Well, good afternoon, everyone. Kent lassman im the president at Competitive Enterprise Institute. I want to welcome all of our viewers for another of ces book forums today. Ill be joined by todd myers. Hes an expert in environmental policy. He is the author of a brand new book out this week called time to think small how, nimble Environmental Technologies can solve the planets biggest problems. He comes to us more than two decades of policy experience. Hes been a leader at the washington, the state of washingtons department of natural. He lives in the heart of the Cascade Mountains with more than 200,000 honeybees as part of the puget sound salmon recovery council. And he works day to day with our friends at, the washington policy center, where the environmental director, as a reminder, sir, we want to get you involved in. This conversation for our friends join me live. I encourage you to use the chat function at the bottom of your screen enter questions those will be sorted and said to me where well get them in front of todd so that we can talk about your ideas and your for those of you that dont have that access, you can try to send an email to events at cei dot org and well get them in the for those of you watching on youtube or cspans notes, welcome back. Were very happy to have you this entire conversation and as well as all of cei programs are Available Online at dot org under tab labeled events. So todd, welcome to the Competitive Enterprise Institute im really to have you with us. Id like to kick off with what i hope is easiest question for any book tour, for any author. And that is tell us about your book. What catalyzed you to write it and what are you hoping to get across . Well, thank you. Its really to join you cei. I really appreciate the work that you do. I have been a fan and, worked with your staff for a very long time more than a decade. And the thing i like about cei is that they are tenacious, fighting, bad environmental policy and unfortunate play. And i think in the world of policy, environmental policy has become synonymous with environmental policy and. So thats why i wrote my book is because i worked in environmental policy more than two decades, as you mentioned, at the Washington State department of Natural Resources on issues like old growth, forest health, spotted owls, all of that sort of the big issues. And i got frustrated that what saw happening with environmental policy is that so much of our policies are made based on politic and making politicians and people feel about themselves rather than the things that actually were most effective. And so there was a lot of symbolic things that were done for the environment. And i think thats folks on the center right are often frustrated or sort of nervous about engaging on the environment because theyre worried that environmental policy has become so synonymous. Big government and we need to change that. And in fact, you see is that every day people on the center right live surrounded by the environment. If you look at a map right, where the red parts of the map, the red parts the map are where the nature is and where blue parts of the map tend to be. Urban areas. So how can we do that . Can we express policy, the care that we have to be good stewards of, the environment in a way that isnt just contributing to Big Government . And so thats why i wrote my book time to think small in time to think small is about small efforts rather than Big Government. Empowering people, not politicians. And so what you see around world are that you give people we have now have the technology to give people the power to do things that are really for the environment, that are about results and symbolism. And ill just give you a very quick example. Whenever people talk about Climate Change as if its the only environmental issue. But clearly not. And one big issue that i think everybody agrees is trash in the ocean. Ocean and the desire to keep plastic out of the ocean and. The United Nations signed an agreement earlier this year and theyre still trying to figure out to do some states Like Washington have banned plastic bags in the hope that that will help. Thats not really the problem problem is primarily in developing countries and so a group called plastic bank started hiring people in like the philippines, brazil, egypt to collect plastic and they can show where theyd collected it on their phone because. Its a they have a geolocation gps and then they would give it to a plastic bank. They get paid on their phone because often they dont have Bank Accounts and then the plastic is recycled, sold to sc. Johnson so when you go to the store and you buy a windex bottle, itll say made with ocean bound plastic. Now none of this technology is particularly difficult, but 93 of people in developing countries have cell phones. But using this very low tech, very simple, small efforts, they have collected more than 3 billion plastic bottles that would have washed into the ocean and more than £140 million of plastic. So more than governments are doing just with these simple technologies. And i think its a fantastic example of how thinking small, small approaches and power with technology are doing more than government approaches. There is theres a lot there, but lets see if we can set the stage for folks because we skipped over the last 50 years. So the plastics example i think is very illustrative and its helpful for. To give a little bit of history and maybe you could explain for our audience the environment, mental and therefore Environmental Policies that followed it follows a natural progression. Some 100 years ago there was a upsurge in interest in preservation. About 50 years ago, we focused on source point types of regulation and pollution so where the big problems are, we look at those places and we create rules around them, rule bound