Climate Advocacy, Biofuels, and Managing Conflicting Values in Conservation with John Perona

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with John Perona, science/policy analyst, writer and advocate for a healthy climate about Climate Advocacy, Biofuels, and Managing Conflicting Values in Conservation.   Read his full bio below.

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Showtimes: 
1:41- What Motivates You!
6:32 - Interview with Perona Starts
15:03 - Pollution Laws
32:30 - Having Complex Discussions 
37:19 - Perona's Field Story; Spaniel Edition 

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This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Dr. John Perona at https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnperona

Guest Bio: 
Dr. John Perona was educated in Biochemistry at Yale and UCSF, and served for 30 years on Chemistry faculties in California and Oregon. His research involved synthetic biology and concentrated on environmental problems associated with Earth's carbon cycle. Dr. Perona also holds a degree in Environmental and Natural Resources law. He is author of a comprehensive climate science/policy text for laypersons, From Knowledge to Power, and is presently engaged in advocating for a healthy climate in the Oregon legislature, and working with the Creative Destruction Lab, mentoring startup companies in the carbon removal field.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental nerds, Nick and Laura. On today's episode, Nick and I talk about motivators. We talked to John Pera about climate advocacy, biofuels, and managing conflicting values and conservation. And finally, our guest has a rather rambunctious Russian spaniel.So here are some fun facts about them. They are versatile hunting dogs known for their stamina, keen sense of smell, and willingness to retrieve. They also may sprain their tails when they get too excited. Facts. 

Hit that music. 

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Let's get to our segment. 

Love Conan. Conan's the best. He's incredible. Yeah, we're listening to the Arnold episode and then started listening to Arnold's new book, which we could talk about. I haven't finished it yet. Is that the one where like he talks about like how he hates the term self-made man? I think that's. Yes. Yeah. I think we've actually talked about that on the show before. That's kind of funny. That's where I came from was the interview. I remember watching the interview on like social media, and he's like, yeah, so, yeah. Yeah, we listen to the episode on Conan O'Brien has Friends or whatever it's called, and he's hysterical, you know, he's like, oh, Lulu and truly or whatever his pets are called or like here and I have to feed the animals in the during the day and then. But then he talks about his book that he wrote, which is called Be Useful, because his father used to tell him that like, get out of bed and be useful. So we didn't get super far into the book, but, you know, he talks about so many interesting things about how his movie career progressed and how it started with coming to America and people told him, you know, you can't do that. You know, you're crazy, you can't do that, whatever. And then he just kept like. Setting one goalpost after another in front of himself. And, you know, it's not like the most fast-paced read or anything mind blowing, but just hearing it from someone who's done it and from such a place of like, you're never going to be able to, like, you went from a poor Austrian to governor of California and beyond, like, you know, like, who would have thought? I know, I know. 

And like I say, I know that the interview, I heard a talk about it, I said, we've mentioned this on the show. Where he said he hates when people say he's a self-made man because he came from nothing, and he said that it ignores all the people that helped me get to where I am. You know, he's talking about his first coach in wrestling, but just believed in him and how that belief translated for him into so many different things. And I thought it was really, really impactful. I thought that was a really nice way of crediting people along the way. We have so many people in our lives that influence the way things turn out. And yeah, I love that you found that as well. That's pretty neat. And even on the flip side, there are people who have not had any help. There are people who have dug themselves out of their hole, and then at some point people start paying attention and want to give them help. But, but even still, those people who kicked you, put you down, who whatever, you know, they deserve some credit too. They motivated. I thank them every day for me never wanting to work for someone else again. The motivation is strong. I can, I can totally understand that. 

But you know, I think you'd admit too, there's no person that is successful that has solely the reason for their success. There's always something else. There's, whether it's being a little lucky in the market or whatever, you always have someone else helping you. There's always some other influence, you need a little bit of both, right? You need the determination. And it can be nurtured, or you can just, you know, in many different ways, but you have to have advocates as well at some point, um, even if it's just your first client in your new business, you gotta have somebody who believes in you. Yeah, and it flips, right? You have the motivation, possibly. You might have, you might have stellar parents who are self-aware and giving you guidance and giving you words of wisdom. Or you may have parents like Arnold's who were not giving words of wisdom, but were just kicking you in the butt saying be useful. But eventually you look back and you're like, OK, that was helpful, right? Um, or whatever the circumstances is, you go from like the people who are pushing you forward to then the people who are pulling you forward. So every time someone tells me, like, our guest today was like, your show is great. That, that's the pull, that's the motivation to keep going and moving in the forward direction. So I like to credit both the people who've given me a kick in the butt and the people who have then pulled me forward and keep me like climbing up the hill. That's a great, I love that mentality and it's funny you say be useful. 

