The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future by Stephen Porder

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future by Stephen Porder https://amzn.to/3tmL1Yo An ecologist explores how life itself shapes Earth using the elemental constituents we all share It is rare for life to change Earth, yet three organisms have profoundly transformed our planet over the long course of its history. Elemental reveals how microbes, plants, and people used the fundamental building blocks of life to alter the climate, and with it, the trajectory of life on Earth in the past, present, and future. Taking readers from the deep geologic past to our current era of human dominance, Stephen Porder focuses on five of life’s essential elements―hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. He describes how single-celled cyanobacteria and plants harnessed them to wildly proliferate across the oceans and the land, only to eventually precipitate environmental catastrophes. He then brings us to the present, and shows how these elements underpin the success of human civilization, and how their mismanagement threatens similarly catastrophic unintended consequences. But, Porder argues, if we can learn from our world-changing predecessors, we can construct a more sustainable future. Blending conversational storytelling with the latest science, Porder takes us deep into the Amazon, across fresh lava flows in Hawaii, and to the cornfields of the American Midwest to illuminate a potential path to sustainability, informed by the constraints imposed by life’s essential elements and the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.

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 roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. The Chris Voss Show family. The family that loves you, embraces you, holds you most dearest, but doesn't judge you.

At least not as harshly as your mom did that time you burned her favorite pan just to try and make those hot dog franks. We've all been there, folks. We used to do that as children. Or sometimes we'd try and fry the bologna and we end up just frying the whole freaking pan and burning down the house almost. And your mother was never happy about that. Does anybody remember that from childhood? Do people still eat bologna?

Is it legal in the U.S. anymore? We'll have to find out. But we have a wonderful guest on the show to talk to us about elements of science and stuff. So maybe he can tell us. And that's why we have brilliant minds on the show. But before we get to that, please refer the show to your family friends and relatives please beloved god refer the show we need all the help we can get uh tell them to go to goodreads.com for chest

christmas go to youtube.com for chest christmas linkedin.com for chest christmas to christmas one on the tickety-tockety as the kids call it they don't call on the tickety-tockety, as the kids call it. They don't call it the tickety-tockety. Anyway, guys, that's the joke. See what I did there? There you go. We have an amazing author on this show. His newest book is called Elemental, How Five Elements Changed Earth's Past and Will Shape Our Future. I was joking with him in the show that it might be vodka and other alcoholic elements, but definitely it's not.

So we're going to learn some shit today, boys and girls. Stephen Porter is on the show that it might be vodka and other alcoholic elements but definitely it's not so we're going to learn some shit today boys and girls steven porter is on the show with us today he'll be talking about his latest book and his amazing insights he's the acacia professional professor of ecology evolutionary and or organismal biology at brown university i had to be careful not to say what i was going to say there. Do we get the Acacia right part? You totally did. Yeah, right on. There you go.

There you go. I flunked second grade. He serves as the associate provost for sustainability, and he is the author of over 70 peer-reviewed scientific articles and has written for the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other media around the world. He's also the founder and science lead on Possibly, a podcast about sustainability science and everyday decisions that we make that do or don't make a difference. He just published his

first book, Elemental, that we talked about today, and it explores how our planet is shaped by life itself and how this understanding can guide us towards a more sustainable future. Welcome to the show, Stephen. How are you? I'm great. Thanks so much for having me on. And yeah, looking forward to the conversation. There you go. And thanks for coming. Give us a.com wherever you want people to get to know you better on the Internet. Yeah, so you can find my website at www.porterlab.org.org and porter is with the d just to be confusing so that's p-o-r-d

as in david e-r pordurlab.org there you go so uh tell us uh give us a 30,000 overview of the book and what's inside sure so uh i'll give you the 30,000 foot overview it's going to take four billion years condensed into just a couple of seconds. So life's been on the planet for about 4 billion years. And understanding how that life works can help us build a more sustainable future. There you go. That's always good to have. And so to drop down to 20,000 feet, there have been three organisms in those four billion years that have made really big

changes to the planet. Spoiler alert for your audience, humans are the third. By understanding how the first two work and understanding how similar and different we are from them, that's the key to understanding how we're going to build a more sustainable century. We've been around for all these billions of years and, and the plan is to try and see if we can go a few more. Well, the plan is to try and make it as, as smooth as possible as we transition over the next hundred and a hundred or so years. So, you know, it's, it's not about sort of survival. It's about,

it's about making it through with the best, the most of the best and the least of the worst. There you go. So who are the number one and two? Do you want to tease that out? Yeah, yeah, sure. So it's very easy to remember. It's sort of pond scum, plants, and people.

