A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

It’s going to make all electricity in the United States more expensive and less resilient. There are all these Tiktok videos and everything else about how offshore wind is damaging to whales.

He also worked as the Deputy Associate Administrator for the EPA in the Obama administration, 90% of the excess heat that we’ve created goes into the ocean.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program, Rob Verchick. Rob is a professor at the loyal law school in New Orleans. He teaches environmental law there. He’s an author of a book octopus in the parking garage. He also worked as the Deputy Associate Administrator for the EPA in the Obama administration. And rob you were a guest on our show back in the middle of the Biden administration, right after the IRA was passed, and now we’re kind of in a different place than you know that position was.

Yeah, how you doing, Matt, it’s great to be on the show. We are in a very different place in the Biden administration, with the inflation Reduction Act and and also the infrastructure the bipartisan infrastructure law. There was a lot of activity going on pushing billions, 10s of billions of dollars into the states for the purpose of cleaning up the energy grid, building back infrastructure, building resilience to climate change. A lot of that money actually, and some of it was private investment that came as a result of the federal investment. But a lot of that money continued to go to the States. There was a real move to try to, as they say, get that money out the door at the tail end of the administration.

But I think it’s fair to say that not all of the investment happened, given the transfer to the Trump administration and this new budget bill that the Congress is looking at right now, could have some effects to pull or claw back some of that money, which is going to hurt all the states, but ironically, it’s going to hurt the states that went for Trump, 80% of the money that I just described was earmarked for for states so called red states. And so I think that this is going to have big effects in many parts of the country.

Yeah, the self destructive nature of this policy change to to me, it feels like Trump is just so angry at any kind of non fossil fuel energy that he wants to destroy because he sees it as a political threat to him.

I think that’s right. I mean, it’s hard to understand exactly what motivates the president at any given time, but it is certainly true, for instance, that you know, as Bill McKibben says, who I know has been on the show just recently, you know, the cheapest way to make electricity is to point a pane of glass at the sun. And so by taking away, you know, the prospects of wind or solar, or at least making it harder, it’s going to make all electricity in the United States more expensive and less resilient because, because those sources of energy cope better with storms and and other and other sorts of things.

I think one of it, you know, and I’m glad that you have shows. We have shows like yours, because a lot of this, I think, is a communications issue. I mean, I’m absolutely, you know, I used to live in in Missouri and and in Kansas too. And I’m sure the folks there have no idea of the amount of money that was coming in from, from the Biden administration that was helping things that and creating jobs that they were experiencing, right?

Particularly those central states like Kansas, they were saying it was kind of like the OPEC of wind that, yes, somewhere around 40% 50% I think some of those states had gotten up into maybe higher 60% plus of their electricity coming from wind energy. So really cutting off their nose to spite their face, to cut off funding for wind.

One of the things actually, that I, that I have been looking into and working on is, and this is a story that I haven’t seen really in the mainstream press a lot, but there are many states, several states, that have been really good, let’s say on wind. You mentioned Kansas, Iowa is another one. Texas and some of those states are have created laws that are actually making it harder for wind farms, let’s say, to operate or to be established.

And the same with solar. In Louisiana, we have a couple of parishes. That make it harder, because in order to have to have solar and when you start asking people about why that is, there’s so much disinformation. I talked to somebody in politics in one of the parishes in Louisiana who said they were afraid that that the solar panels on the ground would reflect light and blind pilots who are flying in planes. And for that reason, they were concerned. And many of these movements in support of these laws are, in fact, backed by the oil and gas industry.

And so you know, some of the states, including Texas, which used to have it had a remarkable wind program still does, and was, you know, producing more wind energy than almost anywhere in the United States. Now, it’s starting to bring in laws and policies that are that are dismantling that, which is, you know, absolutely opposite to the interests of most of people living in that state.

Well, I think it’ll adversely affect their economy too, because we’re they were benefiting by a lot of industry moving there, made cheaper power costs and all those types of things and and now it’ll be more expensive to run factories there than it used to be.

Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.

