Creating optimistic and realistic narratives about the future is essential for inspiring collective action against climate change.

In this episode, we meet Steve Willis, an author and innovator, who discusses his climate fiction novel "Fairhaven," which explores solutions to pressing environmental challenges.

Steve emphasizes the need for large-scale projects to address the climate crisis and highlights the potential for industries traditionally seen as part of the problem, like oil and gas, to contribute to the solution. The conversation delves into the importance of fostering dialogue between the traditional energy sector and renewable solutions, as well as the role of storytelling in shaping a compelling vision for the future.

Takeaways:

• Creating optimistic and realistic narratives about the future can inspire collective action.
• The oil and gas industry must adapt to meet climate challenges and leverage their resources.
• The importance of engaging diverse voices in the dialogue about climate solutions cannot be understated.
• Despair in the face of climate change leads to inaction; hope can ignite progress.
• We need multi-million dollar projects to combat climate change at the necessary scale.
• Fiction can be a powerful tool to visualize and communicate potential climate solutions.

Links referenced in this episode:

• storiesforthefuture.com
• Herculean Climate Solutions
• Fairhaven: A Novel of Climate Optimism
• Fairhaven on Amazon

Get in touch with Steve on LinkedIn

The chart and LinkedIn post mentioned in the episode

I dont think that ive ever seen the title of my podcast, stories for the future, be more fitting because today we will talk about the importance of creating optimistic, realistic stories about the future and how those stories can help us find new ways to use our skills, time and resources. Welcome to stories for the future. This is a podcast that aims to make you feel excited and hopeful about amazing possibilities ahead of us.

My name is Veslemøy Klavenes-Berge and I'm on a mission to discover how we can all live good lives, have interesting jobs, take care of our planet, and look after everyone who lives here. I believe that everyday people have the power to shape the future. Together we can create a world that we're all excited about.

Join me on this journey as we explore these ideas and remember the future is in our hands and I'm confident we can make it really good. My guest today is Steve Willis, an author, innovator and chemical engineer.

Steve is not only one of the authors of the climate fiction novel Fair Heaven, a novel of climate optimism, but also one of the driving forces behind herculean climate Solutions, a company dedicated to finding a thousand ways to do a million tons, and that is tons of CO2 we are talking about. Their goal is to find new, massive, undiscovered technologies that will help prevent catastrophic climate change.

I recently finished reading Steves book, which he has written together with Genevieve Hiltone, and I think this is a book for everyone who gets excited about finding solutions to our huge climate challenges. It's also a novel, so it's entertaining and you really get to know the different characters in the book.

And as Steve says himself, that you will probably recognize some of them from your own life. I did, actually.

I also think Steve's work and his book is extremely relevant for this season's topic of building bridges and bursting bubbles in the energy transition. As in the book, so many of the solutions we need rely on people coming from the industries we today see as the problem.

And his examples of how people skills, technology, and even equipment can be repurposed is nothing less than really inspiring. So I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation and then go get the book. Welcome to stories for the future. Steve.

I'm so, so happy that we connected and that I got to learn about your really, really interesting work.

Lovely. Nice to meet you too.

And as you know, this season on my podcast is focused very much on the energy transition, and maybe more specifically on how we can foster a better dialogue between the more traditional energy sector and the renewable climate friendly solutions to our increasing energy need or our challenges. And I think it's especially interesting to talk with people who have an understanding of both sides, and you're definitely one of them.

So maybe you can start, before we jump into everything, by sharing a little bit about your background and how you ended up where you are today.

Yeah, sure, no problem. So I'm a chemical engineer, and I've been living in Malaysia for the last 18 years, and I have worked with large scale industry all of that time.

So my background is catalysts and oil and gas and refining and other chemical processes. So I have worked on some of those sites, but the last big block was working for catalyst suppliers, helping customers within those industries.

So what took me to Malaysia was the removal of mercury from natural gas. So we had a catalyst that did that, and we had one customer. And the very first sites that we working with was really quite difficult.

So I ended up living in Malaysia to help overcome those operational challenges we were facing. And we, once we started doing that, you realized that if this customer has got mercury, what about all the ones around them?

