"Climate change is a lousy word and the right word scientifically is climate disruption" -John Holdren, chief scientist under President Barack Obama.
Climate Destabilization The Real Crisis Climate Emergency Forum Aug 23, 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u2GCjOO8qI&t=401s
Tom So instead of calling it climate change, which was the general term of art, I started calling it climate destabilization because change is a little too nonspecific. Destabilization is correct basically in all the cases, whether you end up wetter, drier, warmer, cooler, cause you know, you will not have a uniform map where it all goes up kind of monotonically in the same way. [Music]
We have an extraordinary guest with us today, Tom Chi. It's genuinely hard to capture the many dimensions of your work, Tom. Over the past decades, you're widely recognized as one of the preeminent thinkers and doers in the technology and innovation world, a person whose world has shaped fields from advanced engineering. I understand you were an astrophysicist to planetary-scale problem-solving. You were founding leader of Google X, where you helped drive some of the most iconic breakthrough technologies of the past decade, including Google Glass, the self-driving car project, and Project Loon, among many others.
But what makes today's conversation particularly important is your recent work, including your powerful book, Climate Capital, Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future. It takes a much broader, more human view of the climate and ecological crisis. In the book, Tom, you argue that solving the crisis, and correct me if I'm wrong, requires four essential human qualities, community, compassion, creativity, and curiosity.
I first met you, Tom, briefly over a decade ago at a remarkable organization in Boulder, Colorado, the Unreasonable Institute, where you have been a mentor for many, many years. And recently, I had the pleasure of seeing you speak at the Aspen Climate Ideas Festival in Chicago, where your remarks were among the most memorable of the entire event.
And today, you join us not only as a technologist and as a systems thinker, but also as the founder of At One Ventures, a climate-focused venture capital firm that you launched in 2019, dedicated to backing companies that restore the planet rather than extract from it.
***********
At One Ventures | Climate Tech & Deep Tech Venture Capital
At One Ventures https://www.atoneventures.com We find, fund, and grow companies using disruptive deep tech to upend the unit economics of established industries while dramatically reducing their ...
*************************
The work that's happening there is reshaping how capital can be deployed to regenerate ecosystems, redesign industries, and accelerate the transition to a livable future.
As always, we are joined by Dr. Peter Carter, founder of the Climate Emergency Institute. Peter, you're coming to us from Victoria in British Columbia. Please stay with us until the end of the program when I'll present this week's Climate-3, three of the biggest climate stories of the past week, each in one minute or less.
We deeply appreciate your support of the Climate Emergency Forum. Please like this program, subscribe to our channel, leave your comments and suggestions, visit our website at climateemergencyforum.org , listen to our new podcast series. And if you're able, please consider making a donation to help continue producing what we believe is the most important program on the climate emergency anywhere.
Tom, thank you again so much for joining us today. I know how busy you are. I'd like to begin with the moment you described vividly in your book, your experience living in Hawaii, I think it was around 2012, and you had the opportunity to explore the coral reefs near your home. And one day you discovered that the reefs had bleached. Could you paint a picture for us, Tom, of what that was like and how that moment helped shape the work that you're doing today and the qualities you believe humanity must embrace to effectively confront the climate crisis? Tom, the floor is yours.
4.10
And basically watching that reef first experience mass bleaching and then complete reef collapse after that over the course of about six to eight weeks, it was like watching all your friends and neighbors die or move away over a month and a half span. You know, I'm a scientist and engineer by training. I'm a named inventor on 77 patents. I'm formally trained in physics, electrical engineering with a specialization in robotics and signal processing. I'm very technically minded person. So I don't really have better language for this that is technical. But what it felt like is that that experience like left a hole in my heart. That's what it felt like.
That that's not there's no technical term for that. But it just felt like, oh, my God, something really important has been lost. And it really hurts actually to have watched all of that die. It spurs one to questions like, well, is there anything we could have done? And you start, you know, at the neighborhood level because maybe our neighborhood messed up. But it turns out that it wasn't that. I had been a scientist, as you mentioned before, as astrophysicist for six years. And because of that, I'm very comfortable speaking to other scientists, reading papers, understanding where a thing is scientifically.
So I first just started asking some folks ways there's something our neighborhood could do differently. But I basically found out as I talked with more scientists and it was largely marine biologists and coral scientists. I spoke with about two dozen of them. I found out that, yes, not only had our reef bleached, but a large percentage of all the reefs on planet Earth, like almost double digits, had bleached that year. Now, luckily, that doesn't happen every single year. But when I pursued that line of questioning more with these scientists, then there was a pretty broad consensus that we were going to wipe out coral reefs as an ecosystem by around the middle of the century.
So around 2055 ended up being the statistical average of their guesses. But they're highly informed guesses. These are the folks that are tracking the degradation of these reefs. Will there literally be no more coral on planet Earth after 2055? I'm sure there'll still be some small pockets of refugia, but they'll be kind of gone as an ecosystem for planet Earth. I looked at that as a, oh, my gosh, that's so soon. And that's something that people are not even focusing on.
Not to say that the temperature issue is not a big issue. It's a very big issue. It's driving a lot of the other things. But the planet has been hotter at times. It's been cooler at times. There are ways to get the temperature back to normal. It may take more effort and will than we're going to go put in there, but there are ways of doing that.