So what are you working on now, what’s kind of front of mind for you?

Well, as you know, I wrote a book a few years ago called octopus in the parking garage, which you mentioned, which was about climate resilience, primarily in the United States and on land. And now I’m working on a book on oceans and coasts and climate resilience in the ocean. And so I actually just got back from the United Nations ocean conference, which was in France this year, and was quite exciting.

I mean, there are people from all over the world. They’re talking about many different kinds of policies related to the ocean, and a lot of people don’t realize it, but there are at least three very large international agreements that are going to be opening and taking effect that are going to do some really good things to improve, to improve the health of the oceans. And the ocean is extremely vulnerable to climate change, and as a result, we’re very vulnerable as a result too.

Right? It seems as though, really, the ocean is the dumping ground for all of our CO two it’s absorbing most of it, and there’s a lot of concern that the deep ocean is being adversely affected by all this and the acidification. I guess I’d ask that question, along with, how can the how is the Trump administration likely to go along with any treaty that’s actually pro environment?

I’ll take those questions in order, okay, but yeah, it’s true that, as I’m writing in the book, the ocean is just one giant sponge, and it absorbs both heat and carbon dioxide. As you point out, 90% of the heat, excess heat that we’ve created with carbon pollution, 90% of that heat goes into the ocean, which is incredibly lucky for us, because we’d be burned to a crisp if that weren’t true. But what that means is there’s a lot of heat in the ocean and and all of the life in the ocean has to deal with that.

Now it’s also, as you say, it’s, it’s absorbing about, you know, a quarter to a third of the carbon dioxide that we’ve put into the atmosphere, which is another great win for us, because we couldn’t survive with that much CO two in the atmosphere, but what it’s doing is turning when that CO two goes into the seawater, as you say, it turns into into carbonic acid and and it makes the ocean much closer to vinegar than it does, you know, to to the way that it used to be. And that’s making it harder for coral reefs to build and for oysters to grow shells. It’s going to affect the sea, the seafood industry, tremendously, and the rest. So what’s going on in terms of sort of international politics on this? I was astounded.

So the ocean conference, there’s only been three of them. This was the third. It was in nice France, highly attended. This is what the UN has dubbed the decade of the ocean, because of some agreements that I’ll explain. And there were, I mean, it was the heads of state. Many heads of state. There security, of course, very tight, many exciting things going on. And the United States did not even send a delegation to this event, which was amazing. I mean, China had a delegation. The Saudi Arabian government had representatives there. You know, everybody was there. And but I have to say, one of the things that was interesting is, you know, the discussion, you know, at these, at these large events, and even the smaller ones too, was.

Because people are just moving forward. They’re not, they’re not thinking about the United States. They’re thinking about maybe companies, us, companies that are making money and doing work, and some universities. But for the most part, it’s, it’s the rest of the world. So you know, a few things that are going to be happening, for instance, is that we’re, by the end of this summer, will probably have ratified among the nations. You know, scores and scores of nations will have ratified a treaty called the high it’s informally called the High Seas Treaty, which is about protecting marine life and fish and protecting against pollution on seas which are not in any country’s jurisdiction, which, as you might imagine, is a really big deal, right?

You know, because there’s a lot of illegal activity and illegal fishing and human trafficking, all kinds of things going on in the high seas, and so there’s that there is a lot of movement on a new treaty to control plastics in the ocean that is getting a lot of attention, and is going to create a lot of money for companies that figure out how to work with that. And there is also a lot of movement in building marine what they call marine protected areas, which are enormous, sort of parks, marine parks, we might call them, in which fish are protected in the waters.

And what people are realizing is that when you protect these areas, first of all, you get a more sustainable fish catch, and so you actually end up, in the long run, making more money out of all of this. And the second thing you get is you relieve some of the stress that the climate change has placed on the ocean, because the ocean is an amazing machine, and it can rebound and it can come back, but we’ve got to give it breathing space. And so that’s what these what these agreements are intended to do.

