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Episode Transcript

Bernie Zahren
We are outrunning our ability to sustain our planet. It’s that simple.

Tan Deleon
On behalf of the members of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, welcome to this episode of Learning and Living STEMM in Connecticut, the podcast of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. My name is Tanimu Deleon. I’m an elected member of the Academy and serve as an officer for its governing council. For more information about the academy, please visit www.ctcase.org. Our topic today is business-focused sustainability initiatives to reduce emissions that contribute to climate change. Here to discuss what we should know about this and what is happening in Connecticut and across the country, is Bernard J. Zahren, the owner and founder of Zahren Financial Company, a limited liability corporation. With his company, they manage Clean Feet Investors I, a private multi-million dollar investment fund. He is also an honorary member of the Academy. Welcome to the show. Bernie. Good to have you.

Bernie Zahren
Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s my pleasure.

Tan Deleon
If I could, let’s start with understanding more about Clean Feet and its investment portfolio.

Bernie Zahren
Certainly, I had worked with a gentleman by the name of Jigar Shah for a number of years when he was he was running something called the Carbon War Room a number of years back for Sir Richard Branson, and they were trying to build a large endowment to essentially fight the ever-present threat of a worsening planet from too much carbon emissions and other, you know, methane emissions and other harmful emissions that are causing a warming of our entire planet. In 2010 Jigar Shah and I started the very first Clean Feet Investors Fund, Clean Feet I, and we were offering it to accredited investors, which is defined as someone worth a million dollars, excluding their residence. But other than that, there were no restrictions. We took in investors over a period of several years. We raised just over $25 million and then we had the challenge of investing in sustainable assets that we also hoped would give our investors a good return, and that worked very, very well. We did solar PV projects. We did several greenhouse and hydroponic greenhouse projects. That was probably our most successful investment. There was a company called Bright Farms, which ultimately was acquired by the Cox family office for $100 million, and so they saw the benefits of a hydroponic supply of food for the future when we start running out of farmlands and having problems distributing enough sustainable food to the world.

So anyway, Jigar and I ran that fund for a number of years, and the investors did very well. They all made well over twice their money, plus we had certain tax benefits, such as an investment tax credit for solar panels, for example, which we could pass through to them. And so that was, that was Clean Feet I. Clean Feet II we started about three years ago, and we have raised money on that as well, made investments on that again, in some solar applications, we have two different greenhouse investments. One interesting thing for the people of Connecticut, which I find intriguing, is that only 4% of the food consumed in the state of Connecticut comes from Connecticut. Now we’re, obviously, we’re not a big farming state like out in the Midwest or whatever; we don’t grow acres and acres of corn and then go feed it to the cattle, you know. But, it still highlights the fact that we do not sustain our own viability, if you will, from within our state, and so that’s why we feel that we’re building a very large greenhouse right now, which is an investment in Clean Feet II in Bristol, Connecticut. We bought a 21-acre parcel and and building the first phase of that greenhouse. So we we believe that the greenhouse model is important when you come into this time of year, into the winter months; most of our produce – let’s use lettuce as the prime example – is grown in California, Arizona, and Mexico. It has to be harvested. It has to be put into a warehouse, where it’s picked up by a refrigerated van that has to travel over 3000 miles to get here to Connecticut. It’s not a sustainable thing to run a refrigerated van that far and use that much energy. When the truck driver has to take a break, he has to stop and plug in his refrigerated van. So you use up a tremendous amount of energy just getting lettuce here to go out on a supermarket shelf.

And then to add to that dilemma is that all those if you go into a supermarket, you’ll see every, every one of those clamshell plastic containers with lettuce in it has a sell-by date. Well, the sell-by date is, you know, usually only four or five days after it goes on the shelf. And at that point, the supermarket says, well, we that, you know, the consumer is not going to buy something that says it’s already past the sell-by date because it’s probably bad. So then they either throw it away, or, in many cases, hopefully, they give it to a soup kitchen or someplace, because it is still a usable vegetable.

