An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis
Ryan Panchadsaram shares how to unlock a cleaner, safer, and healthier future.
Ryan Panchadsaram is the co-author of Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving our Climate Crisis. Guided by real-world solutions, Speed & Scale features firsthand accounts from climate leaders such as Laurene Powell Jobs, Christiana Figueres, Al Gore, Mary Barra, John Kerry, and dozens of other intrepid policymakers, innovators, and scientists.
He is currently a Venture Capitalist at KPCB where he invests in founders and technologies that aim to change the world. Previously, Ryan was the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the United States. At the White House, Ryan helped shape how an $80 billion budget can be used by federal agencies to deliver on their missions in a more effective, design-centric, and data-driven way.
In 2014, Ryan was featured on the cover of Time Magazine as part of the crisis response team that rescued the rollout of Healthcare.gov. After the successful turnaround, Ryan helped launch the U.S. Digital Service. Ryan also represented the United States as a delegate to the United Nations, promoting increased connectivity and entrepreneurship around the world. Prior to public service, Ryan co-founded Pipette (at Rock Health!), a digital health startup that was acquired by Ginger.io, a MIT Media Lab spin-off using big data and machine-learning to improve the world’s health. Ryan graduated with a degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley.
Topics covered:
Environmental health as human health
Natural disasters vs. man-made disasters
Why the toxic train wreck happened in Ohio, and what we can do to prevent further disasters
Gas stoves and childhood asthma
Should you go vegan? Buy an electric vehicle?
Maintaining hope and positivity in the face of this global challenge
Listen
Bonus Recipe: Whole Veggie Patty
Sauté olive oil, shallots, salt, pepper, smoked paprika, cumin, chopped shiitake mushrooms, umami (balsamic and/or soy sauce), seitan.
The blend (but not too much!) with chunky oat flower (oatmeal, blended lightly), walnuts, drained black beans.
Freeze then cook!
Transcript
Halle: Hello Heart of Healthcare listeners today. I'm so excited to have an old friend on the show, Ryan Pacha. Ryan was part of the original group of Rock Health Founders back in 2011, and it's been so fun to kind of grow up together in healthcare. So some background on Ryan. I don't even know where to start.
The company Ryan started at Rock. Was acquired by Ginger io, which was eventually acquired by Headspace, as most of you know. Ryan, uh, went on to become Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the entire United States, where he helped shape an 80 billion federal budget and helped launch healthcare.gov. He was on the cover of Time Magazine.
He represented the US at the United Nations. He became a venture capitalist where he invested in my last company, analist. And then most recently he co-authored an amazing book with John. Speed and scale. An action plan for solving our climate crisis brings together everything he has worked on to lay out what we need to do to avert a climate catastrophe.
And this is what I wanna talk about on the show today. Ryan, thank you for being here.
Ryan: Halle, it's a joy to be.
Halle: So, okay. You're, you're a climate guy now, but you're still a healthcare guy. The word action plan is in the title of your book. Can we just start by telling us the 10 step plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050?
Ryan: Of course. So speed and scale. It's a detailed action plan for tackling the climate crisis and it's uh, for your listeners, actually, I have a feeling a lot of them know what objectives and key results are OKRs, and so we use the OKR system to. Break down the problem, right? We emit 59 billion tons. Of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
And so we've got six solutions, right? Electrifying transportation, decarbonizing the grid, fixing our food system, protecting nature, cleaning up industry, and then removing the stubborn carbon that's left over. So the book talks about the solutions and the first part, and then the second part of the book talks about how we get there faster, right?
Because these solutions could take, you know, the next 50 to a hundred years to. To play, but we need to cut our emissions in half this decade and then all the way by 2050. And so we lean on four accelerants. It's about winning the policy in politics, turning movements into action, innovation, and investment.
And so that's the Plan 10 objectives, each supported by three to five key results and measures that if we move, we know we're tackling this problem effect.
Halle: And how often will you be checking in on these OKRs to see if we're meeting our goals?
Ryan: Yeah, so we've been, ever since the book was published, which was at the end of 2021, we've updated the website Speed and scale.com with the status of these different OKRs. And so every quarter we update. and we're actually in the middle of updating the book as well cuz so much has happened since 2021, right?
In 2023. There's lots of momentum on things like the deployment of electric vehicles, the cost of solar and wind dropping the, the winds in the United States like the Inflation reduction Act. But there's also places where we're not doing so well, Halle, right? Unprovoked attack of Russia to Ukraine really caused the world to burn more coal, right?
Because of the disconnection of natural gas to Europe. We're also still emitting near the same amount this year that we did last, right? So we're still emitting, you know, when you think about the number that matters the most, we're not moving that number as fast as we.
