Climate change is an imminent crisis, fueled by escalating greenhouse gas levels and altering rainfall patterns. The consequences, from disrupted seasons in Guatemala to devastating forest fires in Canada, are evident worldwide. The alarming shift demands a collective focus on adaptation and resilience. Can we navigate the impending challenges, such as water scarcity in Colorado and the relentless fury of unmanageable wildfires, to secure a sustainable future?
In this episode, I interviewed Michael Scanlon, the Founder of ClimateCon. ClimateCon was a conference that celebrated climate innovation and encouraged actionable solutions through breakout sessions and workshops. Our conversation revolved around recent advancements, climate sustainability, transportation solutions, and the looming threat of ecological collapse.
Moreover, we delved into the impact of greenhouse gasses, citing examples from around the world, including Guatemala, Syria, and Canada. Tune in and take a step towards a greener future!
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Climate Innovation and Sustainable Solutions with Michael Scanlon
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Now, I’ve been studying quite a bit about what’s gone wrong with society a little bit psychologically, why so many people are in a terrible emotional state, why there’s so much depression and anxiety, and a couple of themes have come around in many of the things that I’ve read, many of the things that I’ve watched, many of the things that I’ve heard from people, and that is what’s lacking in our current society that we used to have plenty of at some point in the past, and that is community and purpose. And so, as a result of hearing this and seeing this, I’m here wanting to support any time people can gather together a community, especially if they can gather together to serve some kind of a purpose, and that’s why I’m here to showcase to you an event coming up here in Denver in roughly two months from when this podcast will initially air called ClimateCon!, and to share a little bit about this event, I’m here with ClimateCon! founder, ClimateCon! organizer, Michael Scanlon.
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Michael, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me, Steven. It’s an honor to be here.
Well, thank you for coming on and talking about it. I mentioned in my intro, we all need community and we all need purpose, and one of the things that’s going to help get us out of what I refer to as the little dark age of the last 15 years, a period of time in which we’ve been lacking it, is to bring more people into something like that. So, let’s start from the beginning. Michael, what first brought on ClimateCon!? Because I know you’ve been planning this for several months at least by now.
Yeah, yeah. It launched in April 2023, started it in Earth Month. So my background, I had been doing increasingly larger and bigger events leading into the pandemic. In 2019, I actually founded a conference company and I was doing major conferences. I had a conference on March 5th and 6th 2020. The governor was going to come and then the security guy came back and said, “The government can’t come, he has to tell the world coronavirus is here,” and so that company kind of scattered into the wind with the coronavirus. And as I was literally driving rideshare to make a living. I kept thinking at some point, I got to get back into conferences. The series of conferences previous had been around cannabis, cannabis policy in particular, and I wanted to do something more impactful, something more meaningful, something that could have big impact and I kept coming back to climate so that’s where the climate came from was it’s something I’ve been obsessed with for 30 years now and I keep thinking why aren’t we doing more about climate? Why aren’t I doing more about climate? And so, finally, I am.
And so you decided to take what you know how to do, and this is a moment out there for anyone listening, I think I’ve kind of covered this idea before, taking something that you know how to do and using it towards something that you’re passionate about. And so you’re like, “I wanna do something regarding climate,” seeing what’s going on, and what do you know how to do? Put on big events.
I love your point that people should take something they know how to do and I think they should take something they know how to do and push it to the next level and get uncomfortable with it. And so that was what I kept doing with the events, that’s how I made it to conferences, I just kept doing bigger and bigger events. And that’s why I want to franchise ClimateCon! because the idea of doing a single ClimateCon! annually doesn’t scare me, but the idea of doing 100 ClimateCons! a year, that gets me on edge and makes me know I’m pushing to the right goal.
That’s awesome. So one of the things I really like to do on this show is showcase everybody’s personal story. So, your story before the pandemic, before ClimateCon!, before all this involves putting on events, putting on larger and larger events. What drew you to that as a career path? What drew you to that as to what you wanted to do in humanity?
Well, I finally sat down in my mid 40s and said what am I good at and what do I want to do with my life. I kept coming back to I like being around people. Right now, I’m here in my home office, yippee, I’m kitted out at my best sitting in my home office by myself.
My best self happens when I’m around a group of people and we’re all working towards something. Share on XThat’s what got me started doing events, which, honestly, was when I started Chamber of Commerce and that’s what drove me to do conferences was I really wanted to get into major, major scale events. And ClimateCon! on January 23rd, we’re looking at 250 to 500 people and it’ll just get bigger from there. We’ll get them to where we’re drawing thousands of people.