So that’s sort of a, you know, a broad picture of where we’ve been with Clean Feet I, and now with Clean Feet II, which we’re now closing down for new subscriptions, and, you know, we’re looking ahead to what, what would happen next. But our mantra is that we’re helping companies that otherwise might not have the financing or the equity to put into their product. That’s number one. And number two, we’re helping spread the technology that we feel is badly needed to overcome the fossil fuel problem that we have. You know, we’ve lived off of, if you go back and look at the research, we’ve lived off of coal – initially coal – I just bought this book, and the name of it is More and More and More. It’s a history of the use of energy going all the way back to, you know, when people first started burning wood for fire to, you know, cook some meat off of some animal that you hunted down, maybe with a spear going back far enough. But the whole evolution of it is we just need to consume more and more and more energy, which is going to use more and more of our resources. And that’s our problem. Our problem is we’re using more energy than we can logically and economically produce, and so that was, was the first premise of the fund that Jigar Shah and I had started. Also, we took pride in the fact that we were helping start companies that otherwise wouldn’t have the capital to perhaps start their own business. So that’s, Tan, that’s a, you know, a broad based spectrum of where we’ve been, and we hope to continue to fight sustainability in any way we can. You’ve been very helpful to us as well in helping us find suitable investments for the funds, and we appreciate that very much.

Tan Deleon
Yeah, no, no, I definitely appreciate the great summary, a lot of good detail there, and obviously a lot of good nuggets of things that we need to consider and think about. But I want to, actually want to touch a little bit more on what you mentioned with hydroponics, I believe, is the term. And you know, so you did mention that you’re building a facility in Bristol, and, you know, trying to get the food much closer to where it’s actually consumed, as opposed to trucking it in, as you mentioned before. So can you, can you share a bit more about what is hydroponics? How does it work, and how can people in Connecticut benefit more from hydroponics going forward?

Bernie Zahren
Okay, hydroponics, as the term would imply, means you’re growing something in water. And what we build is these large arrays of ponds, really, they’re, you know, they’re three, four feet deep, and you’re constantly dealing with testing and enhancing the essential elements that go into the water. Obviously, water, just water out of the tap, is not sufficient with nutrients to, let’s say, grow ahead of lettuce. So we’re constantly monitoring what’s in the water and how it’s being affected by the nutrients that we add. We’re not we don’t want to use, we want to use as much natural nutrient as possible. But you know, fertilizer is fertilizer. You’ll, you’ll put various types in. We had an early experience with one of the greenhouses we built for Bright Farms, which was in the first fund, where the people building the greenhouse said, Well, we would like to have both lettuce and tomatoes because both are a product that, you know, lose their shelf life if they sit around too long. So we built the first one near Philadelphia, and it turned out that that was a problem, because lettuce likes a cooler, more moist atmosphere to grow in, and tomatoes are the opposite. They like a hotter, more humid environment to grow in. And furthermore, when when you’re going to grow tomatoes, you have to have a pollination of those little flowers that come on. So you got to put a bunch of bees in there, and they pollinate the the tomatoes. But, but we found very quickly that the two crops were not compatible at all, so we took out the tomatoes and made it an entirely lettuce-based growing facility. But that was one of the very difficult learning experiences we had with hydroponics.

But today you can grow a lot of things. People were dreaming about blueberries and other types of things that could be grown in a water-based hydroponic system. And so we’re working with this outfit, H2O Farms, that’s the Bristol one that’s being built. They’re based out of Israel, and Lior, who’s the head of that company, has been designing and building greenhouses all over the world for a number of years, and he keeps coming up with new, new iterations of what you know, what things that, that they think they can do, but it the benefit here in Connecticut is we’re going to pick up a head lettuce. We’re going to put it in a plastic clamshell, and it’s going to go directly to the distributor, who’s going to put it in the supermarkets immediately. There’s also a demand nationwide for this. Some of the produce, is actually taken fresh all the way to Toronto and put in storage containers and flown over to Europe, where they have same problem we do, especially in the wintertime. They don’t have any fresh produce and very little capacity to grow it. So that you know, the distributor here on the East Coast is saying, I will buy all the lettuce you guys can produce because I have a home for it, not just in Connecticut or in the eastern United States, but literally all over the world because of today’s transportation systems. That’s not the most sustainable. You know you’re going to you’re gonna have a truck take it to Toronto, and then you’re gonna have a plane fly it to Europe. So you are using additional resources in that process. So we’d much rather be able to build more greenhouses closer to the markets and diversify in that in that regard, other than that, hydroponics is not that complicated. I mean, you can they sell even home kits where you can grow some things at home with the proper additional elements that you can add to a water-based growing method.