Halle: What grade would you give us overall
Ryan: Oh, well, we're clearly
Halle: Give, give me a letter,
Ryan: Lemme letter. Uh, well, we're clearly off track. I would say we are at a, d to F scale on where we are today. But you know, you and I, and I think everyone who listens, we are eternal optimist in some way and trying to find where the gems are. . So when you look to things like the electrification of transportation, right?
The sheer number of electric vehicles being bought today globally, right, is reaching the 10 to 11% that are electric. In some places in China, it's all the way near a hundred, and in some places in Europe the same. And so what you can see there is countries that prioritize the electrification. You can see a massive wave shift over to it.
And so you can see those eight gigatons. There's a way to reduce those, so,
Halle: well on, on that electric car. No, keep going. I'll ask the question next.
Ryan: Oh, it just was just kind of saying it's like, and then when you look at things like, yes, we're still burning coal. You do see the cost of clean energy, rapidly dropping. Right. Solar and wind. You know, a lot of us have heroes in the climate space that we've been following for the past two, three decades.
Like you have Al Gore who has consistently told us that solar and wind will be cheaper one day. And then 20 18, 20 19 rolls around and that cost, crossover happens and now all of a sudden it is the economic thing to do to deploy more solar and wind. Right? Like, and so things like that give me hope because when market forces and the economics are behind the clean green thing you can be more certain that they, that they'll happen.
Halle: Yeah. Okay. So on the electric car thing,
Ryan: Yes.
Halle: I, uh, got my second hybrid car and my very old school father seems to think that the battery on electric cars and hybrid cars is worse than just using gas in the first place. How do I argue with him about this?
Ryan: Two, two fronts, right? The first is when you think about a battery, right? The battery that you have in your car. , you keep recharging it and you ultimately will get to use it over the course of the car's lifetime. And then when you buy a new car, that battery gets recycled, right? We don't recycle gasoline, we pump it into our cars, burn it, and pounds of CO2 go into the air, right?
So that's on one side. It's like when you think about gasoline, when you think about the batteries, the fact that we get to, to get to reuse it. The other piece too is you'll see these pictures of the mining of batteries and how destructive it is and how bad it is. There's some truth to that, that what the mining practices for batteries have to get better.
Right. You know, with this. Injection of capital in the United States to mine more domestically. I think you're gonna see more responsible practices for mining. But when you like zoom out and look at the extractive practices of coal, gas, fracking, and all of the above, the amount of damage that does to our natural ecosystems and so forth, it's worse, right?
And so I think it's very easy to try to poke at those things, but in the reality, it's not. It just doesn't add up.
Halle: perhaps it's the lesser of the two evils, but still work to be done.
Ryan: That's right. I think absolutely it is. Let's see. Is it the lesser two evils? That's a good, good. It's a good . It's
Halle: I hope it is
Ryan: Oh, I was gonna say, if the other path is even the evil one, right? Like I think you can pick and poke at ways. The, the practice today isn't done well, but you can always find a path. Like you can actually like, draw a line to how the mining can be done more responsibly.
The mining can be done, cleaner, recycling gets done, and so you actually have this really clean path for how we move people around.
Halle: Well, I'll say I when gas prices were going crazy last year, I was very happy plugging in my car.
Ryan: Oh
Halle: I felt very good about it. I had no regrets.
Ryan: you know, in the, in the. The race for decarbonizing our vehicles. There was this moment when is it gonna be hydrogen? Is it gonna be the fuel cell, is it gonna be electric? And what's been shown this past decade? Kudos to Tesla, kudos to B y D in China. They've showed that.
Lithium ion can actually be a more cost effective approach, right? Because of their scale, they were able to drop down those prices. But there's something about having a plug in your garage. That means you have a gas station in every home. Sure, this doesn't fix it for apartments and condos and other shared living situations, but for the American home all of a sudden, Quote unquote gas pump there.
And so when folks talk about hydrogen cars in some way, that's off the table because the electric revolution has not only proven it's working really well, people are finding it quite convenient. The part where the range anxiety is, is for those longer trips, and that's where we need great electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
And there's money flowing behind that to make that happen. Um,
Halle: why I haven't jumped totally to electric. So my, my Volvo does 40 miles on a charge, which is. On my day-to-day, I never need to get gas, but if I needed to do a road trip, I'd have that option, which is kind of like I, I haven't totally moved over to electric, but I, you know, I've probably filled up my gas tank twice in the last year.
Ryan: Which really means that like for more than you know, 90% of the year, Halle, you're driving an electric vehicle and you know, a thing to throw out on this topic because. This shift to electric or plug-in hybrids is gonna take 10 to 15 to 20 years, right? We keep our cars longer and then just because you, you know, sell your car, someone, someone's gonna use it for, two or three more life cycles.
And so, you know, cities really need to find a way to get people out of vehicles. And when you read speed and scale, we're super nerdy. But , we have found a very innovative thing that cities can do. Which is the protected bike lane. Halle, like it is a
Halle: Okay. Let's talk about the protected bike lane, cuz that's also a public health initiative. I feel like the climate warriors and the public health geeks can kind of come together on this front.