Now, what is the key to having events grow larger and larger? Because I’ve been at events where there’s a small, intimate group of, say, a dozen to two dozen people, and I’ve been in events with thousands and they’re going to take different considerations in order to make them something valuable for the participants.
I started with networking events, doing like a monthly networking event. Anybody can do a monthly networking event and I encourage people to start there if they’re looking at events. Even if you’re still going to do a bigger event, do a monthly networking event to build your bigger event. And the first key there is always have new blood. Because you’ll have regular people who come around. Think about 1 Million Cups where you and I met. There’s always somebody new in that room.
Always. At least one or two people raised their hands when they asked who’s new to 1 Million Cups.
Yeah, they’re so good about that, and that keeps the regulars coming around. When I did the chamber, that was key. With all our monthly meetings, we needed that.
which is why I was so frustrated with the pandemic, was that when I started that one, I was losing money but I knew that if I just never quit, it would grow and be something big. And I had to do such a reset, I thought why am I in this topic? I’m going to shift to a better one. But the climate one, I’ll just never quit.
Yeah.
And it might take three events, it might take one event, it might take seventeen events, but, eventually, it will be profitable and huge.
Now, I need to ask you, as someone who’s also extroverted, someone who also prefers to get out there in the community, how it is that you got through the pandemic?
Oh, man. Not well. I struggled. And things that like — because I’ve written a few books and one of my books, it’s an unpublished manuscript, more accurately, one of them, when I talk about processing through failure, I say don’t do it in front of the fridge. When you’re in the anger stage, don’t process through the anger stage in front of the refrigerator. I ate too much. Well, as soon as I could, I started to travel. This is what I did. The summer of 2021, I went on a couple of nice, extended vacations in places where I had been before, some places that I was comfortable with. That was kind of the key for me. And just reconnecting with old friends. I did a fair amount of that and that helped a lot.
Yeah, about a year ago, I was back at a resort in Cancun that I had been to before and I actually started talking with other people because we always hang out at what I refer to as the party pool so there’s the party pool at his resort and then there’s the more private — it’s actually great how this resort does it, they kind of let everyone have their own different experience, and I started talking with some other people who are regular travelers to that resort, people who have their membership and everything like that, and they actually said that the winter of 2020 was one of their best trips ever because it was such a different vibe. It was, I don’t know, just different because there weren’t as many people there but the people who were there, they just felt like they just had to go all out because they’ve been cooped up for several months and it’s just such an interesting way you can kind of get a little bit outside of your own head when you go and change your scenery in every way, whether it be traveling to another country or just going for a hike in nature 20 minutes away from your home.
Yeah, I was just going to say, the hikes in nature, I know I took a ton of those during the pandemic. That’s always been one of my go-tos when I’m struggling with anything. I like to go usually with my children, go for a hike in nature and isolate a little bit, get a fresh scenery.
That’s awesome. Now, tell us a little bit about ClimateCon!, about the event, about what anyone that registers for the event can expect in the room.
Yeah. So ClimateCon!’s a conference celebrating climate innovation and inspiring action. So, with the innovation, we’re really leaning into startups and other — they’re not all startups, some established companies, Halliburton has been around forever and Halliburton Labs is innovating heavily with their clean energy accelerator. We’ve got 30 breakout sessions we’re planning. It’s going to be January 23rd here in Denver, Colorado, at the CSU Spur campus. We were so lucky to get that venue. That venue is really sustainable, they recycle six different types of water, they get their heat from the sewer underneath, so the venue kind of reflects our values back which is beautiful.
Love to hear that.
The thing we’re really leaning into with those sessions and workshops, we’re challenging panelists to come forward with some type of action plan that people can take forward. Some of the workshops is the chance that day for attendees to participate in the formation or the finalization of these action plans, and then they’ll be open to the public. So, on January 24th, if you come to the conference, you know how the day after, it can almost feel like it’s just such a whirlwind, like if you’ve ever been to Denver Startup Week —
Yeah, exactly.
— it’s a whirlwind, when it’s done, you’re like, “Man, how many people did I meet? Where’s that stack of business cards?” With this, you’ll at least be able to go back to our website and see a series of action plans that you can then leverage and utilize in the days, weeks, to months after.
And when it comes to innovation around climate, around sustainability, is there a couple of particular innovations that you’re feeling the most optimistic and excited about?
So, good question. I don’t usually get that one.
My job is to build the platform. I got to make sure there’s a stage there and the microphones are working. Share on XI don’t work in sustainability and so I really try to stay out of it but I will tell you as someone who’s seen it all, the hydrogen is super exciting, the stuff they’re doing on hydrogen. The grid is something we have to do something about.
Oh, yeah.