Well, it’s fantastic to hear the progress that is being made, and kind of the world not waiting for the US. And, I mean, maybe it’s a positive I was reading that the US wasn’t there to muck up the treaties and try to throw roadblocks into them. So, so maybe it was a positive that Trump and his crew weren’t at the conference.

Well, you know, it’s a funny thing that I think there’s some truth in that a lot of people don’t realize. We’ve all heard, I think, or many of us have heard, you know, of the phrase The Law of the Sea. There is, in fact, a law, an international law of the sea, under a un agreement from the 1980s and the United States isn’t a member of that because Ronald Reagan didn’t want the United States to join. So almost every country in the world is part of the as part of the so called Law of the Sea, except us.

We abide by almost everything in it, and we certainly profit from the fact of having it, but we’re not in it. And so we, you know, it’s, we don’t really get much of a chance as the United States to influence these laws, because we’re really not at the table when they come into effect. And that’s, that’s unfortunate, I think, for a number of reasons, including economic ones. Because, you know, we could build a structure that that would be in our economic interest otherwise.

Well, I’ve heard of some areas across along the coast in California kind of being designated as kind of preserves in the ocean. You know, I wonder if the Trump administration can do things to put the kibosh on those, and whether or not other states are doing similar things. And what’s your what’s your read on that?

These are some really interesting environmental issues, but they’re really interesting legal issues too. We have protected areas in the sea in the United States, in US waters, some of them are enormous, and they’re either they either come in the form of what are called national monuments. And you might know national monuments on land. You know, for instance, Mount St Helens is a is a national monument. For instance, they’re somewhat like, like national parks and Bears Ears and grand staircase.

These have been some other more recent ones, Obama actually George Bush, and then Obama expanded it, created some really large preserves in the water, which are under the same act that the President uses to create national monuments on land. There’s one in the western islands of Hawaii, which people may not even know exist, unless you look very carefully on a map and they they create a no fishing zone that’s absolutely enormous out there. President Trump has, has talked, has mused about taking those, those parks away, and there’s a legal question of whether he can do it, because there’s a there’s an old.

The law, as I said, the Antiquities Act is what it’s called, that allows the president to create national monuments. But there’s nothing in the text of the act that says that the President can remove national monuments or even shrink them, and so that’s a legal question, probably that’ll go to the US Supreme Court if it’s challenged.

Didn’t he try to shrink or eliminate Bears Ears in his last administration? And what he did and what happened there in terms of the court?

Well, he, first of all, yeah, he wanted to. So Bears Ears National Monument created by President Obama was big. Was a big action at the time, because it was the first national monument created with the input of the indigenous populations in that area, and often, and they also the tribes had some governing influence in bears here. So it was, it was, you know, monumental, if you will. And a lot of, in a lot of ways, President Trump was concerned, because there were opportunities to mine and drill in Bears Ears.

And so what he did is he shrank the monument, shrank the map exactly to accommodate the oil and gas and mining interests that had wanted to be there. And so he did that by by what they call a proclamation, and it went to the end of the court system exactly for the reasons that I brought up, which is that we don’t know whether or not the President has the power to shrink a monument. I think the answer is no, if you look at the text and the history, but you know, it’s an open legal question, and it actually died in the courts.

We don’t know what the answer is, Because Trump left office, and then Biden came back and, you know, puffed it back up again. So, so we have the same, roughly the same, boundaries as we did before, for Bears Ears, but we may, we may have a different result this time, right?

So he’s, yeah, I read that among the, you know, hundreds and 1000s of things that he’s doing to attack the environment. I I recall reading that he’s trying to shrink national monuments and national parks, I guess not national parks, because I don’t think that’s as easy to do. Or what’s the other designation for national uh, well, there are national forests, and he’s putting some of that up for sale, or would like to did the timber.

And then there’s also a movement with the Bureau of Land, of the Bureau of Land Management, to perhaps sell some federal land in these areas, in the public lands for the purpose of building housing for people who don’t have homes where there’s just for billionaires, the official reason, yeah, or don’t have. I don’t know how that’s gonna help, right?