So I spoke to lots of the oil companies and operators in the area and asked the question of, do you have mercury? And they would say no. And then the next question would be, have you tested for mercury? And the answer is no, and will you test for mercury?

And the answer is ridiculous. Meet these people. And they were. The first solution was always denial.

And now, in the context of seeing what the industry's reaction to the climate challenge, of course the first reaction is denial.

But the reality with working on the mercury problem was that the further they got into it, they realized that they did actually have a problem, and they would come back and they would say, we've got mercury on the platform and we really need to do something about it. But the platform's already 200 tons overweight, so how are we going to deal with this situation?

So you'd end up with these long, protracted projects about what needs to be ripped off, what needs to be changed, what needs to be put on, how do you get the weight back in balance? Does the platform need reinforcing and all these kind of things, which is nothing to do with catalysts, what wouldn't work at all?

The practical delivery of the support that they needed. So for quite a few customers, we ended up spending hundreds of millions of their dollars fixing the problem.

So the catalyst piece was a small fraction of that, but it was support across the whole piece. So I did that for ten years out here in Malaysia, and then when the oil price went down, we were all released.

So I ended up doing consulting work, and I still do mercury consulting work now. It's really interesting to, you know, touchstone.

So the, the mercury work continues, but we ended up doing a lot more environmental focused work, including looking for large scale solutions. So where are the multi million ton solutions going to come from?

And that partly came because we were doing some innovation work with a contract invention company in the states, and we accidentally invented a large scale climate solution. They'd asked for a atmospheric water generation system. So pulling water from air in order to feed drinks company water needs in dry countries.

So you pull the water out of the air.

And we realized that this particular odd design, which is still just a design at the moment, if you pushed it and pushed it and pushed it, it would pull the CO2 out of the air as well. And because of the way it was arranged, it could be very effective.

So after stumbling across one, it's like, well, if we can find this really big solution by accident, what can we find if we actually go looking?

So we now have a list of dozens of really large scale solutions, and some of them we've worked with real companies, some have gone into startups and some have gone into fair haven. So the books that you've been reading, so they are based on really real solutions, and we're working on this.

It became very clear that in order to get some of this stuff deployed, we need to interest and engage real people in the wider population, more than just engineers and bureaucrats and stuff. We need some enthusiasm from more people and also to bring more people onto the puzzle.

Yeah. And so let's start with your company called Herculean Climate Solutions. I think it's a great name.

So that company tackles large scale carbon capture and sequestration projects.

And you have told me a little bit about this, but so if you could tell us how you choose your project, how you prioritize which projects to pursue, and how do you ensure that they are scalable to make a significant impact?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So to answer the last piece first, the scalable piece, we've generated a lot of ideas.

So our list of a few dozen workable solutions is several hundred long. And so you end up with the top few. It's like, okay, that is worth pursuing.

And I, we've used what we call the three awkward questions, and the three awkward questions for startups or a solution or whatever are will it work? Will it do a million tons? And is it a negative emission?

Okay, so they when we've been doing startup accelerators and so on, you see the guys on the other side, there are other people who are pitching and I'm so sorry. Yeah, that's just not going to work. You know, you're breaking, you're breaking some laws of physics trying to do that.

And, and all the effort and determination that you're putting into it will be wasted because you won't be able to get past that point, you know, ultimately.

And one of the things about the startup accelerators and so on is that they focus on what's your pitch and what's your team and what's this and what's that, and they don't focus on will it work? And if it won't work, everything else that you've done is totally wasted.

So we've had a few chats on the side with some people, other people in and say you've looked at this and it sounds really neat, but you've missed this point.

So we've helped them on the outside and we've also done direct work with other companies that have been looking for how do they go forward into the future. So one particular recent project we've done was from a european pump company.

They supply specialized pumps to the oil and gas industry and they're already seeing a contraction of their future market. And we've spent some time with them looking at mega trends in industry. So what are the trends within their own industry and around their industry?

And what could you possibly do with this particular type of pump for a climate solution? So the big things going forward are climate solutions.