My dad's version of that was quit standing there with your teeth in your mouth and uh. I never heard that one before. I always put sand there with their teeth and mouth, you know, that's his version to be useful. It was always kind of like, oh gosh, I better do something, right? And I've never heard that. Yeah, that's the first thing I thought of when you said it. I can put my teeth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean the first time you said it, I remember like trying to touch my face like, what does he mean by that? Right? Yeah, yeah, it's just, yeah, you gotta move. You can't just sit there, you know, don't just watch me, help me, you know. So, yeah, yeah, it's a life lesson, I still. I still remember that. Yeah, taught me a lot, uh, for sure, so. That his hysterical. So I don't know where to go from here, but no, I think that's a good place to stop it's.

Welcome back to EPR. Today we have John Perona on the show. John is a science and policy analyst, writer and advocate for a healthy climate. Welcome, John. Hello, Laura and Nick. Great to be here. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Let's start off with some of your backgrounds. You have an extensive background in science, law, and education. So, what first sparked your interest in this path and how has your career evolved over time to get your Well, I would say the very first spark came in my childhood when I had the opportunity to spend summers in the Italian Alps with family. And I was at a pretty impressionable age. My first trip was when I was 7, and then there were more trips, 4 or 5 of them before I was off to college. So, I just fell in love with the hiking trails and the snow on the mountains and, you know, staying in these little mountain huts overnight sometimes and being with my relatives and learning Italian, and so I got really connected to that sort of environmental ethic, and I've continued to go back since then. Last time actually was in February. Oh yeah. Yeah, you know, I can see now the impact of climate change on that high alpine environment. I mean, I just see it with my own eyes. I don't have to read about it in papers, you know, and so that motivates what I'm doing now. Oh yeah, totally. So how has that changed? What's that look like? I've never so I don't know. I mean, it seems like it's hotter and there's a lot of mosquitoes used to be, right? So it's more the subalps in the region going up to the really high peaks. 

The mosquitoes are not on the high peaks yet. Hopefully they won't get there, but it's temperature and its environment for things like mosquitoes and then it just changes in the ground cover in some places like the blueberries aren't growing the way they used to. And it's just, you know, you talk to folks up there and they're noticing the changes. Yeah, yeah, interesting. So it sounds like your parents had a lot of interest in travel and, you know, you didn't just 7 years old, say, I want to learn Italian, so they must have influenced you, it was, you know, really my mom's side of the family, and she was born in Italy. So when we went back to visit, we would stay in this, you know, mountain town it's called Castagne actually. And my great grandmother, who I got to know growing up in those visits, her picture is now posted at the town square and on the, the one little cobblestone road in the town, population is on the order of 300 people, and it's become like a tourist center for how things used to be in these mountain towns, you know, so now there's an agri Turismo, there's Which is like, you know, farm to table stuff, a great local food, and, you know, there's a whole historical tour and, you know, there's my great grandmother with this broom all in black, right? sweeping up the cobblestone main street outside her house where we used to stay for, you know, months at a time when I was growing up. So, you know, that was definitely, that was definitely an influence, although I have to say it kind of went underground for a long time because I was focusing on. A career that was not environmentally centered until later on in the career. Yeah. Interesting.