But that’s a winner argument. So in terms of I you know, there has been sales of timber on national lands for for a long time. So I assume that’s within his purview to do. But I guess the question is, what, what is the scope of of what he’ll be able to sell? I recall Reagan selling off a fair amount of national, you know, land that the the national government had in its, in its asset column.

Yeah. I mean, this actually, believe it or not, goes back to Clinton, you know, because Clinton had a the beginning of something that was called the roadless rule, where the Forest Service would not build new logging roads. And so the idea is that all of the areas that don’t have roads in them would not, you know, would not have access by machinery, and then, as a result, there wouldn’t be harvesting there. But it’s a problem for a number of reasons, but one is wildfires.

You know, there’s a lot of talk Trump, you know, talks about, oh, the need to get fuel out of the forest so it doesn’t burn. But there’s actually a lot of evidence that shows that it’s the old growth forest that actually is better at standing up against fire, and you can actually make fires worse by not properly managing the forest systems. And that’s a problem that we’re going to see, but it’s going to be, you know, a long term one, right?

So turning back to your home state of Louisiana, or at least your current home state, you know they’re talking about building a lot of liquefied natural gas plants along the Mississippi River, and what’s happening there is that, is that happening? Are they starting those projects or not?

Yeah, they definitely are. Louisiana is actually it’s really interesting right now to see what’s going on on the coast in terms of oil and gas. So as one of the things you pointed out is there’s a movement to export more natural gas, right? And. The way that you do that is to liquefy it so that you can ship it in other places. And so there’s a real desire on industry to build those, what they call LNG facilities, liquefied natural gas facilities. Another really big issue right now in Louisiana is carbon capture and storage.

That’s the idea where, or the technology in which you might imagine a electric plant, a natural gas powered electric plant, let’s say that would produce a lot of carbon dioxide, and instead of putting it into the air, what it would do is it would pump that into pipes that would HIGHLY concentrate it, sort of like, like dry ice, really, and then move it and bury it underground forever. And the idea there is that you get to have your consumption of fossil fuel and refining and so on, which creates CO two, and then you just bury all that stuff in the ground, forever in depleted oil wells or other features underground. There’s a lot of interest in in Louisiana for doing this, and in fact, a lot of the funding for it was provided.

The federal funding was provided by the Biden administration. And those are the those are the subsidies that that may be protected as we go forward in the Trump administration, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think it’s pretty dangerous. There’s no we’ve never done it at scale. There’s no record that you could possibly store this high pressure gas underground for you know, ever you know, or hundreds, 1000s of years and and the other thing that’s really interesting to me is there’s no way that it works unless the federal government just continues to pour money into it, because they’re basically paying, they would be paying industry to store their waste underground. Consumers aren’t going to pay for them to do that, so somebody’s got to pay for them to do that. And so it’s basically just a permanent subsidy that would never, ever go away. And what I’m afraid is that Louisiana might get in this business.

It’s not going to reduce CO two very much. I was on a, you know, I worked in on the governor’s panel, researching that is no way it will. And then what’s going to happen is someday those subsidies are going to go away, and we’re going to be stuck with all this infrastructure. But anyway, that’s, that’s, those are, those are two things going on. I’ll just mention one other thing. In Louisiana, we would love to get offshore wind in Louisiana, because in the Gulf, we had some of the best places available for that. And the construction of those, those offshore wind operations, we know how to do that in Louisiana, because we’re already producing in in my city, in New Orleans, we are producing the long turbine blades in Houma, is short drive from where I live. We build the boats that put those wind turbines together offshore and those big leggings, what they call jackets in the industry.

We build those too, and we have built, we the Cajuns in Louisiana, have built offshore wind off the off the off the coast of the Atlantic and the North Sea and all over the place, and we could do it in the Gulf, but President Trump has said that he is very against offshore wind and doesn’t want any money going into it. And so we’ve got a lot of people kind of on hold. I mean, as you might imagine, there are a lot of industries that would love to get involved in this in Louisiana, but at this point, can’t. And our governor, who was, who’s Republican and a backer of President Trump, he’s, it’s very hard for him to come out in favor of this, even though it would help the economy.

