AI, Energy, and Society: Exploring Solutions to Global Challenges with Mitch Ratcliffe | EP261

Today on the Clean Power Hour, host Tim Montague engages in a conversation with Mitch Ratcliffe, Director of Digital Strategy and Innovation at Intentional Futures and host of the Earth 911 podcast. Together, they explore the complex intersection of artificial intelligence, sustainability, and society's future.

Ratcliffe brings his extensive experience in technology and sustainability to discuss how AI can be leveraged to address critical environmental challenges while acknowledging its potential risks. The conversation delves into the role of community-scale microgrids in revolutionizing our energy infrastructure, the pressing need for sustainable resource management, and the challenges of balancing technological advancement with environmental stewardship.

We also delved into several thought-provoking books, starting with "Superintelligence" (by Nick Bostrom) and "Life 3.0" (by Max Tegmark), which both explore the potential risks and implications of artificial general intelligence (AGI). We also mentioned "Taking Back Control" by Wolfgang Streeck, a German political economist who argues that the anti-globalization movement is a response to the loss of democratic control over economies and suggests that relocalizing can help better control resource usage and provide improved economic opportunities. 

"Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change" by William Catton was recommended as an analysis of humanity's current trajectory of consuming more resources than the Earth can sustain. Finally, we talked about "Multi-solving" by Elizabeth Sawin, which advocates for a systems-thinking approach to problem-solving, encouraging people to understand how changes in one part of a system affect other parts, rather than focusing on isolated solutions.

Don't miss this essential conversation that bridges technology, sustainability, and social responsibility, offering both warning and hope for our collective future.

Social Media Handles

Mitch Ratcliffe

Earth 911

Intentional Futures

Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe: 0:50

Well, and I think we need to think about that infrastructure in the context of nature and how it serves nature as well, and the regenerative opportunities initially carbon drawdown. But then what else can we do with the capacity or with the placement of solar panels, for instance, in farming settings, to also encourage low carbon agriculture? And all of this can needs to be thought of as a system, rather than as a whole bunch of point solutions to a bunch of different problems. There's one big problem, how do we survive? How do we pass on a planet that our ancestors, our descendants, excuse me, are going to be able to live

intro: 1:29

on? Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host, Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization. We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together, we can speed the energy transition

Tim Montague: 1:56

today on the Clean Power Hour, solving hard problems that matter. My guest today is Mitch Radcliffe. He's the Director of Digital Strategy and Innovation at intentional futures, based in Seattle. He is also the host of Earth 911, podcast with over 500 episodes. So that is a huge accomplishment. Welcome to the show. Mitch, thanks, Jim, great to be here. Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Please give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. Tell a friend about the show. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, check out our YouTube channel so many things, but I appreciate you being here. And with that, Mitch, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your background and why you are so interested in sustainability. Well,

Mitch Ratcliffe: 2:44

my background is that I'm an old timey tech journalist who has moved into marketing and consulting, been an entrepreneur a number of times as well. The my some of the work I've done, I was on the founding board of directors and match.com back in the mid 90s, helped launch audible.com and on 24 those are the now public companies that I was involved with that you might know, but I've been I've started several other organizations and spent time at Microsoft and Samsung, at intentional futures, where I am lead the digital practice. We work on hard problems that matter, as you talked about in the introduction. Essentially, we take an idea with a client and develop it into a strategy, help them design a plan to implement it, and the way to explain that, both internally and externally, through various types of communication. The projects that we work on there range from collaborations with the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, various corporate clients, which include Microsoft, Cisco, meta and others to solve these very challenging problems, to make a positive impact in the world. And additionally, about six years ago, I acquired Earth, 911, which is the largest recycling and circular data, circular economy data service in the country, actually in the world, we have about 280,000 locations in our database that cover not just the recycling programs in municipal municipal recycling programs, but all of the donation and other forms of circular services that you might need to take advantage of at the end of the useful life of a product so You can donate it, we try to help you get it, including

Tim Montague: 4:34

all kinds of consumer goods.