But when you go and extinct an entire class, an entire ecosystem type, that's not coming back, right? I asked the scientists directly, it's like, let's say we extinct shallow water corals. Is there any chance that they'll re-evolve? And their estimates were on the 10 to 20 million year timeline, but not guaranteed. And I was like, well, we're making a 20 million year decision right now.
I don't really think that we understand that that's what we're doing. We think it's just some political fight between the left and the right or some narrative fight. No, we are making 10 million, 20 million year decisions right now.
8.10
We talk about this really abstractly, but the first time we ever documented coral bleaching period was in the early 80s, which means we literally didn't even know this could be a type of problem for corals until the early 80s. By the time we get to the 2050s, we'll have wiped out corals as an ecosystem from planet Earth. Turns out I was born in the late 70s. I expect to die after the 2050s. The entire thing would have disappeared in a single lifetime.
But that also points to the fact that there's nobody else coming, right? If we are going to solve this issue, the people that are going to solve it are alive right now. There's nobody to wait for. There's no magical force that's going to come in and change the trajectory of this. You got to look left and right and you got to work out who's alive right now. It's going to make the difference because this is the time. There's not a later time for this one.
Herb- Your comment about a hole in your heart is the comment that reverberates with me and I'm sure many of our viewers and millions of people. Of course, the challenge is how do you take the hole in the heart and redirect it if that's the right way to put it towards solutions, towards positive action. And of course, that's what you are doing with your venture firm. That's what you talk about in your book. So from what you've said in the book, essentially, that was the catalyst for you. I don't know if it was a complete switch in your career, but basically sort of going in direction X rather than direction Y. And tell us sort of what that journey has been, you know, at least briefly from 2012 or so till the present.
9.40
Tom- Yeah, it was pretty wild journey, actually. And actually, before we get there, I'll tell you that even though the pathway is pretty wild, the origin is very common. Like when I go and speak with highly motivated, really effective people in the world and you really just break it down, like, why did you get into this work? How did you get so passionate? How did you stick with it for decades?
And I'm going to tell you that about 95 percent of the folks tell me a story that's more about tragedy than inspiration. That's not necessarily a problem. Like somebody has a child that has a rare form of cancer and then they become one of the biggest fundraisers in the world on that type of cancer. And that is how one kind of makes up what they can when they're faced with the gulf of grief. And I don't actually think about this as a terrible thing. I think of it as the origin of most motivated people is tragedy. Every once a while you get inspiration, but inspiration doesn't typically make you stick with a thing for decades and decades.
Like you get inspired by a thing. You do a great little artistic series. Maybe you did that for 10 years and you're like, fantastic work. I was really inspired for that 10 years for that thing and you move on. As much as kind of all the great stuff comes from either inspiration or tragedy, actually, most of it comes from tragedy because it's the thing that makes you stay in a thing for the rest of your life, not for a couple of years of fun, inspirational times.
Just putting that out there, because I know a lot of people kind of feel like they're coming from this place of grief and they think that that's going to be the impediment. No, that is the launching pad for most of the people that actually see through really hard things. It starts with grief, actually.
So my journey from that was, yes, certainly starting through grief. Once I started to talk with these other scientists and realize the magnitude of this, actually, I went back to the IPCC data because I felt like I had been informed. I was a person that was reading the IPCC reports and not just the executive summaries, like the scientific work behind it, because former scientists. And I was like, how was this missed? How did nobody telegraph that this was going to happen? And I went and recomputed some of the data from the IPCC, because what has been happening is we've been really focused on presenting the consensus view, because we've been trying to fight against climate deniers and climate deniers say like, oh, this one percent of papers disagree with you. See, there's no disagreement in the thing.
So we've been really focused on the consensus view. We've been focused on average temperature scenarios by the year 2100, because honestly, averages are pretty easy to get consensus on as well. Right. But in my calculations, I was seeing something a lot more concerning, which is the volatility was increasing way faster than the averages are. And there's a very straightforward way to measure volatility it could vary in standard deviation for anything that's a normal curve. You can get into those details if you want, but volatility is just as easy to measure as averages. And in the grand scheme of things, I was basically seeing, oh, my God, and this is me doing the calculations back in 2012; I could see that the volatility was increasing about three times faster than the averages were increasing. And what a one degree C increase on a particular spot on Earth. What it might mean practically is six degrees hotter in the summer, four degrees colder in the winter. That's what one degree means. It doesn't mean one degree the whole year.
I started to realize that a lot of the damage from climate change was actually going to happen way sooner than these by year 2100 scenarios, because it's the upper and lower bounds of volatility which actually drive the most disturbed outcomes in terms of ecosystem disturbance, human displacements, all sorts of thing. So I calculated back in 2012.
And just for context, this is still three years before Paris is signed. We were not talking about the problem like this. If we ever talked about any effects from climate change, it was like, well, maybe there'll be more hurricanes and maybe the hurricanes will be more powerful. And yes, the physics on that is true, too. But like nobody was kind of calculating the broader volatility.
And when I sat down and did that volatility calculation, I predicted that within 10 years of 2012, we would be seeing massive wildfires, massive droughts, human displacements, climate refugees up in the 100 million plus territory. And these were not things that we were talking about at the time, but literally all of it came true. It's the kind of calculation that one never wants to look at and have to believe.
