Hopium, hydrogen and social leadership

Are you confused about the energy transition and what it will eventually look like? If you read the headlines, it looks like hydrogen is the answer to everything. But what is hydrogen’s role and what about the rest - solar, wind, nuclear and more? It can be overwhelming, so when I struggle for clarity, I look for people engaging and sharing great content on social media, but in particular, people who are challenging whatever is accepted in the mainstream media.  

And that’s how I found Paul Martin, a chemical engineer based in Toronto, who has been very actively participating around this discussion on LinkedIn, and he isn’t afraid to correct thoughts and ideas he does not agree with, generating great conversations – because that’s how we all learn, right? Not always pretty, go and check Paul out. We need more people participating like this. 

In this podcast we’re discussing hopium (you’ll understand after you listen), green wishing, the role of hydrogen, navigating the complexity of our energy options, why moral hazard is something we need to pay attention to, where we need to focus, and we’re going to finish with why it’s so important to participate as a social leader if you are an expert in your field. If the global narrative is wrong, we need the experts to change it. No more stepping back! Everything is on the line now. 

You can learn more about Paul

Hydrogen Science Coalition https://h2sciencecoalition.com/ 

Paul Martin on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-martin-195763b/ 

Spitfire Research https://spitfireresearch.com/

An explanation of #hopium https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-hopium-paul-martin/

An article comparing EV and fuel cell cars https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mirai-fcev-vs-model-3-bev-paul-martin/

 Check him out on LinkedIn for more and dig into his articles. 

To get in touch with me, all of my contact details are here https://linktr.ee/andreatedwards

My book Uncommon Courage, an invitation, is here https://mybook.to/UncommonCourage

My book 18 Steps to an All-Star LinkedIn Profile, is here https://mybook.to/18stepstoanallstar