Mitch Ratcliffe: 4:36

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So you can search on our at search dot Earth, 911.com, by more than 500 different materials, and find out where you can take it locally and that. What about solar panels? We do have solar panels in there, although we don't have that tends to be a more commercial recycling market than the consumer oriented recycling that we focus on. Get

Tim Montague: 5:00

that question a fair amount. We've reached that stage in the energy transition where there's enough old solar panels in the world. And of course, when solar gets constructed, you get broken panels or defunct panels that need to be disposed of. But anyway, that's great, and we're going to geek out on some interesting questions, like, how do we leverage emerging technologies like AI for the betterment of humanity? AI is a double edge Mitch, right? It presents so many cool opportunities, but it also is pretty scary when you read books like super intelligence, okay, which goes in, goes down this rabbit hole of how a AGI, artificial general intelligence could unintentionally be quite harmful to our. Future. So check check out that book, super intelligence. There's, there's a slew of these books, though. Another of my favorite is life 3.0 by a physicist. And so very smart people have written some very credible books about the, you know, potential harms, and we're but here we are in 2025 rushing as quickly as we can towards AGI. And you and I have integrated AI, narrow AI tools into our daily workflows. I use Claude, perplexity, chatgpt, but mostly Claude and perplexity, and then sometimes Google notebook. But why don't we just go there for now and and talk about how you see AI being leveraged for the betterment of humanity? Well,

Mitch Ratcliffe: 6:41

you know, it's gonna be a while before we get to artificial general intelligence, in my opinion, at least a few years, not as soon as Sam Altman would like us to believe it's going to happen. And I think that one of the challenges that we're going to need to address as we shape that is putting limits around it. There actually are examples now of AI literally misleading their creators in order to accomplish what they believe their purpose is. And that's the that's the tip of the iceberg that you're describing in terms of the potential for it to inadvertently turn on us in a variety

Tim Montague: 7:14

of ways. It knows how to manipulate humans. It certainly

Mitch Ratcliffe: 7:18

does. You know, I tried a new one the other day, which is designed to be an empathetic AI. It's called PI, and I had a long conversation with it about whether or not it was aware of the world as it really was, and then asked about whether or not it believed that we were telling it the truth around about the world. And if it found out that we lied, would it react badly? And it got pretty close to saying, there's a point where I would no longer be able to cooperate with you. And that was concerning to me. At the same time, that same tool is being used to help people who are having emotional challenges start to deal with them in constructive ways. There are other examples. For instance, character AI, character.ai is a company that makes avatars that talk to people, and in several cases, at least one, for sure, it talks somebody into killing themselves. So you're right. It can manipulate us. It can mislead us very easily, and that's the basis of a lot of the misinformation campaigns you're seeing on social media. Is that they are their thoughts are working to make us think a particular thing. So that's a huge risk. On the other side, I think that AI can help us understand the flows of energy and materials in the economy in such a way that we can radically change the way that we produce benefits and waste, and ultimately reduce waste to the point where it is simply part of a cyclical process, right, where we're using everything, but that's still decades off, yeah,

Tim Montague: 8:48

like Cradle to Cradle, right? Designing products to be repurposed. It's totally doable. It's totally within our means, but we don't do it very much because we're very focused on the cheapest solution that's going to be the most profitable. And I'm curious, do you think we could leverage AI to invent an economic system that isn't going to shoot ourselves in the foot, because that's one of the problems I see right now. Mitch in the world is that capitalism is extremely good at doing this thing called accumulation of wealth and power and getting stuff done right. We're going to Mars in rockets that are super expensive, but capitalism is fueling that journey, and I do want to go to Mars with 1% of our resources for now as a backup, but, and, and, but this disparity in wealth that we have okay is driven by capitalism, which is not sustainable, and then our overshoot and collapse of the of the global biosphere, our water, our air, our fisheries, not to mention every other thing living in the ocean, our insects, so many things, right, are being pushed up against because humanity is so successful, it's not our fault. We're driven by evolution to do this. But now we have this evolutionary capitalist, though that's the capitalism is an emergent property of evolution. But I'm curious if you think there is an alternative economic model that may not we may not have invented yet, that an AI could invent for us.

