President of the institute. I want to welcome all of our viewers to another scope for, today i will be joined by todd myers, he is an expert in environmental policy, he is the author of a brandnew book out this week called time to think small, how nimble Environmental Technology can solve the planet biggest problem, it comes to us with more than two decades of policy experience. Hes a leader at the washington, the state of Washington Department of natural resources, he lives in the heart of the Cascade Mountains with more than 200,000 honeybees and is part of the recovery council. He works day today with our friends at the Washington Post the center where he is the environmental policy director. As a reminder, we want to get you involved in this conversation. For our friend joining live we encourage you to enter questions into the chat function. Those will be sorted and said to me where it will go to todd and you can talk about your ideas, your questions. For those of you who dont have that access, you can try to send an email to events dot org and well get them in the queue. For those of you watching on youtube or cspan book notes. Welcome back. We are very happy to have you. This entire conversation, as well as all of ceos programs are Available Online at cia dot org under the tab labeled event. Todd, welcome to the Competitive Enterprise Institute im happy to have you with us. I would like to kick off with what i hope is the easiest question for any book tour or any author, and that is to tell us about the book what catalyzed you to write it and who are you hoping to get to. Its nice to join you i really appreciate the work that you do. Ive been a fan and worked with your staff for a very long time. More than a decade. The thing i like about them is they are fighting that environmental policy and unfortunately, i think its the world of policy that environmental policy has become thats why i wrote my book because i worked in environmental policy for more than two decades. You mentioned the Washington State department of natural resources, forest health, spotted, owls all the big issues. And i got frustrated that what i saw happening with environmental policy is that so much of our policies have a patient politics making people feel good about themselves rather than the things that actually were most effective. So theres a lot of symbolic things that were done for the environment. I think that is why folks on the centerright are often frustrated and nervous about engaging on the environment because they are worried that environmental policy has become synonymous with Big Government. And we need to change. That in fact, what youre seeing every day, people on the centerright are surrounded by the environment. If you look at where the red parts of the map are, its where the nature is, its where the blue parts, tend to be more urban areas. So how do we express in policy the care that we have to be good stewards of the environment in a way that isnt just contributing to the government. That is, why my book when time to think small, its about small efforts rather than Big Government. Empowering people not politicians. What you see around the world is you give people the amount of technology to give people power to do things that are really effective for the environment. That are more about results than symbolism and i will give you a quick example. Whenever people talk about climate, change as if its the only environmental issue, when clearly its. Not one big issue that i think everybody agrees on is trash on the. Ocean ocean plastic, the desire to keep plastic out of the ocean. The United Nations signed an agreement earlier this. Year they are still trying to figure out what to do. Some states like Washington State have banned plastic bags, they hope that will help. Thats not really the problem. The problem is primarily in developing countries, and to a group called plastic bank has started hiring people in places like the philippines, this, ill egypt, to collect plastic and they show where theyve collected on their phone because they have a geolocation. A gps. And then they give it to plastic bank and they get paid on their phone. They might not have bank accounts. The plastic is recycled and sold to a c johnson. When you go to the store and buy windex bottle, say made with ocean bound plastic. None of this technology is particularly difficult. 93 of people in these countries have cell phones. But its a very low, tech simple small effort. They have collected more than three billion plastic bottles that would have washed into the ocean. More than 140 Million Pounds of plastic. More than governments are doing, just with the simple technologies. I think its fantastic example of how thinking small, small approaches in power technology, to do more than government approaches. There is a lot there. But lets see if we can set the stage because we skipped over the last 15 years. So the plastic example is illustrative and helpful for people, you give a little bit of history and maybe explain to our audience feed orbital protection, and therefore Environmental Policies that followed the natural progression. 