The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Burn Fuel Better: From Helpless to Hopeful in the Race Against Climate Change by Don Owens

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

Burn Fuel Better: From Helpless to Hopeful in the Race Against Climate Change by Don Owens https://www.amazon.com/dp/1736090070 Burnfuelbetter.com The time for blaming, minimizing, or avoiding the climate crisis is over. We are in a critical ticking time bomb, and the Earth is in a perilous state. The effects of climate change are everywhere — for anyone to continue to deny it, is insane. From the extreme weather conditions like drought and fires to the devastation of our glaciers covered with black carbon — we are running out of time. Burn Fuel Better will shed light on some of the unintentional mistakes we are making to address climate change and suggest practical solutions we can make to minimize and possibly reverse the impact — solutions that can be fully implemented today, not 20 – 30 years in the future, when it will be too late. With an accidental discovery of lowering certain types of emissions from diesel engines, this new way of burning fuel minimizes black carbon from entering the atmosphere and adds life-sustaining oxygen. It may sound too impossible to believe and too good to be true. Still, once you discover the proven science behind the technology, you will see how easy it is to join the revolution to save our planet — one fuel-burning vehicle and application at a time. Go to BurnFuelBetter.com to get your free gift and join the revolution today.

You wanted the best... You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a monster education role. rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Folks, boss here from thecris Foss Show. Dot thechrisvoss Show.com. I like my version maybe better. No, but the one gal, the operatic gal, she sees it so eloquently.

Plus, she needs work. It's a tough job market out there. Anyway, guys, welcome the big show. As always. We are the oldest living podcast out of a handful still left from the 2000s, where we do something none of it, than them else do. One to two new episodes a day. Nobody's putting out that sort of power, at least not in the lower 99% of podcasts. So please support the show. Go to goodreads.com, Fortezs, Christfuss,

YouTube.com, Fortesch,christvus, LinkedIn.com's Fortes Suss-Christvost. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Voss show. Some guests of the show may by advertising on the podcast, but it's not an endorsement or review of any kind. We're an amazing young man talking to here in the green room. and we're getting into his book. His book is entitled, Burn Fuel Better, from Helpless to Hopeful in the Race Against Climate Change by Don Owens.

We're going to be talking to him, and it's pretty prevalent. Right now we are in August of 2026, if you're watching this 20 years from now on YouTube like you do, and we are seeing massive climate change. In fact, we just saw Spokane, Washington, huge subdivisions burned down, just like the Park Palisades,

just like the other thing, happened in California in the trailer park areas. I forget what they were called. But it just came out that it was one of the electricity wires that set it off from the electricity company. But still, the amount of fire spread that we're seeing is incredible. So Don Owens is a leading expert in hydrogen-related engine and energy technologies. He's the author of the latest book before mentioned, and he's dedicated the past decade to creating a customized hydrogen solution that is now broadly applicable. The Leaf H2. He owns 19 passes and purposely tested and verified his technology and laboratories approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He previously, he was the CEO of Business Internet Systems in the late 2000s. He launched a first-of-its-of-its-kind online platform that serve a significant business card printing needs of the U.S. Congress, the executive office, and the Department of State. He also spearheaded early web and work database optimization for the U.S. Census Bureau. After receiving a law degree from George Stern University, Bianas Greer as a patent attorney for Western Electric and Bell Labs.

He received an engineering degree at General Motors Institute, now Kettering University. Welcome to the show. How are you done? Thank you. Thank you very much, Chris. I'm doing it absolutely fantastic. I'm doing fantastic. It's wonderful to have you, sir.

Give us any dot-coms. Where do you want people to get to know you better on the interwebs? Okay. It'll be the main book website is burn, fuel, better. com. And I do have another company that is actually promoting this product that I have, at least that's developing, this product that I talk about in the book. And that book is, and that is, H-N-O-N-N-T-L dot com, H-N-O-I-N-T-L dot com. But that's, but the book is burnfuelbairn.com. All right. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside your book, Dawn.

Very good, very good question. In fact, the main thing. thing that I really want to, or what I want people to understand and see in this book is it's a statement that I would like to make in this, and this black carbon is the enemy of the planet. And the reason why I want people to know about black carbon and what it does is that it has such a devastating effect on climate change. Black carbon, huh? Black carbon. And most people have never heard of black carbon.

I had never heard of black carbon. I didn't realize that it even existed until one day I was doing some research on the fact that our product reduced particulate matter. And particular matter is a is an exhaust. It's unburned fuel. Particular matter is what happens when you combust fuel and it creates this unburned fuel. And it turns out that black carbon is a major component of particular matter. Oh, wow. And then we found out that particular matter, that black carbon is, that it,

coast to glaciers and causes them melt, which is a direct cause in climate change. And in fact, if somebody have, most people have heard of CO2, but people haven't heard of black carbon. I haven't either. Yeah, no, no, I'm serious. No, most people have not heard of it. And if you did a Google search on, is black carbon worse than CO2, you will be shocked to hear that black carbon is 1,500 times worse than CO2 for them. Wow. And it turns out that our product, the thing that I accidentally found was we reduced black carbon by 50%.