How do you use this particular type of bump in Nthin, which is related to fixing the climate crisis?

Obviously, most of these markets don't yet exist, but if you are a established company with a real product and you can see a pathway to it, you're in a really good position to push that. Then it's a matter of finding the other part as to work with in order to develop some of these things.

Yeah.

So that would like the big majors in oil and gas, for instance, you're saying that they could be a real solutions to many of the problems because they already have working technology. Yeah.

I mean you've been reading fair haven and the COVID of the book is the large scale rigs to reefs project. Yes. And we've got, and we did, we made it as a nice picture. So you can put the picture on the table and say this is what we're going to try and do.

And as it happens just before COVID we'd got three quarters of the way to setting that up.

So at the time I was working with a offshore supply vessel company and they had done a rigs to reefs project in the region, and they were casting around for other things. I said, well, if you've done a small rigs to reefs project, how do we make a low cost into a really big and effective rigs to reefs project?

And you do that by going to the piece that they've already done, doing the baseline survey of that and an adjacent piece of the seabed, and then using low cost other structure making to a much larger thing. So the reality of an oil platform is that they're the most productive marine habitats in the planet, slightly bizarrely.

And a lovely piece of work was done a few years ago by clays and some other researchers comparing real natural reef with nearby oil rigs. And the real natural reef, you know, was quite healthy and very productive and so on.

And when they compared it to the oil rig nearby, it was 18 times more productive than the natural reef.

Oh, because it's a multi story structure, you know, plus whatever else is going on, inevitably on the platforms, there's some food going in, whether it's as actual food or sewage or whatever. Now there's some nutrient going into the area. But the conclusion was that the bulk of the benefit was because it was a multi story structure.

So where we got to with the trials in Malaysia was, you know, here is an existing piece of work that's already done.

We managed to get the baseline and scanning done of what the fish population was at the time, and spoke to the local governments and the fisheries and the agriculture department and some of the oil companies and so on. And we were casting around for external funding and then Covid arrived. So it was clearly we were not going to be able to do any of that at all.

So we parked all of that, and this year we've been going around the loop again to see if we can get the project funded and going for real. There's more enthusiasm this time, you know, so people have come to me this year and said, how far did he get with the Ocean Orchards project?

You know, we're looking at blue carbon things. That sounded like a good idea.

We'll get it a little bit further along this time, because the, one of the reasons for writing the book in the first place was to explore how these things develop, you know, so if you can get past that first piece and do your first square kilometer of ocean orchards and chains of fishing practices and so on associated with it. How productive can we make it at its peak managed optimum? You know, what's the best we can make of it?

And then how many can we photocopy around the coasts of the world, particularly in the tropical areas, in areas that have already been trawled to utter destruction? You know, the trawlers are an astonishingly damaging process that we've applied all the way around the world.

So it's not about going into a pristine forest and changing anything.

It's going back to an utterly destroyed piece of underwater landscape and trying to take it back to the best thing that it can be, you know, so it's not. You're messing with a Nate natural thing. We've already done that bit. Exactly. We've already trashed it.

Yeah.

How can we restore it to a high optimum? And there was a lot of interest from the oil companies at the time, so we're going to go around and have another rattle at that.

That is interesting, because I wonder about this. How do you get the oil companies interested?

Because as I see it now, the problem is that they're still earning so much on their original, so it's very hard to get them to prioritize more risky projects and. Yeah, these kinds of things.

Totally. Yeah, I mean it really is.

But this time around there seems to be much more interest in where's the blue carbon coming from, you know, or where are they, the carbon credits and offsets and everything for their operations. And it's really interesting to compare it across a number of industries.

KL is a marvelous place where lots of international exhibitions come through every year. And particularly since being outside proper companies, I go to most of them.

So I go to the oil and gas stuff, I go to the palm oil things, I go to the shipping one, I go to the trucks. The trucks was quite fun. And you see all of these things from different perspectives.

And the oil and gas people are really aware of the environmental issue and they would try and do something if they could. Whereas the semiconductor people, interestingly, it wasn't even on the agenda, you know, there was no awareness of it at all.