But part of the reason I left my job, which was one of the best jobs I could ever imagine having because I was using my technical skills all the time on things that I think are generally good for the world, though did we need a self-driving car this decade versus five decades from now? But that was actually part of the resolution process. I realized we could also invent a self-driving car in 50 years and society would kind of be fine. But if we wait 50 years on coral reefs, they just don't exist on planet Earth anymore. There are things that have a real timetable, not the fake timetable that industry creates where it's like, we just need to be the fastest. We need to be the fastest at self-driving cars. We need to be the fastest at A.I. Like what if China is faster than us at A.I.? It's like, no, no, no. Those are all fake. All those deadlines are fake. That's just industry just wanting to be faster. That's a preference. Right. All the coral reefs dying. That's real. And that's not a timeline that we arbitrarily get to move around and make fake urgency on and no, that's just real.
15.00
I realized after I'd done that volatility calculation, I am a physicist and I was like, well, look, I didn't even do a really complicated thing. I'm just basically looking at the macro. So this is effectively a conservation of energy calculation. And I'm pretty sure it's right. If you're a physicist and you think to yourself, well, I don't see anything wrong with the math. And it's basically predicting that we're going to have these mass volatility events within 10 years, what is the moral thing to do if you believe your own work? And for me, I was like, I probably need to work on this stuff. Right. Like I have kind of the most amazing job I could ever imagine at the time. Honestly, I still got paid more there than I have ever since.
But in practice, I realized that if I stay there, I'm just going to make more gadgets for the world. There's no real time pressure for those gadgets to exist now versus later. And a lot of the most important parts of Earth's systems will die in those coming decades while I'm busy making gadgets. So I basically left a very safe and comfortable and amazing job. And I kind of went out in the world in the truest sense of the word. I basically went to the front lines of where all this ecological damage was happening.
So, for example, places where the glaciers were calving 100 times faster than, than they had historically, even 20 years prior. And we were kind of losing on the glaciers, including glaciers that basically feed major river systems on which 50 million people downstream depend. I went to the places where they were clear cutting the Southeast Asian rainforest and putting up the palm oil plantations. I went to the Amazon where they don't even bother taking the timber anymore. Only seven percent of the extraction for the Amazon is for the timber, like the other 93 percent of the time that we're clearing the land. We just slash and burn it to go do soybean and cattle or gold mining or all this kind of stuff. Right. But we could even care less about taking the trees out.
Given all that, I got a very clear view on the forces that were driving the direct destruction of the planet and what that destruction looked like. And I also spent a lot of time in communities where people live on a dollar or two a day. These are actually parallel problems that if we end up with a just civilization at the end of the century, then we will have worked on both of those problems really substantially. And there's nothing like seeing this stuff up close.
And I went out there with as open a mind as possible because I didn't go out there saying like, well, I know all the solutions to deal with all the troubles of people that live on a dollar or two a day. I didn't go out there presuming I knew all the solutions to be able to fix the cryosphere or what we're doing to the oceans or, you know, how we're driving this ecological disruption and chaos. I just learned from a lot of people on the ground. I worked with a bunch of teams that worked on the stuff close up. As I started to work with them, I started to see, hey, some of my tech skills are useful here. Some of my finance skills are useful here. Some of my leadership and running team skills are useful here.
And I gave the advice that was useful at the times that was useful, but it led to a world where I was actually working with dozens of these teams and including helping to bring them some capital. And that basically got bridged into the world where I could see that venture capital was a way that I could contribute to this formally through a job as opposed to in a lot more of a scattered way by just finding the right investors for this one, finding the right investors for that one.
Herb What strikes me when I listen to you and think about this with puzzlement and amazement for many years now, and maybe you can provide some insight into this. You know, we have literally hundreds, if not thousands of billionaires. We have thousands of people that have the kinds of skills that you have, if not exactly, but comparable in so many areas. And yet, is it fair to say that one percent of the people make the choice that you did, one percent of the billionaires, whether it's, you know, Tom Steyer or Michael Bloomberg or somebody else decide to devote even a small portion of their capital? Now, you've been around these people directly or indirectly for many years. What's your assessment? Because I ask because to me, it's certainly not the solution, but part of the solution is to find a way to mobilize. We have a society that has inequality, but at least take advantage of it and mobilize those people to give back in ways that could protect their own future and their family's future. It's not selfish by any means. So what's your perspective? Can you generalize?
Tom This will hopefully be helpful even beyond the billionaire class, which is basically everybody in the world and every organization in the world is in one of two states. They're in the state of either having more money than sense or having more sense than money. Generally speaking, people will look at the people that have more money than sense and be like, oh, guys, if we could just get a little more sense in you, then we could deploy these dollars in a useful way.
But in truth, actually, both sides have power and they really need each other. Right. Because if you're a person with more money than sense and you have bad advisors around you or you're taking actions where the future is going to be way worse.
20.03
So it would be in your interest to do things that would help either the environmental or social future of the planet. But if you're not getting that advice, then you really do need the inputs of people that have more sense than money. It's a relatively rare billionaire that goes and constructs that informational world around them because it's way easier for people to have just a low friction environment, which effectively leads to, it's another way of saying you end up surrounding yourself with yes men and you don't experience any friction because everybody loves the glow of your money and they just want to stay in the orbit of your money. And they're going to say all the things that you want to hear.