I say what caused the shift? I think what caused the shift is I got tenure at UC Santa Barbara. It was the year 2000. I was 38, so that's 25 years ago, and more years ago than I like to admit. Um, and I started getting restless. I've discovered about myself is that what I really enjoy the most is a learning curve, not necessarily a super steep learning curve, but one that's steep enough to challenge me and get me into, you know, sort of new things. So that desire to start doing something different than just the, the sort of typical work in the lab, which is sort of conventional structure, function, biochemistry work, studying proteins, studying RNA molecules, determining. structures, that kind of stuff is what we would do in the lab. But increasingly my interest became started to move into other directions, and then I sort of found books on, uh, oil and gas depletion. I found books on environmental degradation of various areas, Bill McKibbin's books, you know, many other writers. I discovered that in town in Santa Barbara, there is a great little organization called the Environmental Defense Center, which is a very small public interest law firm. And so I went there and I said, can I help out? You know, because I knew that they were doing work on oil and gas in the channel, you know, trying to prevent more platforms from being built and making sure that there was pollution control, etc. And they said, yeah, sure, what year of law school are you in? And I said, Well, I'm, I'm not in law school. And they said, Well, if you wanna, you know, do what we do here, you really need to learn a little law. And that kind of keyed into these very broad intellectual interests that I have, not just science, and my learning curve. And so there's a night program, there's a Santa Barbara College of Law, and I got into that, and after a year in that program, I started, you know, interning and I was a tenured professor in biochemistry, but I was also an intern in this law, sorry, in this law firm. So I kind of took it from there. I mean, I, I did some work with them, and then after I moved to Portland in 2011, I was doing work in the labs because they recruited me to try to build certain programs, but then I again felt this pull. And there's another law program here.

 It's one of the nation's best. It's the Environmental and Natural Resources law at Lewis and Clark, the Northwestern College of Law. So that was also a program I could do part time and with a lot of my classes. And so I did that and simultaneous with that, I got into advocacy more seriously than I could at the EDC in Santa Barbara. So that was kind of the evolution of things. That's really cool. I like to see how you just stepped into it. Someone said, Do you need some law to work here? I don't have it. I'm gonna get it like, OK, cool. Um, how, how do you decide what classes you need to take? Someone asked you a question like that. Uh, I want this job. I don't have that skill. Let me go get it. Uh, that's great. But over the time, so I'm curious about having so much information on the law side, and then also having the science information, and then also having your own experiences. How do these all come together and give you different perspectives on what's happening right now with climate? Yeah, so one thing I developed at Lewis and Clark was this idea that I should be checking statutes. For scientific accuracy and integrity and that, you know, they should get the science right. And it wasn't hard to find examples where the science was not done right. So I wrote several law reviews that came out of seminars that I took at the law school. In fact, I chose my classes specifically for the ones that I could Satisfy the requirements for by writing papers, so then I could publish papers and that that would be better than just like taking an exam in the classroom. 

So for example, groundwater in California, they had just passed the Sustainable Groundwater Law Act in California for the first time, and that was great, except that they had to, they had to base the law on some sort of historical standard. Then they based it on the average of 20th century groundwater levels, as they were known. And the problem is that the 20th century was very wet in California, and the 21st century, there was every reason to predict and has in fact continued to come true that it's a dry century. And so the very basis of the law has the wrong standard in it, and they just basically ignored basic climate change when they wrote that statute. I could give you other examples, but you know, it's sort of come up again now. In the climate Superfund law with respect to some of the details about how that's a law that if we pass it, it would mirror laws in Vermont and New York that have already passed, the fossil fuel companies are challenging it, of course. Um, they don't want to pay billions of dollars to states to partly compensate for the money damages associated with all the climate concerns like all the wildfires, all the coastal erosion, all the floods, etc. and it's different in different states. Yeah. And so, you know, even in this law, there's, there's a lot of science underpinning the idea of how the fossil fuel firms have impacted climate and it's not all correct. Interesting. So, can you give us an overview of the law and what it's trying to accomplish and then we can dive into some of the challenges. Yeah, so, I mean, the law is based on the principle of uh polluter pays, which is a sort of time-honored principle in environmental law. What that basically means is, you know, if you make a mess, you clean it up. Right. And it's embodied in the federal super fund laws, which are for, you know, toxic waste sites. The company has been occupied an industrial site for many years. It got polluted with chemicals and whatever, and then they go away and, you know, the community is left with this toxic waste site. And so the Superfund law was intended to require The responsible companies to actually clean it up. 