Tan Deleon
So temperature regulated. And I think, please correct me if I’m wrong. But one of the things about hydroponics is you don’t have – there’s no, there’s not a lot of pesticides, right? Is that accurate?

Bernie Zahren
The goal, the goal is zero, yeah. You don’t want to let any, any, uh, outside pests in, and in the event you do, then you probably have to sanitize your whole facility again so that they don’t propagate and expand. So they, they go to great lengths to keep, you know –  they’ll have double airlocks, for example, when employees are coming in or not, to make sure they’re not carrying in a bunch of beetles or something on their back shoulder, you know? So, yeah, it you have to take good care of your growing practices. We have a greenhouse in the Chicago area, and they wanted to get it not just as pure as possible but they wanted to sell it to the kosher market in the Chicago area.

Tan Deleon
That’s a big market.

Bernie Zahren
That’s even tougher, because the rabbi who certifies it as kosher has to come in on a regular basis, and if he finds any living bug whatsoever, he could, he could yank your certification. So but, but they were able to overcome that. They have sold a significant amount of produce to the Jewish community in the Greater Chicago area as kosher, and that gets a premium, so that, you know, there’s again, another offshoot from the basic business here. We’re not going to try to produce kosher in the new Bristol facility, because we have an off taker for everything we can produce to begin with.

Tan Deleon
So yeah, so that’s, that’s, those are, those are definitely some key points that you just made. So do the cost savings of not having to truck this from a far distance or transport it from a far distance get passed on to the consumer? Like, what’s the benefit to the consumer, at least the Connecticut consumer, besides the fact that they’re getting fresh produce, something that’s, you know, I’ll use the term organic. It may be a better term for hydroponics. Maybe it’s beyond organic, just because of the way it’s grown, in the fact that, you know, there’s no pesticides and there’s not a lot of additives, etc. But from, from the Connecticut consumer, you know, like, what’s the, what’s the advantage, beyond just the fresh produce that they’re going to get, especially fresh produce in wintertime.

Bernie Zahren
Well, hopefully, you know, a slightly reduced selling price, because we’re not transporting it 3,000 miles from Southern California. Secondly, the supermarket operator recognizes this, too, so he’s able to perhaps give the consumer a small price break compared to something coming from a lot further away. But the most important is that it’s totally fresh. It totally still has all of its nutrients, which, you know, they can dissipate, you know, in a week or so, you know. So that that that’s one thing. Now, there are other places, you know, like you can, you can go into some of the really upscale supermarkets where they they leave vegetables out open space, you know, and then you pick what you want. But the plastic clamshell for head lettuce and for leafy lettuce is pretty standard now. You don’t see much of the you’re not going to see a whole tray of leaf lettuce laying out in the middle of the the store and with people just grabbing a handful and putting it in a bag. You lose a lot of the sanitary conditions that way too. So you know, the benefit is mostly longer useful life, some of, some of the head lettuce that we’re growing now with the H2O Farms, people also have a smaller facility done in Guilford. And we’re, we’re, we are invested with that as well. They leave the roots on the lettuce and tell the consumer if you put water in if you put this in water and put it in your refrigerator, it’ll last for a couple of weeks before there’s even a drop in either the taste or the nutrient value of it.

So again, Europe is quite a bit ahead of us. You know, you’ve probably read about how the Dutch grow a very large percentage of all their food now in greenhouses because it’s, it’s, it’s more efficient than they’ve learned how to out of, how to cut it down to the nub in expenses, even though they historically have had, you know, they’ve built the dikes and everything so they could have more farmland years ago. Now they’re saying, no, we don’t want the farmland, we want a greenhouse. We want an all-year, all-climate growing facility. So that, I guess, I don’t know, is that enough on the local basis, Tan?

Tan Deleon
The key points I think that you made is like, you know you’re you’re getting a longer shelf life, right, for the product? You’re also getting a more nutrient-dense product, right, as opposed to, because, don’t because, as you mentioned, trucking it over a certain amount of miles, you’re reducing the nutrient value right from when you pluck it and bring it to the consumer. So I think those key, those things in general, and then potentially, you’re also saving, passing on savings to the consumer. Those are, those are three major checkpoints, at least for me as a consumer, then you would get from other products on the market, and then you’re also getting the concept of not having, you know, a lot of pesticide use and getting the quote, unquote, you know, organic stamp on it, so to speak. So, yeah, no, this, these are tremendous things that I don’t think people really consider.