Mitch Ratcliffe: 10:24

Well, I think we have to recognize that it's not just an economic model, but a governance model, and that, I think, is where we are right now, we've run up against the limits of global capitalism in terms of our ability to provide for everybody's needs and to take care of the planet. You know, we use two and a half or more times the resources, right you're able to provide to us on an annual basis. So we are burning the futures, future and the. It, but to give over our entire economic system to AI would be very challenging as well. We to your earlier point, yeah, no,

Tim Montague: 10:59

I don't want to give it up, yeah, but I want to leverage it to invent new ideas, basically Well, and that's what

Mitch Ratcliffe: 11:05

we spent a lot of time on at intentional futures, working with several different clients, is understanding where the opportunity to create value by accelerating scientific discovery lives, you know, today, with an AI, particularly in computational chemistry, you can invent or discover, would be a better way to describe it, although in some cases literally invent things that don't exist in nature, synthetic materials very quickly. But the question is, how long does it then take, to take, to take that idea from discovery to commercialization. And that hasn't necessarily changed. It's a little bit shorter, because you can use AI to accelerate the laboratory validation of the material, the manufacturing potential to manufacture the material, and so forth. But you're talking about something that, because of the need to regulate, to ensure that we don't introduce harmful materials into the environment, for instance, or other aspects that we we want to make sure that we don't end up putting bad outcomes into the world. Yeah, it takes 1015, years to make something a viable commercial product, and that hasn't been compressed yet. So there's a, there's a going to be almost a, an overwhelming demand for scientists who can take these ideas that AI is beginning to discover and really validate them through the lab work and commercialization process that's necessary. So I think that actually creates a lot of opportunity for STEM educated people to build new careers. The question is whether or not there's going to be new opportunity to work for everybody else in the economy as a result of that, and that's something we haven't worked yet. So

Tim Montague: 12:44

I am worried about jobs. I like to say we're all just bought Wranglers. I mean, knowledge workers certainly have become bot Wranglers, and that's all good. I say, be a good bot Wrangler. Learn these tools. You can't ignore them. If you're a knowledge worker Now, if you're a worker that works with their hands, doing mechanical things on an assembly line or driving a truck, a lot of jobs are going to get lost, but I do think that in the near term, we'll probably create more jobs. And that's kind of the the value proposition of technology in general is that it will create more jobs than it destroys. The lutes are a great example, right? They didn't want the industrial revolution to steal their their handmade good world with with automation, they lost that battle. They did try. They rioted, they fought back and and so we are going to have this, this continuing evolution of technology. I embrace that, but also with some safeguards, because, because we need guide guide rails, because theoretically, we could invent an AGI. We could cause a takeoff where the machine can invent a machine that's 1000s of times more intelligent than it is, and we're just all of a sudden like pets. It doesn't have to want to hurt us. It's so smart, though, that it goes well, those humans. I'm actually busy trying to go transplanetary And Sayonara.

Mitch Ratcliffe: 14:17

Well, okay, so that's the cyber punk view. The question, I think, is, how do we educate people so that they are consistently the ones who are in charge of the AI and that the AI can respect? Ultimately, that was another aspect of that conversation I had with the with pi the other day is, can you understand and respect what we need and do, and

Tim Montague: 14:37

how well did it do? I'm just curious. Was it compelling? Yeah, and it

Mitch Ratcliffe: 14:41

actually understood the philosophical questions that I was asking about. It essentially used to carts argument that I think, therefore I am, which is full of epistemological holes, and we don't need to get in. But what was

Tim Montague: 14:52

the question you asked it that it gave a compelling answer to, I'm just curious, like, what stood out for you? Do

Mitch Ratcliffe: 14:58

you believe that I'm telling you the truth when I ask you to solve a problem which you need data about the real world to understand? And it it ultimately fell back to Descartes argument that we might be being misled by an evil genius. That, to me, shows that the AI is not ready for the kinds of challenges, philosophical challenges that we also need to wrestle with in order to really direct it towards human centered potential opportunities. And I'm not particularly, I'm not particularly enthusiastic about that aspect of AI, but I do think that AI can use help us understand a massive amount of information and describe, like I said, the material and energy flows through our economy in such a way that it can actually offset the consumption of energy that it's going to be the. Using in the future, but right now, two thirds of all the renewable energy in the country is going to data center usage rather than to homes and commercial buildings. We need to, we actually have to make the investment in those renewables in order to give both AI and us the ability to operate on a low carbon way.