Yeah. And so the idea now is over historical periods in the past, this is a backward looking law, a retroactive liability law. Over historical periods in the past, climate damages have accumulated, and they've accumulated mostly because of burning fossil fuels and generation of carbon dioxide and methane. And it seems just the principle of basic fairness that the citizens of Oregon and these other states should not have to shoulder 100% of the burden, financial burden associated with building up climate change resilience at the same time that these law firms have. Earned substantial profits by selling their products in our state. So this law, if successful, would recover funds and so there would be an interagency effort to assess damages and come up with a damages number that will certainly be in the billions of dollars. Um, they will come up with a climate resilience plan for how to restore parts of the natural world that have been damaged and how to make infrastructure in the state more resilient, and then we will portion liability to the very largest fossil fuel firms that pass a certain threshold of emissions of CO2. And a portion liability according to, you know, how much fossil fuel product globally they have produced, and it's easy to calculate how much carbon dioxide is generated from mining a certain quantity of coal or gas or oil. They're not the same amounts in each case because coal is more carbon intensive, but it's easily calculable, and so we would assign relative liabilities to fossil fuel companies out of the total amount, let's say it's 10 billion, fossil fuel company A. We're going to ask you to pay $2 billion because you included a lot of fossil fuel Company B, you only have to pay $700 million because you did pollute, but not as much. 

So something like that. And if many states get into this, and Oregon is the third, but parallel with less, there are other states like Maryland and California who are trying to do this, two states have already done it. You can imagine that the damages are going to get very large, hundreds of billions of dollars, even more than that potentially. And so they're gonna fight this with everything they have. Yeah, so part of the thing that I think is really interesting is we haven't really talked about lobbying a whole lot on the show, and I know that's basically what you're gonna have, you have lobbyists on like the oil and gas side and on the, you know, the Superfund side. How does that process work, and then, yeah, we'll dive more into the challenges after that. Yeah, well, we have not seen, as far as I'm aware, oil and gas. Firm lobbyists in the legislature trying to get them to oppose this law. It's pretty partisan. Um, Oregon has 60% majority of Democrats in both houses of its legislature. If the Democrats want to pass the law, they probably pass it. And the fights, as far as their side is concerned, will be on lawsuits later. I mean, there's already lawsuits against Vermont, against New York. They've already been filed. The firms are trying to get the cases to be in federal court because they think that that's more favorable to them. So far, the Supreme Court has declined to hear any of these cases, we're on good grounds there. We'll see going forward. So the advocacy is coming from those like myself and the groups I work with. To try to persuade lawmakers to vote yes on this. Yeah, yeah, so you're gonna be talking specifically about this bill pretty shortly here. Um, what's your goal for that? How are you, uh, presenting your argument? 

Well, it looks like I'll be part of an expert panel if that actually comes about because it's still under debate as of this recording, I don't know, um, but. The idea is I would be part of an expert panel and I would have all of 2 minutes to explain one of the technical aspects in the bill, which is how do we apportion liability among the fossil fuel firms based on this calculation of CO2 from amounts. Other experts will talk about other aspects of it, and then they'll be, they'll open it up for other folks who want to give oral testimony. So you mentioned that, that, you know, like there's challenges with the bills, sometimes how they calculate things. Is that also the case here in what? Yeah, it's the case here because it's not easy to calculate the amounts of methane and nitrous oxide. It's not as easy to calculate those amounts from the amounts of fossil fuel in our mind. Since all we're doing is apportioning respective liability and the total damages is determined elsewhere in the law, it doesn't really matter how you calculate respective liabilities, so why not calculate them based on just on CO2, where it's easy to do the calculation and it's less open to challenge from the companies. So that's my argument. Interesting. That's very cool. That's really cool. So that's where the science aspect of things sort of came in. Yeah, yeah, it's like science and the law kind of meeting each other, and that's pretty neat to see. So you also talked a little bit about contrasting values in climate work, and I, I thought that was quite interesting. Can you talk about what those differences are like, you know? Yeah, so I wrote a blog piece. I wrote a book on climate science and policy. 