And they're off heading in their thunderous, glorious new future and impacts climate. They've not heard it.

No.

So it was really interesting to see, you know, the semiconductor industry is growing and becoming very large is nothing like the volume of value going through that the energy industry is at. But its blinkers are on hard, theyre not looking and theyre not aware of the problems, whereas the energy industry is totally up.

The other striking thing about the energy industry is that if we are going to fix the climate crisis, it has to be done at the scale at which the damage was done.

And that means you need multi billion dollar projects, which means that you need people who can do multi billion dollar projects and they are oil, gas, mining and a little bit of construction.

Most construction projects aren't that big, but if we're going to do ocean orchards at scale, it's lots and lots of deployed things and it will use hundreds of boats and lots of finance and lots of interesting technology and eventually employ millions of people doing that and shift the way that fishing is done.

Yeah, that is very interesting. Now we have to talk about your book. As I said, I'm in the middle of reading fair heaven and this is a really interesting piece of work.

I would say it's a book different from everything else I've read, I think, and I have so many emotions coming up when reading it. But yeah, it is. And I think the main ones are the feeling of urgency.

And that has a lot to do with the way that you, the headlines of the chapters because you have this time, place and also time of the day and degrees above pre industrial level.

I know. That's really quite disturbing, isn't it?

It is. So this novel is set into the future a little bit going back as well, as I remember.

Yeah, yeah.

Some of the short stories that are in there, the Titanic one, for example, steps beautifully back to a time when there was no degrees of warming up, a pre industrial, you know.

Exactly.

So I went back and pulled out all, you know, they are real, real temperatures. The ones going forward are my estimates based on the stuff that I've read. But the, the historical ones are the numbers that were there at the time.

You know, so it's the urgency.

And the other feeling is kind of a, I wouldn't say maybe not optimism, but optimism, curiosity, and also kind of this feeling of let's, let's get to work. Let's do it. And it's also because, as you said, you use the book to kind of showcase examples of solutions.

So I keep googling and checking, is this actually something which somebody tried already? And that is also one of the reasons I'm still reading, because I do a lot of research.

As I'm reading, Fairhaven features a group of visionaries and innovators working to bring about climate solutions.

So could you share a little bit about how you develop these characters and their journeys and how they reflect the real world challenges and possibilities?

Yeah. So I was thinking about this yesterday, when I was reading your questions in advance and take three characters out of the book.

So the first is Grace Chan, who's the main protagonist, who we follow through the story, and then our friend and colleague Hans, who's the bit older engineer, and then Sigmund, who's the old chap, you know, the polish project manager. All of them are partly people I've worked with and also partly bits of me, you know.

So Grace Chan, the main protagonist, is a young malaysian engineer, and she starts on a massive new project, and she suffers from climate anxiety, and she's using a journal to try and manage her climate anxiety. And the climate anxiety journal turns into the short stories that subsequently reappear. And that's exactly what I've been doing, you know.

So the writing of short stories, I found a really, really powerful way of distilling how you feel about a thing into a manageable block. There have been a few times where the startups have failed and all that sort of stuff, where it's really, really distressing.

And you can write about a character, describe how that character feels, and close it so you can get to the end so it's not just sloshing around in your head all the time. You know how that character reacted, you know what the end is.

You've got a single word title describing that feeling, and it's done and you can move past it. So it's been a super powerful piece, which is why one of the versions of the Titanic story, so there's been about eight evolutions of it already.

You know, the Titanic story appears as part of a climate anxiety workshop, because lots of people suffer from climate anxiety.

If you're working in the field and you've got climate anxiety, you're starting to understand the extent of the problem, you know, so it's a badge of honor almost to, you know, you have to have the anxiety to show you've understood it, but you also need to be able to live with it and manage it and understand what are you gonna do.

So the early days of Grace Chan is very much coming to terms with all of that and then doing something useful with it, you know, and her role as a young engineer, doing everything that comes to hand, is roles that we've had in the past.