So. And one industries or what was the machinery where you could get that reduced or what was the 50% reduction? Okay. It's actually, anytime you burn fuel with internal combustion engines, what we do is we add hydrogen, a little bit of hydrogen, very, very small amount of hydrogen. to the mix in the combustion chamber. And it increases the flame speed and everything else inside the combustion chamber. So literally anything that burns fuel from a combustion perspective can reduce black carbon and reduce these emissions by 50%.

Wow. And what produces the most black carbon in our environment right now? Is it cars? Is it industry? What is usually where that's out of control? It's usually in the trucks, cars, engines that, any kind of internal combustion engines, you see all of these at these construction sites, you see all the back holes, and they all use diesel, okay?

Literally anything that uses diesel fuel and gasoline, but diesel is predominant. It can be reduced by 50%. Yeah. I mean, I can tell diesel is not fun because anytime I'm following a diesel truck, whether it's a pickup truck or whether it's a, especially if it's a pickup truck usually it seems like the truck diesel trucks that are running loads they seem to be a little more cleaner but there's a lot of these pickup truck dudes that i don't know if they've cut the calic converter done something to their vehicles but i always have to press that recirculating air button because as soon as i smell it it will choke me out in the cabin which is an indicator

that i i only tried cigarettes once and i took a puff and i coughed my lungs out and i went yeah this doesn't sound fun. I'm not going to do this anymore. And to me, that's an indicator. Now, one thing I'm pulling up, I kind of Google as we go through the show to pull up research or topics that I can vet with a person. There's one website that I'm looking at,

and let's keep in mind, the internet's not always true. It was on a website, so it must be true. But they're indicating the word soot was an early 20th century version of of a particular or particle pollution called PM2.5.

And they talk about how it's got chemicals, acid, metals, soils that spend in the air after it's been disturbed or routed up. And it eventually goes to your lungs and into your bloodstream. I don't know if that's true or not. Yeah. All that's true. Yeah. All that is

all that's the result of combustion. In fact, when you use any kind of internal combustion engine, it produces unburned fuel. And that's what the PM 25 is. It's fuel that during the combustion cycle, it did not get burned, but it was still exhausted from the combustion chamber. I imagine this is what contributes to black lung, maybe, in coal. It may be a little bit different from black lung, but in essence, it is indeed soot.

Yeah. And in the case of human beings, it's harmful for your lungs. health. And in the case of the environment, it literally, when you see these glaciers that used to be white, they are covered with sit. And they become black. And because of that, they don't reflect light the way they usually reflect light. They absorb the light and they melt. And so that's what causes some of the climate change issues is melting glaciers and sea level rise. So these things are, it's pretty significant. In fact, like I said, if you do do a Google search on which is black carbon worse than CO2, you would be shot because most people have just

never have heard of it. Now, scientists have. But most people haven't. And what my whole idea or objective is is to alert people of the fact that black carbon exists and we have an enemy that we can focus on. Like, for example, I know you've seen movies where the aliens attack the earth and the entire earth, no matter what the geopolitical thing is, they all organize and they get together and they fight the enemy. And so that's, in essence, that's what I want to get across to humanity, if you will, because we can point to an enemy now, which is black carbon. And once we are able to identify an enemy, we can defeat that enemy.

Now, 50% is not as good as 100%, but it's a start. And it can maybe help to slow down what's going on with the climate change. And it may indeed give us a little bit of hope that maybe we can do something. Because climate change is such a huge problem. It's the kind of problem that you just don't think you can do anything about it as an end of it. According to a website I'm looking at, and again, always double-check my data, folks, but we're trying to get close to right. But this is suggesting on this website, I'm looking at that 51% of household energy

contributes to black carbon. 26 is transport. Eight is agriculture, and five is industrial, and then it goes down from there. But 7 million pollution-related deaths every year, 29% heart disease, stroke, and lung disease, lung cancer,

come from what they say, black carbon. Now, in your book, do you ascribe things that maybe we should be doing to change the tide, or you have solutions that can be fully implicated today, but not 20 years in the future? or 30 years when it's too late.

See, what I'm talking about in the book is, and what I discovered when I was kind of tinkering around with hydrogen, these hydrogen-related products, is that when you add hydrogen to an eternal combustion engine, you reduce the black carbon. Now, human beings, we want to be comfortable. I remember sitting in a hotel room at Las Vegas, and I was very happy that it was cool inside, and I really didn't care whether when they were burning coal to fuel electricity. Yeah, because you're like, it's

110 degrees of making. Yeah, and that's the reality. We want to be comfortable. We almost have to, we have to be comfortable. So we can't really sacrifice too much in terms of, you can't expect us to sacrifice too much in order to defeat climate change, because

number one, it's such a big problem. We don't think we can do anything about it. But in the book, I talk about the fact that black carbon is indeed the enemy, and if we identified as an, I mean, we do know that we can cut it by 50%. And now 50%, like I said, is not as good as 100%. But what happens is once the human brain or the human being gets involved with anything, we can decide to do anything we want to do.

