Looking around the world, there is much to be frustrated and angry with. “If only …” could start a million sentences about possibilities for change to the better. The climate and clean energy space is replete with such ‘missed opportunity’ frustration space. Assaad Razzouk‘s new podcast “The Angry Clean Energy Guy” (website) gives voice to this frustration in an impassioned and informative way.
Assaad begins each podcast:
There is so much to be angry about, if you are a clean energy guy.
Every day, SO many things that happen around the world make me angry when I look at them with lenses COLORED BY the climate change chaos unfolding everywhere around us
– and I am especially angry because I KNOW we can solve the climate change crisis if we were only trying.
But as a civilization, as a collective, as a society, we’re not.
IN FACT, we are doing the opposite, because the climate chaos is getting worse!!
Razzouk has, for awhile, been a staple of my social media life — a Singapore-based clean-energy investor, his tweets and LinkedIn posts often highlight items that I might otherwise have missed and his OPEDs (and other commentaries) frequently coherently lay out issues and opportunities. Thus, when he announced a podcast, I had decided to try it out … and, with the opening, he had me especially I was experiencing an ‘angry clean-energy guy’ micro-moment as I listened. I had walked to the library to return some books, arriving in beautiful weather perhaps ten minutes before it’s opening, and there were five people in cars with engines running, engines polluting as they waited for the doors to open. Really? REALLY? Have to doubt that a single one of those people considered what was coming out of their tailpipes.
That sort of ‘micro-moment’, which is exemplary of thoughtless all around us, isn’t Razzouk’s focus space. As he puts it,
each week, I will share with you a few TOPICS that struck me and that I was very ANGRY about – and this will generally have to do with CLIMATE CHANGE, SOLAR OR WIND POWER, PLASTIC POLLUTION, THE OCEANS AND OTHER RELATED TOPICS – as well as some of the HYPOCRISY I see coming from the REALLY BAD ACTORS in my world WHICH, NOT SURPRISINGLY, ARE MOSTLY BIG, BAD CORPORATIONS
In line with that, Angry Clean Energy Guy’s first podcast discussed plastics in the ocean, Cyclone Idai, and fossil-foolish global banking.
Re plastics, Razzouk opens the discussion with a poignant example of how and why anger is sparked.
angry to see that a dead whale turn up in the Philippines, with, wait for it, 40 kilograms of PLASTIC in its belly.
So this poor whale died of “dehydration and starvation” after eating 40 kilos (or 88 pounds) of plastic rice sacks, grocery bags, banana plantation bags and general plastic bags
He provides some context
We are currently producing EACH YEAR plastic equal to the total weight of 5 billion of us, 5 billion people.
Can you even imagine that kind of VOLUME? I can’t …
And here’s an even more incredible number: Since we invented plastic, we’ve produced THE equivalent of the weight of 100 BILLION PEOPLE
We’ve recycled just seven percent — leaving 93 billion people of plastic weight for landfills or, too frequently, the environment to ‘absorb’ (roughly 5 billion people’s worth has made it into the oceans).
And, at the core of the plastics problem: subsidies to the oil industry (across the board) and an inability (refusal) to price in real costs (externalities) (which, in this case, would include plastic pollution implications).
But do you know what else? Pretty much all of the TV, press and social media coverage I’ve seen blames us, the consumer, and the Filippinos in the case of this poor whale, for this tragedy.
But the truth is very, very different: The plastic EPIDEMIC is fundamentally due to the fact that OIL, the principal raw material in plastic is not priced correctly.
And therefore plastic is not priced correctly
And the reason oil is cheap – – and plastic is cheap — is because its impact on the environment is not in its price.
In other words, oil companies aren’t paying for the damage their product is causing
The oceans are paying, the rivers are paying, the waterways are paying, and WE are paying with our health
All this plastic means hardly any drinking water we consume is free of microplastic, and so much of the food is consume is contaminated with microplastics
But you aren’t going to see that mentioned in ANY of the media coverage about this poor whale.
So: oil companies are burying us with plastic because they are basically dumping it on us free. If oil companies PAID for the environmental impacts their products cause, plastic would be a lot more expensive and guess what would happen then? Supermarkets would STOP giving out plastic bags that most of us, ashamed as we are of taking, can’t say no to when we have a baby with us, 3 other bags, and are frenetically working our phones because it’s raining and we can’t get to the subway …
Wrecking the planet is the business model of Big Oil.
“Wrecking the planet is the business model of Big Oil.” Assaad has the capacity to eloquently, directly, succinctly capturing the truth of a matter.
The above is simply a taste of The Clean Energy Guy weekly podcast which has joined my podcast staples for informed commentary for walks to the library and elsewhere.