Pond scum. Yeah, so there's a group of organisms called cyanobacteria, actually. The science name is cyanobacteria. Now, they're in congress right yeah exactly exactly uh it's never fair well well said but you know you said it not me right so so cyanobacteria are these little single-celled organisms that that float in the ocean uh and um you hear about them even today you know that sometimes you'll get a cyanobacterial bloom they'll close beaches and stuff like that because they have toxins in them that are bad for us to drink in or whatever.

Yeah. But about two and a half billion years ago. So my wife always says that, you know, before you take a geology class, you don't know the difference between a million and a billion. They're just big numbers. And certainly because I've never won the Powerball, I don't really know the difference between a million and a billion either. But two and a half billion years ago, these single-celled organisms actually changed the world more than any organism before or since. They took an earth that had no oxygen in the air,

so we would have suffocated instantly, and they evolved novel ways of getting energy and food. And when they did that, a byproduct of that evolution like the chemistry of what they were doing pumped enough oxygen into the air into the ocean and then into the air that it changed the world from no oxygen so think like mars and the moon to oxygen now there was an atmosphere on the earth before uh before so it's not exactly like mars and the moon but anyway so they pump so much oxygen into the air that they take us from this one state where only single-celled things can be alive it's all anoxic to this other state which sets the stage for uh the evolution of all multicellular life like us there you go now i am

one of those beings that creates the the things that do that i just go to taco bell and it creates a gaseous nature that interestingly that gas is really important for our story so you know oh it totally is so uh at the time that cyanobacteria did this they uh the earth was kept warm actually by a methane blanket. So the greenhouse gas of the time was methane. And methane is a really, really strong greenhouse gas, much stronger than CO2. Yeah. That's what I learned from Taco Bell. Exactly. I knew we were going to get back to Taco Bell sooner or later.

So when, but the thing about methane is that it reacts with oxygen. So that's why it burns. That's why we can burn, why you can light your farts on fire. Burns my eyes, yeah. Exactly. Makes me grow. So when cyanobacteria pump all that oxygen into the atmosphere by accident, they're just doing their thing, proliferating, growing, growing, growing.

They pump all this oxygen into the air, and it destroys the methane that's keeping the planet warm. And so it takes the planet from a warm ocean planet to basically a giant frozen snowball and that change probably drove we don't even know how many species extinct because they were all single-celled organisms that don't live leave fossils behind but it was the biggest environmental change of all time now in the long run two years later, we're really grateful for it. But it would have really sucked to live through that transition. I'm into that oxygen thing. Yeah, me too, right?

Yeah, it's like a breath of fresh air. That was really good. There you go. That was good. That was good. That's what my daughter would call a dad joke right there. There you go. There you go.

Or a professor of science joke. Yeah, yeah. Same thing. Yeah, pretty much. So what was the second one then? So the second one are land plants. So if you think about, so like we think of, we can't imagine a world without plants, right? Like everywhere we have plants.

Yeah. But for most of earth history, there were no plants on land. It was only relatively recently by recently, I mean, only 400 million years ago, but still that's not that long ago in the history of the earth plants sort of crawl their way out of the ocean and come on to land and they become the second great world changers actually in a very similar way to the cyanobacteria. They figure out a new place to get energy. So not a new way to get energy, but a new place to get energy.