I think one thing that maybe someone you know, you know, one of the staunch advocates out there, might be like, well, why is it in a plastic clamshell? But I mean, you did say that you know, it’s in a clamshell because it’s going to produce, it’s going to extend the life of the product, as opposed to it just being out and then people touching it, right? Because that reduces the sanitary or hygienic quality of the product as well. And I’m sure those clam shells are recycled or made from recycled consumer, post-consumer use. So, so you’re, you’re basically hitting all points from a sustainable standpoint. So, one thing I do want to kind of shift – Conference of the Parties the COP 29 – so what do you think needs to potentially happen in order for us to maybe move the needle? I did see, you know, just in passing that, you know, the new collective, quantified goal. You know, they raised it from 100 billion to 300 billion for, you know, the smaller countries, the developing countries, because their impact is not as large as the developed countries. But is that really enough money to do what they want to do by 2035? I mean, it seems like not a lot. And, yeah, I don’t know if you want to just expound on that…

Bernie Zahren
Yeah, I mean, you can add zeros to every, every need we have for capital to put into not just more sustainable features for people, they take these island nations, which some of them are already seeing sea level rise that’s encroaching on the size of the of the nation, you know. And they’re saying, what happens? You know, my biggest fear is the ice melting. You know, we’re seeing it. We’re hearing about it. We’re not paying enough attention to the fact that, for example, Antarctica has a couple of these huge ice shelves that are hanging out, literally hanging out over the edge of the ocean. And there’s grave concern by the scientists that it’ll just crack off. One of those ice shelves could raise the sea level rise around the world by several inches. Well, several inches, you know, you southern Florida is, is not inhabitable any longer. You know, the Everglades are already almost at sea level. And if you, if you raise sea levels all over the world, you’re going to raise more flooding.

A friend of mine spent a lot of time in Bangladesh. He was a priest who went over there to to minister to the to the people. The lower southern part of Bangladesh is at sea level, and a sea level rise of six to eight inches, a third of the country will be underwater. And so, how are they going to survive? The people can move, but they’re already overpopulated. And how do you feed them? How do you take care of them? How do you give them the services that we have the ability to enjoy here in our country? But how do you give those to the billions of people? We’re headed – we’re at 8.1 billion population of the world today. The prediction is we will, won’t peak until we get to 10 billion. Well, you know, that’s another 25% increase in the population of the world. And they have to be fed, they have to be cared for, they have to have medical attention, etc. We are outrunning our ability to sustain our planet. It’s that simple. You know, let’s talk for a second about what we’re going to hear a lot about in the coming weeks is the fact that we passed the Inflation Reduction Act. It provides additional benefits, such as tax credits, etc, to deploy solar, wind, and hydroponic water and store water above a certain level so that at night you can pump it up. And during the day, when your demand for electricity is high, you can allow it to flow back down.

Tan Deleon
Oh, just like a dam.

Bernie Zahren
The next night, you know, it’s you’re using energy to pump it, but you’re giving people power at the peak of the day when they need it the most. And you know, we’ve had some blackouts here in the in the Northeast here recently; some of them were because of storms and trees down, but some of them were also because our utilities can’t quite meet the demand for service. So building what we call micro-grids has a very attractive future, where you could put distributed generation – battery storage is getting cheaper – so you can store during the daytime, when the sun is out and you don’t need, let’s say, air conditioning or heating or whatever, you can store it and then use it on the hours when you need it more that that’s a big coming future for investment, for the types of investment funds, like we have with Clean Feet Investors.

But the other side of that is that the technology innovations are very dramatic. You know, we’re hearing all about this artificial intelligence, etc. Well, that’s great, and it might, it might indeed lead to scientific and better living long term, but artificial intelligence takes massive amounts of power to calculate all this stuff, you know. So it’s not, it’s not like, oh yeah, they did just turn the machine on, and it’ll tell you how to do this. It’s going to need power. It’s going to need power 24/7 because that’s the kind of model that that that we’re, we’re going to build there. So we have, we have political challenges as well as economic and environmental challenges. My focus is much more on the environmental side, where I’m hoping we can continue to progress in making energy and providing sustenance to the world without degrading our natural resources and destroying a future for our planet.