I hate when people say do something but we have like a 19th century grid and we’re in the 21st century. There’s a guy coming who does transportation. It’s an existing type system. It’s above-grade, meaning it’s up on like the second story so it just zooms over red lights and everything. Individual cars on cables or some other system that you summon like Uber.
Oh, wow.
So he wants to build a pilot track here in Denver somewhere. We’re thinking about suggesting the 16th Street Mall because the 16th Street Mall already has second story capacity and will be a perfect place to put a demo track up. There’s a billion and one things like that going on in the industry. To circle back to the hydrogen, that one’s interesting to watch because it’s still a ways out and there’s a lot of different types and ideas over how to do hydrogen so it’ll be interesting to see which one kind of wins the day.
That’s a very important part of any type of innovation, whether it be individual, within an organization, or within a society as a whole. The whole idea of parallel processes as opposed to just, “Oh, let’s try this one thing and see if it fails or succeeds and then we’ll start on something else,” and that can often delay things a bit.
Yeah, yeah, I like that idea of parallel — and I like that you’re talking about failure, Steven.
If there’s one thing that I would ask listeners to take away from this, it’s get out there and fail. Fail, fail, fail. It won’t kill you, especially if you don’t lose money, whatever.
Yeah, and I want to have a little bit of grace for a lot of people because the vast, vast majority of us spent at least 17 years in a schooling system that taught us that the worst thing in the world was to fail and reinforce that, the worst thing to do in any course, oh, you failed, you’ve got an F on that exam, so it’s going to take a little bit of subconscious unlearning to kind of take that different approach.
Yeah, that’s so true. That’s so true. I happen to have one of my manuscripts here. I wasn’t — I probably told you I’d spring this on you, Fail Your Way to Success, and in there, I talk about taking small steps, getting started at it. The first time I heard it, I thought it was crazy. Get out there and fail. What? Why would you want me to fail? I thought that was the dumbest thing anybody had ever told me. To go fail. What the hell? No, I want to go home and watch TV and everything will be fine, because nothing failed. And like the biggest risk people take is never taking a risk.
One of the messages that I’ve heard quite a bit is making a choice to stay in the same spot as where you are is still making a choice. It doesn’t feel like taking a conscious choice but you actually are essentially choosing the incumbent life that you have over the possibility of trying a new approach or trying to do something different.
Yeah, so true. Remember that old Rush line, did you ever listen to Rush?
I’ve listened to some, yeah.
if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
Yeah, exactly, and that’s something that I’m personally working on and I hope a lot of people out there listening are also personally working on as well, because it is, like we have the behaviors and ideas mapped into our subconscious that stay safe, the worst thing that could happen in your life is to be called a failure. Can you imagine? Even in our pop culture, we hear, “Oh, that person, he’s a failure.”
Hard stop. And that person had said that was wrong because a human can’t be a failure.
Failure is an occurrence, not a type of person. And that’s, I think, an important thing for people to take away. Share on XFailure is an occurrence. It’s something that ends, you get over it. I talked in that manuscript about the different ways you can process it when it’s done, maybe you have to apologize to somebody who was harmed. I love where you’re going with people kind of recreating their subconscious and getting out some of that. I never thought about that part, yeah, for 17 years in the public schooling system, failure was the worst thing that could happen to you.
Also, one of the most interesting things is that there’s a lot of people right now and climate’s just one of many areas where people feel in a way disempowered and going out there and failing. Do you see that as a way for people to feel maybe a little bit less disempowered? Like, okay, I’m not stuck here, I tried this and I failed, but I can keep trying.
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And the other point, the last line in my book, my manuscript, you’re not always going to fail. Sometimes, things are going to work out and you’re going to succeed. You’re a smart person and you work hard, you’re going to learn along the way and put things together, particularly if it’s like an event. I had events where I could go through and account multiple mini little fails and people are coming up to me on the way out the door going, “This was a great event.” So it’s like that’s another thing, what you perceive as failure might be perceived as success by the community.
Yeah, we tend to be hardest on ourselves too.
Yeah, we are our harshest critics.
So is this event in Denver, is this the first ClimateCon!? You talked about eventually being franchised in multiple cities, so January 23rd, 2024, is this where it’s all beginning?