Ryan: Completely right. So number one source of pollution emissions in a city is these cars. And so when they become electric you eliminate that, right? Not completely, cuz tires still produce a little bit of particulates, but you, you eliminate the CO2 emissions piece. But still, that's gonna take too long.
And so the protected bike lane is a way that a mayor who's in office today, or an elected official today can carve up a street, move bikers into it. , which keeps them safer. But then what we saw through Covid and through many studies that have happened in the past two to three years, is when you make biking safer, uptake happens.
It's like this no-brainer kind of thing, right? Like people don't bike in cities because it's dangerous, right? We see too many stories of people getting hit, and the truth is when you've painted a lane on a road or you have what these called or shares, you know, when you just draw an arrow on the street to say, Hey, a biker might be.
Car drivers don't care. That's still their road predominantly. And so when you look to other countries and other cities like Paris or you look to, the Nordic region, you have amazing biking infrastructure, everything from highways to parking, and people use it rain or shine, snow or hot weather.
Halle: and the idea is to get the bike lane closer to the sidewalk so that the parked cars are kind of protecting the bike lane versus the bikers being kind of the buffer between the moving cars and the parked cars. Right?
Ryan: That's right. Cause when, when the bikers are the buffer, by the way, like the, the number one way people get injured is actually doors opening into them. Right. And so, I mean, this is one of those things that can be done. By a sitting elected official today, which is kind of neat, right? You, you set up the plan, you spend a lot less than trying to build an underground subway, or you spend a lot less than trying to like roll out EV infrastructure quite often and you actually get a community alive again, right?
We've designed. The United States so beautifully to make it really easy to move cars around, right? Like we've gotten, you know, asked about grades. We get an a plus for car
Halle: Yeah.
Ryan: in the United States, right? You're, you're from, you know, you're from Ohio, there's these photos of the downtown areas and some of your, the big cities there, and they were gorgeous.
And then we needed to put these really big lanes in the middle of things, and we made these trade offs. . It's not too late to say, okay, cool. We got an a plus on biking. What's the next elective? Okay, the next elective here is making our cities safer. And honestly, when you do this, I think when we talk about the health benefits of it, right?
People are actually being more active,
Halle: Oh,
Ryan: but, but there's also like a, the mental health piece here of being outside of a car, seeing a neighbor, seeing kids interacting with people in a way where,
Halle: Yeah,
Ryan: The culture here in the US is quite often you are in your home. You hop into your car, you go into work, and you come back, or you go to a, we're very sheltered in the way we move.
Yet
Halle: yeah.
Ryan: else in the world, you run into people all the time and that's what makes you human.
Halle: that's what you know, it's interesting. I always say when I moved from Cleveland to New York, the winters were worse in New York because in Cleveland I never experienced the winters because I went from my house to my garage. To, a parking garage at the mall, to a parking lot at school.
And so you never, you know, you never experienced the elements when I lived in New York City. Obviously in the winter, I had to experience all of it. . I do think that there's, uh, certainly a mental health benefit of being outside vitamin D. The lack of stress from being in you know, a, a gridlock, parking on the freeway, et cetera, uh, makes the commutes a little bit more.
Enjoy.
Ryan: There's this beautiful piece in the New York Times, this past weekend about uh, teenagers when they finally get their cars right. I think you and I probably, when we got our car keys, you know, there's this moment of. Empowerment. Right? And it talks about how these, it just really is poetic, right? About them getting their keys, them finally feeling like they can leave their home and they can explore.
And I got all the feels cuz that was me, you know, when I was 16. But now that I've, you know, a lot older and looking back, you realize we kind of trap our kids and our communities. By making you need a car to move around, right? You don't see these nostalgic stories of getting your car being an empowering moment for kids in Europe, kids in Asia and other places, right?
Like for them, they've been able to just get into the bus or take the metro or ride their bike. And it's kind of this fascinating thing that where we keep our kids that don't live in cities that have, good transportation. Locked up till they get a car and that's when they can experience the world and that's really unfair and a toll on their mental health.
Halle: Yeah. Well, I'm gonna plug the Heart of Healthcare episode 15 with Deborah Hersman, who I, you introduced me to who was the Chief Safety Officer at Wemo, and she was the c e o of the National Safety Council board member at the National Transportation Safety Board. And she, we had an amazing episode about Car crashes as a leading cause of death and just thinking about the amount of lives that could be saved if we didn't spend so much time in our cars.
Ryan: It would be radically transformative. And the cool thing about this, like one thing I want to kind of carry through our conversation is, you know, while the book is about climate, you're right, uh, , I am a healthcare person first. We don't have to say the word climate, by the way anymore, Halle, about anything.
