economic advantage, and that’s because. As we’re subsidizing the oil industry. So taking away subsidies of things like that would help the world. But I think, you know, ending the concept of waste, rebalancing things like economic subsidies at the state or federal level would be the biggest benefit to the entire world, let alone the ocean.

So do you see California acting on that front? I’d had Senator Ben Allen on the program a number of times, and he had authored a bill about plastic reduction, but it didn’t quite go as far as what you’re saying. And have you been working with anybody at the state government to do something along these lines?

Well, Ben is a great friend and a terrific friend of the environment, and here been at all to see many times, great guy and and I think his plastics legislation was was really revolutionary, and we need to keep building on it. I think the state itself is a great model of how you can reduce waste going to landfills.

In the 1990s a bill was passed to reduce the volume going to landfills by 50% by the year 2005 and so when I was EPA Secretary, I had to certify whether or not we had met that target and could go farther. And sure enough, we had, so by 2005 against the 1990 baseline, we had diverted more than half of the waste that would have otherwise gone to a landfill. And now the state’s target? Well, then we set a target of 75% we’re close to that.

And this, the state now has a target of 100% so there’s a future where the world’s fifth largest economy, California can have a zero waste future and be utilizing everything that we currently send to landfills. So I think, you know, Ben is on the right track with that, the state has shown that policy matters.

The technology has then caught up. As I said, technology is over 90% efficient, whereas humans are not. And the finance community is coming in, realizing that there’s opportunity there, so you’re seeing more investment in that sector.

So what will that look like? Will that look like every product that we get will go into a recycling bin, essentially, and no more garbage cans. What does that look like?

Well, actually, the opposite. So there’s a company called Athens services here in Los Angeles that operates three or four what are called murphs material recovery facilities. And when they collect your trash. They take it from one bin. There’s no recycling because, again, humans aren’t good at it, so the one bin combined everything keeps extra trucks off the street, by the way, which reduces traffic and pollution right off the bat.

But then they take that mixed material to their facility, dump it in a giant Hopper, bigger than this room, and there’s mechanical fingers that break it all apart, the bags of trash, the woody waste, whatever it might be, and then it ends up on conveyor belts. And technology scans it with AI and says, Oh, that’s a number seven plastic. Ooh, that’s a green glass. Ooh, that’s white glass, et cetera.

And as it’s moving underneath the belt, it identifies that, and then it sends every one of those pieces of waste off in a different direction, with magnets, with vibrators, with eddy currents, as it’s called, various other technologies, so that by the time you get to the end of this facility, you have different kinds of bailed plastic. You have bailed cardboard and paper. You have the organic waste separated for going to compost or some other beneficial use.

You have different glass, clear and colored separated, and all of that is then ready to go back into products and services so and keep it out of landfill. So the technology already exists, and it’s just a matter of getting more governments around the world to use it, and some of that comes by simply banning a lot of these materials from landfills, and that will force the waste companies to adopt this kind of technology.

Well, that’s a brilliant solution. So it’s fascinating. When we get to people thinking about these issues and working on these issues, we get solutions to them. So we’re making progress, we just need to keep doing what we’re doing. So what drives your personal commitment to the environment and conservation? How do you maintain your momentum, given all the challenges that you face?

I mean, I guess that’s the benefit of some gray hair. Is that, you know, I started on this journey when I was a kid and and was a diver in the Santa Monica Bay here and learned about what was harming the kelp forest, which was polluted runoff, by the way. So again, the point that what happens on land matters to the ocean.

And so here we are, you know, five decades later, six decades later, and I’ve seen how things have gone in the wrong direction, in the right direction in some ways. For example, you know, back then, cars were far more polluting than they are today, and we didn’t have electric vehicles, or any zero emission vehicles or hybrids. So look at how far we’ve come today with auto emissions. But there’s more cars, more people driving cars. So it’s the same thing with energy efficiency, the light bulb of today.

A is, you know, over 90% more efficient than the ones that I grew up with as a kid, but there’s more people using more light bulbs, so I’m motivated by the progress we’ve made, and it’s easy to just look at how big the mountain is ahead of us, especially when we’re talking about climate change, and we’re sitting here today still in the shadow of the smoke from these epic fires in Altadena and Pasadena and Santa Monica and in the mountains here, but we’ve made so much progress that we can build on that. I think our future is much brighter, and that’s what keeps me going.

Thank you for all the work that you’ve done over the decades. It’s really amazing, and it’s a testament to, hey, hard work and just diligence. Keep going at it every day to make progress. And I urge everybody to go down to all to see and check it out and to volunteer and to donate, because it is such an amazing organization, and I love the idea of you guys franchising it and getting financing.

I would encourage people to check it out in that the technological advances in the companies that Terry and all to see have been fostering down there are really cutting edge, really exciting. It’s like going to a science fair. It’s really cool place.

Well, please do our website is all to see.org A, L, T, A, S, E, A, dot, O, R, G, and sign up for our newsletter. So you know when our events are and open houses and we welcome everyone. And I’ll just leave you, Matt, first of all, I want to thank you for the opportunity to talk to you and your audience.

Again, you’re terrific. If we don’t communicate these solutions and inspiration and a sense of hope, then we really are lost. So thank you for what you do. And I’ll leave you with this thought. Shakespeare said, nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend.

And so when nature calls thee to be gone, what acceptable legacy Canst thou leave? And I think if everybody takes climate change and our other environmental problems seriously and does just their part, that’s a legacy that even William Shakespeare would be proud of. So thanks for everything you’re doing

well.

Thank you very much, Terry. Great to have you on the program again, and look forward to seeing you again sometime soon, hopefully down at all to see and everybody tune in and check out what Terry’s doing.

Follow it and get involved and do your part. Do something today. That’s what I encourage everybody to do so. Thanks for listening. You.