Yeah, it’s just unfortunate. Yeah. I mean, it’s crazy, because you look at some of the European countries in Denmark, they’ve, I think they’ve gotten, like, 100% of their electrical power from from wind, and a lot of it from offshore wind. So they, they want to become the Saudi Arabia of wind, which, oh yeah, and the Danish companies are coming down to Louisiana. They want to to do that.

And we sent, I say we, but a planning organization that I belong to, a private planning organization in Louisiana, helped create a basically a an exhibition trip for a series of lawmakers in Louisiana, to go to Denmark, to go to Copenhagen, and then onto the Yulin, what’s called the Yulin Peninsula, where there’s a lot of port Traffic and so on to see how the Danes, over many years, converted some of their shipping industry facilities to facilities that could accommodate offshore wind. And they’ve made a lot of power, and they’ve made a lot of money out of that.

Yeah, it’s, it’s unfortunate that, you know. Louisiana isn’t using its clean natural resources rather than its oil gas resources, which are much dirtier. You know, we hear a lot about how Louisiana has been losing 10s of miles of coastline every year. I assume that’s still happening down there. Are there real efforts being made to stop that loss. And what do you see happening on that front and as Trump kind of stopped, you know, cooperating to make that, that effort effective.

Yeah, it’s, well, right? There’s a whole chapter in my Octopus book about this. It is, there is an effort, a 50 year effort, on paper, to restore a lot of the wetlands that Louisiana has lost. It’s the largest contiguous wetland in in the lower 48 and we’ve lost, as you say, 2000 square miles since the Industrial Revolution. It’s in beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and a lot of that has been because of oil and gas activity, you know, tearing up the coast to get the pipelines in and and so on.

So there’s a movement, and we rely on that, on those wetlands for a lot of things, habitat and also to protect us from hurricanes, and it supports the fisheries. So we have a plan, like a $50 billion plan to rebuild a lot of those wetlands, and we are in the process of doing that. It is what I call, in the book, the largest climate adaptation project in the world, and it is bringing scientists and engineers and all kinds of companies down there and so on.

So it it’s moving forward, and is using technologies at a scale that have never been used in the world before. We’re literally opening up parts of the Mississippi River and allowing them to flow in certain chosen areas, so that they bring sediment and water and rebuild wetlands in a way that’s much more efficient than if we were just to do it ourselves with with backhoes and pipes and things like this.

And countries all over the world are coming to visit to see how we do this, because every Delta has this problem, or almost every delta and so, so we’re moving forward. We are having a hard time finding the money to do it right. And we would, you know, we rely on on royalties that we get from offshore oil. We rely on monies that are appropriated by Congress. But I think it’s going to move forward. I actually think we are going to prove to the world that we can, we can do a lot of things down here with our engineering capabilities. And so I’m hopeful for that. But you’re right, the Trump administration is not being terribly helpful in this regard.

Well, my understanding is that they increase the royalties that the oil companies have to pay in order to fund this project. Is that, is that accurate?

Yeah, that’s right. That was, that was a deal that actually, Senator Mary Landrieu, years ago, orchestrated. You know, it might surprise people to learn that the royalties on land are much more generous, right? So if you are mining in the state of Utah, for instance, 50% of the if the state gets 50% of all the federal royalties that come from that. And the reason is, the idea is that, well, states have to pay to accommodate the environmental damage that happens, and so they should get 50% of the royalties.

We don’t get anywhere near 50% of the royalties. You know, we got, you know, our royalties were much smaller than that, and and Mary Landrieu was able to to get us a little bit more. And what’s ironic is, of course, the damage that we experience is so much larger, but the politics are such that, you know, it’s that’s money that otherwise could go to the Treasury and help, you know, with the deficit or whatever. So that’s money that that it’s hard for us to get.