Yes, and I’m glad you bring that up. People still have a chance to go to climatecon.world, that website, again, it’s climatecon.world, and make sure that you secure attend tickets so they can be attendees. But, yeah, this will be the inaugural one and I’m excited. I want to set the bar really high. I’m really all about feel. Every day, I think about what’s it going to feel like for my attendees. So, as an example, we’re going to have costumes made up of the different atoms and molecules that are greenhouse gases, so a methane molecule might pop up out of nowhere. It’s kind of whimsical. We’re going to encourage people to wear costumes if they want and kind of as a nod to Comic-Con, obviously, have similarity in name, cultural sort of reference to. Even thinking I want to have the live music. So I really want there to be a feel that’s warm and community, that you feel like you’re part of a bigger movement. One last thing is if you work in sustainability, all day long, you’re talking about it, your company trying to get people to reduce their energy use, why we have to get greenhouse gases down, all the things you’re trying to do, and then you get home and you turn on the news, it would be easy to think, man, we’re failing. And, of course, as we talked about earlier, that’s not a bad thing. But we want them to have a day, where we want sustainability professionals to have a day where they can kind of see each other, circulate with each other, talk with each other. I was surprised to see Denver didn’t have a major climate event. So now Denver does have a major climate event. It’s ClimateCon!, it’s going to be January 23rd, and you can learn more at climatecon.world.
And are there other similar climate types of events in other cities, in LA, in Europe, anywhere else that you’ve looked into?
A little bit. I got to be honest, I don’t do a lot of the comparison game. I don’t worry about — I don’t consider other events competitors.
Oh, yeah.
So I don’t spend a lot of time looking at other events. New York Climate Week was recently and that got a lot of press so I couldn’t miss that and I’ve ran into a few people who went to New York Climate Week, but that’s a whole different type of event than what we’re doing.
Yeah, for sure.
That one’s free and open to the public and it almost gets overrun. They had 75,000 people and I think it was almost too big, which is kind of an odd thing to say about an event, they almost need to figure out a way to split it into 500 smaller events. And that’s kind of the idea. It’s kind of like Denver Startup Week combined with some kind of climate action. Anyway, I didn’t go to that one. So, it’s hard for me to compare to other events because I don’t look through that lens.
So what you just said about the event being too big combined with what you had previously said about failure being a launch pad to success has now given my brain a whole new way to think about 15 years ago, all those banker bailouts, when they said too big to fail, maybe that means they’re too big to succeed. Sorry. I couldn’t help but make that that association right there.
As someone who had a previous career in financial services, I’m a big believer in the regulations we have in that industry, but I’ll tell you, the banking industry’s quickly getting down to four banks, not to change the subject.
Yeah.
And I don’t know that that’s good for America.
No. I mean, competition empowers the consumer, not to get too far off. That’s what the free market needs is competitors.
And, historically, we’ve always had thousands of banks, which is good.
Yeah, those little ones in your neighborhood and now I think people are still going to have those kind of state and campus credit unions for an alternate but it’s hard to, as a traveler, to resist the allure of Chase ATM almost anywhere you want to go. As this event kind of starts in January and then expands onward with your expansion plans of having it be more events around the same size to have that same action-oriented innovative environment but in multiple cities and multiple places, what do you hope the overall impact will be over time as this becomes what you’re envisioning it becomes?
Wouldn’t it be something if we were able to sort of put a dent in the universe? If I’m dreaming, if I’m going for the biggest goal possible which is where I like to live, this thing will make an impact and the goal is to — I’d like to do Boulder next, in part because Boulder’s right here and it’s just up the road, it’d be easy to focus on, but because I think Boulder is big enough to handle its own ClimateCon! I’d love to see the mid-tier cities across America. Everybody thinks San Francisco and New York and those are great cities, but what about places like St. Louis and Kansas City? Charlotte, North Carolina? Atlanta, Georgia? Places that people don’t initially think of will be prime, and I guarantee you, every one of those cities has thousands, not hundreds, thousands of people working on ideas, saying, “You know what, what if we try this?” They need a lot but one thing we can give them is a little boost, right? We get them some backlinks to the website, we could give them some content of them on stage, we can get them introduced to key players in the industry in their region, in their area, in their town, and that’s the goal. That’s why this thing’s got to succeed.
So we need to power people to innovate in order to create kind of a more sustainable future, in a way.
Exactly. I couldn’t have said that better. And the innovations is what’s going to save us.
We’ve got to innovate our way out of this problem and we got to do it fast. Share on XHow much of what we need to do is individual behavior versus innovating a new solution to something else? Like I live a half a mile from the grocery store, so unless I’m carrying seven, eight bottles of soda or some ridiculous stuff like that, I’ll try to walk there instead.
Yeah, appreciate that.
How much does that matter? How much does that have an impact of my biking around town, you’ll see me with a bike helmet everywhere I go sometimes, how much does that impact things and how much of the issue is involved in our individual behavior?