And the thing is that I was never that type of person in the first place. I'm an engineer and the things that we build need to work. So if a thing's not going to work, I'm just going to have to tell you it's not going to work. Also, scientists, if I'm telling you, if I, if I know that something from the physics perspective is just literally impossible, breaks the diffraction limit, goes against the second law of thermodynamics, right, is higher efficiency than one can get from Stirling cycle or whatever, then I would just tell you. So, yes, the billionaires actually found that to be very refreshing, actually. Now, they didn't keep me close the way that they do with the yes men, the yes men go to the parties, they do all sort of thing. But when they actually wanted real input on whether things are going to work or not, they would call me because I'm a person who would just actually tell them what was true from the engineering and science side. And that sounds like that would be taken care of. They're surrounded by a lot of technical people. But like this desire to be around fame, wealth, all that sort of thing does distort a lot of people's minds.
And for me, I grew up very blue collar working class. I could truly care less about being wealthy or not. Like if I can have a workshop where I can build shit and invent shit and I have some instruments to play music, I'm having a very happy life. I'm fine just telling you what's real, whether I'm a hundred millionaire or a two millionaire, that I'm still just going to generally conduct my life in this way of making stuff and making music.
Herb That's very, very refreshing the way you put it and very sincere. And I know Peter is, I'm sure, very eager to to talk with you. You mentioned the IPCC earlier. Peter has been an expert reviewer for the IPCC, follows it very closely. Peter, the floor is yours.
And you mentioned things that scientists never, never mentioned. It's very, very special. That's very special.
So you mentioned basically what comes down to the human aspect. And it's a crisis of values. I'd certainly like to hear a little bit more from you about that, because that really, really is fundamental. And also, perhaps as somebody who over a long period of years has transferred all his modest capital into clean energy and done very well through it. I'd certainly like to hear what your, what you think your prospects are on people investing in clean energy, because obviously we have to have a ton of that. So values.
23.30
Tom Yeah, happy to go do it. So like after I did that analysis and found out that volatility was kind of going to be the killing edge of climate, then I already started redoing my language around it. So instead of calling it climate change, which was the general term of art, then I started calling it climate destabilization because change is a little too nonspecific. Destabilization is correct in basically all the cases, whether you end up wetter, drier, warmer, cooler, cause you know, you will not have a uniform map where it all goes up kind of monotonically in the same way. So given that then it's like, Oh, destabilization is a better word.
When you actually look into the history of why we even use the term climate change, it originally came out of a Republican messaging strategist, Frank Luntz.
***********
Blogger: That's it! I remembered that from experience but I didn't know the details. Now I can dig farther and maybe develop a post about this because yes, the term climate change nullified the issue because it does not really say anything
***********************
[Transcript continued]
If you've ever seen a debate where they have like a panel where they have those little sentiment knobs, Oh, I agree with this. I disagree with this. I'm neutral on it. And they'll, they'll basically show in real time exactly how the sentiment of a group is evolving. Then basically Frank Luntz used that methodology in order to go figure out what terms for what we're now calling climate change, which is literally his term. What he was optimizing for was the thing that sparked the least sentiment, the least desire to act, to feel anything. And he arrived on climate change, which is a pretty neutered term. It doesn't have any, you know, energy to it.
Destabilization really feels like, Oh, maybe we got to look at this. We might want to do something. Everything's getting destabilized. Change might be positive, right? So climate change by itself doesn't really say anything about whether a positive thing or negative thing is happening. And basically I started to refuse to consistently use the term that was created by the strategist that specifically wasn't interested in the truth, was just interested in what words would lead to the least amount of action.
Because this to me is kind of like a subset of what Carl Sagan used to call weasel words. Right. And yeah, so you guys are familiar. And look, I was an astrophysicist. I've worked in the same building as Carl, as Carl Sagan. So his thinking and work does affect mine a decent amount because really wise dude, really figured out how to talk about technical topics to lots of people. And I also think that's part of my job as well, right? To go understand these climate and engineering topics at some real depth and try to bring actual working solutions to bear.
So on the value side, it goes all the way to the beginning, like the language. How do we talk about a thing? How do we frame it? And what were the intentions of the people that led to the current framing?
Look, obviously Frank Luntz is kind of adversarial sort of party relative to getting the good work done here. But even some of the people that were trying to do the right thing, I think we maybe came at it in ways that didn't end up working for us. Because I think without really thinking about it, we ended up on something that is a format of a thou shall not goal. Specifically, we kind of converged on the goal thou shall not exceed 1.5 degrees C. Okay, I get the sentiment behind it. I think the science behind the level of destabilization that we get to beyond 1.5 degrees C, that all makes sense why, you know, a target was chosen.
But being an executive leader, then I, every single quarter, I had to have an all hands where I got in front of the whole team and got them inspired about what we're going to be building next. And the thing is, is that thou shall not goals are very uninspiring. The most famous collection of thou shall not goals is the 10 commandments. People don't read the 10 commandments and afterwards say like, I'm so excited to live my life. They're like, Oh my God, everything's terrifying. Like there's a hundred ways to mess up and only a couple of ways to succeed. This is terrifying.