And I will tell you why. These actions that we have to take to tackle our climate crisis, improve our lives in such meaningful direct ways. Right? So on the electric vehicle front, it's cleaner air and getting out. Actually out and using your body and experiencing people. Right. And when we jump to the other categories, I can share more about how it's not about always the co2, there's another benefit as well, a health benefit.
Halle: yeah. I mean, environmental health is human. . And we know that a warming planet has a lot of negative impacts on health longevity for so many reasons. I, I mean, there are entire podcasts, uh, where every episode goes into another aspect of environmental health. Uh, but I'm curious, when you were writing this book and really researching the impact on health what really stood out to you?
Ryan: There were a, a few layers, right? There's the health of the planet, and then there's the health of us living in it, right? And so when it comes to the health of the planet, there's this warming number that people keep talking about, right? When you hear it, it's like at Paris many years ago, we set out a target to keep warming to 1.5 degrees CELs.
and that's an important number because that's the average warming since pre-industrial, you know, era that we're trying to keep it to. Right. You know, with all the CO2 and greenhouse gases being emitted, we've warmed the planet and we know that when things get warmer, things change, right? Uh, at the polls, things are melting and getting warmer, changing the weather patterns.
It increases droughts, it increases extreme weather events, and. , when you think about us as humans turning up the dial we're actively doing it and it's up to us to to, to be the generation that says, okay, we're gonna stop this. And it's up to all of us to say how fast we wanna stop this. One thing to kind of share about this one and a half degree number, which I find fascinating or when we talk about it, it's the average warming of the world.
So it includes the warming of the oceans plus the land and what. I find interesting is to up to, up to this point in time, right? That means we've warmed 1.1 degrees already, right? So the world has changed. I think the part that most folks leave out, Halle, is that because of the ocean warming versus land warming, it's actually warmed up a lot more on land, right?
So when you take the two averages, right, it means it's in the oceans. It's only warmed less than a degree, but on land it's already warmed 1.9 degrees centigrade, which is 3.4 degrees.
Halle: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: that is significant. And so I'm sort of trying to play through my head right now of how we as a team can say, you know, the average number is, is good and all, but why aren't we talking about the land-based number, the number that you and I as people experience.
I'm sort of having this public health moment where we're not doing a good enough job translating the science, cuz 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit already warm. Is a lot people actually can, can, can see and feel that. But when we talk about 1.1, 1.5 degrees Celsius, it just, I don't think translates for Americans the same.
Halle: So, you know, I think about natural disasters and how we are seeing an increase in climate related natural disasters. But I also wanna talk about manmade disasters. And it feels like we're operating at a scale that we have never seen before in terms of things that we're doing to this, to our environment.
And I wanna talk about the. Train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio that was carrying toxic chemicals. And, you know, the details are still being sorted on, on what's gonna be the environmental and health impact. But people are saying that they're ill, they're sick. You know, we're, we have big concerns.
Can you talk a little bit about this disaster in particular, and then just why can't we get our shit together and not have big messes like
Ryan: when you look at the current disaster that's happening, right. What's scary about it is that there are, I think, what is a near a thousand derailments that happen every year. . And to your point though, when one, that one happens and the train happens to carry chemicals that are wildly toxic and are entering our air and water stream and killing things, it makes you really question, do we have the right regulatory framework to keep us safe?
We have a lot of. Folks in the political realm that keep saying, cut the red tape, cut back regulations. You know, companies will police and protect, you know themselves, cuz consumers will get upset enough, right? I think that model worked well when companies were a lot smaller, right? And so when a harm happened, it was just in a really small area.
But today companies are so much bigger and are. They carry larger payloads, they're more connected to the world. And so when a failure happens, it hurts a lot more people or it takes down an entire system. And so this moment that's happening in Ohio is this reminder that we need. Really like this is why safety regulations exist.
This is why there's that added tax in that space and when we roll back regulations, this is what we should expect to see happen. And so I hope it's this reminder that, you know, on safety that we can't sacrifice it when we know.
Halle: Yeah.
Ryan: When something like this happens, you don't get to hit the undo button, um, we don't get to hit the undo button when lives are lost. We don't get to hit the undo button. When you decimate an entire little environmental ecosystem it's also then, you know, you kind of move away from safety for a second here, it's also a question and a critique on. Are rail infrastructure in the country as well.
Are we investing enough in it? If a thousand of these happen a year like that sounds like a lot more likely than what's happening in other countries. I think we just need to look deep within us to say what are the right things we should spend on to strengthen our infrastructure? And if it means stronger bridges, roads, and railways and biking infrastructure and all these things, like that's worth our tax dollars going to.
Halle: Yeah, I think so.
Ryan: You know, you, you asked the question a bit earlier too about on the health aspect of it, right? I, I jumped to the planetary health, but human health is actually the thing. We all revolve around. Right. And so, you know, there's a few more areas where the book kind of drew us to, right? There was one really big stark set of studies that showed the delta between socioeconomic and racial backgrounds on greenhouse gas related deaths, right?