responses. So with the plastics 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 about the solution side of it, which is not big regulatory Central Command answers. Its markets and volunteerism and connecting people through technology. Could you walk us through kind of these what are all the moving parts here . Because weve got regulate ocean of central regulators. Weve got clean up efforts that are small and personal. Ais, it seems like we need to name all of the pieces yeah, so great. So one of the things that i say and i sort of hinted at that people are concerned that environmental ism has become synonymous with sort of Big Government solutions. And in many ways were stuck in the 1970s with how we think about environmental. And as you pointed out, the problems that we faced in the 1970s with air and Water Pollution were point sources. They were big smokestacks. They were big outfalls. Right. The cuyahoga catching on fire, those sorts of things and targeting and solving those problems. Government is actually pretty good when there are a very limited number of sources and they can focus on those and have a big impact and was what we saw in the 1970s with the creation of the epa. Those two laws was that it did actually make our air and make our water cleaner because. They could focus on a few sources. Our problems today are very different. They are distributed. Theres lots small sources and. So what we do today has to be different and you dont take my word for it, you can actually take the word of bill ruckelshaus, who was the first director of the epa who did, you know, who sort of first implemented a lot of these laws. And so actually my book ill just read he wrote a great column ten years ago where ruckelshaus said yesterdays solutions worked. Well, on yesterdays problems. But the solutions we devised back the 1970s arent likely to make a much of a dent. The environmental problems we face today. And so we have to change our mindset to deal with the types of problems lots of little bits of ocean, lots of using energy and having small impacts. In puget sound, where i work on salmon, one of the biggest problems is simply tire rubber bits of tire rubber that go into the water. And if you try to do the same kind of top down 1970s approach to those problems, not going to have success and that fact is what were seeing is is that a lot of those problems are not being solved, which is why a lot of the people on the environmental left are turning to these sort of distributed technology based, innovative solutions. There is still an instinct, i think among many to turn to government, but when they really want to solve them, were finding that Innovation Technology is the answer not those Big Government programs from. The 1970s and just for a moment, unpack for us what you mean. Its there in the title and youve made some to geolocation and mobile phones and whatnot. When youre talking about information technology, its more than a supercomputer that fits in your pocket right or were talking about hardware and software as well as distribution. So hundreds of, millions of people empowered. Help us understand a little bit more to your last like i said, 93 of people in developing countries have some kind of cell phone or a smartphone. And so the ubiquity of the technology is simply part of it. The supercomputer in your pocket, a big part of that as well, just being able to communicate and collaborate with people immediately in a way that simply didnt exist before to use of Ronald Cossey in language the costs are very very low to collaborate and so you can do things that only government could do before but its not just cell. It is Smart Thermostats that use intelligence to help you conserve energy in ways that you dont even have to. Think about in my electrical panel, i have a Little Orange box called a sense monitor. A connects to the electrical wires in my house and a million times a second detects what electricity is coming my house to determine what of appliances im using, where im using electricity, and then gives the information so that i can make those sorts of decisions. So the the fact that technology has been so made so easy to develop and is so ubiquitous, not just cell phones, but lots of other things has given us lots of new opportunities to solve problems and do things that. Only government could do ten years ago because the transaction costs of collaboration or information were so high, they just werent available. So lets see if we can work through a couple more terms. As i read through the last week in the last week i kept under underlining and circling terms. I thought, well i know what that means. But then i would come in three or four pages and i would have a much deeper understanding. So why dont you tell us what is Citizen Science . This is something thats been percolating around in magazine articles for two decades, but but youre talking about it in a very real now sense. Yeah. So Citizen Science people talk about it now because as its its real, right . You can you actually can do a lot of things in Citizen Science and its basically just its a combination of two things one people providing data that previously was not available. So just to make a tangible example for people who are birders, they use ebird. I use ebird and ebird is just an app where put in the birds that you have seen, where you saw them and when you saw all of that data though goes, to Cornell University, there ornithology program. And they are now able to use that data to determine bird migratory patterns and do a variety of cool things, both scientifically and for habitat preservation. So people, corporations is much bigger than a third grader with a tin pan in the backyard collecting water right precipitation rates. Absolutely. And in fact, its funny that you mention that, because one of the best Citizen Science