100 years ago there was an upsurge in interest in preservation, about 50 years ago we focused on source point types of regulation and pollution. Thats where the big problems, are we look at those places, we create rules around them. Rule bound responses. So with plastic, we have plastic flowing into the ocean. Were not talking about how it gets there, whether its coming out of a dump or falling off a ship or whatnot. Were talking about the solution side, which is not big regulatory central command, answers. It is markets and voluntourism and connecting people through technology. Can you walk us through what the moving parts are here. Because weve got regulation of central regulators, weve got cleanup efforts that are small and personalized. It seems like we need to name all of the pieces. Yeah. Thats great. One of the main things that i hinted at, the people are concerned that environmentalism has become synonymous with Big Government solutions. And when he weighs were stuck in the 1970s with how we think about environmental problems. As you pointed, out the problems that we face in the 1970s with air and Water Pollution primarily were point sources. They were big smokestacks and figure out falls. The tioga river catherine. Fire those sorts of things. And the targeting and installing those problems, governments actually were pretty good when there was a very limited number of sources and they could focus on those and have a really big impact. That is what we saw in the 1970s with the creation of the epa and those two laws was that it did actually make our air cleaner and make our water cleaner, because they can focus on a few sources. The problems today are very different, they are distributed. Theres lots of small sources. So, what we do today has to be different. You cant take my word for it you can actually take the word ads as i director of the epa. Sort of first employee thought of these laws. I say from my, bud i just read, you are the great call about ten years ago where said yesterday oscillations work well in yesterdays problem. The solutions we devised back in the 1970s are not likely to make up much of a dent in the mental problems we face today. So we have to change our minds that to deal with the types of problems and lots of little vests of ocean plastic. Lots of people using energy and having a small impact. Working on salmon and the little bit of rub or the going to water. Try to do the same kind of top down 1970s approach these problems youre not gonna have a. Facts and that effect is what were seeing with all of these, problems are not being solved. Thats why a lot of the people in the environmental left are turning to these sort of distributive Technology Based innovative solutions. There is still an instinct among many to return to. Governments but i really want to solve. Them providing an Innovative Technology with the answer, in the 1970s. Just in the, moment unpack for us and made the reference to geolocation and global phones and whatnot. When you are talking about information technology, its more than a supercomputer that fits in your pocket. Right . We are talking about hardware and software. And distribution. Hundreds of millions of people in power. Help us understand a little bit more. 93 people in developing countries have some kind of self on our smartphone. The ability of the technology was simply part of it. The Company Rocket was a big part of that as well. Just communicating collaborate with people immediately. In a way that did not exist before. To use the language on the transaction costs are really really low to collaborate. So you can do things only governments could do before. It is a smart thermostat. They use Artificial Intelligence to help you serve energy. Anyways you dont have to think about. In my electrical panel, we had a box called a sense monitor. And look to electoral wildes wires in my house and 1 million times a second, the electricity was coming into my house to determine what kind of appliances i was using. And then gives me the information. So i can make the sort of decisions. The fact that technology has been so made so easy to developing a so ubiquitous, not yourself owns but lots of other things, which has given us lots of new opportunities to solve problems and do things that only government could do ten years. Ago the transaction cost of collaboration or information was so high. It just was not available. And see if we can work through a couple more terms. As i read through the book last week in the last week i kept undermining in circling terms i thought i know what that means. But then that would come three or four faces not have a much deeper understanding. What is it science . Its been percolating around and magazine articles and two decades talking with a very real now. There are signs people talking about it now because its real. When you can do a lot of things in Citizen Science which is basically just a conversation of two things. We will provide the data that previously was not available. Just to make a tangible example. People who are easy bird and that is just an app where you win the birds that you have seen, what you saw them in when you saw them. All of that data, though, goes to cornell university. They are now able to use that data to determine your migratory patterns. And having that presentation. Science is much bigger than a third grader with a tin can in the backyard collecting water. Precipitation rates. Absolutely. In fact its funny you mention. That one of the best Citizens Science programs on the web is called sais starter. What we have a long list of Citizen Science programs. The woman who created a darling cavalier was doing Citizen Science programs for kids. I want to do that. I want to find ways to help out. So it expanded, and technology has allowed us to expand it. All but leopold has wonderful essay from 1943. The great conservationist of leopold. What you call wildlife story. What he says he is like, amateurs how interesting the different animals they are learning about them. Then become experts in them. They are not credentialed phds. They are just amateurs who are interested in it. In 1943 we didnt have technology. We have to show that science and show that information in the way that we do now. Its not a new concept its just been made very powerful with these technologies. Simply putting birds into an app, tributes to scientific research. Lets stick with cornell. Im going to their web page over the years, i also have a library of bird calls. Not just see it on a map where birds pass through, or where they are found, populations. What is to keep the accuracy high . When they hire graduate students, they send them out into the field with some hiking routes and a notebook. Counting on the graduate students being honest. In Northern Virginia where my backyard ice or a sopping way, it all goes into the