Transcript

Unknown: 0:08

welcome to uncommon courage. My name is Andrea Edwards. Today, I'm excited to welcome my guest, Paul Martin. He's a chemical process development expert based in Toronto. And I found him on LinkedIn being very, very active. And I, I just really wanted to have a chat with him and share it with you today. And we're going to cover lots of different things in this interview, not necessarily just what he's an expert in, but why he does what he does. Alright, so welcome, Paul. Hi, it's great to meet you finally, after seeing you very, very active on LinkedIn. But what I want to do today is I want to cover two parts of what you do. It's about your work and your message, but also how you participate on social media. Because I think it's, I think you're a really great role model, further type of character that I think we need to see out there on social media. So but let's start with your background and the work that you've done so people know who you are and where you come from. I'm a technical person through and through, I'm a chemical engineer, I've worked in worked in chemical process development. So helping people take new ideas out of the laboratory and turn them into businesses, making them commercial, getting through all the steps along the way to get rid of the risk and make sure that things worked and get all the data that's necessary to do that. And I'm still involved in doing that as a consultant. So I don't actually design and build plants anymore. But I'm mentoring and helping people get the data data that they need, and providing guidance through my little consulting company, I also help investors sort out truth from lies in, in investment materials. So people have pitch decks, for instance, for new companies, I can help them ask the right questions and make sure that they're getting the information that they need in order to make an informed decision. So I do all sorts of things like that, but they have to meet my forecasts. For me to do business with them, I have to be able to help them. So they have to be asking me questions that I can help them answer. They have to be making the world better, not worse. And that's entirely on me to figure out whether that's the case, they have to be able to pay me because I'm doing lots of pro bono work through an organisation that I helped to co found called the hydrogen Science Coalition. So I've got my plate of volunteer work is already full. And it has to be clear to me that they're going to be fun and not a drag. If they're going to be terrible people to work with I want nothing to do with it. I know I've had enough of officious difficult people who are more about the process than about getting things right. And if they aren't going to be a good fit, then I'm not interested in working with them. So yeah, anyway, that's me. Know, I like that. I'm also also a lifelong environmentalist, I've been interested in environmental issues from a very young age. And so chemical engineering seen would seem to be a weird choice for for somebody who is an environmentalist, but it's actually really the right choice. Because you can do way more on the front end of the pipe than after the mistakes and accidents and problems have happened. Too many people think that you have to be ashamed to be part of an industry that hasn't necessarily been great for the planet. But we're always going to have industries that are not great for the planet. And it's about scaling down the really bad ones now, right? But um, well, I mean, when I started my career, I started it from the perspective that there were mistakes in the past that had to be corrected, and a lot of effort and time was required to correct them. And so that's what I did. For the first five years of my career, I always helping, you know, deal with problems of past. And I very quickly realised that we were still creating all sorts of problems. And it was way more effective to be working on preventing the problems of the future or reducing the impacts and emissions of the future than to be dealing with past impacts that, for the most part really weren't as much of a big deal as some people seem to think. I mean, whether we destroy the climate than the only habitable planet we live on. That's a rather major thing. And it's much more important than whether or not we dig up this particular pile of coal tire that was leftover for making town gas back in the 1800s. You know, because that stuff's really not going anywhere. It's not hurting anybody. So, you know, I got tired of that sort of thing, digging up a site and moving it to another site. It just really wasn't doing too much Aside from making a living. Yeah. All right. So I want to start with hopium because I think your your, your that when I remember the day I heard somebody you know, somebody on on LinkedIn referred to hopium in a comment. I wish I could remember who that person was, and, you know, figure out who it was, I could go give him a big hug, because it's so completely describes the world of the energy transition. Our hope, is being weaponized to delay the carbonization. Yeah, and that's what the hopium is about. And so I mean, the the metaphor just gets extended to know and there are hope yum dealers and pushers and petty marketers, and they're hoping addicts and you know, recovered addicts like myself who who are, you know, on an anti hopium campaign, trying to keep people, people from taking the first puff puff from the pipe, you know. So yeah, I mean, obviously it's an it's not a word that I created, or even the person that used it first within earshot of me created the first time I heard this, when I did a little bit of digging, first time that it was used in mass, I guess, was in relation to Barack Obama's first run for president. There are a lot of people are referring to that as a hopium campaign. And it's the fusion of the words hope and OPM obviously, and the intention is to is to communicate that although hope, you know, I certainly agree with with what German author Gupta said, he said that, you know, in all things, hope is preferable to despair. And, yeah, that sounds right. And it's probably right. But one has to be careful that one's hope is actually grounded in reality, and that it's not a hope for suspending the laws of thermodynamics or something like that, because those hopes are actually destructive. Right, they prevent it. Amanda got time. Yeah. And honestly, you know, I hate the word optimism. Optimism drives me bonkers because they actually understand philosophically what optimism is and totally reject it. And optimism isn't mere hopefulness. Okay. It's optimism is the notion that things work themselves out because a deity made the universe as good as could possibly be made. And this is the best it can be. And I reject that entirely. I think people solve problems every day and that makes the world better. And hopefulness, not optimism. Yeah. Okay. I like that distinction. The other word that you used was green and wishing. Wishing. Green wishing is the fuel right? It's It's the it's the thing that pushes people to swallow or breathe in the opium smoke. Green wishing is what people do when they put something in the recycling bin. Because they don't want to put it in the garbage but they're not entirely sure it can be recycled. You know? It's it's hoping for the Deus Ex mashing solution that technologists are going to provide that's just going to make the whole thing go away. You clean up the climate. And you know, greenwashing is what's fueling people to think that we can set up giant vacuum cleaners to suck co2 back out of the atmosphere, even though chemical engineers like me just laugh at it as stupid and mindless and dangerous mean, you know, greenwashing