programs on the web is called ci starter, or where it has a list, a long list of Citizen Science programs. And the who created it, Darlene Cavalier was doing Citizen Science programs, kids. And shes like, hey, i want to do it. I want to find ways to help. And so it expanded and. Technology has allowed us to span expand it, but its not a really a new thing. Aldo leopold has a wonderful essay from 1943, the great conservationist aldo leopold, what he calls wildlife sports and what he says is like amateurs become interested, different animals learn about them and then become experts in them. They are not, you know, sort of credential phds. They are just amateurs are interested in it. And of course, in 43, we didnt have the technology that we have to share that science and, share that information in a way that we now. But its not a new it has just been made very powerful with technology so that simply putting birds into an app contributes to Scientific Research so what does lets stick with cornell ive ive gone to their web page over the years to they also have a library of bird calls. So yeah listen not just see on a map where birds have passed through or where theyre found or population intensity, etc. , whats to keep the accuracy high, you know, when they hire, graduate students, they send them out into the field with some hiking and a pair of binoculars and a theyre counting on the graduate students, to be honest. But in Northern Virginia, if i go in my i go to birder and i say, i saw a penguin, you know, it goes into the database. What what are we doing . What do we do about that sort of problem with citizen scientists . Maybe not malicious, but people make errors, right . They think they saw a rare bird when did not how how is that accounted for . So theres a variety of ways. So, one, you mentioned bird calls. One of the things that ebird does now is if you hear a bird, you can actually press a button it will record the bird and identify the bird for you, which is really cool. But lets say you are certain that you have seen a penguin in Northern Virginia. When you go into it knows where you are and it will say, here are the birds that are that you could have possibly seen. So first it simply said, you cant see a penguin. It will tell you it wont give you that list, but you say, nope, i a penguin and you put it in. Cornell has merely and millions of bits of data that they collect and so if among those million bits of data is sighting of a penguin, they know that it is anomalous. So theyre a variety of layers of protection that they can use. So by using this data, both first by narrowing it down based what they already know, but by determining whether penguin the sighting is anomalous and if all of a sudden 200 people in Northern Virginia see a penguin, it either means that Climate Change has really done something strange or they need to call the local zoo because there is a penguin list. But unless they those 200 hits, theyre going to say this is a mistake. So they have parameters can send for error rates to to track that down would you mentioned with the leopold article concept that i think is all around us and people are aware of but they dont think hard. What it can do for science. We talk a little bit about gamification i ive been taking my kids hiking since since they fit in one of those little backpacks. You know, since theyre about a year old. And if it off, i will tell you, at least in my household, in their early teens, when they dont want to spend alone with their father. And it came back for my oldest when she got into geo caching. And so she started collecting badges for finding geocache caches. What is what is the badges and the tokens and the numbers . How does this all contribute to as opposed to just being a distraction . Us yeah. So of the challenges of with ebird and other things like that is that 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 or off the beaten. They dont have very many sightings because its hard to get there. And so youre just an amateur birder. Youre youre going to stick by the road. And so a thing called roadside bias. So they have a lot of data in some places and very little in others. And so just like geo caching, we have a thing called avocation where you go out and you they say, look, we need to do sightings in this area. And if you do sightings in area, they will give you points and then you can get rewards like, hats and shirts and, you know, just prestige that you sees among your community. Youre so collected, voluntary private association community. Thats right. So you what happens, like i said, that the cost of collaboration is now so low that even if youre not part of a birding group, you are still part of a birding community. Online on ebird and if you can score points to show that you are one of the top birders in Northern Virginia, thats pretty cool. People like that. They respond to that in addition to sort of the fun little trinkets. But it is a way to supply that basic citizen data where people are going out their normal places and getting the data they need. Theres one in key thing, which is and is a key to gamification. Initially, ebird was built as a system where they would say, heres the data we need. Go it. But what they found is, is that it is better to tell people you do what you want and and work with them and, reward the people using the app rather than treating them just as graduate students going out into the field. And that becomes more effective so consumer response rather sort of top down mandates is what makes ebird really work. And i think its a metaphor for the types of things that im talking, helping the environment from bottom up rather than the top down. So, so i dont want to put words in your mouth and i may even be borrowing words from your book, but it seems to me what youre describing is that solve a pro