And I think we accidentally made a goal like that with 1.5 degrees C. It feels like there's a thousand ways to mess up and only a couple of ways to succeed. And you just feel like you're walking on eggshells the whole time. I'm not saying that that doesn't express the appropriate urgency. That is the appropriate urgency, but in terms of how human systems work and how humans are motivated, that's the wrong way to motivate humans.
If I got in front of my, as an executive in front of my team and at the all hands and said, guys, it's miserable out there. You know, thou shall not do this, this, this, this, this anymore. Then yeah. How motivated is that team going to be to come together, use their most brilliant minds to solve the problem?
So that's why in our firm, we came up with a goal, which I think has got more appropriate goal construction, which is our firm should be focused on helping humanity to become a net positive to nature. Unlike a thou shall not goal. You're working towards something you want, not something you don't want. You're not like facing damnation by some external exogenous party on the other side of it, which is also in there in a down also not goal. You really do have agency to try to do what humans can do to build the civilization that we need to build.
You know, values spoken are one thing, and that's great. I'm very happy when people speak up for their values. But I think more important than values spoken is values that are organized into skillful, repeated action. And when one redefines the goal from that should not exceed 1.5 degrees C to let's work toward a civilization that's net positive nature. Then this helps one to operationalize this work in ways that can be a lot more coherent than thou shall not exceed 1.5 degrees C.
And I think this gets into the answer to your second question, because the way that we've organized that work is helping humanity become a net positive nature. Inspiring. That's great. How do you operationalize it? Nature to us has got four physical subcomponents, air, water, soil, biodiversity. So, of course, we care about all the emissions, but that's just in the air category. But we also are damaging water resources, hydrological cycles. We are also degrading soils. We are also destroying biodiversity directly. And if you can work on all four of those things, the nature ends up being extremely healthy. But if you only worked on air, you could ruin the other three things and nature could still die in the palm of your hands while you're just working on the one thing with air.
Now, this may sound really sprawling now, but the way that we address that is we stack rank the industries that are doing the most damage. So there's four industries that actually represent more than 90 percent of global water pollution by volume. Agriculture, the biggest out of that, that is 70 of that 90 percent. So it's very large contributor and also the largest use of water on planet Earth, about 70 percent of our freshwater resources go to agriculture. But putting that aside for a second, then you got textiles, paper and pulp oil and gas.
And it means that if all you did was address how those four industries relate to water, then you could potentially head off 90 plus percent of global water pollution. If you want to go deal with that last nine percent or whatever, then that's a thousand more industries.
So what we do in our firm is we focus on the industries that are doing the most damage to nature in each one of these subcategories. And this really helps on the investment side as well, because it means you're never getting into a problem that's too small, right? Like literally everything that you're trying to solve is the biggest industries that are doing the most damage. So when you succeed at solving the problem, those industries, then the financial upside is also very material.
The way that you actually win there is you can't just try to talk with the CEOs and get them to vote differently with their conscience. I mean, sometimes that'll work, but it's like a very inconsistent theory of change, like the consistent theory of change that does get executives to move over and over and over is winning unit economics.
So the way that we can work on our investments is we're always looking for things that are disruptive deep tech, which help to usher in radically better unit economics, which is the reason that industry is interested in working with us paired with radically better environmental economics. And that comes from our values, right?
But at the end of the day, if you get attracted to something because it might double your margins and it just so happens to get rid of 95% of your CO2e emissions, and it just so happens to get rid of 90% of your water pollution, you're not going to be upset with that.
*********************Now, that said, if I came to your factory and said, oh, I have a thing that costs a little bit more, but solves those two problems, you almost definitely would not buy. But if you flip the order on it, then people get interested. They get far enough into the thing. They see the margin improvements and then they're happy that there's environmental improvements. But I'll say 95% of the customers of our investments, they are not even looking at the environmental part. They are actually cleaning up their operations just because they're seeing a strong business opportunity there.
Peter- The only other scientist I've come across ever that has pointed out that climate change is a lousy word and the right word scientifically is climate disruption. Only one. That's John Holdren, who was the chief scientist under President Obama. One scientist, my God, right?
The other thing is you talk about volatility. You know, the very first scientific paper published on what you talked about, Tom Chi, was published a week ago. The very- thar first paper pointed out that no other scientists and no other policymakers had ever looked at that right, that they really had to. So that certainly reinforces one of the many, many accurate and wise statements that you've made for us.
Tom- I knew the calculations weren't wrong and I actually had published scientific papers in the past, so I do know how to do it. But I was like, no, I need to get to work. I need to actually just work on the problem, not just tell everybody that they're wrong.
And I also understand why they stuck with that so long. That actually was the success of the climate deniers, because the climate deniers were so harsh on any paper that was disagreeing or any outlier in the data. And if you want to understand the volatility, you have to include outliers. But we were basically trying to focus on averages because we wanted to have a story that we can actually get policymakers and deniers to pay attention to. And there was a lot of strength in the averages.
But then you miss being able to look at the volatility and the variability with clear eyes. And in a way, the climate deniers got what they wanted. We had a less effective message because we couldn't just stick with just the pure data, including some of the outliers, and put those into our calculations.