And that's really around air pollution. The fact that communities that. Tend to have less money live closer to freeways and places where you have lots of heavy wheeler trucks going by and, and things like that. And there's always this thread to pull. That's an environmental justice piece when you think about this decarbonization fight, right?
You electrify vehicles, you electrify trucks, you push for clean air standards, you help the air quality in those communities. You take away the coal plant that. Upwind or downwind from them, and you improve their ability to breathe. On this topic of the ability to breathe, there's been the recent, um, kind of a multi-part research, right?
Consumer reports was looking into gas stoves and measured the Yeah. The research that consumer reports did found that the amount of gases that were being released when your stove was off, when your stove was burning was shocking, right? It's, uh, you know, natural gas, by the way, is methane and a bunch of other gases, but it's predominantly methane.
When you burn it, it of course produces co2, but it produces formaldehyde and carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides as, as well. and let me actually take that one more time. Uh, just, uh, from where, when you burn it for, from when you burn it, it produces byproducts like formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, and the nitrogen oxides as well.
And it's been shown that nitrogen oxides lead to or related to asthma. And so you have this, this, this study. Rmi, the Rocky Mountain Institute did, which showed that 13% of childhood asthma could be linked or related to the fact that gas stoves are burning in those homes.
Halle: People have. very fancy, expensive gas ranges because we've been told that those are better for cooking. And so now this has become an issue for many more people than you know, we originally thought.
Ryan: Com completely. It, it also, one, I think it, it hits you as a parent, right? You're a parent. I'm a parent. We, we think we do good for our kids when we cook them a home-cooked meal, right? Like sometimes when you go to takeout, that's where you're like, okay, this is where the bad stuff comes from, right? But then all of a sudden to know that when I'm lighting up my gas stove, I am emitting. A harmful set of gases into my kids' lungs. Like that's just really scary. And then when you kind of pull back the research on the ventilation and you realize that not all vented stoves actually vent to the outside, a lot of them just recirculate the air in the space. Right? They use like a charcoal filter and you're like, wait, what?
And then you also peel back one more layer as well too, I think. When you look at the United States, how many people have gas stoves? It's still only like 30 ish to less than 40% of the country, right? So we've got this like sort of desirability effect of gas, right? Cooking over it on one side, which we've been really drawn towards.
But on the other, there's all this research now showing it's not healthy at all. What's sort of neat about the moment in time we're in for electric vehicles, for solar and wind, and in this case, in your home cooking, there is an alternative that exists that's supposed to be pretty darn good. The induction stove, it boils things faster.
It's more controlled. Some of the best chefs in the country use it in their Michelin star kitchens. It's just not popular here in the us, but with. cuz they tend to be a bit more expensive in some ways, like from the inflation reduction act in other places like induction stoves, how it can be a real thing.
Halle: Yeah. Do you think that we should ban gas stoves installing new ones?
Ryan: The stove piece is the, is the hard one, right? Because let's just put back on the speed and scale gigaton hat, right? When you think about natural gas use in the home, like 5% of it goes to the. 95% is actually to the furnace and the water boiler, right? So you're, uh, heating that's happening throughout where you live, as well as to keeping your water warm.
And that's actually the place where the environmental, you know, emissions problem is right for the climate crisis. It's that we need to switch those heaters to heat pumps. And same with those water boilers as well too. What's neat about heat pumps is that they're electric. They're highly efficient, and so the switch to them, Halle, is actually a way for a lot of families to save money.
And to keep their houses more consistently warm. And you'll always hear, you know, heat pumps don't work in the cold cuz they're a heat pump. And what's kind of funny about that is they work really well in the cold and they work really well in places that are not cold as well too. They're just really poorly branded.
Like it is like a thermal exchanger. Yeah. It's a marketing issue. And so to your question of should we be bann. I think you always should give people a choice. And I think when you talk to any parent after they hear this, they go, ah, well I don't think I want that, but can you show me what a good induction stove looks like?
Like we have a long way to go because there's a lot of homes that really, the rest of homes by Bahai that use electric stoves. And this is the old resistance way. And I say old because it's what's been done in the past, right? The coils that when you turn 'em on, it takes a long time to heat and. There's even a marketing piece there to remind folks induction is different than electric.
And so, I think parents are gonna choose to want an induction stove. And then I think when you talk about a ban, it, it really is on the heating. and water cooler size, sorry, water heater side like that. That's where an updated building code can come into play. And just to take that for two more seconds, it's like the way you do it is any new homes built, make sure they're built the right way for older homes.
When these appliances fail, provide incentives for families that can't afford it to be able to switch. And by the way, the Inflation Reduction Act does that right? Provide incentives to make the switch easy, affordable, and.
Halle: So one of the things we're constantly hearing is that eating less beef, uh, is something that we can each do individually, and I've actually read that reducing our, uh, our, our beef consumption is actually more effective than even getting an electric car.
