2030 is only seven years away and the predictions for the future of life on this planet in the upcoming decade are troubling. According to the Center for Science Education if we continue on the same trajectory we will experience large amounts of melting snow, changing precipitation, rising sea levels, warmer temperatures, and dramatic changes to sea levels and our everyday lives.
During these last three years, people around the world have witnessed unusual raging fires in Europe, tornados, earthquakes, floods, and changes in regional weather. It is easy to see and believe that the Earth is on a time clock and changes are needed if the eight billion people on the planet want to continue to thrive. The questions on everyone’s mind are what can we do and are the predictions real?
In honor of the month of Earth Day and to get a different perspective I reached out to the author of the book Climaturity Marc Cortez who is an entrepreneur and long-time veteran of the solar, electric vehicle infrastructure, and energy storage industries. As one of the solar industry’s early architects, he has been working on the front lines of the climate change industry for decades. Mr. Cortez is also a professor of entrepreneurship and technology commercialization at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.
My Interview with Marc Cortez
Is Climate Change Real?
Climate change is real, it has always been changing. I think everyone accepts that, and certainly mankind's industrial revolution; us discovering and burning fossil fuels contributes to that.
Is 2030 going to be as bad as predicted?
The first time I heard about the climate and issues was probably in 1989, there were 10 years to live. Then in 1999, there were 10 years to live, and then in 2000, 10 years to live. We're now into the fifth decade of the countdown till the tipping point.
It is a story, it's a narrative.
The United Nations is a political group. They're not scientists. Some scientists contribute to the UN reports who report the findings but, they are a worldwide group of political analysts that number in the thousands. Their job is to frame science for their political consumption. When the UN started, they had the charter to be impartial and not be advocates. That has changed dramatically.
Starting around 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) created scenarios. Scenario planning is just a tried-and-true way of literally taking a blank spreadsheet and saying, “Hey, what if all these different things happen? Let's lay out a bunch of scenarios. What if we make a bunch of assumptions of things, and then let's plug in some things that we know, like, temperatures that we've measured over the past 20 years and actual science that we can measure.”
What results is this scattershot of a whole bunch of different scenarios. There are 45 different scenario classes that the IPCC gathered; within those scenario classes there are about 1,143 different scenarios, and they are all made up.
I always remind myself and everyone that the scenarios that we're looking at are all made up. These are scenarios that have been crafted to help us try to project into the future. They're all forward-looking guesses.
They are considering temperature measurements from the past and projecting those forward; trying to guess how the globe is going to react to more people, more energy, different energy mixes, different growth patterns, different population patterns, and different population migration; try to think about how complex that is.
It is an exercise in trying to predict the future. The idea that we have 10 years to live is a fabrication. It's just fiction.
So, of those 1100 different scenarios, pick one, right? Look at those and say, which one do you think you want to create a story about?
What unfortunately happens, and what I pick on in my book is the most extreme scenario is called representative concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP 8.5), which takes the worst of everything that's happened in the past and projects that forward into the future.
People have chosen to communicate that as the baseline, and you can chart how much it gets, communicated in the different IPPC reports. Over the past 25 to 30 years, you can see that scenario, whereas when it started, all the scenarios were created equal. By 2022, the most extreme scenario is now front and center and it gets mentioned 60% of the time as this is what's going to happen, except that nothing is backing that. There is absolutely no science, there's no probability theory, it's a narrative that people chose.
So you feed that to the media, and what does the media do? They have their own stories and their positions on things.
The headline says we've got eight years to live. In Egypt at COP 27, what came out of that, is the climate reparations fund which will be funded by the US and China, it's follow the money.
There is zero science that leads us there. That's unfortunately one of the challenges with climate change is there's a bunch of stuff we know, and then we've projected a bunch of that stuff forward. The scientific community has strayed into this area of advocacy.
They now take their own science and form opinions about what that science should mean and what it should mean to us. That’s a big part of what's happening in all of these doomsday reports, scientists who personally believe that we're headed in a certain direction, but their science doesn't, doesn't prove it. That's the challenge that we have in trying to find this truth. I was expecting to find smoking guns, and all I found was fog.
How do we need to think differently now and in the future about climate change?
I think part of it is continuing to peel back the onion. The reason I wrote Climaturity is we must be able to talk about this. I've been raising my hand for 15 years, but when you're in the solar industry, you're not allowed to raise your hand. You must go out there and say, yes, solar is the answer to everything.
If you read the New York Times, you're going to get a very clear narrative and if you listen to Fox News, you're going to get a very different narrative. My suggestion is to read both. Try to sort through everything because what you will find, as you read most of these narratives have qualifiers like if, could, might, maybe, potential, and projected. Those are all words that describe guesses. As you train yourself to go through the stories start looking when you read, put that lens on and say if this bad stuff happens in 20 years, it's projected that we're all dead, put up the red flag.
Explain the popular mindsets for the climate crisis and how they both may be wrong.