You've been there, and the people on the podcast have been there and listening to the podcast, and they are somewhat the target audience, you know, and. But the young engineers are the one who are out there at the cutting face, seeing and doing and hearing and interacting.

So that's like your base level professionals. And then Hans is like the, you know, half a generation ahead, and he knows he's done some of that stuff and he's responsible for other things.

And his perspective is a bit different. But, you know, I've been that person, and we've worked with those kind of people. And then Sigmund is a really interesting character.

So he's like the seasoned Sifu wise man at the end of his career, guiding and leading and challenging and coaching, but also absolutely crucial part of it. And it shows that together, those three generational blocks can do enormous things, and none of them can do them on their own.

And one thing that's become really apparent to me is when I was at the science fiction convention the other day and someone said, we need to educate the children so that they can sort out the problem. And, yes, we do.

You know, obviously we need to do that, but we need to also suck up our responsibility and do everything we can, you know, because passing the buck on to some poor and unempowered people is massive neglect. That's not what we should be doing.

We should be working generations to generations and working together to bring all of our collective expertise onto those things. So they're the three main characters.

I think it's a very good point with the generations, and in the book, they're actually living together in this apartment and, like three different blocks or ages. So. Yes, very.

And amusingly, my very first job, we lived like that. So one of the guys had a house.

He bought it cheap, and he had some rooms, and there was either three or four or five people living in there from work. And the oldest one was 65. Yes. You know, and we refer to him as dad jokingly, but there was totally the role that he had.

And, you know, it's like spin off all of these wise experiences from his. From his history. Marvelous. Absolutely marvelous.

Okay, we have to talk a little bit about optimism, because in this world, which is a lot dominated by doom and gloom, why have you chosen to focus on optimism? And how do you hope that this perspective will impact readers through the book and the broader conversation on climate change?

Yeah. So optimism is a funny word that means lots of things to lots of people. And it's nothing in my usage of it.

It's not fluffy bunnies and flowers, you know, it's determination and persistence and grit, and that's what gets you through in the end. And it's kind of optimism, but it's also a decision to remain engaged. And again, talking to people at the science fiction thing the other day.

There's so many of these old tropes for dystopian apocalyptic futures, and it's been done and done and done, and, you know, the Mad Max and the road and handmaid sail and all of these sort of things. These are the futures that have been drawn for us to imagine. And when you. I'll send you after a chart that we produced.

I saw the chart. That was brilliant.

So just jumping in here to give you some background information, what we're talking about here is a chart that Steve created and posted on LinkedIn, showing that the fiction created by writers and filmmakers today is mostly dystopian and not very likely even, and that we have this gap and lack of fiction that shows a decent future that we actually want. I will share a link to this post in the show notes so that you can take a look yourself. Now back to the interview.

Yeah, and that gap, you know, the reasonable, decent, livable future and stories written about it, there's almost nothing in there. You know, it's Kim Stanley Robinson's book and almost nothing else we need.

And talking to people at CoP 28 last year, we need a shareable vision of a future that doesn't suck, one that we can aim for and talk about and have shorthand to describe. Because at the moment, people can't imagine a future that's going to be okay. And if they only see despair, they give up.

And if you've despaired, you will fail. You have actively chosen to fail, and that's unacceptable. And I've tried despair. That doesn't work. There's a solution that's not a way forward. So.

Okay, tried that one. Let's try and identify things that will work and find ways to do them.

And the novel is a way of showing a larger selection of possibilities and saying, yeah, I know it's going to be hard, but it's also be interesting. And even if it becomes tough as we go further in, at least you're doing something interesting and positive that's better than despairing.

So I kind of open up that, and there's lots and lots of different jobs. You know, there's fishermen, and I open and pr people and accountants and all sorts scattered through the book.

And if you're an accountant, work on a company that's doing the right stuff and help create a company that's doing the right stuff.

Yes. And that's the feeling that I got.

Like it's not optimism, Rosy red future, but I think maybe the feeling that I'm after is also agency that you get the feeling that you are actually able to do something and that you're an important piece of the puzzle. So, yeah, that's a very important feeling to have. So instead of kind of just hands up, I can't do anything.