And that place was land where all this sunlight was falling and nothing was using it. They become the world's great miners and they start mining for both water in the soil and nutrients from the rocks. And eventually, at this time in the Earth's history, methane was pretty much not that important anymore to keep the planet warm. Carbon dioxide was the main thing keeping the planet warm. And plants begin to pull so much CO2 out of the air that they actually, over the course of a long time, take us from a world that was all tropical, like hot everywhere, you could swim in a bathing suit on the North Pole if you happen to be there,

down to they pull so much CO2 out of the air that they actually precipitate another ice age. And a mass extinction event occurs because plants, like they did the same thing as the cyanobacteria. They innovated a new way to get energy by moving out to land. They innovated a new way to get nutrients and food and water. And all of a sudden they changed the chemistry of the planet so much that they kind of were victims of their own success. Like it was unintended consequences, part two.

Wow. This is why I don't have a lot of plants on my own. Yeah, but, you know, they do produce oxygen. So that's good. That's true, too. But, you know, sometimes it's overrated. I don't know. Yeah, plants on my own. Yeah. But you know, they do produce oxygen. So that's true too. But sometimes it's overrated. I don't know. Yeah.

I personally, I study plants. I spent my life walking around tropical forests, like shooting down leaves with a slingshot and analyzing them chemistry. I can't, I can't grow anything. Like everything I try to grow in my office dies. My garden's a mess.

Like people are like, Oh, you're a biologist. You must know a lot. You're a biologist. Yeah. I know how to kill them and grind them up and analyze. Yeah. I are like, oh, you're a biologist. You must know a lot about animals. Yeah, you're a biologist. What the hell's going on, bro? Yeah, I know how to kill them and grind them up and

analyze them. I'm not that kind of biologist, I guess. There you go. There you go. Let's ask you, what got you into this field? Tell us a little bit about your origin story. What made you interested in all the things that you do now with sustainability?

Yeah. It's a great question, and I think a lot about it these days because you know i was a history major as an undergrad so i didn't know diddly squat about this stuff oh really a history and after a while i got more and more interested in uh the way that the way that humans interact with the environment, but more generally just how to make sense of this crazy living planet we live on. We've got like 10 million species. It's so complicated.

And I began to think about, well, what really controls how much life there is on this planet? Why isn't there more and why isn't there less? And it turns out that energy and food and water are the reason and as i thought more and more about that uh it was like oh wait actually that's the same thing about people like like energy food and water we all need the same stuff and then i had a student come into my office one day i was working on tropical forests and and really loving the sort of hardcore ecology out in the woods kind of thing. And the student came in. She showed me a picture of what I thought was Iowa.

It turned out to be the southern edge of the Brazilian Amazon where they just mowed the forest down and planted soybeans. It looked exactly like Iowa. Oh, wow. I was like, oh, my God. We're transforming this planet in such profound ways. Is there a way for me to understand that too? Like, can I, can I leverage what I've learned about other things like forest to understand how humans are interacting with the environment? And then as it became clearer and clearer that the 20th, 21st century wasn't really going the way I hoped in terms of issues of climate change and

sustainability, I thought, how can I put the skills I have to work on this problem? And so over the last five years, I've kind of completely changed what I do. I do a lot less basic science. I do a lot more things like this show, communicating and writing and thinking. And I'll tell you something that's really motivating to me is that I'm much more optimistic than I was 10 years ago. Really? You know, people talk, you know, I'm sure a lot of your listeners are like, oh, he's going to talk about sustainability. It's going to be like he's going to be yelling at us for being bad people and like everything we do is bad and blah. But no, I'm actually more optimistic than I was 10 years ago.

And I feel like we're making really, you know, we got a lot of work to do. It's going to be a hard time. But yeah, we're doing great stuff. And so part of also why I'm doing this is like, look, can I make the world a perfect place? No. Can I try and make it a little better every day? Yeah, I'm going to try that. And, you know, that's all you can do.

So that's what I'm doing. That's what we do. That's what we do on the show too uh you know all you can do is if everybody pitches in does a little bit trying to improve the world a little bit you know we can all maybe uh create a wave that can overcome everything as uh as bobby kennedy would say um the uh uh you know we're kind of at a correct me if i'm wrong but we're kind of at a, correct me if I'm wrong, but we're kind of at a precipice point of realization, you know, you can deny climate change all you want, but, you know, I was just watching, you know, historic floods in New York city. Uh, recently, you know, we had a, like the first 100 year cyclone or hurricane or tornado, whatever the hell it was coming at California. You're like, you know, normally you hear about that in the, in the Gulf and you're like, yeah, that's pretty normal.