And if we decide as a policy that black carbon truly is the enemy of the planet, we can turn industry onto it. We can turn everybody on to the fact that we can burn our fuel better. Now, we're going to be burning fuel. Anybody that thinks we're not going to be burning fuel for the next 100 years, they're just fooling themselves. Yeah. But indeed, so all that stuff is not going away.

cargo ships are not going away. We're going to have to burn fuel, but we can burn it better. And that's the whole point of the book, is that we can burn it better and we can end up reducing some of these. So a lot of your, seems like a lot of your background is in hydrogen development as a fuel source. Is that correct? Yeah, I have an engineering background. I didn't know that I was going to be so heavily involved in hydrogen.

It turns out that I got involved just because I read this article in a book about how you can build a little device that can make hydrogen gas from water. And if you mixed it in your combustion, you can save gas. So my whole objective was to save gas for a car. But when I went to an engine testing lab after I realized that it did work, I found out about Black Car. not by black carbon, but I find about particular matter. And it wasn't until years later that I realized that particular matter had its major component as black carbon. Yeah. Now, what is your outlook?

Recently, tell us what your thoughts are. Recently, we saw Spokane washing go through, I can't find the words, horror, sheer horror, watching their neighborhood burn down, whole subdivisions. I don't even know how wide the spread was, and maybe you do. And I watched the Park Palisades thing. I watched the other fire that was near in Malibu that they now reported was sparked off by electric companies. It's Transformers, yeah. And thank you. And what is your assessment of what's going on right now?

Where are we in the Tomb State time clock? Well, you know, the thing about it, if we don't do anything, the good thing, and I should say, and I hesitate by saying good thing about what's going on, is that we are, literally seeing the results. Yeah. Ten years ago, you didn't, if somebody said climate change and sea level rise, they wouldn't even believe that it existed. Now, there's nothing good about the fact that it exists, but the fact that people now see it is good, because we now know that it's real.

And if we don't know anything at all about it, it's only going to get worse. And the thing about it, this year they had four, I think four or five, category five hurricanes. They call them typhoons over in the Pacific, I think. Pacific Ocean. Now, fortunately, none of them hit land. But it's very evident that we are going down a very, very dangerous road with climate change. Now, now, everybody knows that, but at the same time, it's still nothing, you don't, you don't commonly think there's something you can do about it. The reason why I call this book, from helpless to hopeful, is the fact that we might be able to do something if we get engaged.

And again, our engagement isn't, we don't have to necessarily sacrifice anything, but if we decide as a policy that indeed black carbon is the enemy of the planet, we can reduce black carbon by 50% and go on a path of mitigating climate change. We're not going to be able to stop it, But we can make it at least not get worse and worse and worse. Because without doing anything, it will eventually get so horrible that's ridiculous. And what's going on in Washington and other parts of the country in Europe, you can see it. You can see wildfires.

You can see heat and incidences. You can see stronger storms. You can see storms happening in different parts of the country that used to be in Tornado Alley. And now Tornado Alley is moving up to Chicago. So you saw us, you saw seeing all these things. But we can do something about it. It's a bit hard to deny at this point. I mean, I guess there's still Republicans that are going to deny it because they're

vested with coal and coal funds their lobbyist efforts. And, but yeah, it's really hard to ignore. We were talking before the show about how up here in Utah, there's, there was only three snows all winter long. And normally there's a choking, annoying amount of snow. you just end up painting winter by the time it's done. Unless you're a skier, then you really love winter up here. But even the skiers had mud to deal with instead of the things.

And it was pretty crazy. I think the heartbreaking thing of the Spokane, even more so than seeing the post pictures, was seeing. I saw so many people that were in the middle of these giant sun divisions that were, everything was normal that day. But they saw the fires approaching and they could see the speed that it was moving at. I guess there was some definite wind behind it. And they were like, yeah, it's probably time to evacuate. And I'm looking at it going, well, you couldn't tell because it was just a short video of a clip,

how fast the fire was moving. But I'm like, they're in the middle of a huge subdivision. Normally you just have maybe some of the outer homes, five homes catch fire and use it by then. The fire trucks are there. And they're hosing down the homes around it and they're trying to contain it. But to see those videos of people just being human, weird day today, there's a fire over there. And then they've lost everything and probably had to evacuate the fastest you could possibly go.

It was just insane. And it just deep in the empathy that I have for that whole situation. What do you think right now we're living in a very interesting moment politically in where the Trump administration, those watching this 20 years, from now it is August 26, we're seeing them disable anything that has to do with science because it's a religious theocracy coup of our takeover our country. And they're getting rid of, I think there's some sort, you probably know more about what this thing does, but there was some sort of environmental climate science base in Colorado. And they're disabling that.