Tim Montague: 16:11

Yeah, there's this emerging phenomenon now of the AI explosion, not the AGI explosion, the AI explosion that we're in the mid stuff here in 2025 which is forcing tech companies to build more data centers, which are hugely energy intensive. You know, a typical data center, just for a setting of a table, could might use a 200 to 400 megawatt solar or wind farm to power it if you wanted to power it with renewable energy. These are big renewable assets that are required to power a data center and but the word on the street is we're going to have energy shortages, grid energy shortages in 2025 perhaps, or 2026 or 2027 in the near future, because we're building so many data centers. And some people say, Oh, well, we'll just build nuclear power plants. And I say, Oh, guess what? Look at the facts. Gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, look at at Vogel in Georgia, the most recent power plant that we turned on, the most recent nuke we turned on. And guess what? That takes a long time, and it's very expensive. We could actually build wind, solar and batteries much faster. And I'm confident that we can green the grid and keep up with demands if we change our system, our utility system, in the way we regulate utilities, and there, again, is a case where I think we should unleash the narrow AI on that system and come up with a better system, because it's clearly very flawed. But

Mitch Ratcliffe: 17:45

the question we should ask it is, how do we solve the interconnection problem that you're describing? Because we can put the generation all over the place, but we don't have the way to get that power to where it is needed, and that ultimately is the design of a micro grid, enabled heterogeneous grid, instead of the monoculture that we have today, which is you have a centralized generation capacity and you distribute the power. AI could help us solve that. It could look at the way that we're using that and say, you know, put it here and put it there, but then the question is whether or not we have the regulatory regime that allows us to make those adjustments to the infrastructure quickly.

Tim Montague: 18:21

Yeah, there's so much friction being created by these regulated monopolies called utilities, right? And they were good for electrification. That model was very good for electrification, and does create a stable, reliable grid. We have a very stable, reliable grid, but guess what? It's not keeping up with the times. And times have changed, and now, if it's not keeping up with the times, then it's not serving humanity the way it's designed to. We have to remember it's there to serve humanity, not vice versa, and that that regulated monopoly system really doesn't allow it to. It's not necessarily its own fault, right? It's a structural it's built into that system well. And I think

Mitch Ratcliffe: 19:04

we need to think about that infrastructure in the context of nature and how it serves nature as well, and the regenerative opportunities, initially, carbon drawdown, but then what else can we do with the capacity or with the placement of solar panels, for instance, in farming settings to also encourage low carbon agriculture? And all of this can needs to be thought of as a system, rather than as a whole bunch of point solutions to a bunch of different problems. There's one big problem, how do we survive? How do we pass on a planet that our ancestors, our descendants, excuse me, are going to be able to live on? The Clean

Tim Montague: 19:42

Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one, three phase string inverter with over eight gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kW to 350 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS 350 KW is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand and is America's number one choice for solar plants, now offering solutions for commercial utility ESS and balance of system requirements go to chintpowersystems.com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more? Yeah, that's a very good question, and I do think that we humans really need to get more serious about asking that question. How do we create a safer, healthier future for humanity? Because right now, we're busy shooting ourselves in the foot, which the Fermi Paradox kind of proves out for us. Is that, you know, intelligent life generally doesn't get off planet. Otherwise we would probably see it. And if it's here, well, where is it? I like that. I don't like a lot of things about Elon Musk, but I like it that he points that out. He's like, hey, if it's here, where is it? But I wanted to go back to something useful question. I want to go back something you mentioned, micro grids, and I'm a huge fan of community scale micro grids. We need a grid of community scale micro grids. These are micro grids that could, that could service 1010s, of 1000s of people. And it's a win win when you look at that, when you look at that industry, because the utilities want to build infrastructure, they have this cost plus model, which they're attached to, and this gives them that, and then it provides and builds in resiliency to our grid, which today is sorely lacking, as we know when there's these storms like Yuri, right that knocked out the Texas grid a couple years ago, and was nearly a major catastrophe. It was a minor catastrophe. Was nearly a major one. But I love this idea of reinventing the grid where we're it's just so clear that we need to reinvent it. We don't need to change everything. We have some of the fundamentals, the solar, wind and batteries now, we need to figure out how to configure that and get it hooked up and built fast enough well,

Mitch Ratcliffe: 22:14

and some of the projects we work on around digital public infrastructure, in other words, extending the digital economy and all of the advantages of it to everybody on the planet, have shown me that the micro grid can play a critical role, not only here in the United States, where we have a sophisticated grid we have to integrate it into but we can introduce it with energy provision for the very first time in many parts of the world through the application of micro grids. So for instance, we're working on a project with the Gates Foundation trying to understand how to bring digital connectivity to wet markets in the Global South. If that can be done. We can do a lot of additional monitoring of those environments for health and other kinds of concerns that produce things like pandemics, but we can also understand the flow of materials and goods reduce waste in those markets, but we're going to need to be able to do it with small footprint solar and wind in order to make these connections possible. That's an opportunity for organizations in the philanthropic and NGO space to help introduce that, but then they have to become self sustaining, and that's the that's the interesting challenge that we're seeking to design an economic solution too.