Herb- I wanted to go back when you talked about your sort of vision of moving towards net positive. And I think that relates to what you spoke of when you first started speaking at the Chicago Aspen conference, where you sort of gave the comparison between the explosion in human population and the resources we use, and the explosion in another creature that I won't mention. I'll let you mention it, but maybe you could take a couple minutes and talk to our viewers about the metaphor you used in the example.
Tom So you guys will appreciate this because I think you're of the generation that would know about this book, The Population Bomb. And in The Population Bomb, they kind of talk about how the world population continuing to grow and boom is going to lead to mass famines, major disruptions, all sorts of things.
And it was very influential in the way that we kind of thought about modern economic policy, you know, social policy, all that sort of thing. But that book basically had baked into it a kind of accidental assumption, which as soon as I state it, it'll be apparent that this is the assumption. It's basically the idea that human beings are effectively a unit of damage. And if you have too many of them, then you'll just have so much accumulated damage, then humans won't be able to keep surviving on this planet because of all the, you know, we're just a bunch of units of damage and there's too many of them now. And actually, I still think that we have that thought in a lot of places. Now, the metaphor that I spoke about at Aspen, because it's not even just a metaphor, it is just a true thing about the natural world, is that there's a species that's very much like us that we don't worry about the population bomb at all. And I think it's very instructive. So if you look at the biomass of all the humans on planet Earth, it's about 350 million tons. So long story short, ants have a very similar amount of biomass to human beings on Earth. And that's not the only way that we're similar. Both of us are eusocial organisms that have multiple roles in our societies. We build architecture, we change the landscapes that we're part of, so on and so forth. And actually, largely like ants are omnivores. They also practice hunting, farming. They do a lot of things. They do a huge number of things that humans do. So very similar to us in a lot of ways.
But one way that they're quite different than us is human beings eat a little bit less than 3% of their body weight per day. It's about 2.8% on average per day. Ants eat 30% of their body weight per day. And given that we're starting with the same biomass, that means they're literally eating 10 times more of the Earth than us every day. It turns out to be about 100 million tons of food per day from the Earth, while we eat about 10 million tons of food from the Earth per day. In other words, ants are eating what a population of 80 billion people would eat.
And we're not sitting here worried about ant overpopulation.
And the reason is that ants are not a unit of damage to their environment. If they are an invasive species in some settings, sure. But most ants in most places are not a unit of damage to their environment. And because of it, we don't worry about them eating what 80 billion people eat. We know that they are following the golden rule of kind of all species and ecosystems that have lasted. Because honestly, if you don't follow this rule, you don't last, which is maybe the trajectory we're currently on.
But that basically is all species in ecosystems tend to be giving more in ecosystem services than take.
Ants do eat things from the ecosystem, but they also aerate the soils. And that helps to improve the productivity of that ecosystem. They also help to cycle nutrients. They help to do a lot of things that end up being highly productive for the ecosystem. That if they didn't do that, then the ecosystem would have a lower carrying capacity. If you calculate how much they take from that ecosystem compared to how much carrying capacity they add to the ecosystem, they are actually net generative. That's why we don't worry at all.
They could be eating 100 billion people worth of food, 200 billion people worth of food. Honestly, there's a bunch of organisms that have more biomass than ants and humans. I just chose them because they're so similar, right? But everything that has more biomass than us, those numbers are even more in the favor of, yeah, no, we don't worry about those things because they are following the golden rule of all species.
And we just stopped following it.
But you got to follow the golden rule of all species if you want to be here for an extended period of time. And I'm hoping we want to be here for an extended period of time. It's not guaranteed right now, but I'm hoping we want to be here 10 million years from now. Right now, we're not on that trajectory, obviously.
**************
COMING SOON
Hansen’s El Niño WarningHerb- We've sort of begun to bring this conversation down to earth a little bit with ants, no pun intended or maybe intended. But let's switch over to the company that you founded. People go to your website as I did. They see, oh, I don't know, maybe two or three dozen companies that you have invested in in a whole variety of fields. Maybe take a couple, maybe say two of them that you think might be of particular interest to our viewers. What are they trying to do? How does that fit with your values and what would the impact be if they succeed?
Tom- Yeah, I'll take a couple of them, you know, actually building off of the example I shared before. The four industries that are doing the most water pollution by volume are agriculture, textiles, paper and pulp, oil and gas. And on the textile side, a lot of it is coming from textile dyeing. A little bit is coming from a smaller piece than that is coming from runoff from cotton production. But if you look at textile dyeing, we invested in a company that, and again, the triad is disruptive.
Deep Tech brings in radically better unit economics paired with radically better environmental economics. So the disruptive deep tech in this case is a new type of textile dyeing machine. The unit economics have massively improved. So instead of costing about twenty eight to thirty five cents to go dye a standard length of fabric, then ours only cost nine to fifteen cents. So two and a half to three x cheaper opex. So effectively, if you're not doing it our way, we're going to put you out of business; like we are literally much, much better on the operational cost and margin side.
But in terms of ecological economics, it basically takes the amount of wastewater from a textile dyeing station from several dozen metric tons per day to about 100 milliliters in a week. Walking through this might be useful if one is trying to solve these problems for the planet.