They're disabling the wave monitoring machines that we had all over the world to monitor temperature and current. They're disabling everything that could give us an early warning against things. California a couple years ago had a, it's first hurricane or something in a hundred years off the coast. You're like, no one happens in Florida. And what is your assessment of what's going on in the disabling of our science community and people monitoring climate change? What is the future looking like for us? The thing about it is, and you're absolutely correct, When you have leaders that don't care, the policies will be policies that no one can live with. And they just won't do anything at all about it.

Now, the beauty or the good thing about humanity is that humanity isn't only in the United States. And so you have people that do care in other parts of the world. Honey, call the movers. That's about where we're out now. But you're right, though. When you think about having the head of the EPA hating the environment, You can't help but get bad policies coming out of the EPA. Oh, yeah.

You can see. Yeah. They're totally promoting, like, the coal industry and all of the goombas that are in the regime. They're all coal people. Yeah, but even who on earth would want to cut down all these monitoring systems that can give us an alert on things that's going on in the environment? Why? It's this insane. But it's saying that.

Well, Jesus told them to. I know. But fortunately, fortunately, and at least hopefully, there are more people that have their heads screwed on straight than don't. You haven't seen us lately, have you? I'm kidding. Oh, man. No, it is, it is disturbing. It's like living on the set of the movie idiocracy.

And now it's a documentary instead of just some fictional movie. It really is. It really is. Any intelligent, well-educated person who's read well and stuff, you're just surrounded by morons. By morons. And you never could have expected it. It could be so extensive. I didn't think we get dumber. I thought we get smarter with the scientific age, but we're getting dumber. I don't think we're getting. We are.

Yeah. And at the same time, there are still, and again, this is the thing that always gives me hope, is that I do know that everybody. is not like this. Yeah. They seem to not be breeding as much as the stupid people, though, is the problem. But I'll believe in your hope because that's all that we have at this point. That's all we do have. But no, I think it's, I think this is going, I grew up, and I'm not sure your age, but I grew up in the era of burning rivers.

And when I would go to the beach in California as a kid, you'd be stepping up. on needles, broken glass, broken bottles, jagged cans. Us going into the ocean as children in the 70s was like, you pretty much assumed that anything that pinched you, cut you, or bit at you probably wasn't an animal. It was just some shit that someone had thrown in the ocean. And it was bad. It was like every footstep you'd be stepping on some shit that was human made.

And beautiful beaches like Santa Monica and stuff, Thankfully, that's changed for a lot of the part. But that was in the 70, burning rivers. You'd see beaches that were piled with junk and tires and stuff. And when rivers burn, that's kind of your sign that sounds really wrong. And there was Love Canal, the whole thing that Jimmy Carter launched the EPA with, what was going on back then. But you can look at the pictures.

I remember growing up in California and the smog from the, there was, car jams back then 40 years ago, 50 years ago, I guess you could say no. And I can remember the haze of the smog. In fact, you always knew when a fire was going on because the fire glow would reflect off the sun and the fog and the smog and you'd be like, there's a fire. You're like, how can you tell? I can see it through the smock gives off a weird color. So do we all need to switch?

No, hold on. This is the other question I have for you. I'm sorry. No, I noticed that a lot of the cars. car makers seem to be abandoning electric. And some of them introducing hydrogen. Is this the sort of stuff that we need to save the thing? Is this better?

Or what are your thoughts on that, since hydrogen so well? Yeah. The thing about hydrogen is wonderful and bad is that hydrogen is indeed a fuel for the future. Right now, it's not available as a practical matter, even though some car, some car manufacturers are making cars that can burn on hydrogen. but the only place you can find hydrogen and a fueling station is in California. So you can't buy a hydrogen car in Alabama because it would just be like a, what is it, a desktop.

Yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to fill your tank. You'd have to tow your car everywhere you wanted to go. And which makes no sense. But hydrogen is indeed the fuel of the future, but because it burns, clean and it has no emissions. But as a practical matter, my book, and what I'm talking about in this book, is that hydrogen can be a fuel of the present also. Because even though a lot of people are going toward electric, a lot of companies are going toward electric, they begin to realize that the electric infrastructure is not vast enough for people to be to buy electric cars. You have a lot

of people. Even now. Even now with all. Yeah, even now, it's not, it's still not, I would never buy one. I live in California, but I don't, I'm not, I wouldn't be, wouldn't be comfortable with driving all the way to San Diego and having to go to a charging station as opposed to a gas station. And so that's the reality. And here I am. I'm, I'm an environmentalist, but I still recognize. I got to pick up my daughter from school. I got to do stuff. And I got to do stuff that I know I I got to do. And I can't necessarily depend on electric. Now, there are a lot of people in California that they can, but that's not true everywhere. But you do have a lot of places where electric cars are indeed being more used, used more.