Now, last time we talked, there was a Democratic governor, Bell Edwards, and there was a plan to kind of go net zero by 2050 Yep. Kind of curious as to what happened with that

one. Yeah, that’s on permanent pause. I suppose. I was on the governor’s task force for that, and helped contribute to the plan, this net zero plan, which was a proclamation by the governor, an executive order. And so, you know, it doesn’t have to be followed by the next governor. And so, you know, people ask me about that, and I have to say, I mean, it’s obviously disappointing because we had a plan that could have brought that offshore wind and terrestrial wind and solar into our state and made money and helped people.

And so it’s unfortunate that we’re not doing that. It now. But what is good is that those plans are still there. They’re actually still on the website. I sent a reporter to see them a while back, and a lot of that information, information about what wind would contribute to the state, the small amount that carbon capture and storage would produce in terms of benefit, is an important number, because I think a lot of people say that that the carbon capture and storage is is more effective, and we showed with the government’s own numbers that it wasn’t that effective. So a lot of that information is out there for the public to use and for policy makers to use in the future.

But yeah, there’s nothing going on now at the state level, from the governor’s office that is really pushing that forward, and it’s really unfortunate, because, as you know, our state is one of the most vulnerable states in the country to climate change.

Do you see private efforts to roll out wind and solar in in Louisiana that are being effective?

Yes. So there are smaller communities that want to build local grids so that they have some kind of autonomy over their electricity. And these are happening in some in some rural areas. There are also parishes that are very parishes are our counties, and there are also parishes that are very interested in lowering their costs in various ways. And are, you know, making it in some cases, easier for solar and wind, and trying to encourage that kind of investment. There are others, as I said, that are trying to block it, right? But here is the problem.

The problem is that wind produce, let’s say wind companies, right, or solar companies, they’re skeptical of coming into a state if they don’t know that there’s going to be a market for the electricity, right? And so almost every state that has a healthy wind and solar program. In fact, most states, just period, have what are called portfolio standards, which are, you know, sort of a green energy standard, which insists that a certain proportion of electricity that goes into the state’s grid be from renewable sources. Now there are only a few parts of the country that don’t have these standards, okay, the Mountain States, that’s that’s one area, and the other area is the southeast of the United States.

And if you look at a map of where wind does not exist on land for any in any large capacity, that map is almost exactly the map of states that don’t have these portfolio standards. And so Texas, Louisiana, you know, Mississippi, Alabama, all the way to Florida. Nobody has any wind or solar build out of any large extent. And part of that reason is because we don’t have a standard. I’ll tell you a quick factoid, a quick trivia piece, is that the city of New Orleans, for historical reasons, that only if someone in New Orleans would understand, the city of New Orleans, actually has it the power to create its own portfolio standard. The city council can do that, and we have done it.

We have a portfolio standard in the city of New Orleans that requires more wind and in our case, nuclear power, which we use. And so the city itself is much cleaner than many cities in the southeast, but the rest of the state you can’t do anything about.

It’s interesting. There are and there’s a Republican mayor out here in California that has kind of made it its city net zero and so in part, for economic reasons, and he convinced his Republican city council that this just made economic sense to do it, and so they built out a lot of solar, and have have wind, and that it’s generating money for them. And I think that’s kind of old fashioned Republican values versus kind of, I don’t know what the current regimes values are, they don’t seem to be always tethered to just kind of financial interest, because wind and solar are cheaper than, you know, say, even gas, natural gas, if I read the politics, I think they are connected to what call incumbency, right?

There are certain industries that profit from not having renewable energy, oil and gas, namely, and the fossil fuel industry, and they’re working very hard to make sure that these other types of energy don’t come online. You know, I was researching a while back. You know, there’s a whole big fight, political fight in the Atlantic, in. The coast of about offshore wind, and there are all these tick tock videos and everything else about how offshore wind is damaging to whales, and all of that is overblown. Incidentally, I don’t want people to actually think that’s true, but those so much of that disinformation was pushed out by Exxon, or at least funded by companies that were funded by Exxon and other fossil fuel industries.