It's called From Knowledge to Power. Which was inspired by the advocacy work I'm doing and the folks I met in the advocacy community. In fact, just before I answer your general question, that book came about because I began to give seminars in a local pub, basically monthly. I put myself out and I said, you know, I'm going to give these seminars about climate science and policy. Does anybody want to show up? You're trying to motivate, you know, actually support for a national carbon pricing policy at the time, because I was working with Citizens Climate Lobby. So I put together a curriculum for this, you know, it turned out to 8 monthly seminars, and I talked about it with some of the local advocates, and they looked at it and they said, Great, John, but you can't go ahead like this, it would be tragic. Right, and at the time, I was looking at climate advocacy. I was looking at climate change like mostly as a biophysical problem coming from science, right? And my legal background didn't really shift that very much, you know, it's more technical stuff. And what I'd left out was sort of the societal impact and the values of the advocates in the community who would be going and, you know, advocating in front of the legislature, which also have to do with values of justice. It's not just about climate. Per se. And so the tragedy was not, oh my God, you know, you're talking too much about the carbon cycle and not enough about, you know, atmospheric physics, you know, right? We're fine with I could do that part as I chose, but that I had left out. 

And so, you know, I didn't feel qualified to discuss some of those climate justice concerns and I so I recruited speakers from the community. And so this the series went well. It inspired me to write the book and gave me the theme that I didn't have to dumb things down, and I saw what I'd seen a lot of materials for citizen advocates are just like, here's this overview, you guys can't understand the details. And I was like, no, that is just not right. You just have to explain it properly. And so the premise of my book was, you know, education. In the service of advocacy, and I'm not dumbing it down. We should probably have someone else if they, if I was successful or not about that. I think I had some success with that. So the, to get back to your question, the climate advocacy divide, I wrote a blog piece entitled Advocate versus activist or maybe advocate or activist question mark. So that comes back to a lot of people say they're alarmed about climate change. So the Yale Center for Climate Change Communication, together with George Mason University, has done this great work in public opinion surveys and analysis. On, you know, how people think about climate change. And so they divide Americans into different groups like subgroups. There's global warming, six Americas is what it's called. Uh, so there's a very large and growing group of alarmed Americans. 

But if you look among those alarmed Americans, there's like 30, I forget the percentage of the population, but pretty high percentage. And growing, and you ask them, well, so what are you doing? You're alarmed. Are you doing anything about it? And the answer is typically no, very, very small fraction of folks which are called the active alarmed, which, you know, comes down to, you know, a fraction of 1% of the total population or something like that, are actually doing anything. Right. And so you ask, well, you said you're concerned about climate change, you're not doing anything, why not? And a typical answer, one of the biggest answers is, I'm not an activist. So people don't see themselves as activists, and the problem is that activists are associated with things like throwing paint on the Mona Lisa. Right, so you see all these and you see disruptions of traffic and you see people protesting and you see, right, so there's all this, that's what gets the news, right? So that's giving activists a bad name, but there's also this pretty strong connection. Really dominant in the climate advocacy movement, that the, you know, the climate justice groups, the ones that are coming from environmental justice and prior to that social justice, it's really about alleviating harms to frontline communities who have suffered the most from communities of color, who have suffered the most from climate change, and no one doubts. That that they have suffered the most from climate change, not to mention that they've contributed the least to it. Right. 

However, the focus on, on that aspect of things means that the long term picture of the climate for future generations is the integrity of the biosphere, those issues which motivate me as someone who loves the environment, the most, it leads to different policies. Right? Like if we want to, we need to build, like the most important thing in my judgment on climate is solving climate is to build out the renewable energy infrastructure, and we have problem we have huge slowdowns on permits and so that we want to make that easier to do. And, uh, you know, it's clear no brainer for me, but many climate justice advocates are like, you know, not so fast. We're concerned about building this in the Impact on this community, the environmental movement too, you know, we're concerned about, you know, I've advocated for a plant that would build that would produce renewable diesel, which saves a lot of CO2 emissions, but it's on the Columbia River, right? The, the river advocates are like, no, you can't build this thing, right? It's a potential spill, right? It's gonna harm their ecosystem. Well, you know, what's more important, the local ecosystem in the short term. While this plant operates or climate change, which is an existential threat to basically the way we live, right? So that's where I'm coming from, you know, I support nuclear power because, you know, I see the concerns that folks have, but to me, even if there's a meltdown of a reactor somewhere, it's a local thing that happens here. It's not the big picture of the climate. 