But as a policy made it matter, these car manufacturers, if they are given incentives to add hydrogen to their combustion, they can make cars right now that can cut down pollution and cut it down drastically. And at the same time, still be able to meet their production and sales goals. Because I know, I think Porsche, was it Porsche, somebody, one of those companies over there decided to go all electric. And they just screwed up their whole product line. I was a big Porsche fan. What is it, McCoyan and the, I can't think the other one starts with a C. But Cayenne. But, and they went all electric.

They still make some gas-powered cars now, but I don't want their electric cars at $200,000. It doesn't make any sense. Sounds like you're paying a hell of a carbon tax. Oh, man. I don't know. But see, but the reality also is that even though electric is good, and I went to China recently, and they have an unbelievable infrastructure for their electric cars. So I went to this major city, and just about everything over there was electric.

but they also have the infrastructure. And so it's not an issue of trying to find a charging station and having a stand in line for 40 minutes just to get charged up. That's another downside of it. I hate that, like, some people think that's cool. They're like, oh, I went to the Tesla spot and sat for 40 minutes. And I'm like, I could have been driving 40 minutes. I don't enjoy long-term, long-distance driving at all.

And then I've seen some of the lines at the Tesla power stations, whatever they're called. Like some of them are out of control. It's not crazy. Just see people waiting two or three hours just to get a spot to start charging. It's crazy. No, it's crazy. And again, to this degree, we don't have the infrastructure. It doesn't make sense.

It really doesn't. Even though you can be the biggest environmentalist on the planet, but it doesn't make sense to be waiting two or three hours just to be able to go somewhere to do what you have to do for the rest of the day. Yeah, that's crazy. No, it's nuts. But again, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's in the thought in the right direction. However, the thing about electric cars as opposed to even hydrogen is that electric steel is based on the fact that your infrastructure is a coal plant, a coal electricity plant down the street. That's what's making the electricity.

So if your electricity was made being made by solar, everything will work out. But if the electricity is still made by burning fuel and burning coal and burning everything, then you're not really doing anything. You haven't really accomplished anything by going electric. Now, I'm not trying to say you shouldn't or we shouldn't go in that direction, but we still need to look at the fact that we have to burn our fuel better. And if we do burn our fuel better, and that's the whole purpose of this book,

is to get people to start thinking about burning our fuel, because we're going to be burning fuel forever. Now, at least for at least two or three or four hundred years. Maybe it is stop after 100 or 200, but we're going to be burned it. And meanwhile, we are literally with this black carbon coating these glaciers. Now, people talk about, at least a lot of people don't realize that Greenland, Greenland has miles, almost miles of snow on top of it. And if that melts, some people say there would be, the sea level arrivals will be as,

almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty, the Elbow to Statue of Liberty, which means that all of New York, all of the coastal areas will be underwater. So now, granted, it's going to take some time to get there, but if we don't do anything now, we will get there sooner than we want to. And that's the whole point of trying to get rid of black carbon and why I'm so passionate about it, Because I just, I didn't realize until I did find out that it is the reason that our glaciers are being coated with black soot. And they are literally melting because of it.

I'm sorry. Does your book give, it looks like 50, according to this website, and again, folks, be careful with data. And I haven't spent time fact checking this. But it looks like about 50. Most of it comes from households. Does your book give people maybe action items or things that they can do? in their household too? No, no, we don't know any.

I can't do anything about the households. Do you think that's true, 51% or do you think it's more cars and trucks? I think it's more cars and truck. I know when you look at, when you look at, is black carbon worse than CO2? If you literally put that in the search, is black carbon worse than CO2? It talks about the source of black carbon. Okay. And the sources of black carbon are usually transportation.

But it's a lot of other sources, too, but it's generally a lot of. Yeah, burnt fuel. Now, let me ask you this. Maybe, and again, I don't know if that number is correct, and it does sound off, because I would think that big industry, like if I drive by a refinery, the shit that's in the air from that thing, even with all the EPA regulations, is quite extraordinary. There's one I drive by, and I remember when I was younger,

I would drive by it with dates, and it smells like sulfur. And my day would be like, did you fire in the car? I'm like, no, this is, we're passing the refinery. It's that it always smells like that. But it was great if you need to fart, You're like, go by the refiner. She won't know. No, I'm just kidding.

Fucks, don't do that. Jokes. Anyway, maybe that 51% they claim, or 50% they claim is household derivative, is attached to the coal burning fuels that, I think most of our fuel still comes from coal burning, doesn't it? Not in the United States. It's mostly natural gas now.

Oh, okay. Natural gas is over as outpaced coal, and which is good, because natural gas is not quite as bad as coal. But it still creates pollution, too, because it's still a fossil fuel. But it's not as bad as coal or diesel. Yeah. And so we still have these, from what I've been seeing, the Trump administration regime has been dismantling windmills and windmill deals and calling them out as bad.