And so they they are very clear that this needs, that they don’t want renewables. I noticed when I was at these ocean at this ocean summit I was telling you about you might imagine that plastic is the big issue right plastics in the ocean, and the oil industry is totally gung ho on creating more and more markets for disposable plastic, because they know that that oil they’re producing is not going to be consumed in the same way for energy in the future.

So there’s got to be another thing you can do with this oil. And so they’re pushing fertilizers, and they’re pushing disposable plastics, and it’s just amazing to see, you know, how all of these things get connected, but it is. It’s not, as you say, it’s not about, you know, sort of micro we cannot, you know, you know, economic. These aren’t economic decisions in the broad sense, they’re decisions that benefit certain companies that already have pull over the political system.

Yeah, well, I guess you know a thought that comes to mind is whether or not say cities that that are controlled by Democrats would would kind of start to do whatever they can to get off of fossil fuels and kind of create the model for, you know, a fossil fuel free economy, which would essentially fighting the the battle against the economic actors, which are the fossil fuel companies that that are bound to Determine to pollute, regardless of the cost to the environment.

Yeah, I think, you know, argument has to be done with talking about your pocketbook really. I, you know, I think people care about the environment for sure. And I think all things being we know, we see in the polls, people are concerned about renewable energy. They’d love to have more of it, but they want their bills to be lower and and sometimes that’s that is a hard issue, because some of you know the movement toward renewable is going to cost money in certain ways, like, for instance, one of the things that’s a barrier for us in Louisiana and Texas too, which is looking at it that’s a barrier to offshore wind is we need transmission lines to move the electricity to the cities that would use it right and we don’t have that infrastructure built.

And so we’d have to have those large power lines. You know that you see when you drive across, you know a state, those large power lines are going to have to be built across in many parts of the country. And of course, that costs money that the utilities, you know, have to pay, and they were going to say they have to raise rates if they don’t get money to do it.

And the other thing is that that we have a lot of, you know, local land use laws and national laws too, that that slow that process down for reasons that I’m sympathetic with, because we don’t want development just coming in without people having any, any say in how it’s done. But that’s that’s become a very big issue in the renewable energy space is, is, how do you roll out these transmission lines? Who pays and how do you get them constructed quickly enough.

So what do you see as some of the bright spots in in moving forward, given the current administration and ways that can people can make a difference, even though the federal government seems to be not particularly interested in in the environment at the current, current time.

Yeah, I think we have to act like a river, right? And you have to, you find, you find the areas where the river can flow, and if it gets backed up in some place, then that river has to move and find, you know, other tributaries. And right now, I think the game is in states, and not just blue states, but states that that have, you know, that have a fair amount of Republicans and Democrats, where you might be able, for instance, to to roll out some kind of a of a solar project, or, or, or a wind project.

Or, in our case, you know, here in Louisiana, I’m working with a number of people to help build the legal infrastructure, to imagine the legal infrastructure for offshore wind. And we’re saying, hey, well, it doesn’t even have to be in the federal waters, right? We have state waters right, within within three miles or so from awful. Louisiana, and we can use we can permit that now, not with the governor that we have it. He may not be interested in that, but we can put all of that, all of that planning, together now.

And the other thing that we can do is we can start communicating more with the public in ways that appeal to the values that that people have. There are some people who are, you know, driven, as you say, by renewable power and getting carbon out of the out of the atmosphere. I’m one of those people. A lot of my students are those sorts of people, but there are a lot of other folks who are just like, look, I want my house to survive a storm.

I want my grandkids to be able to move to Louisiana someday, because and have the life that I had, instead of, you know, fearing that it’s going to be underwater or prone to floods and this kinds of thing. And so we can feel we can appeal to security. We can appeal to saving money and being wise with money. Those are the things I think that we need to, that we need to gear up around.

I feel like appealing to health and link linking to health and that clearly there’s tremendous health detriments to a dirty environment. You know, you look at those plants along the Louisiana, you know, the Mississippi River, and there’s spewing just all those toxins and cancer alley there. You know, a health argument should resonate. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it’s completely taken the country by storm, but I’ll tell you what.