Why should we exclude this zero-carbon source, right? Because of local and immediate concerns. Right? And but my voice is a minority among advocates, right, as a, right. So when I wrote that piece, advocate versus activist, I was saying, if you call yourself an advocate. Immediately the connotation of activists as you must be progressive, you must be protesting, that's gone. You know, who's an advocate? You know, you could have some conservative lawyer, the most conservative guy you'd know, and he would call himself an advocate. Right. So I'm a healthy climate advocate. I'm not. But it's kind of like sometimes hunters, duck hunting, like, you know, they want wet wetlands, they want that in a way that's maybe counter to what people would think. That's really interesting to see. We've talked a little bit on the show about, you know, even like how you conserve things. Do you save what's currently in a local system or do you prepare and plan for what's changing? And even that has different answers. So it's really interesting to see that. So how do you kind of work through and navigate through those challenges? I just, you know, do the best I can to articulate my positions and to be respectful of what other people think. It's not that I disagree fundamentally with their values. I mean, I, you know, I was educated when I gave those seminars in Portland at the pub, monthly, you know, the folks in the environmental justice community who said, look, you know, this is what's going on here, you know, we need to, we need our concerns addressed. And so I'm not, it's not like I'm disagreeing on substance. Um, I'm saying, you know, we're worried about policy here, right? Like we've got to build this thing. 

I appreciate that there might be some impacts and we'll try to alleviate them, but at the end of the day, we gotta, we're gonna build this thing or we're not, and you know, it has to get built. So I, you know, I just do my best and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Yeah, so you mentioned uh biofuel and, um, you know, renewable energy. Can you kind of walk us through like what about that is important? I mean, it makes sense from like a You know, obviously they're renewable for one thing, but how do you see like, you know, biofuels? That's something I heard a little bit, uh, a lot about abiligo. I've heard more about solar and wind recently, and obviously it's not gone away, but how does biofuel fit in with the rest of these energies? Biofuels is controversial and part of the reason. Is that the fields, you know, that kind of got started on a bad foot because it was basically the Federal renewable Fuel Standard, which is all about corn ethanol. So profits for Archer Daniel Newland. 40% of the corn crop is not going for energy, most ethanol. And the climate, the actual CO2 savings, you can look at the life cycle analysis, it's not that big, right? Furthermore, You know, what do you do with ethanol? You blend it with gasoline. Well, gasoline is on the way out for electric cars anyway. And you can only blend it at 10 or 15%, right? So even if you can manage to make the ethanol in a more climate-friendly way, and it's still gonna have an impact when you make it, it really doesn't do very much, right? So that was one problem. And then another problem was, you know, the, the structure of that law incentivized the import of biodiesel. And it didn't matter where it came from, so it came from, you know, Southeast Asia. And so tropical rainforests were getting cut down and indigenous folks were getting displaced so that we could have palm tree plantations, so that we could get palm oil to ship to the US so that we could make people associated with the biodiesel industry rich, right? And so, those are not good examples if you want to promote biofuels today. So, but now what we have is we have a product called renewable diesel, which is a drop-in substitute for petroleum diesel, and which typically saves on the order of 60% of the CO2 emissions and which can be made sustainably. 

So in the Oregon statute, It's actually excluding palm oil as a source for renewable diesel. But you know, you can make it from animal tallow, um, you can make it from sort of fish byproducts which otherwise would pollute waters and get released. So you can, you can make it from used cooking oil, and you can make it from crops. Right? And so that raises the question of indirect land use change, which is what many environmental justice advocates are concerned about, and prices could go up if part of, for example, the soybean oil crop is diverted. To making fuel instead of for food. So what, so food prices might go up. Now there's global markets for this, but and there's complicated economic agricultural models for will food prices go up or not. They're pretty hard to get perfectly right. And so, you know, from my point of view and many others who think like me. The climate savings by substituting renewable diesel for petroleum diesel is so great that we should keep an eye on these concerns about food prices, but we're certainly not gonna, you know, not pursue the industry, whereas environmental justice groups will say we don't want it at all. Right, you know, biofuels are bad, and there's a discussion about how, well, you know, corn ethanol, palm oil, that stuff was bad. So all biofuels are bad, right, so then it kind of devolves into that kind of argument. So, you know, I pushed for this renewable diesel refinery to get permitted and it's still in the process, but many of my colleagues or some of my colleagues anyway in the advocacy movement disagreed with me. So we have to agree to disagree. Yeah, and honestly, like, uh, it's kind of what I want to dive into. 