And I think you heard very quickly in the intro, I'm a physicist and electrical engineer by training. So you can actually break things down from a physics first principles lens and it'll tell you exactly where you should look to solve the problem. Let me walk you through it in the following way. If you're trying to look at whether a new technology has the potential to positively disrupt an old technology, then all the industries that were working in our physical industries, they have to follow the laws of physics. And you can understand any system through the laws of physics by basically breaking into four things, because basically physics overall is just the study of matter and energy moving through time and space. There's only four things to track. If you track those four things, you will understand the physical system very well.
So when we try to go and assess whether a new technology can be an old incumbent technology, which tends to be a dirty, damaging, high emission technology, then we just go head to head on those four attributes. How did matter change between the old system and the new? How did energy change? How did time change? How did space change? If you don't have a big win on one of those four, you can immediately pass on the deal.
There's not going to be a unit economic win if there isn't a physical difference, and there definitely can't be a unit economic win in the right place if there isn't a unit economic win. Now, what do I mean by the right place? Well, if you're trying to go beat the cost structure of existing industries, then you need to go focus in on the part of the cost structure that is most meaningful to them. And how does one determine that? If you look at all the physical businesses in the world, then you can actually break down 90 plus percent of the cost structure of any physical business in the world comes down to just three different cost sources. Feedstock costs, which is the cost of the atoms that you'll be transforming, processing costs, which is the cost of the energy and the labor that you use to transform it, and transport logistic costs, which is the cost of getting the atoms to you and getting the end products away from you.
And then you understand why that would be most of the cost structure of most physical businesses based on that. Right. So great. Now, the cost structure of those businesses are not split a third, a third, a third in those three categories. Each industry tends to be dominated by one of those three. This industry is dominated by feedstock costs. Great. This industry dominated by transport logistic costs. Great. And that basically tells you exactly where the innovation needs to be for you to win. Because if you take 50 percent of the cost structure out of a small part of the system. Right. Something that's only 10 percent of the total cost, then people are not really going to care. But if you take 50 percent of the cost structure out of the thing, that's 80 percent of the cost. All of a sudden, everybody in industry is falling over to use your technology.
That is basically the formula to go and work out the things that are going to be successful in the kind of reinvention of the economy towards something that the planet can live with in the long term. And I know I'm getting into the details a bit, but like imagine our firm does that times 100, because that's still like the 101 version of explaining how our firm succeeds at doing the type of investing that a lot of other folks have had a lot of challenge with.
Herb- Peter, we'll go ahead. Why don't you begin to wrap up with any other thoughts or questions for Tom?
Peter- I just want to encourage people to watch this video, keep replaying Tom's answers, because there's so much there's so much material. It's absolutely essential in Tom's answers to our little questions here and also rewind several times Tom's explanation of the importance of climate variability. So thanks very much, Tom, for being here and thoroughly enjoyed listening to you. Thank you.
Tom- I'll toss in one other thought on the variability point, which is people are going to be paying attention to temperature and that will matter and there will be extreme heat events. We've seen extreme heat stroke issues in Northern Europe, in South Asia, all sort of thing, and that will continue to happen. We need to stay on top of it. But the other thing that is going to be massively destabilized is the pattern of how water moves across the planet. And I think we have been told the wrong story, and it's been told by the people that want to be resource capitalists in a way that I think will basically destroy civilization. And they'll basically and they say something like, oh, yeah, there's going to be wars over water because water is going to be so scarce and dah, dah, dah. And that's people that want to, number one, commodify water, move it out of the public sphere into the private sphere and through privatization and commodification, then they're going to make crazy money. But their actual basic statement is untrue. On a warmer planet, the source of all freshwater is not just a defined amount of water that's in a river or lake. The source of most freshwater on planet Earth that we directly experience is evaporation off of the ocean. That becomes all the kind of moisture that's moving in the atmosphere that rains down on us at a volume that way larger than all the rivers and lakes in the world. Basically, in one day, then as much water falls out of the sky as rain as one and a half times all of the capacity of all all the rivers on planet Earth combined. Right. So there's actually a lot more water at play at that layer than the stuff that we kind of talk about as our normal water resources. And the reason that we're going to experience shortages is not that we're not going to have more access to freshwater than ever. It's because we've massively damaged our hydrological cycles. We're not going to experience that water as life giving, irrigating the fields. We're going to experience it as flash floods. We're going to experience it as chaotic patterning because we have so degraded our soil, so degraded our watersheds. So if we wanted to be prepared for this particular moment, we would start working actively on the repair of hydrology, like water moving too fast, chaos, water moving too slow, chaos. Stagnated water breeds a bunch of disease, all sort of thing. You just need slow water. And we need to get really skillful at managing landscapes to do slow water and do so in ways that we also have good carrying capacity for these destabilizing events, because we are just going to have a lot of climate destabilization so that the soils and the aquifers can take excess rainfall so that we don't have the major overruns and destructions of infrastructure when we experience water volatility.
Because a lot of this century is going to be water volatility, fire volatility, not just heat.
Herb- Yeah. And I think that, you know, there's the whole concept of the biotic pump, the fact that, again, that water and moisture coming across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa basically then meets the Amazon and creates its own self-perpetuating cycle of water. And then if it affects where you are in California and everything else, everything is connected with everything else.