And then you're like, but California, what stuff's coming from over there. Um, you know, we've seen all sorts of craziness going on with our environment, our history and, you know,

hot summers and, and, uh, you know, we're either getting too much water or too little water. And so, uh, we're kind of, it's kind of coming in our face where it's a little bit harder to deny now that something is wrong and it might be us.

So there you go. Now, the book is entitled How Five Elements Changed Earth's Past and Will Shape Our Future. Talk about these five chemical elements, hence the title. Yeah, sure. So if you took me, for example, and ground me up and put me through a chemical analyzer, which I'm not asking for. Sounds like Fargo too. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And you analyze my chemistry, you would get the following elements in this this order of abundance hydrogen oxygen carbon nitrogen phosphorus okay now if you took a mushroom out of your fridge or a plant that you managed not to kill before you know because you over watered it and you ground them them up and analyze them

too you would get those same five elements in that same order of abundance, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus. If you did that with any living cell on earth, you get basically the same thing. We're all made of the same stuff. So in my field, you know, like some ecologists study like the wolf eats the hare, you know, or the whatever, like the animal, one animal chases the other, that sort of thing. Other ecologists are like, why is the world so diverse? And there's so many different species.

In my field of ecology, we think, okay, look, we're all made of the same stuff. How are we getting that stuff out of our environment? How are we getting the water, the H and the O that we need? How are we getting the carbon that we need? How are we getting the nitrogen and the phosphorus? Actually, competition for those elements is what shapes all life on earth. The reason that you eat food is to get chemical energy from that food and the nutrients you need nitrogen and phosphorus to make your body.

So, and that's the same thing a plant is trying to do is trying to get carbon dioxide out of the air and suck up nutrients and water through its roots. So it's probably the same thing the worms are going to do when they get me in the ground. Hey man, it's no joke. It's the cycle of life. And you know, so we're all made of the same thing the worms are going to do when they get me in the ground. Hey, man, it's no joke. It's the cycle of life.

Cycle of life. Yeah. And, you know, so we're all made of the same stuff. We're all trying to do the same thing, which is get energy and food. And these five elements are the key for all of us. The other piece of it is that four of those five elements, so hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen, those are the ones that make up the gases that keep our planet warm. So without the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to keep our planet warm, the Earth would actually be frozen.

There's not enough sunlight hitting the Earth to keep it warm without that greenhouse blanket. Wow. And, of course, what humans are doing is we're changing the amount of greenhouse gases in the air by burning coal and oil and gas, and that's making the planet warmer. But we're also dumping huge amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus and water on the Earth's surface to grow our plants and grow our food. So we too, just like the cyanobacteria in the plants, are altering the flows of these five elements around the world. And that's really why we're changing the planet like at a fundamental chemical level that's what it is that humans are doing that are

changing the world the most i love that you're explaining it this way because that that has to be the most simplified version that makes sense in an educational way than about any argument i've ever heard about climate change and and you've put it down, you've condensed it down into a concentrate that is very easy to understand. And you're like, okay, yeah, well, that sounds like what we're up to. Yeah, it is. It's what we're up to. And it's also a window into how to move forward, right? So, I mean, I'm happy to talk about all of the different aspects, but just to focus on climate for a minute, we have no interest in pumping greenhouse gases

into the atmosphere. We want the energy, right? And so we want to be able to talk over the computer and you have your fancy microphone there and the good lighting and all that stuff. I had a light on my screen and it went out like literally one minute before you bought me on there. So, so much for my tech, but anyway so we want the energy now to back up. If you have one cyanobacteria and then there's two of them, you get twice as much oxygen produced. If you have one tree and then you have two of them, it's pulling twice as much carbon dioxide out of the air for humans. Most all of the energy that we use is not to run our bodies it's not like every time you add another human you add the need for a lot more energy all the energy we need is for like lights and transport you know flying around and driving around and