Yeah, I don’t know what the kind of percentages are and everybody agrees that we still have to take personal responsibility for what’s going on out there. And how much of it is China? How much of this problem is China and India that’s so far out of our control? But a lot of it, it’s amazing, 10 percent of it is like airlines and the big shipping vessels, cargo vessels that cross the — maritime. And a lot of maritime is moving around fossil fuels so they’re burning fossil fuels to move around fossil fuels. So, there’s some easy stuff. We’ve got to get off fossil fuels and that transition is going to happen faster rather than slower. But there’s all kinds of learning and, hopefully, the conference can address some of these obstacles. There’s all kinds of obstacles in the way. I think it is important for individuals to do things but I also don’t think — like this conference isn’t going to be about telling people not to use air conditioning. Personally, I don’t use air conditioning, I think, to me, it’s part of the death cycle of creating greenhouse gas emissions to warm the planet so you need air conditioning to create greenhouse gas emissions.
Positive feedback loop.
Another thing that people have really learned and agree on is you can’t force people to do things they don’t want to do and we shouldn’t have to.
I mean, you just talked about Boulder and I know plenty of people who would love to have a train that they can travel on between Denver and Boulder.
Wasn’t there talk of putting one through there, the line was finally built or something?
I think there was some sort of agreement with the owners of the track or something that really kind of put it on like kind of almost indefinite hold in this weird kind of way. It was supposed to have been open by now, to be honest.
Yeah, I don’t even know the status of that one. But, yeah, mass transit has been a tough sell to Americans. Americans very much love their automobiles. It’s too bad because the worst thing about the automobiles are for pedestrians and bicycles, like you were talking about cycling. It’d be nice if we had a few car-free areas where people really could walk and bicycle leisurely and safely.
Yeah, and that’s something that I think Colorado is better than most states in the country about. Like here in Denver, I can say we have the Cherry Creek Trail, we have the Platte River Trail. There’s even Arapaho, they’re trying to do some of these like, not car-free roads but where they have like those areas where only bikes can get through so you can’t really use it as a through street and stuff like that. So definitely Colorado is one of the better places for that. And I love cycling, I love cycling kind of everywhere, all over the place, but I know a lot of people are deterred from it by not really having that many places, not having a reasonable route that they can take to go from point A to point B on their bicycle.
Yeah. You’ve got some good examples, those trails where they go below grade and take you under some of the worst intersections.
How much is it some of this public policy about are we going to spend this money widening another highway versus building a bike trail versus improving tracks to potentially put in like a high-speed rail network or something like that?
It’s interesting to bring that up. We’ve got a fella come into the conference, his name’s Jerry Tinianow, I hope we got his last name right. He was the Chief Sustainability Officer for Denver until about a year ago. He’s a data-driven guy and I wish he was right here right now because he could answer that question w statistics about where the dollars make the most impact. And that’s one of the good things I would say about today is we’ve got more data than ever. At the turn of the century, when I was younger, I think a lot of these decisions are kind of made by gut. Of course, biking is better. And now it’s all data driven. Well, I can’t remember, he had one example where he said it just doesn’t get people out of their cars. Honestly, I hate to say it, it might have been bike lanes. And that’s something that they’re really trying to address. Of course, talking about public policy and money, right now, because of the Inflation Reduction Act being a little over a year old, that thing had billions and billions of dollars in America for climate-related, clean energy and all that other stuff, and that’s the one that’s really having a big impact on people right now. Significant amounts of money are flowing. And what’s interesting about that money is it’s more targeted towards underrepresented communities. So if you live in a community like Commerce City, that’s historically been what you might say the victim of a lot of environmental pollution.
Oh, yeah, I forget, it was Sunco, was it?
Suncor, the refinery.
Suncor, yeah.
It’s not just the refinery, though, historically. Denver’s economic years ago once said the northeast part of every town, historically, is where you put the dirty stuff because the wind blows out that way. So, anyway, places like that that have been historically impacted can get a 30 percent bumper on these. So whereas you might be putting $100 million plant or need a $100 million loan to put in this solar power, that massive thing in a certain community, you can get $130 million. So it’s actually designed to help the places that are normally victimized. From a public policy standpoint, it’s different.
Yeah. So your path first involves you deciding that you want to put on events because you’re naturally an outgoing person, you’re better off when you’re around people and this is what you can bring to the world. And then, more recently, you’ve determined that climate and sustainability is where you want to have the impact, but what made you decide, of all the things you could put on events about that, that was going to be your thing?