And there's a related piece, which is also worth pointing out at this point, is that people are aware of the problem and they realize it's big and large and hard and there's a tendency for people to snatch the first viable excuse. And, you know, it's like, here's a thing, I won't do anything until this has been sorted out.

And they know perfectly well, but it's never going to be sorted out and it just forgives them for not trying harder, you know?

Yeah.

So, and the number of times you like touch this and people say, oh, what about this? What about this? You know, the classic what about kind of questions. Yeah, and, yeah, that's happening.

And yeah, we, and it's going to take a while to flush out and we need to get on with all of these things as soon as we can. And giving up is unhelpful.

Yes.

Only thing we can do and let's do that.

Yeah, exactly. So one word that I'm very focused on is, or to avoid is polarization. So how do you think.

So again, speaking about the oil and gas industry, and it's no wonder that people, when you feel threatened, do you feel your work is threatened or your livelihood that you get defensive? I think I'm just putting myself back like eight years and I totally understand the feeling. I would be there myself, I think.

But how do you think that we can best navigate these challenges and deal with them as a unit or together and avoid more polarization?

Yeah, there's a couple of pieces within that, and there's an abstract one which we've been talking about recently, which is about what is the nature of a company and what does a company do? And it's not just oil and gas, it's all companies. And in some ways, a company is an algorithm. It's a thing that does a thing.

And the goal that it has is to maximize shareholder value. So it's a program that does that.

And these things were set up at either the beginning of the industrial revolution or after the second world war, and their role was to maximize shareholder value because that was aligned with the goals of society at the time. And that's what they've been doing. And they're not sentient, they don't have emotions.

They do exactly what it says on the tin, and they're heading in that direction. And back in the fifties, that's what we wanted, that's what we wanted the algorithm to do, but we've not adjusted it as time has gone on.

So what we're reaping now is the consequences of a runaway non intelligent artificial system, which has done what we asked it to do at the beginning, and we haven't changed its objectives. And so one of the things I think we need to try to do is adjust what the goals are of those companies.

And it sounds very difficult to do, and you know, and I know that it is hard, but a few tweaks within the companies to adjust the direction would actually be extraordinarily powerful, because you've got the big companies and they have the structure and they can do multi billion dollar projects, and if they're doing projects which are part of the solution, more than part of the continuing problem, they will gradually switch over to that. So I think that's one aspect of it. And again, using fiction as a tool to anticipate a future.

One of the projects we looked at was large scale mineralization. How do you do multi million ton CO2 mineralization through olivine, as an example. And there's going to be massive operations.

And if some of these big companies, mining companies, oil companies, shuffle into that direction, all their skills are still fully applicable to that.

And then all the fundraising and all the lobbying and all the management and all the other has up things and everything else that they do, those are the skills that are going to be necessary for these big operations, and they just need to shuffle a little bit to include some of those. And gradually the oil and gas things will diminish with time. They won't disappear over time.

But the, the continued acceleration of the use of fossil fuel fuels is something that the system can't. Can't take anymore. It could in the fifties, but it can't take it now.

No, true. Yes. So in a way, trying to. So that is my vision that the oil and gas companies, or other companies as well, not only oil and gas.

I mean, particularly, I mean, stage in the story now where the stories are becoming, making the little journey into Hollywood and all that sort of stuff, that's a tool that needs to be adapted and used. And every one of the existing industries are tools that will either be adapted and become part of the solution, or they will cease to exist.

Yes.

So things like gambling, for instance. Now, I find particularly being back in the UK, there's far too much gambling because they loosened the restrictions ten years ago.

And it's an extraordinarily predatory system. Destroying the lives of the poorest makes a load of money, but it's a different form of drug dealing.

It's really destructive to see it, especially seeing the step change of s and seeing it from. As an outsider's perspective, and that as an industry doesn't have a future. Pure predation doesn't have a future.

You know, we need to find a way of either closing it or changing it or doing something with it. And that's a small example of what will happen to all industries, you know, what will happen to the food industry and large scale agriculture.