whatever yeah and that's a great out for us because we can have more people using more energy without the unintended side effect of dumping a bunch of garbage into the atmosphere. We don't need to do that. And so that's what's happened in the last decade. I said I was more optimistic. What's happened in the last decade is we're really beginning to see the path for that to work. Like we can see a path now where, you know, the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere is projected to start falling next year or the year after wow yeah now is that coming from uh our electric vehicle initiatives and different things like that so this is globally but yeah so it's solar power it's wind power it's electric vehicles it increases inefficiency and look i

don't want to i'm not sure I'm going to sugar coat it. We got a long way to go. But like 10 years ago, the peak was not in sight, you know, and now we're like right up against that peak and we're going to start going down. And that's, that's awesome. So we have an out that our world changing predecessors didn't have, which is twofold. One, we can see what's coming so we can be smart about it. I mean, in theory, we can be smart about it. It remains yet to be seen how smart we will be.

And two, our success is not fundamentally coupled to the energy that we need in our bodies. It's all about running society, right? And we can get that without the negative side effect. They couldn't do that. Our world changing predecessors couldn't do that, but we can get that without the negative side effect. They couldn't do that. Our world-changing predecessors couldn't do that, but we can. Well, that's great that you're optimistic about it. I'm hopeful, too. I mean, we definitely want to, you know, I don't know how concerned I am. I was just reading about how someone's building a new electric car plant or battery plant for electric cars somewhere, and they've got to actually fire up

the coal plants to cover it which is kind of interesting it's kind of interesting how wait we need coal plants to put out more carbon so that we can have cars that put out less well look we're i mean we're in a we're in a wonky time right like we're in this transition time like i can see a future where electric car batteries are made produced with solar power and wind power powering the factory right yeah there you go right now you know yeah we have an electricity grid that has a bunch of fossil fuels on it and so to build those first electric batteries to build those first solar panels to build those first windmills like we're going to use the energy we have that that that kind of, it's all, it's the only show in town, but just because, you know, you could look at the,

you could look at the model T and be like, you know, there's no, there's no way everybody's going to want a car. Like it doesn't even have a radio. It doesn't have a roof, you know, they're really bouncy. I don't like whatever. And, and, and you could complain about it. You could say like, wow, that's, that's step's step number one right and we're evolving to something and we're rapidly evolving to something that's a lot better so you know they're going to be these sort of weird things that people point to you know like uh oh you know it takes it takes energy to make solar panels isn't that but the fact is even if you use coal to make solar panels or batteries it's better than what we were doing before.

And those things will get phased out, too, as we go. You can't ask for an instantaneously perfect solution after doing something the same way for 150 years. That's true. Do you see countries like India? And one of the problems we have is we went through our industrial age, our big pollution age. And one of the problems is third world countries are, you know, still going through theirs. And we're trying to test them like, hey, you guys should pollute less. And like, you guys polluted everything back in the day.

And we're like, yeah, but we're different now. And they're like, we're trying to become an economy. Like, you guys are jerks. you see uh countries like india and china finally turning the turning the uh corner yet so a couple things uh first uh they're going to be slower right because you're right like we we we dumped all the pollution first and then we raised all you know our people out of poverty and gave them all sorts of things. And now we're like, dude, don't do that. You know, that's bad. And, you know, so they, we rightly say, hey, if India and China don't stop emitting, you know, that's going to be a problem.

And they rightly say, hey, man, it's all your fault. Like, you know, don't get on your moral high horse after 150 years of dumping garbage into the atmosphere. The truth is both are right. The U.S. and Europe historically have emitted the most. And by the way, it's the total amount of emissions that matters, not the annual rate of emissions. So like the total amount over the entire industrial age that sets the amount of warming, not just how much you emit each year. So U.S. and Europe are still leading the pack in total amount of emissions. So that's one thing.

The other thing is that the atmosphere doesn't care one bit where it comes from, it only cares how much there is. The amount of warming, it doesn't sound like, oh, India is doing it. So that's okay or whatever. So we need to reduce emissions. It's definitely incumbent upon the wealthiest countries to sort of push the way. But it's also true that prices are falling. So like solar power is now the cheapest form of electricity in every market in the world.