It’s a tough – it’s a tough world. I have seven grandkids, and I tell them all the time I don’t know what kind of world you’re going to live in after I’m gone, but 30, 40, 50 years from now, I’m not very optimistic that it’s going to be better than it is today. It should be, because we have the technology to do it. But do we have the willpower and the dedication to it that I think we need?

Tan Deleon
So, so how do we? How do we remove so, you know, as a business leader and as an investor, a successful investor, I might add, what is your advice to other business leaders to help destigmatize sustainability, right? Because, I don’t know, I mean, in some realms, it’s almost like it’s a bad word or something. You know.

Bernie Zahren
There’s a lot of scary things going on. We’re not trying to solve those problems. But indirectly, we are, you know. I mean, Ukraine’s number one product has been sunflower oil. Over many years, they export many, many containers full of them. They get transported out of the Black Sea and into the world. They couldn’t process nearly half of their crop this year because of the turmoil that they were just defending themselves. So what do we need? We need environmental justice. We need political justice, and we need peace, and the ability to recognize that breakthroughs in China can help breakthroughs in some small island nations in the Pacific Ocean. The Paris Accord was a very important part of the dedication to this a few years ago. And you know, everybody has to go at their own pace. Everybody has to look at themselves and say, “What am I doing?” You haven’t had the chance to come up to see my my environmentally sustainable house, but I hope you can sometime.

Tan Deleon
Oh yeah, no, I wanted to. I was gonna ask you about that, because I’ve heard, I’ve heard really good things about it. So I mean, if you, if you want to talk about it now that’d be great. Because I was actually gonna, you know, let people know that, you know, he puts his money where his mouth is, like he’s not just preaching about the stuff. He actually is doing it. And please, please go ahead.

Bernie Zahren
Yeah, yeah. So I bought a house in 1989. It was already like 40 years old and being run down, not in great shape. I lived in it for 10 years, and then I decided I needed to remodel this thing. So we tore it down to the basics, and we rebuilt it with every environmental benefit we could add. I put in a 15 kilowatt small wind turbine, and I’m up on the top of a ridge, and so I get very good wind up there, so I create my own sustainable power with the wind turbine. Then I put solar panels on the roof, some for making electricity, and net metering that into the grid. But I also have some solar thermal panels where I preheat my hot water and send it down to a storage tank in the basement so that I have hot water when needed. But the most important things we did were we put in super good insulation in the walls, and the ceilings and the windows are all double pane, you know, enhanced.

The views are good from the top of this range, so I do have quite a few windows, but they’re all very, very efficient. So, you know, I’m trying to live in a net zero environment, and most of my electric bills, all I’m paying is a service charge for the utility to read the meter and send me a bill and give me, you know, give them rather a little bit of overhead coverage. But most months of the year, I’m able to get down to almost a net zero energy use, and that was a primary goal. Other things that we’re doing is in, you know, how we fertilize or how we utilize water, and what have you, to be as sustainable as possible. Now it, you know, it’s costly, you know, to renovate the house and to put all these amenities in cost more than a normal house would. But I can say we’re living in a home that is a net zero energy home.

Tan Deleon
And your ROI, what do you think your ROI will be?

Bernie Zahren
It’s not; it’s not fantastic, it’s not 20%, I’m afraid.

Tan Deleon
Okay.

Bernie Zahren
You know, the investment was well worth making. But you know, it’s been 10 years now since I did the renovation. I have not gotten to net payback yet by any means. You know, but you know…

Tan Deleon
But that was, that was probably also because it was, I mean, it was also 10 years ago. So, I mean, in the last 10 years, technology has come a long way. In the next 10 years, technology will come even further. And as a result of that progress, hopefully the cost also follows suit as well with that progress, wouldn’t you say, or?

Bernie Zahren
I agree. You’re seeing – do you know the PACE Group – People’s Action for Clean Energy?

Tan Deleon
I’m not familiar, no.