Is that true?
Ryan: Ooh this is . This is where the either or piece, it's like we have to do both. You gotta get the EV and you have to eat less beef. This is, I think, the continual,
Halle: All right. Don't ask too much of us
Ryan: but this is the challenge, right? When you talk about like reducing the emissions of humanity, it's like you can't keep, like it's always.
Different parts of , uh, pointing fingers at the other. And my, my sort of philosophy on this, Halle, is like, if you can afford the cleaner alternative, you should be picking it, right? If you care about the climate, if you care about the future, if you care about kids, and so forth, right? And so a very simple one there is like, if you're gonna spend more than $50,000 on a car, right?
A five seater, you should be buying an electric vehicle. There are not enough vans yet on the market that are electric. There's literally just two, the Rivian and the Model X, and those are very expensive. Right. So you can't demand people to do that. But you asked about beef, and I love that you asked about beef and not the trope of like, oh, you've gotta go vegan to save the planet.
Right. Or, you know, when you look at emissions from all of proteins, yes. Being vegetarian is radically the more carbon. Less submitting, um, option. But when you look at the scale of meat eating, it's actually beef and cheese and lamb that are by far the biggest culprits. Right? And it's because beef and lamb are ruminants, right?
These are animals that burp a lot and produce methane in their burps, which is a greenhouse gas. And so if you eat less beef, there will be less cows in the world to be slaughtered and so forth. And. by just removing that out of your diet or eating it, far less you are making a difference, right? And so I think there's this idea of if you get a chance, pick the lower emitting protein on the menu, right?
If you see a fish on the menu and you were thinking about picking, you know, the pork or something else, like pick the fish cuz it's, it's better. Or if you see something that's made with chickpeas or tofu, do that, right? Like work your way down. And I think that's where you have this plant-based meat movement that's trying to recreate the feeling of meat, but to really go to the bottom of the totem pole in a good way of what, you know, a low emitting protein is with chickpeas and stuff like that.
Or, or pea protein,
Halle: Well, not to plug another one of my podcasts but we had Oh my gosh. Was it beyond, was it beyond Meat or
Ryan: was it Ethan Brown or was it Uh, they're both.
Halle: Patrick.
Ryan: that was impossible, Ben.
Halle: Okay, well I'm gonna start that again cause I don't wanna
Ryan: Yeah.
Halle: Okay. Yeah. So, so to plug to, to plug another episode, we did, uh, an episode with the founder of Impossible Foods and his entire premise was,
I actually don't care about food. I just wanna stop climate change and really taking that approach. But they've, these companies have been under heat lately, right? Like perhaps they're not as healthy as they made themselves out to be.
Ryan: I would say you've got, uh, a hype cycle around them that peaked and has come down to earth. And so these companies have a lot to prove, Halle, right? Like, do they actually taste better? Right? What they found is folks have been picking them, but have they been sticking with them? Right? That's the real, that's one of the real questions and tests.
And then as well as, are they healthier for you? Right? Some of them, right? It's hard to paint the entire industry at the brush because so many. so many different approaches, but yeah, it's a highly processed thing and you have to question that, right? Like, do I want the highly processed version or can I actually just get the, the bean Patty
Halle: Oh my gosh. I love a black bean
Ryan: I know. I,
Halle: take that over fake meat any day.
Ryan: I, um, I kind of went down this, this thing where I like, I love actually the Beyond Meat Impossible Burgers, but I was like, well, what if it, what? Like how hard is it, to make your own kind of bean, you know, Tempe kind of patty with mushrooms and stuff. And I had a lot of fun with it. And maybe I can
Halle: yeah. Share, uh, Yeah. Oh my gosh, yes. We'll share the recipe on, um, on the website. That would be great.
Ryan: a lot, there's so much satisfaction, I think, in seeing your food and whether it's, and, and actually like cutting it yourself and you know, and, and making it, there's, there's joy in that. But then I think you can also know Providence, right? Where did it come from? What , what am I putting in my
Halle: I, I mean, there's nothing that tastes better than something from my garden. I don't know if it's, if the produce is better, but it tastes better. And I think it's like when you're putting the work into it and you're investing the time into having this garden, you watch the development.
You just have an appreciation for every berry, every leaf of lettuce, every stock of broccoli.
Ryan: And so that's the health, right? Like there's a health piece to eating food that's just been picked. And I'll give you the quick climate piece too, which is the distance food travels. Think about that, right? Because that, that's actually a lens. If you're picking between two things, it's like,
Yeah, I get the stuff that was grown locally cuz that was just moved around, you know, the short distance. And that's also something to think about when you think about clothes as well, or all these, like the clothes themselves aren't necessarily a highly emitting thing, but moving them around is, and when we do get, you know, electrified planes and electric vehicle vans and all that good stuff, then yeah, the emissions from clothes moving around isn't gonna be much.