fuels greenwashing, right, if you're a green wishing you're likely to believe the greenwashing that other people are doing? Yeah, right. So but you mentioned it earlier, but you were a believer, you're a hope? What's the I was a Hopi ematic. Yeah, I thought I thought for sure that hydrogen was the fuel of the future. And honestly, I'm still convinced that hydrogen is the fuel of the future. But I'm also now convinced based on working with the stuff for 30 years, that it'll never be the fuel of the present. Okay, so if it's the fuel of the future, and never the fuel of the present, it's kind of worthless, isn't it? Yeah. So yeah, hydrogen, hydrogen in particular, is something that's been driving me bonkers because I know it's so intimately I've been making and using the gas, like I said, for decades, and so I understand it really well. And I don't have any money riding on it one way or another. So I can tell the absolute truth about it, as I see it, you know, from where I'm led by the data. And the clear thing there is that people, people have this box on their heads for when we've had it on our heads for the last 10,000 years. Oh, I'm called need heat, what can I burn? And they're now being told they can't burn fossils anymore. So instead of asking the right question, which is how do I keep warm? They're asking, what else can I burn aside from fossils? And the answer that they're being fed largely by the fossil fuel industry, and it's hangers on and it's unintentional collaborators that are useful idiots is hydrogen. You know, and that's a problem because it's not a solution. In fact, hydrogen is the decarbonisation problem that we must solve. I mean, half of humanity's lives are hanging on us solving the problem of decarbonizing hydrogen, because hydrogen is used to make ammonia which is used to make all the nitrogen fertilisers that that literally doubled crop yields. So half the humans and their food animals on earth would go hungry if it wasn't for hydrogen. And yet 99% of that hydrogen is made from fossils without carbon capture. So we have to solve that problem. And yet, we're being pushed on this notion. Oh, don't worry, we will have abundant hydrogen, and it won't matter that we're going to waste it on dumb things. Because we'll have lots of you know, and when you burn it, it just makes water which is kind of only partially true too, but I won't bore you with the details. But but so for the rest of us, you know, people like me I'll never have your level of intelligence or experience in this field. How do we navigate the complexity of all of this? You know, it's hard as everyone's so overwhelmed, and we'll talk about it when we talk about social media. But everyone keeps saying to me, oh, hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen, and I'm like, I don't know, that's not that's not what's coming through for me. I mean, the the largest message is definitely the hydrogen spin. But there's, there's messages in the in the outer information world that are saying, no, no, no, no. And you're, you're one of the people that sort of came to my attention because of that. So, you know, where do we go? What do we do? How do we, how do we make sense of it? It was so super hard, because we have this infrastructure of, of government that's supposed to do things like regulate and tax in the public interest. And in order to do that we need, you know, smart, independent thinking, educated, informed people making decisions in relation to these matters. And the trouble is that we've told ourselves for years that taxes are theft, and regulation is just red tape. And government doesn't serve a useful purpose. You know, and this is just a lie. Like, it's, it's ridiculous. And one of the consequences is that now, when we're presented with a problem, it's the corporate world that steps up in its own interest, not in the public interest in its own interest, with solutions, and pitches those to government and then government adopts them, you know, picks them up, buys into them doesn't necessarily do a good critical review to make sure that it's the right thing. And so we have governments jumping on this popular notion that hydrogen is the solution to the fossil fuel problem. And hydrogen absolutely isn't the solution to the fossil fuel problem. In fact, it is a big part of the fossil fuel problem. And it's arising, because governments aren't thinking about these things independently. And industry interested parties are coming forward and saying, Yeah, here it is, here's the solution, give us money, give us 10s of billions of dollars, or euros or pounds or whatever, it to put this in place, and you can keep living the way that you are now. Right. And the real solution is no sorry, guys, we've got to stop burning fossils. We can't tolerate their emissions to the atmosphere, we're not going to be burning them and then capturing the co2 and burying it in large quantity. Because that doesn't make economic sense. And as a consequence, making hydrogen from fossils and capturing the co2 and burying it, not likely to be a thing. And using electricity to make hydrogen to burn it to make heat is dumb when you can just use electricity to do the same thing. And now there are there, you know, we can get into a million niche cases or sidelines because of well, what are you going to do with aircraft? You know, I have solutions for aircraft, they don't involve hydrogen. So, you know, there's there's a lot of this messaging that's been very carefully, very prepared in a very calculated way. And the messaging is usually about so called hard to decarbonize sectors. Oh, what are we going to do about the hard to decarbonize sectors? My answer to that has always been, who cares? Why don't we work on the easy to decarbonize sectors, decarbonize them, and then worry about the hard to decarbonize sectors, how about that? Because those are the ones that are going to get us the bang for our buck, you know, they're gonna get a co2 emission reductions for nothing, for less than nothing. As an example, electric cars being a perfect example of that, they actually reduce the total cost of ownership if you drive your car a lot, already, and they're still getting cheaper. And the co2 emission reductions that they produce that toxic tailpipe emissions, that they reduce those benefits come to us at zero cost, in fact, at a negative cost. So why aren't we doing that? You know, big time, why aren't we putting all our effort into doing that? This is so obviously a good solution. Why are we instead worrying about the last 5% of decarbonisation? How we're going to do it? It's mad, right? It's just not not careful thinking, is one of the comments you made there was we're gonna continue our life as it is, you know, we're gonna make all these changes, but we can continue as we are. And to me, that's one of the fundamental flaws that we we cannot continue how we are, there are some people that want to use decarbonisation, or environmental issues as a way to tell us that we have to, you know, destroy capitalism or whatever, pushing a political agenda. And I'm not one of those. And I don't think that those people are helping, helping us much. I think lots of things have to change, but important things about how we live can keep on going and humankind can continue to thrive and conditions for the average person can continue to improve. And we can tackle decarbonization at the same time, but we just won't be able to do things the same way that we've been doing them now. We're going to have to change we're gonna have to alter how we do things. In a fundamental and important way, we're gonna have to change our entire relationship with energy. But saying that that means that our lives aren't going to