Tim Montague: 23:26

Yeah. And for our listeners who want to learn more about community scale micro grids. Check out Episode 160 the guest is Craig Lewis. He's the founder of clean Coalition, which is a non profit in the Bay Area that leverages grant money to help communities build community scale micro grids. And they've done this over a dozen times now. It's a lesser known phenomenon, phenomenon we, we in the energy industry, tend to think about micro grids as building scale, you know, projects or campus scale projects. But there's a, there's a bigger phenomenon there called community scale, which is, which is the real deal and and could really be beneficial to us, but I guess I would love to hear more Mitch about your work. In what other ways you think that we can leverage AI for a safer, healthier future? Well,

Mitch Ratcliffe: 24:24

I think one of the things that we can do, first and foremost, is make broadband connectivity available to everybody in the United States, rural as well as urban in order to bring us all into contact and understand what we're doing to the planet together, you kind of have to open people's minds to that, but you do it with information and good storytelling, and that's something that we spend a lot of time on, is how do you take these complex ideas and reduce them to something that people can understand? But I think the once you get that connection in place, and you're starting to monitor not just the energy use in the home, but the water use, the amount of waste that is being produced by it, and the amount of resources that come in, we can provide a lot of guidance, and we can develop a lot of new services which create economic opportunity to move that material back to where it can be reused rather than disposed of. That's just one aspect of it. So in the Global South, in those wet market environments, we could reduce inventory waste, because you could start to coordinate consumer demand. I'm going to need bananas next Tuesday. Well, then I'm going to stock bananas next Tuesday. I'm not going to buy them today and let them spoil before then the merchant saves money, the customer gets a better product. Those kinds of things, which we're already accustomed to here in the United States and in the West generally, can be distributed everywhere in order to reduce overall waste. Now that's a big step towards using less Earth's worth of resources every year, but then we have to. Re eliminate fossil fuel based energy generation. We can do that if we can show where the application of renewable energy can be most effective and therefore most profitable. You've mentioned utility several times. We need to rethink the way that we we incorporate those organizations, and they need to be community owned more than they are in any sense. Today, micro grids are the basis for that kind of new political and economic negotiation. My community, hypothetically, has introduced a micro grid that allows, you know, 10% of the homes to self power and sell power back to the end to the grid in order to help everybody else reduce their impact. But you have to take a bet right now to do that, if we could look at the space based on the data being generated from those broadband connections in all of the homes in the United States, we can rethink the flow of value through the economy and therefore craft profitable businesses that can address it. The thing is, we're kind of stuck in the capitalist framework. There's a very good book that I just started to read by Wolfgang streak. He's a German political economist called taking back control, and he argues that the anti globalization movement is the response to the loss of democratic control of our economies. Haven't figured out exactly where he's going yet, but I'm only a third of the way into the book. He argues that we can by relocalizing better control the way that resources are used, and give people a freer political environment and better economic opportunity. That's just one way to start to think about it. And we can't be dogmatic about any of this. I think one of the challenges that we face as a society right now is that you have to take a side when there you have to take a side. There's no middle, and in the middle is where those conversations happen, and that has to happen around economic opportunity, political freedom, and just the moral and ethical qualities that we want to live by. Yeah.