So you mentioned cancer alley and those plastics that many plastic and petrochemical facilities there. And you know, one way you might attack the plastics issue, right? I was telling you about plastics in the ocean, is to say, Oh, well, think about, think about the health effects in cancer alley, right? From having this. And that appeals, right? But you know, the other thing that I that I sometimes say when I’m talking about plastics to people, is, I say, do you know that you the scientists now say you, you probably have a teaspoon of plastic in your body right now, right? Some of it’s in your brain, some of it’s in your sexual organs.

Some of it is, you know, all around and then everybody, not just people who live in cancer alley, right? But everybody says, oh my gosh, why? Why do I have plastic in my body? And is this what I a world I want for my kids? I think that’s a good point, right?

So, yeah, it would be great if you could get some offshore wind in Louisiana. I guess it would be not as deep of a water as the Atlantic coast, which I, my understanding is, poses a lot of technical challenges for creating it on the Atlantic coast, because Denmark is, I think shallower waters is that. Is that true?

Is awkward. Every area has its own concerns. So in the Gulf, one of the issues is that the wind is is very steady, but it’s not as powerful as you find on the Atlantic. So you have to have, you know, kind of a different set of physics running those, those motors. You’re right that it’s shallower, and we know how to build platforms out there. One of the issues, it’s not a deal breaker, but we have to figure it out. We have figured it out is we have to endure hurricanes right now off the shores of Taiwan, they have offshore wind and they have hurricanes, so they call them tsunamis and so, you know, we can manage those kinds of things. But yeah, there are, there are different issues.

If you have offshore wind closer to the coast, which I was arguing for, for legal reasons, it actually creates more environmental issues that you have to deal with, because you have more sensitive fisheries closer to the coast, and you have more interaction with the shoreline, right so that so there, you know, everything has, has trade offs there. We’re also in a in, as you know, a big flyway for migratory birds in in Louisiana. And so there are a lot of people who are thinking about how to deal with that. There are ways to do all of these things.

So it shouldn’t be a reason not to think about offshore wind. But yeah, there are lots of of technical things, but if we figure those things out, we can export the technology right? And that’s, that’s one of the things I’m hopeful about, we could figure these things out and then have a market in the rest of the world for it.

Rob, thanks for being on the program and you know, thanks for all the great work that you’re doing. You know, it’s helping both Louisiana and around the world. That conference that you went to in nice and working on those ocean issues are things that you know we we absolutely need, and you know, thanks for digging in. Make making it your life’s work. Tell us so ways that people listeners can follow what you’re doing and support what you’re doing.

Well, I also have a podcast. It’s been on hiatus for a little bit, but it’s. Coming back. It’s called Connect the Dots with Rob Verchick, and it’s supported by a group called the Center for Progressive Reform. And for anybody who’s interested in learning more about the democratization of of electricity, the democratization of of renewable energy in general, and of climate resilience, you should check out the Center for Progressive Reform. We’re at progressivereform.org and you’ll see a lot of my work there, and a lot of work from some of the best academic minds who are working with communities in Louisiana and the Virginia area and North Carolina and elsewhere, and you might be able to get involved that way.

Well, thank you again. Everybody should check that out. And I really appreciate the amazing work that you’re doing, Rob, and keep it up, and we’ll have to stay in touch. And kudos to you for really pushing the ball forward in New Orleans and being creative. And I think that that’s a big part of of how we’re going to kind of solve these problems, is just being more creative than the other side.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you so much for all the work you do, because communication and talking is one of the most important things we can do about the climate crisis.

Well, certainly working on it, and, as you say, trying to expand the group that are listening out there, so that, you know, we can get more people who are engaged on this front moving forward, so everybody can make a difference on this. And I think one of the things that helps me think about this is Cesar Chavez quote saying, every dollar we spend is a vote, and so we start spending our dollars more wisely.

That sends a message to companies, hey, we don’t want polluting products. We’re not going to spend money on plastics or try to reduce our plastic consumption, try to reduce our fossil fuel consumption, and all these things will help turn the tide.

I like that. I like that.

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