Tom- If people want to track that specific thing that you're talking about, then there's this woman, Abigail Swann, at the University of Washington Eco Climate Lab. Her lab has done the most sophisticated simulations on how atmospheric hydrology is evolving as a function of the decisions we've been making. Changes in vegetation, changes in industry, all sort of thing. I got to mention this work because she is documenting the breakdown of everything, but in the process of documenting the breakdown that's coming from our decisions, she is also kind of sketching out the playbook of what you would change on the surface to fix atmospheric hydrology. And when you fix it, it happens at the continent level. Just like you say, stuff that happens in Africa is affecting South Africa, us deforesting the Amazon is affecting the Baja Peninsula.
It has that scale of impact if you're able to repair atmospheric hydrology. And I don't think that we've ever even had the ambition as a civilization to think at that scale because these are larger than country scales. And I think our biggest ambitions are like, oh, if we could do it at the national level, guys, no, this is the time to really come together on something that matters a lot more.
Herb- We will put a link to Abigail Swann in our show notes. And also, I mentioned that the Russian physicist Anastassia Makarieva also thinks that continent and planetary scales, maybe it'd be interesting to get the two of them together with you to moderate, Tom.
Tom- I would just be taking notes from them. They're very brilliant folks. But yes, absolutely.
Herb- Let me wrap this up by a quote that came from your book. One of the things I highlighted, it was something you said, you said the living diversity of this planet represents a body of wisdom of how life can thrive in every nook and niche on Earth. And it is stored in the genetic legacy of these beings. In their behaviors, learned and instinctual, in their language, in their cultures, in all the ways that these organisms communicate and live in community.
Our actions are burning down this multi-billion year body of wisdom, an incalculable loss that if we cannot course correct, will be the biggest and most devastating legacy of this era in history. Let us leave us on that, not out of a sense of paralysis, but out of, I know that Peter joins me and Charles and Heidi and everyone on our team joins me in commending you, Tom.
Maybe it was good in some respects and seeing the coral bleaching. I'm sure it wasn't good in a lot of other respects, but it led you to make a real difference, not just in the companies that you invest in, but also in how you're helping us all reconceptualize what we need to do. We thank you for the generous amount of time you spent with us. We hope you'll come back again. And we just want you to know that on behalf of our viewers, we're with you and we're with your team. Thanks so much again, Tom.
Tom- Thank you. It was great being here. Herb- Now we're going to switch to our regular program ending, which is the Climate-3, three of the bigger stories in the climate headlines for the past week of which there were dozens of stories. So one has to do with the concept that many of you may have heard of, of overshoot. It's the idea that the goal was to keep to one point five degrees C. We're now at one point five. Many predict we'll be above one point five in the coming years. We were above one point five a year or two ago. And then the idea is that, well, hopefully we'll come back down. We'll overshoot our goal and then come back down. Well, a new study has shown that unless communities are extremely sophisticated and wealthy and whatever, that the consequences of shooting over one point five, the consequences in terms of extreme weather will be so severe that they will essentially be irreversible, that we can't come back from overshoot for many communities around the world. This, of course, is only one paper. Probably isn't very surprising, but it's a sobering analysis of the fact that we're not in a very good place. The second, which is also not a very good story, is in the UK. We've talked about it in the past weeks. And many of you, even if you're not from the UK, have read about the extreme weather they have experienced. And yet the climate deniers, and we talked about those recently with Tom just a few minutes ago, the climate deniers have come out of the woodwork. So in the newspaper called The Mail on Sunday, a commentator said, this long, hot summer is not the apocalypse. It's like a glorious, long holiday in France. Well, I don't think many English people that I know or read about would think that anything they experienced in the past couple of months is like a holiday in France, as nice as that sounds. But that wasn't enough for the UK. So the deputy leader of the hard right climate skeptic Reform UK party, which is possibly may win the next election in a couple of years to run the Great Britain. He said his name is Richard Tice. He said the British people, quote, should enjoy multiple heat waves and shrug off warnings of dangerous climate change while enjoying more English fizzy wine, reports the Financial Times. I'm not making this up. Maybe the Financial Times is making this up, but I doubt it because they're a very reputable newspaper. The article says that Tice told journalists that it was arrogant to try to stop climate change. It quotes him saying when it's a bit warm, let's enjoy it. Let's celebrate some of these things rather than just being doom and gloom. These are direct quotes. I wish I was making it up and saying this is an April Fool's joke. But this is the extent to which we have climate denial desperately trying to deal with the fact that climate denial is impossible for any rational human being.
And the third of the stories is also not a happy story. And that is that the president of Brazil recently announced a major new oil discovery off the coast of Brazil, not far from the Amazon. And he said that was wonderful for Brazil. So here we have the president of Brazil, one of the world's leaders in acting on climate, heralding the discovery of oil. But basically, he said that the money, the resources that we get from the sale of this oil will go towards being more aggressive in attacking climate change. So, you know, we've heard lots of different rationalizations for business as usual, and that's one of them. So I don't know which is crazier, what the president of Brazil said or what the head of the Reform Party in the UK said. But those are the three climate stories for this particular week. As always, thanks to all of you who have watched us. Please like and subscribe to our program and we will see you next week. Thank you so much. Goodbye.
*****
Recent related post
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
"We need to decarbonize now" -Bill McGuire "Elites Have NO PLAN for Climate Collapse" -Novara Media Aug 23 report w transcript at Heating Planet blog
No comments:
Post a Comment