The new build. Right. And it makes sense. Right. Because all you got to do is put up the panels and then you don't have to keep burning stuff all the time. And our plant all the time. They just sit there and produce. Right. And windmills have a bit more spit, you know, turning parts and need for replacement, but they too are falling rapidly in price. So it's going to be the case that yes, India and China are a little bit more reliant on dirtier fuels. Also, we offshore all our manufacturing to China, right? So we claim we

have lower emissions, but basically it's because they're making a whole bunch of stuff to ship to us. I would also say that China is the world's biggest market for EVs. It's producing the world's most solar panels. And as they build new coal-fired power plants, which they are still doing, they're not even running them as much as they thought because they have so much solar coming online. So they're building these plants, and then they're not even running them full-time because they don't need it um so yeah you know everybody's got to do their part and i'm not a big believer in the blame game like we are where we are and we have very little time to to write the ship so

let's just roll up our sleeves and write the ship and stop pointing fingers and just get to work. I mean, it doesn't make any difference to the atmosphere where the carbon dioxide comes from. There you go. Well, I'm glad that you feel positive about it. That gives me some hope that we can get to a better place in what we need to take and do. Because, you know, I enjoy oxygen. I'm kind of into that whole sort of thing. I enjoy Clemson clean water, although I have to really, uh, clean my, uh, water now when it comes down to it. So there's, there's that.

Um, so, uh, yeah, that's, that's always important as well. Uh, as we go out, what are some final things we haven't talked about in the book as, as we go out? Well, I think one of the big things we haven't talked about is how book as as we go out well i think one of the big things we haven't talked about is how we how we grow our food um and so you know it's kind of it's kind of amazing to think but if you took all the land that we farm and added up that area it would be the size of south america and then if you took all the land that we graze animals on so like you know not farmland but but pasture lands that and add it all up, that would be about the size of Africa.

So it's like an enormous amount of land surface is going into food production. And the way that we do that right now is we take a whole bunch of fertilizer and a whole bunch of water, and we dump it on those plants to make them grow. And then we kind of like lose all that fertilizer out, out somewhere else, either out to the ocean, out to rivers, out to the atmosphere. That system is, is very productive in terms of making food and it's very broken in terms of environmental consequences. And so, you know, I have a lot, there's a lot to be done on the food production side. So, you know, we've talked mostly about climate change, but there's a lot to be done on the food production side. So, you know, we've talked mostly about climate change, but there's a lot to be done managing these other elements, nitrogen, phosphorus and hydrogen and oxygen combined in water that will help us build a more sustainable future. And so there's a lot, but there's a lot of great work being done there, too. Like I have a colleague working in Iowa who is planting strips of native prairie just on a

little part of each farm, but across the like perpendicular to the direction that water flows. And she's reducing erosion rates by like 90 percent. So that means that the fertilizer that's choking up rivers and causing like dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, that stuff's being caught by prairie grasses and actually rebuilding soils instead of losing soils. So these kinds of entrepreneurial and innovative ways of growing food, they also are going to be key to managing these five elements in a sustainable way.

But again, we're making a lot of progress. So it's not all great. We have kind of created a bit of a shit show but uh you know we can see a way forward and that's very encouraging there you go well that's what we want we want to you know just keep on a good path if we can get there and and uh you know do you think we'll be able to beat you know rising oceans and stuff like that i mean watching the floods in new york city this week i like, that's what it's going to look like, I guess. Yeah.

So oceans are a tricky one. And the reason is that the ocean is still responding to what we did quite a while ago. So it's going to keep going. So basically, we know how much sea level rise will be between now and 2050. And there's basically nothing to do to stop that. Like we're locked into that. But what we do now will affect what happens after that. So like if you've got a beachfront house in Florida, like that's not a great thing to have.

Good luck with that. Good luck with that. And, you know, and so, yeah, sea level rise is going to continue. We're going to need to adapt to it. It's going to cause a lot of human migration. Like there's a lot of people living very close to the coast and low lying areas. And those places are going to, you know, people are going to need to move. And, you know, so we think about, you know, political conflict that goes with people trying to move from one place to another. That is certainly going to intensify as sea level rise uh makes makes places uninhabitable however we we know what's coming so you know we we could we can plan for it in theory i'm not so optimistic that humans are great at that part uh but you know maybe fingers crossed there you go there you go well uh this will be interesting. Do you have a house on the ocean?