You talk about complex, talking about complex things and having complex discussions and, and, you know, that’s one of the beauties of being human, right, is we all have a little, we come from different perspectives, we have different experiences and we bring those to the table in different ways. Um, and you've given lots of lectures, you've done lots of public speaking. What have you learned about like how to communicate these kinds of topics and, you know, like, how do you get to understanding that we may have differences of opinion, but we can still have a conversation? Yeah, well, I mean, I, one thing I try to do is just to be as clear as possible about what are the agreed upon scientific facts that we have a common place to start. So I don't, for example, try to give lectures to a climate denialist community where the premises of the conversation or not, right? And so then I try to lay out the respective values associated with that people might have associated with this policy or that policy. And then I invite conversation about it, if it's in a room where that's sort of possible to do. It's challenging. I mean, it's kind of, I have to know the group. What is their level of scientific comfort? So that, and what are the likely ranges of, of perspective on what I'm talking about so that I can speak to that and so that they're sure that there's, that they will be heard, right? Like I have to be a good listener. pick up on cues that, you know, someone's in the back of the room shaking their head going, you know, like that. But probably if you're, if you're leading a seminar and that's happening, you ought to be paying attention to that. So, I don't know, I don't have great, super great advice because it's really just, you have to really want people to come together, which I do and you have to really believe in, you know, I really believe in the position I've just articulated, uh, and it's important to me to, you know, bring people together on it. I just kind of wish sometimes there were a few more people with my on my side of the debate who are in the advocacy community. I mean, to be fair. The progressive community has been very, very accommodating at the federal law level. The inflation Reduction Act in the Biden administration was a great law and had all this stuff in there that real companies wanted, and they held their nose and voted for it. 

Anyway, get credit for that. Yeah, 100%. It's interesting now, because we've talked a lot about some of the big changes that are happening currently. And so we've had a few people. What's that? What big changes? Yeah, right, yeah. But like uh we we've talked a little bit, and I found that many people still have a lot of hope in the environmental space, and you mentioned this as well. With the shifting priorities in this administration, where do you see positive signs, um. In the in the states, for one big thing, right? Because we have a federal system and if we pass strict climate laws in the states, there's only so much that the federal government can do about it. OK. So that's one thing. Another thing is that there's a big, you know, renewable energy is big business, and there's a lot of money involved, and we're trying to mobilize capital. Right, for these projects, and there's a lot of investment already. And so there's a lot of pressure on the new administration to not, you know, like, try to wipe everything off across the board, right? So, I think we don't know yet what will happen. There are important technologies like carbon capture and sequestration, renewable hydrogen, things that many conservatives and industry groups, business groups support. That I think are gonna be hard to unwind. There are some things like you just have this vendetta by the president against wind for some God knows what obscure reason, right? I mean, even so, it makes it cold outside. If we could just stop, yeah, so I'm not optimistic about certainly not the developing offshore wind industry is gonna take a big hit, um. But I'm not completely pessimistic about the whole renewable energy revolution, and also, you know, the United States is only one country and it's pretty clear now that we're advocating leadership on the international stage that other that Europe and China are taking over. And nothing the US does is gonna deter them from their basic path. I mean, they're gonna have to respond to tariffs and all that stuff, but China can sell their solar panels to South America and Africa, or the components of the solar panels. No, yeah, totally. 