But for right now, when you think. . Just the tax, the carbon tax that comes from moving things, food, clothes and other things. Like that's a real re.
Halle: yeah. Well, when, um, when shipping prices went up during Covid, I noticed a lot of smaller brands using that as a chance to, build local, find manufacturers in the US because the cost of shipping. From overseas was so much higher that it was actually, it was actually making it more comparable.
Um, so it's interesting to think about kinda these external factors and I don't know if those brands have stayed closer to home since shipping prices went down again, but it is, you know, one of those externalities that seem to be good for for brands that made that choice.
Ryan: The, there's a, there's a message we share in the book that it's, you know, the individual actions are expected, right? So eating less beef, doing our best to get that electrical ve you know, vehicle when it's available and things like that. But it's the collective actions, Halle, that make the world of difference, right?
So, advocating for your city to get chargers and protected bike lanes and switching to clean energy to push the companies that we buy from to pick more. Just sustainable practices, right? Where they source, how they power, how they produce, because that's actually where we need to be spending a lot of our energy, right?
It's pushing the larger companies, larger organizations, the government bodies, to help with this fight, right? Because if a company decides right when Apple chooses to. Which they do all the time, by the way, cleaner, you know, recycled aluminum or clean energy, we all benefit from it. When a government says we're gonna phase out fossil fuel of vehicles by 2035, like California has, we all benefit, right?
Like we need. Collective action to step up. This whole idea that you know of the carbon footprint, it's on you. Like it is such an unfair thing that's been put on people's shoulders. Like what we have to realize is that we need to lean on each other, . And guess what? When we do, it doesn't take many of us to put the emphasis in a place we care. and can make things better, right. For our environment, for our health. Right. This cuts across just, you know, saving the planet from a climate crisis. It, it applies to healthcare too.
Halle: sure. So where does it start? Like there's the chicken and the egg problem, right? Like a company's not gonna produce an electric car unless there's demand, but there's not gonna be demand until people have, uh, you know, education, understanding of the benefits of a, a new type of product. So how do you kind of get that flywheel going?
Ryan: It's a great question. So this is, uh, ooh, this is the venture capitalist hat, right? Hall, you're an investor as well too. It's a clean green thing has to compete on two fronts. One is price, right? If you are creating a new, uh, whether it's a food or a way to produce energy or to store it, or to how to move people around, people are gonna look at the costs and say, is it more expensive or not?
And the delta, right, is called the green premium, the cost for why this is more expense. . What's neat is in a lot of places there's not a green premium. There's actually a green discount like solar and wind. So when you're making these purchase decisions, you know, actually electric vehicles, some of them fit in this category as well too.
When you think about the cost of gas and other things, it's cheaper to own. So as an investor, when you see a technology or an approach that has a path to go from a green premium to a. You fall in love with it, right? Because you know the markets will absorb it and get excited by it. The other lens you wear is the performance aspect, which is to your question, if I make a electric vehicle that's not more convenient, that's not faster, that's not performant.
No one's gonna want it. You know, I, I had this wonderful experience in Detroit and got to spend some time with Bill Ford and we were talking about the Ford F-150 and the electric, the lightning one. And he's a grind. Every single F-150 owner knows about this truck and they know about this truck because of the way it performs that it has a battery that it can keep.
And all the benefits, Halle, he was sharing with me were, had nothing to do. A tailpipe emissions or, you know, uh, saving the planet from a climate crisis. It had everything to do with the fact that it was a better vehicle. And so as an investor, when you see that the clean green thing is better performing, you run behind it because as consumers, right, like we pick things that perform better, we like to spend more on those things.
And so, you know, that that's a, uh, a good investment
Halle: Yeah.
Ryan: Unfortunately, oh yeah. Go
Halle: I was gonna say, but you know, sometimes it could be all else equal, but the price. And do you feel like there's a generational thing? Because like, I would, I would spend more money, I do spend more money on like the organic strawberries. Uh, cause I know they're part of the dirty doesn't, but like my parents wouldn't.
Do you feel like there's a, you know, when it comes to like, what's it, you know, environmentally better, what potentially is he better for? Your health tends to be more
Ryan: so, so this is the, the big buck. So I, I, I gave some great examples of where things became cheaper or where it did perform better. But to your point, there are places where the clean green thing is still expensive or the clean green thing is not performing well enough. And so for those areas, we have different ways to Get folks to adopt one.
I think what you see with the support of clean energy is you provide subsidies. You provide an ability for people to bridge that green premium delta. On the performance side though, unfortunately that's one area where no subsidy can , make something taste better, move faster, or get you through the winter.
And so the pressure there on performance goes to the innovator. It goes to the entrepreneur, it goes to these companies that have been in these industries forever, right? Like the cement companies and the steel companies to. do we innovate there to build a better product? And that's why John and I often say, you know, we need the now and the new.