I'm just curious. No, no, no. I'm trying to avoid all that. So I try and build inland. Although, I don't know, man. If we don't do something, you know, I could have a house in Montana and it'll get flooded. No, you'll just have forest fires. Forest fires.

But listen, let me give you you can i give you a personal example please do okay so uh i live in providence rhode island so like new england climate uh and uh when i moved into the house uh it was just like every other house on the block it was like a 1920 house it's about 2 000 square feet uh had oil furnace in the basement steam radiators it looked you know basically like an old house in New England. In 2014, I ripped out the furnace. I put in what are called heat pumps. These are like air conditioners that run in reverse. So they take heat in the summertime, they take heat from inside the house and dump it outside. That makes the house colder. That's

an air conditioner. And in the wintertime, they actually take heat out of the cold air. They make the outside a little colder and they bring that heat into my house. Oh, really? So these are called heat pumps. Your refrigerator does the same thing. It takes heat from inside the box and dumps it out into your kitchen, right? So your cat can lie in front of the fridge and be happy. So, okay.

So I got rid of my furnace and I put some heat pumps in. So now my house runs just on electricity for heating and for cooling, which I didn't have before. In 2019, I got an electric car. Okay. Those two things, switching to heat pumps and electric car, drop the CO2 emissions associated with running my house by 80%. Really? Wow. uh co2 emissions associated with running my house by 80 percent really wow so and that's counting even the fact that i'm that you're having to make that electricity right so that's like counting the emissions associated with electricity so you say okay well why does that matter well look i want

to drop it by a hundred percent but 80 is pretty damn good yeah Yeah, that's pretty... That's not bad, right? You know, it's all about that footprint, right? Yeah. And so, you know, again, like, this is not rocket science. We can do it. And so, yeah, you know, sea level rise, it's going to keep going, but we know where it's going to go. And, you know, we're going to have to adapt. And I will point out, the people who are the poorest in the world

have done the least to cause the problem, and they have the fewest resources with which to adapt. That's a fundamental inequality. Good at keeping in mind who we should throw rocks at. Exactly. Exactly. Because the average American emits 20 tons of CO2 a year. The average person in the world emits four. And the average Kenyan emits one.

There you go. So, but I can drop mine by 80%. There are a lot of people in the United States who can afford to do that too. And that's a start. And that will drive down the cost for everybody else. So, you know, you got to walk the walk,

I think. And so we're trying to do that both at home and at my university. But I also think there's, there's a path forward for everybody. And, oh, by the way, my house way more comfortable than it used to be. Oh yeah. Way more comfortable. And, you know, I got AC in the summer, so it's all good. There you go. That's awesome, man. Well, this has been very insightful and I feel better about the whole climate change world thing going on because, you know because it's kind of seeming a little dark there,

especially like this week when I was watching all the stuff going on with New York City. Oh, my God, yeah. It was just flooding, and I'm like, what? Yeah, I was born and raised in New York City, and watching the water pour down the subway steps, burst out of the walls, that was kind of like a Marvel movie apocalyptic.

Yeah, yeah, apocalyptic sort of stuff. Well, thank you very much for out of the walls. That was kind of like a Marvel movie apocalyptic. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Stephen. We really appreciate it. Give us your dot coms wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs. Sure. So it's www.porterlab.org and that's porter, P-O-R-D as in David, E-R, lab.org.

There you go. Thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, man. My pleasure. There you go. Uh, thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, man. My pleasure. There you go. And order up wherever folks, uh, you can find the fine books,

uh, stay away. These are the way bookstores go to, uh, anywhere and ask for elemental, how five elements changed. Earth's past and will shape our future. And hopefully we can definitely contribute to that.

Cause we want things better. I think most people want things better for their future and I'm into that whole oxygen thing. I really like that stuff. It's good for me, I hear. As long as I keep breathing, my lungs keep using it. So thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, 4Chest Christmas, LinkedIn.com,

4Chest Christmas, YouTube.com, 4Chest Christmas, Christmas, one of the tickety-tockety and I think that was all of it. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.