Bernie Zahren
Okay, well, they’re here in the Hartford area. Two guys who started a nonprofit. I went to an all-day session of theirs two weeks ago, and they’re promoting things like heat pumps, which are more efficient than burning a fossil fuel or using electricity to heat and cool your home and and it’s working. You know, the heat pump cools your house in the summer, heats your house in the winter, and is kind of neutral in between, I guess. But using the natural resources of the earth. You know, if you go down more than about five or six feet, you hit a constant temperature of the earth, and so you can pull that that up to cool down to that 50-degree temperature in a heat exchanger for the summertime, and in the winter, you do the reverse. You bring up a temperature of 50 degrees, and you put it through a heat exchanger so you can heat your home. And so that’s how I heat and cool the house is with the geothermal system. And I have three wells that go down about 100 feet a piece to pick up or drop that energy at below that frost level. So there’s so many of these things that, you know, the technology is getting better. If we can get the consumer to adopt it, they will have a lower consumption of energy and still be just as livable as if they used more.

Tan Deleon
So maybe you know, so just, you know, hearkening back to the discussion about, you know, how we take the stigma away from sustainability, the word sustainability, you know, I mean some of the things, the comments that you made, it sounded like, you know, if we’re able to work across the board, right, then maybe, as in speaking about what you just mentioned, with the technology, if the technology, if we’re able to work across the board, meaning, with other countries, etc, holistically, then the cost for the technology can go down. And then those innovations that you know America makes, or Holland makes, you know, can be shared with some of the developing countries to help their efforts, right? So would you consider that to be a potential goal for the Next Conference of the Parties? Or is that, or I mean, what would you what do you think about that?

Bernie Zahren
Absolutely, I mean, carbon emissions aren’t our only problem. Now, one of the things that scares me the most is back in the 1990s, before Jigar and I started Clean Feet I, I had a company that collected the gas that is generated in landfills by the decomposition of organic matter, and it comes out of the landfill and into the atmosphere as methane. Well, methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas. It’s about 83 times worse than carbon dioxide, so allowing methane to just evaporate up into the atmosphere and block our heat is very dangerous, and it’s causing the part of the global climate change problem that we’re addressing here, which is, you don’t want the environment to get hotter, but it is getting hotter. So the one that scares me the most right now, Tan, is all of the Arctic is surrounded by swamp land and low land and things where, you know, the woolly mammoths died and fell down in that water years ago, and it’s been freezing for decades – not decades – centuries, 1000s of years. Well, what’s happening is, and you see this on the TV, the Arctic has melted every summer now, completely to where the steamships can come off of the Atlantic Ocean, go all the way across the Arctic, and end up in Alaska, you know, which sounds wonderful for the shipping companies, but what they’re doing is they’re melting this frozen tundra at the Arctic Circle, which is just like what we were getting out of landfills.

And once it melts, it vaporizes, it goes into the atmosphere as methane, and methane is terribly, terribly potent and influences our global warming by far more than CO2 out of the exhaust pipe of your car, for example. We’re doing a lot there. You know, California’s adopted more regulations just recently to stricter air emissions from vehicles and and promoting public transportation using electric busses or what have you. But we’re still a long way from taking that set of opportunities to the whole world, which is, you know, in effect, what the COP 29 year’s worth of meetings has an objective of, but we go to the meetings, we discuss it. Everybody shakes their head and says, yes, we must do something more about climate change. But do we do it? We do some of it. We don’t do enough of it that it’s that simple. And the technologies are there.

Tan Deleon
So, you know, for young folks, you know, looking at, you know, some of the work that you’ve done and all the things that you’ve been able to accomplish in your career, you know, what advice would you give a young person today who wants to aspire to potentially follow in your footsteps?

Bernie Zahren
Well? And it’s, it’s advice that I give my grandkids, and it’s sort of working. I have my oldest grandson graduated from the University of Colorado a couple years ago with an engineering degree. He was able to secure an internship at NREL, which stands for the National Renewable Energy Lab in Boulder, Colorado, and they assigned him to a project, and he’s been the chief experimenter, if you will, on this project. And what they’re working on is a way to use wave energy. You know, out in the middle of the big oceans, you’ve got these huge swells that go up and down and up and down. Well, if you put a long piston rod in the ocean, where you have these big swells, and at the bottom, you have a gearbox that you know when, when the swell goes down, this piston turns the gearbox and creates energy. Then the, when the swell goes back up, the floating piston goes up and, again, turns a gearbox which makes energy. And so he’s written a couple of papers on it and given some presentations on it. And you know, I’m very, very proud of that because NREL is considered one of the best research labs in the world. The problem that they’re running into now, though, is as the soil and the seabed changes and moves around and shifts and the sands come over it, and whatever they’re they’re saying we, we’ve proven the technology works, now, the problem is, can you economically build it so that the shifting corals and the sands and the various sea creatures and whatever don’t disrupt it at the bottom, where it’s making the power? So, you know, that’s one example.