I felt like I kind of jumped into it and give a little background for folks who may not be aware but greenhouse gases trap heat. As we burn fossil fuels, we have this increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trapping heat. And what it’s really doing is it’s affecting rainfall patterns. And the altered rainfall patterns is having all kinds of — from Guatemala losing its main season and then creating all kinds of immigration in the Southern border. It was a key thing in Syria. We see it everywhere. I mean, there was an island in Hawaii that was burned off the map this year. Canada had incredibly bad forest fires this year, because they’ve had drought, not in patches but just across the whole area. The whole rainfall pattern of Canada has been changed. It’s getting serious. We’ve known about this issue for decades but it’s getting more and more serious each year because we’re not driving it down. We need to get the 350 parts per million in the air, we’re up to like 420 and rising quickly. So that’s what drove me to do it. I read somewhere that we’re down to seven harvests. Now that one should really scare people. The idea —
Seven harvests?
Yeah, the idea that by 2030, the planet will reach the point of ecological collapse and we won’t be able to grow food. It won’t happen overnight. It won’t go from abundant harvests to nothing but we’re seeing — it’s out there. The week after New York Climate Week, Brooklyn had like a record flood.
Oh, yeah. Oh, my God, I saw those subway videos,
The rain, well, how it used to be scattered, now it’s more condensed when it does happen. It can rain like the heavens can just come down on you. So, we got to get moving on this and that’s why I picked climate. Nothing else is going to matter. I hate saying that to people, saying that your pet project isn’t going to matter, but think about it, if the climate is so destabilized that we can’t go outside and we have to grow our food indoors. That’s another thing, by the way. We can’t control it all. There’s a lot of forces outside our control and, at some point, we have to start talking about resiliency and we have to start talking about adaption.
So is there any part of ClimateCon! that people are going to talk about this adaption, like, for example, close to home in Colorado, it’s definitely water supply and I think we’re only three years out as of the time of this recording from a summer where we saw the sky kind of turn red and ash from those fires, mostly out in California, yeah, so we can talk about how do we manage it, how do we make sure that everyone in Colorado still has water.
We do this session called Water Crisis in the West and we’ve got a couple experts coming in. With that one and a number of the sessions, we still have openings for panelists here in early November of 2023. This won’t be released at this time. But, anyway, we do have some openings, if folks want to come check it out at climatecon.world, but, yeah, that’s a big one, the water issue. The forest fires one is incredibly challenging. I’m not seeing any innovation there. Nobody knows how to water a forest. Historically, we’ve watered our forests with rainfall.
Yeah, and then, of course, we had that period of time where we suppressed all fires and built up all that energy, essentially kindling on a large scale, and a large scale, we might as well be just putting down a ton of kindling all over the West from like 1900 to 1985 or something like that.
Yeah, because they didn’t let them burn and then they burned so hot, they burned the hot hard and it’s harder for new things to grow up and they burned so hot, they take down a lot of the live trees that they used to burn underneath and the mature trees would make it through the fire somehow. So, yeah, it’s a new world in some ways. And that’s where the word “regeneration” comes in. We want to see a lot, we have a few topics that are looking at some seriously regenerative things. The Earth has the capacity to heal itself if we would just quit punching it in the gut. Somebody said, I think it was Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, said we release enough carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that it’s the equivalent of five atomic bombs a second.
A second?
Not America, humanity is setting off five atomic bombs of greenhouse gases every second. And he had quite the graphic, because the globe rotated, all these mushroom clouds happening in the atmosphere. We got to stop that.
The first thing we got to do is we got to stop the madness so that the Earth can regenerate itself. Share on XAnd now is there a connection to our overall culture? Because I tend to think of the word “sustainability” as having somewhat of a broader definition. Obviously, we need to — our environment is sustainable but, also, there’s a lot of other aspects of our lives that I would argue are not very sustainable, even the idea of more for the sake of more, which I think is built into a lot of corporate and materialistic culture as well as being from New York, the culture of being constantly busy, constantly on the move, and people not being able to just kind of say, “Look at last night, there was a really beautiful sunset in my neighborhood,” and be able to just look at it and be at one, at peace with that without thinking what do I need to do to be productive? What do I need to do to move the needle on this? What do I need to do to improve this metric?
Yeah, growth for growth’s sake. And the concept of infinite growth. We’re on a finite planet, we can’t have infinite growth. We have a breakout session on circularity, that’s one of their big things is we’ve got everything we need. Somebody said we’ve got enough clothing to last everybody forever. Not even recycled, it’s just not being done right now. I saw that one last night. That’s a thought, isn’t it? There’s enough clothing already to last everybody forever. We don’t need to keep repairing it and reusing it, but that’s not how we think. We think, “Oh, that’s last year’s fashion, throw it out, I’m gonna go buy something new, fast fashion,” and it’s not just fast fashion and it’s our diet. I think a lot of it — I think our diet gets back to our mental health crisis in America. I truly believe there’s a direct correlation between all the mental health problems we’re having and the poor diets that so many people sustain themselves on. Your brain needs you to eat apples and broccoli, a lot of people just don’t and so —
Well, yeah.