be good or in fact, better is nonsense is it's a non sequitur. Some people confuse different with bad. Yeah. Right. So yeah, and as I was going to say one of the things that one really has to be really careful about in relation to the whole public communication related to decarbonisation Is there a lot of people out there who are arguing from a position of, of moral hazard. So what that means is that they benefit from our attempt to do whatever X, Y or Zed whether it be making hydrogen or direct air capture, or whatever it is, they benefit from that attempt, funded by your money and our money, public money, whether the thing succeeds or fails. So should you listen to such people? No, you should not listen to them, because they're arguing from a position of moral hazard. You're asking the wrong people for that advice. And I'll give you an example of where I've been in a position of moral hazard. For decades, I worked for a company that designed and built pilot plants, which are prototype chemical plants that try out a new process and use that information to gather data about how to scale it up. So someone would come in from time to time, and they'd want a pilot plant built. And then they would ask the guy that designs and builds pilot plants, whether or not they should build a pilot plant. And I would have to say, Dude, I make hammers, and you're asking me if you need a hammer. Don't ask the hammer salesman. If you need a hammer, of course, you need a hammer, you need 10 of them, you need all kinds of different kinds. Right? So if you asked me, there's no point in in listening to my answer, because I'm going to answer that I make money if I sell you a hammer or a pilot plan. And I make no money if I don't. So why would I ever tell you that you don't need one. And now of course, you know, somebody comes in with a preposterous idea. And the example I use is, someone comes in and says I've got this great idea. I want to turn a million sow's ears into one silk purse, you know, we're going to take all the molecules apart and reassemble them make silk out of the proteins and spin spin silk thread and make a silk purse. You know, in the old days, when I designed to build pilot plants, and they wanted a pilot plant for this process of making silk purses at a sow's ears, I would just ask him, sorry, you find it Oh, yeah, Breakthrough Energy Ventures has given us 10s of millions of dollars. It's okay, great when when we start, right, it's possible we can do it, we can certainly build you a very good pilot plant for this process. And if they come to me now is Spitfire research, I'll say you're in the wrong business, dog food, dog food is what you want to do if you've got a million SAS years, because when so personal, never pay for it. You know, so you so when you ask someone that's got no money riding on it, they can give you the honest advice. If you ask somebody who's in a moral hazard position, they're never gonna give me advice that you can trust, it's worthless. And the problem is the whole public discourse about hydrogen is nothing but large numbers of people arguing from either a position of direct conflict of interest. In other words, they make money if hydrogen is used, and they don't if it's not, or people that are arguing from a position of moral hazard, meaning they make money from us trying whatever it is, regardless of what it is. So pay attention to that. So there was a second point, I hope I haven't gotten you off track. No worries. Okay, going back to the politicians, and the you know, that the experts who are advising governments, I mean, that's a big problem as well, right. You know, we're just, we're just seeing it all the time. How the hell is that country done that? You know, I'm originally from Australia. I'm sitting in Thailand. We obviously just saw the the was the willow announcement of a project and yeah, and yeah, it's Yeah. And yeah, and you look at that, and you go, why the hell with Biden do it? You know, I mean, you could see Trump doing it. I mean, Trump would do it 10 times. But why would Biden do it? And it's exactly the same question in Canada. So in Canada, the big news, in my mind, at least the big news in recent days, is that the Canadian government agreed to buy this pipeline project that's called Trans mountain. The idea of trans Mountain is to get the ugly bitumen material from northern Alberta, across the mountains to British Columbia, where it can be put on ships and presumably shipped to China. And the reason people in Alberta wanted that to happen was that they feel like the Americans who are buying it at a discounted price of ripping them off. And, you know, because it's it sells at a discount to the price of regular oil. And the reason it sells is the discount to the price of regular oil isn't because just the Americans want to buy it. The reason it sells is at a discount is that it's junk. You know, it's bad oil, it's 50% residual. And it's full of sulphur, it's full of metals. It's ugly stuff. And that's why it's discounted because it's not as valuable as regular crude is But people have this fantasy that if they can sell it to a broader market, they can get it to Tidewater so that ships can carry it, they'll, they'll be able to get higher prices for it. So the Canadian government bought this thing. And at the time, the reason they bought it is that there were conflicts between the pipeline proponents and First Nations people. And the First Nations people were saying, like, we don't want this stupid pipeline, you guys are gonna, it's gonna leak, and it's gonna contaminate our ancestral land, and we don't want it. And the federal government said, Well, this is a nation nation thing. First Nation should really be dealing with the federal government. So we'll take over the project, because we think the projects in the national interest, and we'll negotiate with First Nations and make sure that everybody's happy before it gets built. At the time, it was $10 billion, it's now 30 billion, it's not finished yet. And the Canadian public is paying for this, and it will be in a decarbonized. Future worthless. Yeah. So we wasted $30 billion to make the people of Alberta feel better about the fact that in the future, we're not going to be burning their bitumen. And that's the sort of thing that you know, so the federal government dealt hopium to the people of Alberta, don't worry, your fossil future is going to be, it's going to be maintained, you guys gonna be okay. You know, and they did that in order to basically ensure that they were elected, and the Canadian public are paying for this worthless asset that's really going to be a liability in the future. And paying three times what, what, what was already a high price for it. And all of that money is a waste, like it has no future post decarbonisation, we're not going to use it, you know, we aren't gonna be selling it to China to make Roadstar. And just Australia or America or the UK with the orcas agreement for the nuclear powered subs, you know, and it's just like, right now, you know, that's where you want to go. Okay, so when it comes to where we should focus on energy, you know, what is the combination of energy that we're going to be, you know, if we get it right, what does it look like? You have to make sure that, that you don't get the cart in front of the horse. Okay, so sure, it's important that we think about how we do things in the future. But the more important thing is to figure out what we can't do and to make that expensive. Because right now, what we're doing is we're allowing people to burn fossils and dump the effluent into the atmosphere. And that's either free or really cheap. So the atmosphere is being treated as a public sewer. Right. And the public sewer is being overexploited because it's free. So there is no solution to the problem of using the atmosphere as a public sewer. That doesn't involve making people pay for using the atmosphere as a public sewer. And that seems so obvious to me. And yet people say, Oh, it's impossible carbon taxes or Bad's tax and everything. It's gonna make everything more expensive. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. And and it's necessary, right? In every major economist who's ever thought about this, the Greeks, you can't fight the market on this, you have to fix the economic problem, because without the economic problem being solved, there's no technology that will fix it. Okay? It'll all be minor frittering around the edges, like the LED lights that are that are shining in here, you know, they actually are resulted in a tremendous decrease in the amount of greenhouse gas emissions as a result of just changing from one technology to another. But those sorts of things are small, they're slow, and they don't result in much decarbonisation, and they certainly won't result in enough decarbonisation quickly enough. So the first thing, we have to fix the economic problem that leads to the over exploitation of the status quo of dumping fossils, fossil emissions into the atmosphere, and then honestly, we can let the market figure out what the best way to solve the new economic paradigm is, is that making hydrogen in Australia and shipping into Germany as hydrogen? Probably not. But if people want to bet that it is, and they want to bet their own money on it, God bless them, you know, that my problem here is that we're not putting in place the fundamental, underlying things that will shift the market, and then we're trying to pick particular solutions, and fund them into success with public money. Right? And that's nuts. That does not work. Okay, it's just not. So you know, what does the future look like the future is electric. In our future, almost all of the energy that we use will be coming to us in the form of electricity, or will be made from electricity. That's the real the reality of the future. I mean, in Australia, individual homeowners are getting this rooftop solar is just exploding in Australia. And that's an example of where the technology is good enough on its own right now to save people money, and so they're implementing it for their own economic interests, whether they care about the planet and the climate or not. That's great. It's not enough. Let's take as an example, I mentioned earlier, hydrogen, that one of the big things we use high hydrogen for is making ammonia, we use ammonia to make all the nitrogen fertilisers that we use to keep ourselves fed. We want decarbonize ammonia production just because electricity is cheap in Australia, we have to decarbonize ammonia production. By virtue of making the existing process of making hydrogen and dumping the resulting co2 into the atmosphere, we have to make that expensive so that people don't do it anymore. And then Australia, Chile, various other places that have abundant combinations of wind and solar, that can make hydrogen most cheaply will make ammonia because that way, they can actually have a product that they can ship that they can sell to the world market. But the world they can't do that if the world market won't buy it, because it's more expensive than the black stuff. You see. So yeah, the cart has to go in the right place behind the horse. And if you don't do that, you won't fix anything. So one of the questions, I've asked some people who you know, who talk about electricity, as you know, that's where we're heading. I think in Australia, America, Canada, Europe. I don't think they necessarily understand that in Asia. So the electricity that is on me right now, is from a coal. Oh, yeah, no, I totally understand that. And I'll tell you, it's going to be winners and losers in a decarbonized future. And a lot of Asia, not all of Asia. But in particular, places like Singapore, South Korea, Japan, big losers in the decarbonize future. So guess what they're not decarbonizing. They will not decarbonize until they're forced. That's what's going to happen because those people import all of their energy, or substantially all of their energy, not all of it, but substantially all of it. They want to import it by ship, because they don't like their nearest land neighbours. So they don't want to have a cable coming from the nearest land neighbour that their nearest land neighbour can step on every time they say something wrong. Okay, they want to import by ship. So if these guys aren't selling it to us, because we don't like them anymore, we can buy from those guys. Guess what that future is finished. Any nation that predicates itself on the import of chemical energy in a decarbonized future will not have any heavy industry? Because they'll be paying 10 times as much per unit of energy as their market competitors are? And I'm sorry, that's not something we're gonna fix with innovation, better technology. That's physics. Yeah. Okay. The physics results in those economics. So those nations, you know, so what's Japan doing? Are they building wind turbines with Mad abandon? No. Are they building new nuclear power plants? No. What are they doing? They're pretending that they're gonna buy ammonia from Australia and burn it in their coal fired power plants. Now, they will never do that. And we don't need to do it and some pilot project. But they'll never do it commercially, because it's insane. Like, it's just so from outer space nuts, that they will not do it. But you see, the more they pretend that they have solutions that are coming down the pipe, the longer will let them not decarbonize. You see, it's what's referred to as predatory delay. That's what this stuff's about. It's about distraction and delay. Yeah. So and, you know, why wouldn't they delay? What's the solution, their solution is to not have any heavy industry anymore. For that heavy industry that's currently in those places to be elsewhere in the world. There's no solution to it. There's no new LNG. It's not hydrogen is not ammonia. It's not methanol, it's not liquid organic hydrogen carriers, it's none of that crap. There is no new LNG. There's no new petroleum. That's the end of that, you know, and the funny thing is that, you know, we went through transitions like this before, you know, in the first in the coal age, and then the petroleum age, and then later, kind of the fossil natural gas age, we've been through these transitions, where places in the world that had nothing, all of a sudden became some of the richest places in the world, because we changed our the nature of energy, and other places that used to be the mainstay, you know, giant, major exports, you know, Chile used to export Chile, South saltpetre, to the world at incredibly high prices, because it was the only source of nitrogen that was available for making explosives and making and making fertiliser. And they went out of business overnight, when the haber bosch process was invented in Germany, these sorts of transitions happen, and there are winners and losers, and you can expect the losers to fight like hell to not have the transition happen, but it doesn't mean the transition is not happening. It's happening. And I know you haven't got a lot of time so I want to move over to the other topic, which is, of course how I discovered you and it's So how, how am I you're participating on social media? So I just want to set the scene, right? Because I like to explain to people how I think, because I think that sort of helps sort of set it up. But when hydrogen was first being billed as the solution of all solutions, including my friends gun, well, it's