They all need to change quite dramatically.

And one of the beauties of using fiction is you can imagine what it looks like and talk about the people who live there and they say, I want to be like Albert living out on this thing in Iowa, and that's what I want to aspire to, and give people a simple little handle of the type of things that are out there that they could be.

Yes, yes.

So speaking of fiction, we need to talk about where you have spent some time recently at Worldcondental, the World Science Fiction convention in Glasgow. And as a self proclaimed futurist, I think it sounds so exciting and I would love to go there sometime.

But first of all, what do you got from the convention or the event? And also how fiction is so important for how we deal with this climate change issues and how.

How is this community also growing into these or using their skills to help with these challenges?

Yeah, I mean, there's multiple layers I'm still digesting, so I'll get there in the end. It was a lot of fun actually.

You know, what, what could be done with a voluntary organization at this kind of scale? So that was really cool. And I. But just picking on the point we touched on before about the climate fiction and the science fiction.

Climate fiction, tiny subset of the larger genre, but the utopia dystopia futures is a core piece of a lot of science fiction and a lot of it assumes that there's been some kind of terrible disaster and these are the people who are recovering from it. And there's a lot of very dark material in science fiction.

But when the chart that we were talking about a minute ago, when we eventually got up on the screen, half of the people in the audience stood up and took a picture of that, and it's like, oh, wow, I hadn't realized that there was this hole in this thing that we were doing. And many of the people who are there are either authors or budding authors or aspiring authors.

And they said, well, there's an opportunity to write something that actually encourages people to get engaged because so much of the genre is so dystopian. They say dystopia is a great way of teaching people to be concerned about it, and that's partly true.

But the people who are motivated by that have already been motivated by that.

Yes.

And hitting them that with the same stick, again, going to help. But you know, that vast tranche of people who are trying to ignore it or are more interested in football.

If you can give them something which is a bit more encouraging and a bit more interesting and engaging and from a different angle, you're going to catch another slice. You won't get all of them, but it's like layers and layers of people.

So there was a lot of interest in where the plausible solutions are and how you write an engaging story about a thing being solved, you know, and it's like, in some ways, when you're writing dystopian stuff and, you know, they're dragging their stove, sells through the mud and, you know, running away from the cannibals or whatever it is they're doing, they're solving a set of problems because that's the way the story is.

But if you start from today and you solve a set of problems and avoid that catastrophe, is still solving a set of interesting problems, which is great. And it's a lot more engaging to write because it's like, okay, how do we solve that political transition? When you've got to this point?

How does that smallish thing become a massive thing and how do you enable that? And those are the kind of questions we need to be exploring.

Yes, at least, I would love everybody to read your book. It's fantastic and it's very much engaging and very, very inspiring. Where do people find it?

Yeah, it's on Amazon, so it's called Fairhaven, a novel of climate optimism. It is in bookshops in Malaysia and Hong Kong.

We're in the process of getting it into bookshops in the UK, which is another really interesting challenge. So, like, all of these fields are unfamiliar. Getting to publishers and agents and distributors is another one of those pieces that you have to learn.

Yeah. Everything is a learning process. That's true.

Yeah. So our plan for the story. So it's like a 50 year arc, but Fairhaven explores the first 15 of that 50.

So it was written to be ready for Cop 28, the climate conference in Dubai, which has just gone.

And the previous book, which was called no more Fairy Tales, was a collection of short stories we wrote for Cop 27, and we'll have a book for Cop 29 this year. And then we're aiming to follow the cops going forward.

So we're looking for four or five books as a set of sequels, explaining and exploring all of the pieces in the ark. That story arc, because the fair haven concentrates on two really big pieces. So there's the ocean restoration that we talked about, the reefs.

Reefs, and the other pieces about refreezing the Arctic. So when you talk about refreezing the Arctic, people say, don't be ridiculous.

But when you actually push at it, it is existing equipment with existing available teams, and you need to fund some decent trials.

But once you have a system going, our rough calculations show that the albedo credits that you would be able to generate from that have a CO2 equivalent, so a carbon credit equivalence. And our rough calculations are that a square kilometer of long term ice, multi year ice, is about 100,000 tons of CO2 equivalent.