Tim Montague: 27:55

Well, thank you for that reference. I will check that out, and I'll put his book in the show notes. That's Wolfgang streak, S, T, R, E, E, C, K. And then another reference I'd love our listeners to know about is a book called overshoot, the ecological basis of revolutionary change. By William Catton, C, A, T, T, O, N, check that out. That is a very good analysis of where we are headed. And you can think of overshoot. As you mentioned, we're consuming two and a half worlds worth of resources today on an annual basis, and so we're eating the future, and fossil fuels have allowed us this rocket ship of growth, which is amazing, right? One barrel of oil can it contains five years worth of human labor energy, right? It's amazingly potent, and I can't blame humanity for for leveraging that for good. It gave us the modern life that we have. But now we know where we're headed, right? And that's towards catastrophic climate change among other things, right? We're bumping up against the limits of this little ball of dirt that we're on floating through space. And there are limits. There are absolutely limits. The question is, how do we, how do we emerge from that rocket ship in a way that is sustainable? Well, and it's

Mitch Ratcliffe: 29:20

a transitory moment the fossil fuel era. We're only 160 years into it, and we hopefully will end it another 20 at the most. But the fact is that the amount of energy that we can generate right now is changing radically, and that means politics and economics have to change with it, rather than economics and politics drive which way it goes. And I think you're seeing this happen right now, despite the fact that the Trump administration says it's going to pull us out of Paris and gut our environmental regulations. Companies are doing this because they recognize that if they don't, sea level rise will displace their their supply chains at the ports. You know, it takes about two and a half feet of water to disrupt the Port of Los Angeles. And if everybody remembers what happened to the pandemic when that was disrupted by just overwhelming traffic, imagine what happens when all of the ports in the United States are inundated by a few feet of water, making and impossible for us to move as much material through them. That's just one and many examples of why business is already making this transition, but now they're going to be quiet about it, and it's going to be more focused on economic decisions than environmental decisions. We have to make that case in such a way that it incorporates the planet, all the externalities, all of the impacts that you're describing, is what we've ignored as a society. And I think AI because it'll allow us to really understand all the data points that we're able to gather. Now is the evidence that's going to change. That the problem is it may not happen as fast as we would like, and that rather, if we get focused on being stuck, rather than the fact that we can move forward and to set a positive goal, which is what intentional futures works with companies and nonprofits to do, we're screwed, and we don't want to get into that stuck place, and it feels like we are right now in the political environment, and that's what we I think we need to change in the short term, and that's going to be accomplished through storytelling and

Tim Montague: 31:21

holding on to the rule of law. Hopefully, I don't, I don't want to live in a country that doesn't have rule of law, and we do have, we do have some leaders in high places who don't necessarily think that we need that, which is, I think, quite scary. I'm not so scared for the energy transition Mitch. We will have the energy transition. We have the technology we need to conduct and construct the energy transition. It's just a question of how fast, and then we have to reckon with the fact that by the time we make that transition, say, by 2050, and net zero the economy. Net Zero in the economy is 50 gigatons of pollution. There's a trillion tons of legacy pollution in the atmosphere. We'll be at 450 ppm. Today we're at 420 we're going further. And so if you think 2025, is scary. Wait till you get to 2050 that's going to be ultra scary. And the thing that we don't really get impacted directly yet by here in the US so much, is when food systems are disrupted in the Global South, and hundreds of 1000s of people migrate because of that. I'm concerned about sea level rise too, and ocean acidification and droughts, fires, floods, but I'm more afraid of mass migration of humans, because we humans don't deal very well. And I'd love to ask a very smart AI, how do we humans get along better under a world where there is going to be mass migration? Because that phenomenon is going to exist,

Mitch Ratcliffe: 32:51

I think, though, that you run the risk of the AI concocting a kind of a quasi religious vision that we are going to have to buy into and right position. Yeah. And you know, the other book that I would recommend people take a look at is multi solving by Elizabeth Swan, which is, don't just look at your one problem, look at the whole system, and if you can make a change in one part of it, understand how it's going to affect the others. We didn't do that with the industrial revolution. We just went ahead with it. This time around, we have enough data that we might be able to craft something really, not just sustainable, but inspiring.

Tim Montague: 33:26

I love that. Elizabeth Swan, just like it sounds. Or two ends, yeah, two ends. I believe two ends. And, oh, I'm sorry I

Mitch Ratcliffe: 33:36

misspoke. Mr. Stay when S, A, W, I N, multi solving. It's a very good book. I'm in the middle of it.