obviously hydrogen. If it's the answer to the all the problems that we've got, then why are we only hearing about it now? You know, and why is it now the only answer? Where was it before? And why are we so like this? There's basically no coverage. That doesn't say, hydrogen is the path, right. So, you know, my, my background is in comms and I was like, it didn't feel right to me. And then, like I said, earlier, on the peripheries of the information world, there were these people with opinions, saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And all the greenwashing started coming up, and then the different colours of hydrogen started coming up. And it was at that point that I realised that was fossil fuel industry 100%, behind all the marketing, and of course, it had a lot of money. And we were all absolutely initially soaked in this message to the point that some of the smartest people I knew, said, yeah, no, it's hard to imagine if it was the answer, great. But if it's not, I just like looking at what's going on. You know, there's some new report came out this week about the Arctic, where they're, they're basically saying the science is so far behind the reality, because the way it's being measured is not right. So what's actually happening in the Arctic is a lot more severe. Things are happening a lot faster, we haven't got any time to lose. Right? So and of course, in this in this process, I found you. And so basically, what I'm saying is it was your participation and people like you who sort of if you're paying attention, which of course many people aren't, there's, there are experts out there. And if you can find them, if you look for them, if there's a whole message that's been coming your way, in the middle of a crisis, where it's not something new, it's existed for a long time, right? We've got to have these critical thinking skills and go wait a minute, something's something's a bit fishy here. But so you're one of these people who said, I'm gonna step in, I've got I've got to be part of this. I've got to be part of this conversation. So what was it? What was that moment that you just went right? I'm gonna I'm gonna get involved. Okay, so I think we we have to fix a bit of a misperception very common misperception hydrogen is not new. hydrogen as a decarbonisation solution, or an alternative energy solution is not new either. Every time that there's a problem with oil and gas, hydrogen is brought forward as a solution. So the first time that this happened in earnest was after the 1973 oil crisis. And then it kind of went away again. And then it came back with gusto in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And then it went away again, and it started coming back in 2015, or thereabouts. And so this, this comes and goes, it comes in waves. And it is brought forward as the, you know, the alternative to Hail Mary, as a result of a pretty simple minded set of thinking, like I said, it's, you know, we can't burn fossils anymore. What else can we burn? As opposed to we can't burn fossils anymore? How else do we solve the problems that we right now solved by burning fossils? And trouble here is, as you mentioned, you can imagine if you're somebody like Northern gas network, in the UK, right, you sell gas door to door in pipes that you own already this capital. So your choice is to sell something in those pipes or to go to business, right, you really only have two choices. So if you can't sell fossil gas, what else you get himself, hydrogen, you have to sell hydrogen. So it's existentially important to them, that they sell hydrogen as a solution for home heating. Hydrogen is a dumb solution for home heating, especially if you make hydrogen from electricity. Because you can do the same job of heating someone's house for 1/5 to one six, as much electricity if you don't involve hydrogen and you feed it to eat, but then if you do involve hydrogen, so you know, I don't have any objective to people trying to stay in business. I do have a problem with people trying to push non solutions funded with public money as solutions to the problem of decarbonisation, when they're doing it from a position of, you know, a very clear conflict of interest, and the hydrogen world is full of this. So this is how I came about it came about it in kind of a complicated backhanded way. In 2014, my son and I converted a 1975 Triumph Spitfire, two seater gasoline sports car to a fully electric car. We did that as kind of a project learning project for me teaching probably took for him and an opportunity to do something, you know, in the interest of decarbonisation, and something that was fun and in the light and in the process. So I did that project fully with the intention of taking it around to schools, and, you know, teaching, using it as a teaching aid, but also to be able to make measurements so I could verify some of the stuff I was hearing about electric cars that didn't quite believe they sounded a little bit too good to be true. So I wanted to know it firsthand. And in the process of doing all the work around that, figuring out what the, you know, how much greenhouse gas emissions were saved, how much toxic emissions were saved by the process of converting the car, I did all this learning, and all of this, you know, putting together of information to make talks and presentations and so on. And I started writing articles on LinkedIn talking about little topics, like as an example, how much electricity does it take to make a gallon of gasoline? Because there were things in the media that were being said about, you know, it was implied that if we just stopped refining gasoline, we'd have enough electricity leftover to be able to power electric cars to run the same distance that they would have run if we would have run gas, cars and gasoline. And I went, Yeah, that's wrong. We've got to, you know, got to figure out why it's wrong. So I figured out why it was wrong. And I wrote an article about it. And people started reading these things, and commenting and making good comments, and I started getting into this back and forth, where I would have to go, okay, it wasn't quite right about that, I have to go fix that now. Because so and so, you know, gave me a good reference that proves that my math was wrong, and I had to redo it. And so I started writing articles in relation to this whole thing, you know, electric vehicles are the better, is there a problem with their materials? Is there a problem with their embodied energy, like, does it take more energy to make the battery than it seems in gasoline, etc. And I started hearing about hydrogen cars again. And I had been involved deeply in this in the late late 90s. And realised at that time, hydrogen is just not not going to be a solution of any kind here, and I was horrified to see it, rearing its ugly head again. And so I wrote an article, which compared the energy efficiency of using electricity if you're on an electric car, versus using electricity to make hydrogen and then hydrogen to run a hydrogen car. And the differences were so stark, that, you know, it just drove me crazy, that people were misrepresenting this. So I Oh, no, it's a better solution give you a longer range, and it's faster to refuel the Yeah, and it uses three times as much energy and cost five times as much per mile driven. So no one's ever going to do this, this is a dead, you know, this horse is dead. And as the Dakota First Nation, traditional wisdom says, If you discover that the horse that you're riding is dead, the best strategy is to dismount. Right. And then when people started getting angry with me about this, and so I had to explain to them and if you are too busy riding the horse, to notice that it's dead, the