And China has these huge swaths of solar energy and windmills. They probably have the largest in the world. Yes, it is. And they're running a country that's more people than us on it. But you see them disabling all this stuff for their goonies, lobbyists for the coal industry, and yet you see the prices going through the roof. The people in West Virginia are getting killed and other sort of Midwest Republican states where coal mining is the big industry there.

And it's really interesting. And so maybe the coal mining or whatever it takes, the burning of the gas, natural gas, maybe that's what's included in that 50%. I don't know. Yeah, it has to be because most households, themselves are just using electricity. You do, you do use gas. A lot of people burn and cookwood gas, but a lot of these households are just using electricity. So the electricity that they're using is coming from fossil fuel sources. So the electricity grid down the street is running on

natural gas or coal maybe, but it's rarely, it's rarely cold outside of West Virginia, I would imagine, but most of it is natural gas, but also fuel that they are. And to the degree that they are, then your households can be included, even though I don't know if 51% is accurate and I just don't know. But I do know that black carbon, and again, I almost challenge someone to look up, is black carbon worse than CO2? Now, we've all heard of CO2. Everybody's heard of CO2 and how bad it is and how it has increased its presence in the atmosphere. But the black carbon is actually worse, 1,500 times worse than CO2.

Wow. And that's what people need to know, because if they know that and they know these things, and they also know, at least this is what I'm promoting, that we can do something about it. We can do something. Again, climate change is such a big problem. It's huge.

It's almost hard to even wrap your head around doing anything about it. But helpless. And literally, you do feel helpless. So it's not unusual for somebody to say climate change and just feel helpless. But due to a degree that there is something that we could possibly do, and black carbon is the target, then we can change that helplessness to at least to some level of hopefulness. And I imagine we're all stewards of this planet. So we've got to take care of it. We've tried to vote properly to deal with these things because right now we're seeing. the penalty for ignoring this problem. I remember, I don't know if this is a decade or two ago or what decade it was, but I remember seeing some Republican congressman throw snow on the floor of the Senate or there, I think it was the House, because they're usually the monkeys over there. The Senate's a little bit semi more respectable. I don't know about nowadays anyway, but it used to be, let's put that way. But yeah, he was like, how could I have the snow if there's global warming,

whatever. It was the dumbest thing. Yeah. But if you're a moron, that makes sense to people. So that's how they get the votes. But yeah, you can see we're in a scary place now. JF, John of Kennedy was just junior, was just on scene. I think it was, what news channel? ABC? It was to forget this morning, a news, anyway, whatever it was.

I think it was Meet the Press on CBS. And they were asking him, are we prepared for the next pandemic? it because it will come. And they had no fucking idea what to do or how to do it. They have no preparation. They've disabled everything. And we're just sitting ducks.

The level of incompetence that surrounds this guy is breathtaking. It's literally breathtaking. Because you just don't know, you just never realize there's such, so many incompetent people could be in one place. A sociobin, he's a blinding a narcissist and a sociopath, and a criminal.

And he's also, what these authoritarian, fascists, narcissists do is they surround himself with people dumber than them. If you ever studied Donald Trump like I have from 1986, fallout every movie's made, he realized he's pretty freaking incompetent. If it wasn't for attorneys, he'd be screwed. And most people of any education level and they can read, know that. And so to find people that he's... he surrounds himself that are dumber than him so that he can look better.

You're right. It's extraordinary. It's just. It's breathtaking. Yeah. If you've studied fascism and authoritarian in history, you understand what's going on right now and what's taking place, but doesn't make the shock any less worse, let alone the shock that's happening in America.

Like, every day I have conversations with people internationally. They're just like, we just wake up in horror. And what happened to America? Like, their whole vision and, and, and, uh, and, uh, dream of America is shattered. And we were the guys who fought the Nazis. Now we're the Nazis. We're the most heated country in the world right now.

Yeah. Yeah. But now, fortunately, like I said, we're not the only ones with, we're not the only country with humanity. We do have a lot of people in this country that understand humanity. We have a lot of people in leadership now that doesn't understand humanity at all, or they are anti-human. But the rest of the world, fortunately, is not as crazy as our leaders.

I wouldn't say as us, because us, we are still the same. We're still basically a country of good people. I would say some of us. Let's put that. A lot of people that see the hatefulness, the murdering, the killing, the assaulting, the violation of American rights that's going on right now, the imprisonment of innocent people. There's some people in this country, maybe 20%, that think that's just fine. And they want a king.

They call it the Red Caesar strategy. Anyway, yeah, who knows where we're going? All my friends who write books on fascism and study fascism have started moving out of the country or have moved out of the country. They moved the first year because they just know how this ball goes. It's going to get worse before it gets way better. That's why everyone needs to start standing up, yelling and screaming, protesting, doing whatever they can. And then reading books like yours, so they're educated.