And you could probably do that. And then there's. What is the value of that? Right. You know, because it's not permanent. Permanent.

But it's one of the beauties of the refreezing the arctic thing is that it is solar radiation management, but not spraying sulfate into the eye atmosphere actually quite difficult to do. And it's using a technique which we had until just a few decades ago. We know we had that ice.

We're just taking on the responsibility, the duty to maintain it. And that's a thing that we can do.

And the principle is to take small ice hardened tugs and offshore supply vessels and pump seawater onto freshly formed sea ice in the winter. So you turn thin sea ice into thick sea ice, which lasts multiple years. And if you can do that, you can start managing the inventory of ice.

Obviously, you need a lot of boats and you need a lot of guys and you need a steady way of making the cash flow work. But at least in the fictional modeling kind of works, which means that if you press it fairly hard, we probably find a way to make it work, you know?

And there are already some teams working on this.

Yep. Yeah, there's four small teams working on it. They need as much funding as can be thrown at them. But it's really heartening that, you know, they.

When we first started writing the stories, there was one, you know, so there are teams coming into it and you will have read in the story. The first 1st trial would be done in Hokkaido, where there's temporary sea ice, February and march every year.

So you can do the trials on ice, which disappears anyway. So, you know, the, the risk of doing harm is very small. So you could find out how effective the, the various different systems would be.

And in Japan you've got access to everything. There's airports and trains and trucks, and you can get all your equipment and hire everything you need.

And the food's great and you're not bioctic, you know, so you can do an awful lot of work conveniently in a place where, you know, the precautionary principle is avoided anyway because it's not a permanent effect you're having or effect you're having. So the fiction is a lovely way of pushing the, you know, how can we have a nice scenario for this? Yeah.

You know, well, if this isn't exciting and interesting to people, I don't know what is. I hope people will just dive in and explore more. I will share everything, every links in the show, notes that will be super.

We're looking for other large scale solutions to include in future sequels.

Right.

So I have some that I'm planning to use, but I know that I don't know them all. So I'm interested in hearing what other people think. And I, you know, have a glorious goal to deliver and writing into a story.

We have a lovely one about expanding the range of mangroves and improving the management of mangroves and, you know, putting forests where they can never be, forest using saltwater agriculture in effect. So there's some lovely, really, really big scale solutions which are super fringe at the moment.

And writing them into a story is great, you know, increase engagement by doing more of that.

Absolutely. So if people want to get in touch with you, is LinkedIn the best place?

Well, LinkedIn is the most convenient way. Yeah, I look at that on a regular basis and. Yeah, that'd be lovely.

Yeah. So I will share your contact information. Thank you so much for a very, very interesting hat.

Absolute pleasure. Absolute pleasure.

Thank you so. And good luck with your future work and your future stories.

Thank you.

Okay, so I just have to repeat a couple of things that Steve said because they are so important for how we think about this transition we're going through. Number one, and I quote, if we're going to fix the climate crisis, it has to be done at the scale at which the damage was done.

And that means you need multi million dollar projects, which means that you need people who can do multi million dollar projects and they are oil, gas, mining and a little bit of construction. We need to stay away from this shame game that we're playing at the moment, alienating large industries. That will be a huge part of the solution.

And then number two, we need a shareable vision of a future that doesnt suck.

So by creating optimistic and realistic narratives about the future, we can inspire the larger population and make people see how they can be needed in this future. I just have to repeat this one last time. Go out and get this book fair, a novel of climate optimism. Im so certain you wont regret it.

And also take Steve up is call to action about getting in touch. If you are working on or if you have knowledge about any large scale climate solutions.

All the information you need is in the show notes and then finally any feedback you have is very welcome.

If you know people I should talk with companies or organizations, anyone interested in this very much needed conversation about how we manage the huge challenges of the energy transition and you know it by now. I want all angles and perspectives. You can reach me on storiesforthefuture.com or via LinkedIn.

Thanks for listening, take care and I will be back very soon.