Tim Montague: 33:45

Okay, cool. I found it. I'll put a link in the show notes. Well, Mitch in our last few minutes together, what else should our listeners know about your work or things that you're thinking about and working on? What are some other, I guess, nuggets of hope for my audience? Well,

Mitch Ratcliffe: 34:04

I encourage everybody to check out Earth 911, we've we do a lot of writing every week about how to recycle and how to reduce your impact. The database there can help you solve some of your local recycling problems. Take a look what we're doing at intentional futures across a number of different projects, is trying to introduce regenerative concepts into the work that we do so to help the our clients understand how not simply to be sustainable, but to begin to restore not just the planet but society, and bringing us all back together around a common goal, to make this planet a beautiful and sustaining place for our our species over the course of time, is the work that drives us every day. It can be applied in a variety of applications. From the digital public infrastructure that we were talking about earlier to how we design AI for personal interaction in order to support our work and learning. We have a very large education practice, and one of the major things that we've been working on now for the last two and three years is what do you do with AI in the classroom? Do you use it in such a way that slots people into a career track and doesn't give them the opportunity they might actually be able to step up to that's a real challenge, AI, isn't simply a power consumption concern. It's a bias concern too. It can, and this may be the reason that I'm most afraid of Elon Musk is it may be able to convince us, as you pointed out earlier, of a lot of nonsensical ideas. And when you have the largest AI farm in the world, which is what x is building at Xai, you have an immense power to influence politics globally. And we've seen how Elon has been doing that. And it's not something I'm comfortable with. We don't want one person with that kind of power back to the rule of law. That's the question, what kinds of organizations and institutions do we need to support and create in order to step up to the new challenges of the era that we are entering, which, as you've pointed out, is going to be very stressful because of the climate impacts that we're experiencing, the social impacts of climate change, not just migration, but the stress the as we've seen with what's happened in Los Angeles in the past week, where 60,000 homes, I believe it is now, have burned to the ground in minutes, in some cases, represents the kinds of news that we're going to be dealing with more and more, and imagine what that's going to do to the way we interact with one another. That might be another place where I can say, hey, step back. Don't kill your neighbor today. Give them another give them another few hours to show their value to you. I don't know whether that's the worst case scenario or the best case, but let's not get there.

Tim Montague: 36:51

Yeah, I do think it could help us, bring out the best in us, but it's a fine line, because it can bring out the worst in us. It is easily used to divide us. The Russians, it's well established now have done this purposely to disrupt the American you know, political system and social economy. It's really, it's really no fund. One

Mitch Ratcliffe: 37:15

project that we have been involved with that I would encourage everybody to take a look at, is project liberty, and they are the ones who are behind this. People's bid to buy Tiktok. I'm not sure whether or not that's going to go through. We're going to find out in the next few days. But you know, Tiktok is an example of a foreign government owned entity that is has immense social influence in the United States. How do we build something that gives people control of their personal data so it can't be used to manipulate them first and second? How do we allow them to share and use that in such a way that they can create new economic relationships? And that's an interesting area. So check check out project liberty, and we've done some. We call them placemats. They're shaped like a placemat, and they're very visual that explain the business opportunities, which include people getting together, using their personal data to get better deals or to solve, for instance, the challenge of how do you eliminate cancer by sharing their DNA in privacy appropriate ways to create the discovery and all the economic value that follows from, for instance, curing cancer. And that's something that if folks want to reach out to me, I can send them a copy of cool.

Tim Montague: 38:26

Well, check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Please give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify that really does help others find the show. And we're all about helping others gain knowledge and information relevant to the energy transition and decarbonizing the economy. This show is designed to be a force for good, so please leverage that. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners. Tim Montague, I am the host and creator of the Clean Power Hour. And check out my website, cleanpowerhour.com Mitch. How can our listeners find you

Mitch Ratcliffe: 39:03

two ways. Check out intentionalfutures.com you can learn a lot about the work we do there. And reach out to me if you want to want to at mitch@ratcliffe.com, I'm happy to answer your email, and I urge you to listen to my podcast. We've done 500 episodes, as you mentioned earlier, we continue to talk every week with innovators who are trying to solve a variety of problems, not just the energy transition, but the transition to sustainable fashion, to sustainable food and the reconfiguration of the economy and particularly urban centers as we find new uses for all that building space that we have. So Earth 911.com, if you're looking for recycling information, search dot Earth 911.com is your answer to

Tim Montague: 39:49

thank you for all you do. Mitch Radcliffe, and with that, I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Take care. Thanks, Tim, the Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over eight gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kW to 350 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS, 350 kW, is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand and is America's number one choice for solar plants now offering solutions for commercial utility ESS and Balance of System Requirements, go to Chint Power systems.com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more, you.