As someone coming from the renewable energy industry, you must buy into this whole narrative of it's the climate apocalypse, or you're a complete denier. It's like the Wizard of Oz. You close the curtains and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain it's ridiculous. And that's part of what inspired me to take this journey, it's not an easy one when you decide to have a different opinion about the climate, especially that flies in the face of an industry that you helped build.
I advocate for a pragmatic and rational discussion down the middle than buying into one of these narratives, there's a better way.
We need to be having a real discussion. What drove it home for me is working with, young adults that are entering the workforce at Cal Poly I'm a professor there. We've got 22-year-olds who have heard their entire life we're all going to die.
They are saying to themselves, well, maybe we shouldn't have kids because the planet will be dead. So, what's the point?
As someone who's helped start this industry, I sit there and think wait for a second. That is not true. I feel that we have failed as an energy community if that's the message that 22-year-old adults are having as they enter the workforce. I felt motivated to dig into the truth and shine a light on that. That's what set me on this journey.
Is there a way to find the truth of where we stand with climate change?
Part of why I've been pushing back on the climate narrative is the extreme solutions that are being proposed. Suddenly, solar is the answer to the world's problems. When we model solar systems, we model them working five hours a day and windmills are modeled for about 40% usage. What are we going to do for the rest of the 19 hours? Sit in the dark.
You need other stuff. Then people go how about electric vehicles (EVs)? Well, the fact is an EV has a much higher carbon footprint than an internal combustion engine. It only catches up depending on how you drive and where you live and where you charge it. And if you have long-range batteries, you may never catch up.
Our climate problem is a consumption problem, that’s the bottom line. We're using too much stuff and discarding it. That TV that I could potentially repair, well Best Buy's having an awesome sale on a 50-inch Samsung TV for $189, I will buy it because I don’t want to spend a Saturday fixing this tv.
In addition, the policies that we have encouraged more consumption. We're trying to solve our overconsumption problem with more consumption. The new bill that just came out, the inflation reduction act, it's billions for more solar, more windmills, more EVs, and more electric charging. You know, if you install a solar panel on your roof today, you've added CO2, it never gets below that. You are comparing yourself against potentially avoiding worse emissions in the future. But it never gets better. It just gets less worse and those are very big differences. We're trying to solve our consumption problem with more consumption, and it logically doesn't even make sense.
Unfortunately, people don't like to hear this, that the best thing that happened to the climate game in the past 30 years was Covid. In one year, we had our emissions dropped by 11% in the United States in 12 months. We did in one year, what 30 years of climate policy haven't been able to do. Why? We did less stuff. We worked less, we didn't drive as much, and we didn't go to the office as much. So how come no one's saying that?
Could you imagine a national policy that says, we've decided that all offices are closed on Friday, you are going to telecommute. That kind of stuff never even gets discussed.
Should we hold industries or businesses accountable for climate change
I keep reading articles that say 11 companies are responsible for 70% of all emissions. It's a target on oil companies but that's not true because it's not like if we just stop those 11 companies, then we've solved 70% of the problem. It's data manipulation.
Oil companies make stuff that we use, they're like Facebook and Twitter. If you want to get back at oil companies, stop using their stuff. People say we must get rid of fossil fuels and to that, I say you first.
That means you're not wearing your clothes, you're not living in a house, you're not driving any car or taking any sort of public transportation, or owning any transportation. You don't have indoor plumbing and most of your food is.
We’re not getting rid of fossil fuels. It's got a bad side, but it's also helped every one of us, especially in the U.S. It's just a fact.
You can't make any solar panels without oil and gas. The first step in the manufacturing process is to fire up a big tractor and mow down a mountain and start sorting through dirt to get all the minerals. There's nothing clean about that.
What are the solutions?
It's a consumption problem.
People need to start thinking like, well, maybe I don't need to throw out this tv. Maybe I don't need the new gadget this Christmas. It’s decisions like, maybe I'll just wait and do it once over the weekend. We're in control of all that kind of stuff.
About Marc Cortez
Marc Cortez who is an author, entrepreneur and long-time veteran of the solar, electric vehicle infrastructure, and energy storage industries. As one of the solar industry’s early brand architects, he has been working on the front lines of the climate change industry for decades. He has raised over $20M for multiple startups, and is currently the Founder/CEO of Liquid8, a water conservation startup. Mr. Cortez is also a professor of Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialization at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Mr. Cortez through his latest book Climaturity he asks readers to question what they know about climate change.
About the Author
Annmarie Hylton-Schaub, Head Marketing Strategist and Content Developer at Project Good Work, a boutique marketing group focused on helping individuals who want to launch social impact projects, charities, and change-making initiatives. The marketing group works to develop branding, marketing strategy, and content to connect clients with the people who believe what they believe so that their project and business can thrive.
If you have a passion for an unserved community, a social justice problem, or want to change minds, contact Project Good Work at ProjectGood.Work to start your project of change today.