So I say we're, we're running out of time, so we like to do a thing on our show called Field Notes where we ask our guests to share memorable moments about their work in the field. Uh, with you, we have a story about your disobedient Russian spaniel. So I hear, uh, what are the rules that they break. What is my, OK, my spaniel, and I had to shut him upstairs and I, I was actually worried on his car because I heard him barking and I guess you guys didn't hear it. Um, we're all good, uh, he's a 4 year old Russian spaniel. He's very, he's got huge ears. Um, he's very, very exuberant. He would never harm anyone, but he's so excited to see any new person that he's kind of all over them when they come in and say, Right, right. So, so a couple weeks ago, I took him out as usual, and I noticed that, you know, he's not pooping right, and he's even squealing. And I thought, oh my God, you know, he's got colorectal cancer, God knows what he's got. And so I, and I couldn't get into the vet, so I went to urgent care, which is, of course, pricey. Right, Doggy urgent care. And so I'm in the room, the, the vet is examining him. He's very uncomfortable, and he's got this little stubby tail, right? He was from a breeder. We got him actually on Craigslist, but originally he's from a breeder, but he cut the tail. And so the tail is like 4 inches long and it's always wagging, you know, up and down really fast, and the more excited he is, the more it wags, right? But it turned out that he had a sprained tail. There was nothing wrong with his systemic. Right. And he, but the issue is he was so exuberant all the time that he, he sprained his tail in the process. And so, you know, so we had to like, instead of letting him run free, so for the past week, the only exercise he gets is walking around the block, which is tough because he pulls his leash and it's impossible to train him not to do that. So I just thought it was really entertaining that um. 

So I, I don't know what the message is, don't be too excited in life or something like that, all things in moderation, I think there's so many lessons there. I mean, first of all, before you decide to get a dog, I'm actually staying with a friend right now who's a 2 year old Airdale, and she was with her mother who didn't get trained very well the 1st 2 years of her life. So basically starting over with a 2 year old Airedale that thinks like a kiss on your face involves teeth. She's so excited to see you and wants to give you kisses, but with her teeth. And, um, and then there's also the correlation, not everything causation, not everything that seems to be caused by one thing is another thing. Uh, but yeah, I was so glad though that it wasn't something worse. I mean, ate half of my sock yesterday. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't know what's gonna stop it from happening again, you know, that's what it was, so. Most people have to muzzle their dog's faces. You're gonna have to muzzle your dog's butt tail muzzle, OK, yeah, yeah. Oh, that is funny, but we are running out of time, as Nick said. So is there anything else that you'd like to touch on that we didn't get to? You know, I think we've, uh, we've done a good job of covering a lot of what I talked about. You know, there's one, there's one issue and one little anecdote, I mean with advocacy. In 2018, in the fall, that was when the Democrats recaptured the House, and there was a sit-in in Washington DC by the Sunrise movement, which is this great youth-oriented group, uh, that protested in a really effective way, and this was at the beginning of the Green New Deal, and they were doing a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi's office, and she was about to become the next Speaker of the House in 2018. Well, I was there that day. It turned out. 

And so the, the, the sunrise movement folks were, you know, they had, they were dressed flamboyantly, you knew who they were, they were all young, right? And then there were, there was my group, which was Citizens Climate Lobby, which is mostly older folks, and we were dressed up in suits and ties, and we've been preparing for days for, you know, a 15 million audience with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon or whoever it was, basically national group, everybody's there. In Washington on the same day. And so we're riding elevators and brushing by the sunrise movement folks. And, you know, then the advocacy stuff got written up in the papers and there were pictures of the advocates in the office, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was just elected and she was in the picture with the youths and it was a big deal, right, for the beginning of the Green New Deal. And there was not a single mention of the fact that Citizens Climate lobby was there advocating for a detailed economic policy about a nationwide carbon tax, with wearing their suits and ties, right? And it shows the distinction, like there's a place for protest. Yeah. And, and to open up a space, right, a new conversation, and then, but then there's also a space, an important space for the people who will get in the room and get into the nitty gritty of policy and try to influence that and make sure it's got the science is right, right, that kind of stuff, so. Yeah. Awesome. 

Well, thank you so much for joining us today. This was a great conversation. Where can people get in touch with you? They can send me an email, johnjerona@gmail.com, and that would be probably be the easiest way. I also have a LinkedIn profile, and I'm not sure, but you can just type John Perona into LinkedIn and you'll find that, so. You know, by all means, contact me on LinkedIn, ask for a contact, I'll be happy to connect with you and then we can talk about climate in all possible ways. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. I really enjoyed being here. It was a great talk. That's our show. Thank you, John, for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. Bye. See you, everybody.