And it turns out, by the way, from a climate standpoint, broccoli and apples are better for the climate than hamburgers and Cheetos.
What about kale? That’s one of my faves.
Kale’s a good one. Good for you, Steven. Awesome.
Yeah. I grew it in my garden which I just had to pull out last weekend.
That’s another one. You’re working the earth and you’re getting hands dirty. That’s something not enough people are doing. I guarantee most mentally healthy people have put their hands in the dirt the last 30 days. It’s incredibly calming to go out in your backyard and I know not everybody has a backyard and it’s a privilege to own a yard and be able to do a garden, but it’s incredibly calming and mentally reassuring to just work the land, grow a couple plants. Grow spices. It’s fun to grow spices and being able to go out there and snip out some fresh oregano or basil.
Oh, yeah. I love doing that as well. Now, I also read somewhere that streaming music, so using applications to stream music, has double the energy use as compact discs had in our previous state because of the way it’s set up and the way the servers are used to kind of store all the data. Is that something that we can make an adjustment or make a dent on or is this even something that’s a major component of what’s causing our energy use to continue to go up and up?
Yeah, energy conservation isn’t something you hear a lot of people trying to talk about anymore for some of these reasons and it’s unfortunate. A lot of the digital stuff, I was thinking about that today as I was sending one email to another email account, like what’s the greenhouse gas impact of me doubling my emails because it’s more convenient for me to send it from one of — but, anyway, not to get off on a tangent, the solution is to find clean energy and to find abundant sources of clean energy. The holy grail is nuclear fusion. A hundred years from now, I predict they’ll have worked out nuclear fusion. Hopefully, 20 years now they’ll have nuclear fusion. And it could literally be as simple — like having energy in a bottle that you just carry around with you and it’s your own power generator. And when we get to that point, it won’t matter streaming music doubles again in their energy requirement. You were talking about the greenhouse gas emissions, that depends on where they’re drawing their energy. If they’re on a truly renewable, 100 percent renewable grid, it doesn’t matter, except for the fact that even then, our energy is still limited. There’s only so much. They’re getting better about the solar and wind transitioning it into the night, mostly through big storage, huge batteries, basically, so that’s helping, but that’s the solution. Anything like that, whatever the example is, it’s consuming a lot of energy, the answer is we got to get it on solar, wind, the one in the ground, geo—
Geothermal?
Geothermal, thank you, and nuclear. Environmentalists hated nuclear when I was a kid and we’ve come 180 degrees. We’re now big fans of nuclear. We need nuclear to be part of it. We’ve been putting nuclear off for too long. It’s harder here in Colorado because we don’t have giant pools of water needed to cool but there’s small scale reactors are coming online and there’s a lot of innovation going on in the nuclear world.
So, right now, the current nuclear power is nuclear fission and the thing we’re trying to develop is called nuclear fusion. How much more efficient is nuclear fusion going to be than nuclear fission is today?
Man, if I knew this question was coming, I would have boned up a little because I’m not a nuclear physicist by any stretch. Whereas fission is a little dirty, you have some waste, I’m not saying fusion is waste free but I think the waste is way reduced. Fusion is the holy grail. Fusion is the incredible thing that — and we’ve had no success getting anybody to come to the conference, and I met a nuclear fusion researcher and I was begging him, I was like, “Come to our conference, come to our conference,” and he was like, “Man, I get invited to five conferences a week,” he’s like, “Everybody wants us to come talk about fusion and if we talked about it, we’d never get any work done on it,” so it’s like I don’t know that we’re going to be able to have a breakout on fusion but, in short, and I encourage people to go research it, fusion’s the holy grail. The day we get nuclear fusion will be a day to dance in the streets.
Oh, I hope so because I love dancing in the streets all the time. We think about all this drive to consume more, more, and more, what if we just danced together? What if that’s where we got our satisfaction, or other types of experience that we have, similar to what you were talking about about putting your hands in the dirt, growing those herbs. When I made my first salad dressing completely with just oil, vinegar, and herbs from the garden, it felt satisfying in a way that salad usually doesn’t feel as satisfying for a lot of people.
Right. Well, and it was a lot fresher than the salad you had the last time you ate out.
Well, yeah, for sure.
Almost inevitably. And I’m not saying eating out is an unfresh salad, it’s just not as fresh as recently cut from your backyard. Nothing tastes as good as something recently plucked from your background.
Yeah, it seems like backyard’s the most and then farmer’s market is a close second and then the grocery store is going to be a lot different because there’s all sorts of shipping and storage facilities in the whole process of bringing that apple to you.