So anything, the more we want to tease out before we go out. Let's see. Like I said, the one key phrase that I want to be embedded in the brains and the minds and the minds of human beings. And this is all based on the fact that when we are indeed in the movies, attacked by aliens, we get together and collectively fight together. But the phrase is black carbon is the enemy of the planet. Black carbon is the enemy of the planet. And if we know that and we understand that, we can start thinking about how we can defeat black carbon.

Because we have to. There is no other choice. We can't let our glaciers melt and all of our coastal cities disappear. And it will if we don't do anything at all. Definitely. Yep, we got to do something, folks. And it's, I feel for these people, they lost everything. I have a, I have a go box, a football.

I call it the football, just like the nuclear football, and I have a to-go box. And it's filled with so much of my rare photos and stuff that, remember, be able that I can't ever replace. And they remind me of stories of my life. But I don't need two or three now because I'm, I don't know, I'm saving shit, whatever. But I was talking to a friend the other night a week or two ago, and she's in California. She's somewhere, I think, near Silicon Valley-ish. forget the other area there. But she's, she, she, there was a fire near the home.

They got word to, to, it was time to evacuate. And she had to evacuate. She's like, yeah, Chris, I just left the house. And I couldn't grab everything. I grabbed the dog and a couple valuables. But it was scary for several hours because I was like, I don't know if she's going to be like the people in Spokane or the people in Park Palisades where you come back in your whole neighborhoods,

everything's gone. Or Maui, Maui's another good example. Yeah. Is it Maui? Mali. Malibu. No,

in Hawaii, they had that. Oh, oh, yeah. Okay. Is that Maui? Maui, yeah. I think it is Maui.

Yeah. The whole city basically burned down. Yeah. It's fucking crazy. And you just look at it, and you just look at the displacement of life too. Most of those people are not going to move back there. They just get bought out.

The hedge funds go in there and try buying up all the properties. I don't know what's just going to look like, vacation. land commercial and yeah it was just it was insane we need to do something folks yep doing nothing isn't working and voting it gets your own interest wake the fuck up read a book I don't know you can't help some of these people stupid as forever anyway it looks like we're getting a lot of comments from Dylan Matt thanks for the comments there it's too lengthy and too intensive for me to pre-qualify this on the show and read it all he's written some very long

pros there. But thank you, Dylan, for your comments there. You might want to back off the coffee. We love you. But these are really long and I can't put them on the show unless I've had them first. Otherwise, sometimes things get weird. Don, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. And give people your dot-coms. Where can they get to know you better as they go as we go out? Okay. It's burnfuelbetter.com is the book. It can also be found on Amazon. But burnfuelbetter.com is my website. I do have another website that we are kind of building systems that will help to alleviate some of this black carbon. And that that website is h-n-o-in-t-l.com, h-no-n-o-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-non-nternational. And there's a link on there about LeafH-2.

LeafH-2 is the product that we are promoting. Even though other people can do it, we encourage everybody to do what we're doing. But it is the product that can help to reduce black carbon. It would be great if maybe I could wear a mask or something that would be specialized for black carbon maybe. Is that possible? Or is that I might just talk about? I mean, you're the scientists. If you wear a mask, it would be a mask for everything.

Yeah. Specifically be black carbon. I almost need that now. I remember during COVID, there were certain masks you couldn't use because the pores in the filter were too large. And you had to have ones that could, I think it was N95 or N-D-9, something. I don't remember. Yeah, something. Yeah. Those affect black carbon?

Those will affect anything that is what I would consider PM, that PM particular matter. Oh, 0.5. And black carbon is a part of that. So black carbon is always a part of the other particular matter element. But what I didn't know until recently, and I wrote this book because of it, was that black carbon was a major. component of particular matter. And particular matter was the problem that people are having with hit with health and with other things. But it just so happens that it also coasts the glaciers and causes them to melt. Yeah. Sometimes here in Utah, we have this inversion effect. They have a very small valley. Yeah. And with the climate, everything here. And so your version will hold the just nasty ass air. And you can see it. In fact, it's wild ago. If you climb the mountain and you can see it,

I love it. And you can see the layer and it's just, it's extraordinary. You're just like, oh, wait, fucking crap. Yeah. Those are the days where you wake up, sometimes you can't breathe, you're choking or your voice is dry and you're just like, yeah, today's version day. Yeah. You just kind of roll with it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's all because of the entire spectrum of fuel burning elements, cars, trucks, everything. Do you think people should wear those masks when they're driving in the car or at least, maybe I should always leave the recirculating air on

in the car? Because man, as soon as I smell that bad shit, I punched that button so fast, it's not funny. And again, that's what I would consider a personal thing because I live in California. I live kind of in the boondocks in California. Okay. And the air is

pretty good out of it. So I don't even think about it. Yeah. But it would be different in L.A. Now, even L.A. has improved drastically. Yeah, definitely. You can see the mountains. Yeah, you can see.