database. What do we do about that sort of problem . Maybe not malicious but people make hers and they saw a rare bird when they did not how is it accounted for. There are a variety of ways. When you mention bird calls one of the things the bird those now, when you press a button, and you hear the bird, and you see the bird, thats really cool. Lets say you are certain that youve seen a penguin in order virginia. It knows where you are. Here are the birds that you could have possibly seen, so first we simply said you cant see a penguin. It will tell. You it will give you that list. No, i saw a penguin. And you put it in. Cornell has millions and millions of bits of data. Which they collect. And, so among those millions of data as one sighting of a penguin. They know it is an anomaly. So, there are a variety of layers protection, that they can use by using this data. Both first by narrowing it down based on what they already now, but then by determining whether the pain which i think is an anomaly. If 200 people in Northern Virginia, all of a sudden see a penguin, it either means that Climate Change is really done something strange. Or it means there to call locals who because opinion is. Listen unless they see those 200 hits, they are going to say that that is a mistake. They have parameters to try to track thats down. You mentioned with the leopold article, a concept that i think is all around us. And people are aware of. We dont think hard about what it can do for science. So lets talk little bit about gamification. I have been taking my kids hiking, sensibility backpacks. They are about year old and it dies off, i will tell you, at least in my household, in the early teens when they dont want to spend time alone with their father. And it came back for my oldest daughter when she got into your cashing so she started collecting badges for finding geocashes. The badges on the tokens and the numbers, how does this all contribute to sciences as opposed to just being a distraction. So one of the challenges a ebird other things like that is the people see a lot of birds where they live. Where they like to hike. Where there are pretty views. But in the middle of the forest are off the beaten path, they cannot have very many sightings. Causes hard to get there. So, there is just an amateur. Youre gonna stick by the road. Theres something called roadside bias. You validate in some places, very little others. Just like geo past really a thing called where you go out and you say, like when you say things in these areas and when you do sightings in those areas theyre gonna give you points. Then you can get rewards like half insurance and prestige. Among your community, the question is voluntary, private association community. Thats. Right what happens, the cost of collaboration is now so low believe you are not part of a Burning Group youre still part of a community online. On neighbor. And if you cant score points, you can show you one of the top birds in Northern Virginia. Thats pretty cool. They respond to that in addition to restoring their fun little trinkets. Its a way to supplement, its better to stop your basic Citizen Science data. Where people are going out and normal places. And giving the data that they made. There is one key thing, which. Because this is a key to gamification. On initially, it was built as a system where they would say here as we get through and we need to go get a. Thats what they found is it is better to tell people, you do what you want. And work with them. Work with the people using the app. Rather than treating them just as graduate students going out into the field. And that becomes more effective. Rather than topdown bandaids is what makes neighbors really work. Those are some things im talking about when you help me out from the bottom up. I dont want to put words in your mouth and it may be bore words from your book but it seems to me what youre describing is programs that solve the problem of the citizen are of the consumer as opposed to just solving the problem of the regulator. The problem of the consumer might be that weve been keeping a list of all the birds theyve seen or that they might have trouble identifying aboard. Their attributes of the apps that helped them with their problem. Then he grows from there. It becomes useful or marketable in the community. Is that fair . Thats exactly right. There is a key to making environmental actions it was a intensest no. There was environmental policy if it is content on the next election if it is contingent on forcing people to regulations or other things to do what you want it may arrive off and say no were not gonna do that. Or it can be undone at the next election. My son is used to, say it, look ill help you see the birds you want to see. Im gonna help you save energy. Whether not you concerned about Climate Change at all those things are durable it doesnt matter what the Election Results are youre gonna keep saving energy and electricity because you want to pay less so that consumer focus is what makes environmental efforts, as a small level, durable for the long run. Rather than the political instability which goes back. Thats why i think it is better approach for the environment. Theyre relying on politicians to do the right thing. Rely on election outcomes. The policy applications. And this one for now. There is nongovernmental solution that we can read about in your book. The deals with migratory patterns. A bargain. A large ngo goes to farmers and says we want habitats, but we dont want to have it that here yearround, we only won it as the birds are passing by. Could you talk a little bit about that program . The project . I think it is really illustrative of again solving a problem for the farmer. Or the landholder. Instead of just saying for a top down place you want access to the land and we dont want to use it for any other sources or any other activities. How did that work out . It is a very toasty approach. So using ebert data. The university now has millio