Yeah, and there’s a whole movement around that farm to garden and eating with food from within 100-mile radius or whatever, you kind of pick, and there’s a few restaurants in Denver that are doing that. They are only sourcing their food from local restaurants, and it really supports the local economy and it does keep down the greenhouse gases. We transport a lot of food a long way, and it doesn’t need to be that way. You don’t need a tomato from California, you can grow tomatoes here.
Yeah. I grew a ton of them this year so I know firsthand that you can grow tomatoes. The main thing is some of them need to be kept away from the squirrels.
Historically, the cannabis growers, those big on growing indoors, they’ve been saying tomatoes. I need to buy equipment so I can grow tomatoes. And it’s interesting. The cannabis industry has really refined growing produce indoors and they could be part of the solution. They really refined how to grow indoors and, worst case scenario, humanity can keep growing food indoors, at least for a certain period of time.
And that goes back to what you were saying about the importance of resiliency, because whether it be something environmental, whether it be something that happens in your life, whether it be the all-demonic failure, failure, we all got to find a way to be resilient to all of that so we can kind of keep going on and keep working at the things that we really find are important in our lives.
Yeah. Couldn’t agree more, Steven. I love what you’re doing, man. I love what you’re bringing home to simplifying your life, it’s so key. Americans, the way we’re raised, it’s about consuming too much stuff, stuff will make you happy and always driving everywhere and I’m glad you’re focusing on simplifying your life. It’s interesting, just walking around, if you could walk to the grocery store instead of drive, you’ll notice so many things you’ve driven past a hundred times.
Even bicycling, I know there’s a lot more stuff and also how the air smells, which is amazing.
Right. And the gentle roll, ups and downs of the land.
Oh, yeah. I can probably make a topography map of Metro Denver from memory of biking right now, with all the subtle little things, like, oh, Capitol Hill is this high but the Highlands is like maybe even twice as tall as Capitol Hill but they both have like an abrupt part right outside the river valley. That’s amazing. Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling us all about an amazing opportunity, anyone out there listening, it’s climatecon.world. Opportunity to go and learn about all these amazing innovations people are coming about, hopefully, you’ll be inspired, and I would also like to thank everybody who is listening. Before I end, what would be the best way that someone would get hold of you if they wanted to talk to you personally about it? Would it be through your email or the phone number?
Yeah, the best way to reach is probably email, michael@climatecon.world.
I almost forgot that but I just like to wrap up and thank all the listeners out there for taking the time to listen to this and any of the other 109 episodes I’ve put out there and I hope that you’re inspired to be resilient, no longer fear failure, and keep going because one of the things we didn’t really cover is what Michael said which is what I say about some of my own initiatives is that even if what I’m doing right now is not going to work, I’m going to keep going because this is something I’m passionate enough about. I’m passionate enough about us reclaiming our time, reclaiming our mind, reclaiming our lives that whatever happens, I’m going to keep going, same way with you, so, hopefully, you find that thing and, hopefully, also, you find that community because that’s something so many people are lacking and it’s something so many people need.
Important Links:
- Michael on LinkedIn
- ClimateCon
- Email Address: michael@climatecon.world
About Michael Scanlon
A proud father of four, Michael was worried about their future as the Climate Crisis continued to deepen. In April 2023, he started ClimateCon!, LLC to build a series of great conferences celebrating climate innovation and inspiring action. www.climatecon.world
Michael has years of experience creating large and important events, from his time founding and creating the Commerce City Chamber of Commerce, to his first conference company, 20/20 Growth Conferences.
He currently serve as a Director with the Adams 14 Education Foundation, helping lead a nonprofit serving economically disadvantaged youth in the Adams 14 school district.
Some of Michael’s career highlights include:
– Served six years as a Director on the South Adams County Water & Sanitation District Board. Upon leaving the board in 2022, he was honored with the district’s DROP award for excellence.
– Built and ran 20/20 Growth Conferences, a series of public conferences designed to explore the intersection of innovation and public policy.
– In 2016, founded the Commerce City Chamber of Commerce by signing up 100 businesses in 100 days.
– Fourteen years in financial services. Sold mortgages, regulated sercurities, and life insurance.
– Published a book, Confessions of a Mutual Fund Salesmon, a rumination of the financial industry and my role in it.
– Two unpublished manuscripts. Building Something From Nothing is a how to manual for others who want to create a company, event or member association. Fail Your Way To Success is book designed to inspire action, to encourage readers to fail, as failure is the best learning tool we have.
– 1990, Bachelor of Science in Sociology at Virginia Tech. Go Hokies!