When I was a kid, I couldn't see the mountains. That's right, because it was, but that was also before people started realizing that what they were putting in the air needed to be slowed down or stopped. Yeah. So it was because of humanity that that worked better now in L.A. It's because we decided that that's what has to happen. And in essence, that's what we have to do with black carbon. In essence, if people thought of catalytic converters were something that was decided to put on every engine.

And something like that can reduce black carbon from a policy perspective needs to put on every engine, just like a catalytic converters as well. Yeah. Well, hopefully maybe we can get some of your book in politician's hands, but it seems like only money works nowadays. Thanks to SCOTUS and Citizens United and other defeats of the recent SCOTUS ruling just made it so you, any billionaire can buy a politician now just outright with unlimited funds where I think as Americans, just average Americans, you're limited to 7,000. These guys have an unlimited ability to spend money now on elections. And these billionaires, they want to, these billionaires for years, we've talked about this a lot of authors, they've wanted this for a long time. Because they produce in China and they produce in Vietnam and they produce in other third world countries that they don't care. They're just there for the money. They don't give a shit if they're dumping asbestos in the river.

And they don't care. They're willing to sell it all out. And they've wanted that for America because America is such a huge market and resource market. Probably when it comes to resources and being able to mine those. They're like, we want to be able to get away with murder like we do another country. on the environment. And they don't care. They're just like, hey, I'm making my buck, and I want to be number one on the Forbes list.

And, yeah, and they don't care about human beings. They don't care about their employees. They don't care about anything. It's all just fodder with their just, oh, we care. No, you don't. Because if you did, you'd do something about it. But meanwhile, and wars, wars probably, wars and bombings, does that produce a lot of, we're in the Iran war right now.

And, of course, people watching this 10 years. I'll probably know that the way it's going. But another Afghanistan, Iraq. But do bombs and war? I imagine the planes when the Air Force and the ships run through the thing. But a lot of their stuff's nuclear, I think, now on the ship. No, it's still, most of us all, it's all fuel that we burn. Really?

Every last bit of it. Even airplane fuel and jet fuel, all that stuff is fuel. It's all based on fossil fuels. And all of it can be burned better. that's the whole point. Every last bit of it can be burned better. But right now it's all being burned and it's creating all kinds of environmental issues. And it will continue.

It will continue to get worse. But we don't have to have it to get worse. We don't have to. It's just unfortunately our emperor or whatever the hell you want to call, can't live forever. And he won't. The billionaires behind that regime, I think, I don't know who's going to be the worst puppet. The guy who loves couches or the current.

heart attack, we're just waiting to happen. So, yeah, I don't know. It's really interesting. Yeah, we'll get into it. But, yeah, one of the other problems is I imagine these huge neighborhood, wipeout, suburban, wipeout fires also create a lot of black carbon and different pollution in the environment, right? Yeah, it does.

It does. Yeah. But not so much as our engine burning. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't help. It's like a chip falling of constant.

It just keeps getting worse, and the worst keeps making the worst happen, and the worst is contributing. It's starting to just become like a snowballing effect, I suppose. Because I know with Park Palisades, one of the problems they had was there were some houses that survived the fire, but the toxic dust and just all the toxins in the air and in the ground and the elements of melting all that shit,

that sometimes it made with the bests, sometimes it made with all sorts of crap. It was so toxic that even people that went back to their homes that survived, the insides of the home were covered with this dust, and they actually had to go back in hazmat suits to see if, you know, their house. And so that's like a whole little low. They couldn't even move back to the area because the toxins in the air were so poisonous from the burn. And so it's just compounding, snowballing effect. Yeah, but again,

There are so many components to us messing up the environment, but they're almost innumerous. Classic is another one. But we can only work with what we can work with, and we can only do the best we can do. And as long as we try to do something, then something good will happen. And that's the whole, I know there are enough human beings on this planet that are truly good and want to do the best that they can do for themselves and for. the planet and for others. Yeah. And the future they're...

Those are the ones that I always look for and I know that they exist. And the future of their children too. Why people have a lineage and they, oh, I'm going to be a grandparent someday. What world are you leaving for those people? But yeah. Anyway, thanks to Matt, Dylan, Matt.

I apologize. Dylan Matt for all your wonderful comments there and your support of the show. We certainly appreciate it. And you wrote a lot of stuff. So what coffee are you drinking, bud? Because I need some of that. So thank you very much, Dylan. We appreciate it.

I think he might have been on the show and been a book author before. I'm not sure. I have to Google it. But thank you very much, Don, for coming to show. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thanks, honest for tuning in.

Order of the book, wherever fine books are sold. It'll be a link for it in the Chris Foss show. Burn Fuel Better from Helpless to Hopeful in the Race against Climate Change by Don Owens. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to Goodrease.com, Forteouschus Christchrist, Chris Foss. on the TikTok and those crazy place in the internet.

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