Another one of my granddaughters is working for Jigar Shah at the Department of Energy, and they have $80 billion worth of funding to put out renewable, sustainable assets. And again, I don’t want to be influencing anyone either way politically, but we have a problem in this world being sustainable. I don’t know whether you have ever heard of the Club of Rome. Are you familiar with that group?

Tan Deleon
I’m not.

Bernie Zahren
No. Okay. Well, they wrote a book. It’s called the Limits and Beyond. This group that calls itself the Club of Rome is a group of scientists and researchers and people who care about the future of the planet, and they’re saying that in 50 years, we will not be able to sustain the earth, okay, because we’re outgrowing our resources, and we’re using up our resources, and you know, we will be at, and as I mentioned earlier, both our population is going from 8 billion to 10 billion. But aside from that, even at 8 billion, we are unsustainable if you don’t do something more about the issue of growth.

Tan Deleon
Sure.

Bernie Zahren
And you know, the problem is, what CEO of any company of any size doesn’t want to grow his business? Okay? So you get this contradiction of, okay, I’m going to start a new company, and we’re going to find a new way to reduce carbon emissions and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but in the process, I want to become a multi-millionaire, and so I’m going to you know that that’s my goal. So, the altruistic intent of future generations is extremely important. You know this, this young lady, Greta Thunberg, you know, went on strike, and the world woke up to what she was saying by her sitting outside her school and protesting climate change. You know, unfortunately, she’s kind of evaporated, and nobody’s talking about what she started anymore. So it’s refreshing to know that the next generations care. And I think that’s happening. I think you saw it on college campuses, and when they did the analysis of how you know college kids voted and what their opinions are now about the different political and scientific challenges that we face, and it’s coming through, but it’s not fast enough. It’s not prevailing on every major college campus in this country or other places. But I think you’re seeing the next generations starting to say, you know what? You know, we really are destroying our world, and we’re really going to be the guys living in it, and, you know, our parents and grandparents are going to be gone, but we’re going to pay the price.

Tan Deleon
Yeah, no, I definitely appreciate, you know, providing some of those insights, and, you know, it’s, I think the takeaway for our listeners here is, folks, you know, go and do the research. You know, the internet makes things very accessible for most, you know, I know that, you know, there’s some pockets of the country where, you know, Internet access is not available. So that’s not lost on me. But you know, go to your public libraries if you’re if you’re able to get, get to one close enough to you. But you know, do the research for yourself. You know, look it up. See what the issues are. You know, you know, fact check. You know fact check us if you want, but you know, we tend to have experts for a reason. And you know, I want to thank you, Bernie, for bringing a lot of his wisdom and sharing it with us and, you know, allowing us to understand more about Clean Feet I and Clean Feet II. And, you know, giving us insights on sustainability, and some of the efforts that he’s done with his investment company, he’s done personally, and some investment opportunities that, you know, other folks can leverage for the future. So, Bernie, I just want to thank you very much for that.

Bernie Zahren
And I want to thank you, too, as you have been instrumental in introducing us to some of those good opportunities we’ve had.

Tan Deleon
And with that, on behalf of all of us living in Connecticut and others tuning in from other states, thank you again, Bernie, for sharing with us information about business-focused sustainability strategies. You’ve given us a lot to think about. So, thank you again.

Bernie Zahren
You know, CASE is a great organization. They have all of the top scientists, doctors, engineers, and whatever from the state as part of their membership. So they have a deep bench of people who understand these things, and hopefully, some piece of this interview will be meaningful to them as well.

Tan Deleon
Yeah, I would hope so. And yeah, CASE is very lucky to have such experts as part of our membership. Very, very lucky. Listeners, I encourage you to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or YouTube, and visit the Academy’s website at www.ctcase.org to learn more about our guests, read the episode transcript, and access additional resources, as well as sign up for the CASE Bulletin. Thanks again, Bernie.

Bernie Zahren
And thank you also. And you know, hopefully, we’ve helped people at least be aware of the issues and hopefully optimistic about helping to solve them.