So we gotta scale up the technologies we have today that's gonna get us, honestly halfway there. We can cut emissions in half, but if we want to get all the way to net zero, we're gonna invent, need to invent and invest and scale up new things, right? New ways of storage, new ways of producing concrete, and, and so,
Halle: So you've been a healthcare person and a tech person really for as long as I've known you. What inspired you to get involved in the fight against climate change?
Ryan: I, I, I should go back to, you know, I've always been at the roots of tech person, right? I, um, worked at Salesforce, worked at Microsoft, and then started when, when I started a company, right? Uh, Jimmy and I left Microsoft together and. It was in the enterprise software space. Right. You and, and rock health were the reason that we took a leap or a chance in healthcare, right?
The program and Inve investment fund and, and and community that you created with Rock Health, I think gave people permission to see if they could solve problems in a space that, you know, I didn't have a. Doctor degree or a public health degree. But you said, you know what, I'm gonna find the experts in that world and pair them up with you, Brian, and the rest of the other founders.
And so, uh, , I have to take my hat off and say, the reason that I have spent time in healthcare is because of you and because of what you built. And for that, journey for me was going to DC right after pipette was Aqua hired by Ginger. I. and I got to work on the regulatory side of healthcare, right?
At the Department of Health and Human Services. And then I found myself working on the healthcare.gov rescue. And what's so neat about being kind of a plumbings guy, right? I call myself a plumbings guy, is that, you know, if we can fix the plumbing, the country gets healthier, right? In the, in this case here, people getting healthcare and healthcare.gov, or if you build a better app and so forth.
My journey into climate is a, is an interesting one cuz I, when I worked in DC I, I worked, uh, in the CTO's office, right? This is in the White House executive office building and just down the hall were the folks working on the climate action plan, right? This is back in 2012. They had a plan then Halle, and in my head, in that moment, I always felt like they've got this right.
The climate crisis crisis is real. Al Gore is out there. You have these plans and it's all gonna be solve. You fast forward almost a decade and you realize that, you know, while we had some of the best and brightest working on the problem, they needed us to help as well too. And so my exposure to climate happened five years ago when I started working for John DOR at Kleiner.
He cares a lot about healthcare and so that's why I started working with him. But he also did a world of work in climate and clean tech, and he was part of that first wave of investors and the early demise of that industry to be quite honest, because from that first wave of investment you have companies like Tesla and End Phase and the Beyond Meats and others that ended up doing really well.
But I was exposed to clean technologies, clean tech ecosystem through him. This book started out as a way to help us wrap our head around the problem, to help us say, well, where do we invest? What nonprofit activities need to happen and what advocacy work should, should come to life? And we had these OKRs and we did, we were interviewing folks cuz as engineers and investors, we like to talk to people who know more than us.
and we said we couldn't keep that to ourselves. And because it was covid, we were recording conversations over Zoom and that's where the book was born. And for me, Halle, I realized that I want always to work on something that has meaning and that affects people. And I found that in healthcare, and I find it even so in climate and the work that we do. What I've seen for anyone who's listening that's thinking about, well, I'm not a climate person. Well, nor was I till a couple of years ago. And then when you unpack the problem, you realize climate, quotes right around it. With the greenhouse gas crisis and, and emissions crisis. It's how we move.
It's how we power our homes. It's how we eat, it's how we protect nature, it's how we build things. And you realize it touches everything. And so it's almost this activation that, you know, yes, the colleagues down the hall have the plan, but they need us, Halle, to say, how am I going to shape the work that I'm doing in the role that I sit in to be on the side of our.
Halle: Yeah, I love. What? So you've always been one of my like most optimistic friends in healthcare, which it's hard because healthcare just isn't changing at the pace that we want it to. And then climate, which also is not changing at the pace that we want it to. What would be your message to people who feel overwhelmed or pessimistic by the scale of our climate crisis?
And what, how do you kind of maintain hope and positivity in the face of this global?
Ryan: Ooh, two. Two ways come to mind. The first is being very clear-eyed. I think that's what I learned from trying to build a company in healthcare. Hell, it's really hard, right? In healthcare, you know, your savings is someone else's profit, and. . I find the analogies between healthcare and working in the clean tech space, so similar, right?
Because if I build an electric vehicle, it means a fossil fuel vehicle isn't sold. If I sell you an induction stove, you're not gonna buy a gas stove. And so I think being clear-eyed about the challenge though is really empowering, right? Because, so it then means that, okay, cool, we're all here for the right reason.
The why. So let's get deep on the how and how we're gonna win and how we're actually gonna deliver, not just savings, but a real benefit, right? And so I think that orientation, Halle keeps me, you know, fighting, right? Both in healthcare and in clean
Halle: Love it. Well, Ryan, thank you so much. For listeners, you can find speed and scale an action plan for. Our climate crisis at your local bookstore. Ryan, thank you so much for being here.
Ryan: Halle, thank you for having me.