person that tells you that it's dead is not your enemy. So that's my whole social media, you know, activity has arisen from my desire to communicate clearly on issues like this, at a level somewhere between technical papers that only scientists and engineers read and science popular ism stuff that's largely gee whiz, Isn't this cool, and doesn't give you the DC. So I'm somewhere in the middle. And I do that reasonably well. And people like it, and they read it, and they comment. And I use LinkedIn because I can edit things. Because what I don't like about peer reviewed articles is that they're like a steak driven in the sand. And when the sand shifts, you know, it's like, there's a, there's an island, off the east coast of Canada called Sable Island. And the North lighthouse is now on the south end of the island. Because it's the sandbar and everything has shifted. Lighthouse has remained physically in the same same place that it always was. And what I don't like is when things change, good information at the time becomes misinformation. So the lovely thing about LinkedIn is it allows you to edit things as things change. And so I update my articles and go, Well, yeah, this number I used, it's now this number. And that changes the the result in this way, or it doesn't change the result, or you know, this is the most up to date, information, conclusions are still the same, or they're altered in this way, or this new invention has come along and just changed everything. So I can modify things accordingly. The other thing that we ended up doing is a bunch of other people were doing something similar in relation to hydrogen, and we coalesced together to form an organisation and not for profit, in fact, not just a not for profit and not for revenue organisation called the hydrogen Science Coalition. And that's important because there are a lot of nonprofits out there that still need to be funded because they do projects and they hire staff and you know, they need money. Yeah. So they have to generate revenue from somewhere. And the mere fact that they have to generate revenue, biases their opinion on certain certain things. So we decided that we were just going to provide our assistance So in relation to these matters from a position of science, and to do that, at no cost to anyone, now, we weren't going to do free consulting for for profit businesses. But if a journalist calls us up and says, Hey, what do you think about this project? We'll give them an opinion. And we have a website that, you know, graciously, there have been some, some charitable donations made that keep that website running. But other than that, it's just the six of us now, we're mostly either academics or retired engineers, or scientists, or the like, who have opinions on this matter are knowledgeable about it, and aren't influenced one way or another. Like, I mean, if you looked at you open the books as my little consulting company, it would be difficult for you to discern a financial interest one way or another on hydrogen, because I have hydrogen related clients. And I have clients that would love to put hydrogen out of business in roughly equal amounts of revenue, so there's no discernible financial interest there anyway. And if a client of Spitfire ever told me, Hey, don't say what you saying on social media, because it's affecting our business, I would drop them like a hot potato would be gone. They would be gone that instant. Yeah, we're done. I'm never working with you. Again. Don't ever tell me what I can say on social media. That's not part of the deal. Yeah, so the six of you are part of it. Hydrogen Science Coalition. So I haven't uncovered all of them. But I will. But yeah, are you all in agreement? We're, we're people. So of course, we don't agree on everything. You know, and sometimes that sometimes it's a matter of we agree, but we don't agree about how to say it. But we certainly we have, we have debate and discussion. But we agree on five principles that are really clear, and they're on our website, and they're super easy to understand. Anybody is encouraged to just go to h2 Science coalition.com. And look at the principles. And, you know, it's really, it's really quite simple. In fact, I've, I've got one of these little two panel, memes that communicate things really, really effectively and usually funny, in a funny way. That nails it all down. It's really simple. So in one in one, picture, Drake, you know, the rap, rap musician is going like this, you know, he's hiding from something that he doesn't like, and it says hydrogen as a fuel. And the next one, he's nodding and pointing with approval, and it says, green hydrogen made from electricity to replace black hydrogen made from fossils. Isn't that simple, right? It's that simple. Somebody tells you hydrogen is a fuel the wrong. You know, there are there are some niche cases where it might make sense, but they're very niche. They're very small and insignificant, but it's not gonna be hydrogen for cars. It's not gonna be hydrogen for ships. It's not gonna be hydrogen for aircraft, like one of our members is retired aeronautical engineer, university professor from from the Netherlands. He knows aircraft inside and out, and he's not going to be hydrogen, that's for sure. So it's people like that. And David David Sivan, who's a professor in the UK working for the sustainable transport initiative. And he, his expertise is heavy trucks as an example. And then we've got another who was involved. Tom Baxter, who's a retired engineer, but working as an associate professor in Scotland. And he has years and years of experience in relation to risk assessments and, you know, the oil and gas industry and how things are done. And so he's taken it upon himself to go after this hydrogen for home heating thing, because there are trials in northern England and other places in the UK, where the residents are basically being, you know, railroaded into having people come into their homes and convert their homes to hydrogen. Yeah, as an experiment. You know, and this is not a good idea, because it's the wrong it's not a decarbonisation solution. But for you personally, like having having that sort of collaboration with like minded people. Obviously, it'd be awesome just to challenge your own ideas personally, right? Oh, yeah. But it is it you know, when your voice is out there in the world, have you having that sort of team behind you of experts. You must be seeing some escalation in your message getting out there in a bigger way. It helps that there are a bunch of us together with that are like minded. It helps that those people are all scrupulously not challengeable on the basis of vested interest that helps a great deal. It helps us get taken seriously. Like as an example, Joanne Whitmore, who's another one of our members who's a researcher at ACC, a business University in Montreal. She and I have been writing op eds together and they've been getting placed in you know, the Globe and Mail newspaper as an example, which is a big newspaper in Canada in relation to to things that are being said publicly about hydrogen, they're just wrong. And we just, you know, correct, correct the public record and say, Look, this is this thing was said, here's who said it. They're wrong. Here's why. Yeah, really straightforward. Yeah. Yeah. But the message is, you know, for audiences, you know, come together with a community of people that, you know, operate at the same level, same standard, what you don't want is to be in the silo, right? So I have a rule. And I would recommend this rule to others who engage in social media, there's a natural tendency, of course, to get yourself a group of people that you agree with, and then just sing singing one of those years, you know, and that's really stupid, boring. It's just not, it's not at all interesting. It's not helping. So what tends to happen is people will come along and say, No, I don't agree with you. And some people will do that in a polite way. And some people will do it in an extremely rude and obnoxious way. And my basic rule is really straightforward. I don't block people on social media, unless they go ad hominem or they are bots, it's quite clear that there's no human behind them, or the human if the humans behind them, the humans working from a script, or if they they're so recalcitrant, that they absolutely will never concede a point and debate. Yeah, like never, ever, ever. They're always on message, and they will never concede a point in debate. That's the only time I block people that you know, the bastards that grind you down, I have no patience for them. The the ones that that will never change and are never interested. But I have lots of people that violently disagree with me, that I'd be totally happy to go a drink with. And we could have a long discussion about why you know why I'm right, or why they're right, and where we agree and where we disagree. And it would be productive. And we learn from one another. So yeah, don't close your circle, don't get in a silo, that's not helpful. That just makes positions more extreme. And, you know, positions get better through debate. Yeah. Right. They get honed through debate. And you can't debate with people, if you only talk with other people who agree with you. The comment you made about the types of people, some people have worn me out, I think I've blocked about three people in my life. Until more than that, until the last time. Yeah, the list, oh, my goodness, climate change denialists, who find it existentially important to deny that we're doing anything to the planet? That's harmful at all? Under any circumstances, those people just forget it. And on the other side, the environmental religionists Yeah, you know, would sacrifice all of humanity to save a species of amoeba, you know, from extinction. Those people have no patience for either they're not helping, and the you know, the usual, the average person raises the middle finger to them and tells them to, you know, get on their way anyway, so they're really not having any influence either. And yeah, I blocked both of those, when they, because they've so quickly go at home and, and Mommy, you know, accuse me of this or that. And that makes it really easy. You don't have to discuss things like an adult, life's too short for that I'm done with you, and I go bother somebody else. I got no time for it either. So with my social media leadership training that I've been doing for years now, one of the things that I really do is try and get business leaders. But all employees, professionals, people who are experts, and I'm one of the things I'm really talking a lot about now is if you are an expert, so I follow about sort of 18 of the big topics around climate change, where I think you you're actually quite wide in what you cover as well, even though you're also deep in your expertise. And what I'm constantly trying to do is piece it all together. So I'm always looking for experts in these different areas, because I'll never have the time to do it all. But it's not me to do that meets the meets the looping everything together. So the message is, if you've got something to contribute to the conversation, please get out there and contribute because absolutely 100% agree with you on that. The thing that a lot of people don't understand is that if you have a voice, you have the knowledge to be able to contribute to the public discussion and debate. It's incumbent on you to do so. There are some people that are tied up with, you know, work related agreements, or or muzzle clauses or the like, and I have the greatest sympathy for those people. They communicate through me. Yeah, because I don't have any of that crap. I'm my own person. For years when I was working for an employer, you know, that I own part of, I used to write articles. And then I would say, if you don't like what I'm saying, leave my employer out of it. They have nothing to do with it. They're really good at the particular thing and that, you know, they focus on that and they don't have any opinion on this matter on any matter because there are company and companies that have no business having opinions on matters like this. And because they're not persons, you know, they may be persons before the law, but they're not Got persons in reality, but now I can say, by all means if you don't like what I'm saying, ring up Spitfire research, which is me and ask them to shut me up and and Spitfire research will be perfectly happy to go tell you, you know, to take a flying hike or whatever. And I'm totally free to say what I want. And I take advantage of that and people need to because otherwise the floor gets yielded to those loud, Rowdy voices you know the drunks in the pub? Yeah. And that's really unfortunate. And we really need people who know things inside note, understand the issues at a high level, to communicate to communicate effectively and to not cede the floor because they get frustrated. Yeah, and this as you get started, the more you can get used to the whole shenanigans that go on Oh, yeah, you learn your own way of managing it right. And you learn, you also have to learn how to moderate your your participation, because there's more to life than just just this. But there's obviously important things to be said and important things hanging the balance, and very important things. All right, Paul, I know you need to go. Thank you. Do you want to final? So the hope I hope you you know, but you Have you still got hope? Oh, yeah, no, I'm a hopeful person by default. I think that the transition away from fossils is not just possible. It's practical. And it's not just practical. I think that once we've implemented that scale, it will be cheaper and better than what we have now. So I can't be any more hopeful than that. i And I honestly believe that there's science behind that position that that's not just me being a Pollyanna or Wishful Thinker or an optimist. It's that not that at all, I think that's honestly true. And I think there's science to support that. And the only thing that we have to do is we have to decide that we want to do it. Like we really want to do it. We're willing to go through a rough patch in the middle in order to get there. And as long as we do that, and we're firm about it, and we don't backpedal. We're gonna make our way through this transition, and we'll come out the other side of it better than ever. Awesome. All right, thanks. Appreciate it. Have a great time. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Yeah. All right. All right. There you go. And that was Paul Martin. And I don't know, I love speaking to people like that. They're participating from a place of deep intention. They want to contribute to what's going on in the world. And when you contribute, with intention and purpose, sort of underlining your message, it really does change the game. So the noise or the drunks in the pub as Paul caught it, they don't have an impact on you, because you're not doing it for them. You're doing it for a much bigger purpose. And to me, that's the heart of being a successful social leader. Do it for a purpose. It's not for ego. It's for something greater than yourself. So I hope you enjoyed that. If you're enjoying the podcast, please give me a few stars. I think you could do stars on most of the podcasting platforms. leave a review if you've got some time. It all helps. And just thanks for listening in. I hope it was useful. See you soon