[Scott] Up next on "Energy Switch," we return to our deep dive on ocean health.

- Half of the sea level rise is due to the warming of the ocean.

And the other half is due to the melting of glaciers on land.

- We're developing more coastlines and using coastlines where we didn't before.

- Right.

- That in itself may not be affecting sea level rise in that place, but it is definitely raising the consequences.

- How much plastic is in the ocean?

- Imagine making an aircraft carrier out of LEGOs.

Now imagine 100 of those aircraft carriers.

And aircraft carriers are big ships.

- Yeah.

- That's a lot of plastics going into the environment every year.

[Scott] Every year.

- People are beginning to realize that the ocean influences them in every aspect of their life, even if they don't live on the oceans.

- Our understanding of the environment has just exploded over the last 10 or 20 years.

Every major expedition that goes out comes back with new discoveries, new findings.

So that encourages me.

[Scott] This episode, we look at pollution, coastal erosion, and other challenges and potential solutions.

[Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by Arizona State University.

Shaping global leaders, driving innovation, and transforming the future.

Arizona State, The New American University.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

In part one, we talked about the health of fish populations and fisheries and the impacts of warming and CO2 on the ocean.

In part two, we'll look at plastic pollution, fertilizer runoff, and oil spills.

Other challenges like coastal erosion and deoxygenation, and potential solutions to these and other problems in an effort to build awareness for and hopefully to improve ocean health.

My guests again are Rick Spinrad.

He's the former administrator for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the former Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans.

Margaret Leinen.

She's the former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and former assistant director of the National Science Foundation.

Coming up, we conclude a fascinating, sobering discussion of ocean health, part two.

Well, welcome back.

A lot of challenges in oceans with what humans dump into them.

How much plastic is in the ocean, Margaret?

And how do we even think about this problem?

- We think there's somewhere between 75 and 200 million tons of plastic.

But a scary thing is we're putting 10 or 11 million tons in every year.

- Imagine making an aircraft carrier out of LEGOs.

Now imagine 100 of those aircraft carriers, and that's the 10 million tons a year.

100 aircraft... And aircraft carriers are big ships.

That's a lot of plastics going into the environment every year.

- Every year.

- I think it's fair to say that this is one of the more ubiquitous problems we've got.

And in part it's because both well-developed and underdeveloped and undeveloped nations use plastics in large volumes.

And, you know, the insidious issue, the picture behind you shows what is probably the sort of classic characterization of plastics problem.

A major portion of the problem is associated with microplastics and nanoplastics, these very, very tiny pieces of plastic that end up in all the organisms, in all the sediments, in all the waters of the ocean.

- Why are we doing this?

- Well, I would argue it's a consequence of the convenience that plastics have brought to our lifestyle.

- Yeah.

- They are a miracle in terms of the costs of getting things done, packaging things, preparing things, but we're facing the consequences of that.

- Medical supplies.

- Yeah.

- Exactly.

- Safety in cars.

- Disposability.

Yeah.

- I mean, it's improved human lives in many ways.

- Absolutely.

- What's the trend then?

- We don't necessarily have a really good baseline on how it's changing.

- Okay.

- My guess would be it's increasing 'cause we haven't really effectively stemmed the flow.

I think people are on that awareness-raising stage, where folks are just starting to realize that this is a problem.

One of my frustrations is that we've got some of these goofy debates going on about what's the best thing to do.

Clean up the surface large plastics or stop the flow, reduce production.

And the answer, of course, is yes.

All of the above.

- And how does that impact then sea life?

- Well, it depends on the size.

So the big stuff like this, you know, people have all seen the pictures of, you know, sea turtles with rings.

- Six-pack rings.

Yeah.

- Six-pack rings around them.

Then the things that are more like the size of a soda bottle cap wind up being eaten by organisms.

- Pelican stomachs you see.

- Yes.

And then there are the microplastics.

- Right.

- And those are taken up by plankton.

There's some wonderful video of little plankton taking-- - With bellies full of microplastics.

- Bellies full of microplastics.

And then they are eaten by small, tiny fish, and those are eaten by bigger fish.

So they wind up inside the fish.

- It's basically filling yourself up with nutrient-free food.

I mean, if you're eating plastics... If all you ate was plastic, you'd feel full, but you would get no nourishment, to put it bluntly.

- Right.

Never goes away.

- And so physiologically, it's a killer.

- Mm-hmm.

Now, do the humans get impacted by eating the fish?

- Sure.

Yeah.

It introduces the plastics into our system as well.

- That's a lovely thought.

- But we get much more plastic as a result of microwaving in plastic and eating the food than we do from seafood.

- Okay.

How do we remedy this?

Education, awareness, but then what are some of the-- - Education, awareness.

There are some things that are being done to clean up the macroplastics, the large plastics, including at the source.

So there's, in fact, a Dutch group that's putting these devices into the major rivers around the world to try to catch a lot of the plastics.

The fishing community, which is responsible for a lot of the castoff of things like monofilament line.

They're looking at new techniques for fishing that will take better advantage.

Or new processes for recovering.

Federal agencies around the world have recovery processes, even beach cleanups.

But I think at the end of the day, it's gonna be about raising awareness.

The most impressive person I met during my federal career at NOAA was a now 10-year-old girl in Savannah, Georgia named Liddy Clever, who started her own foundation and has written two books on pollution and plastics in the ocean.

And I think that's part of the answer.

We need more Liddy Clevers out there telling their friends, telling their parents, telling their school boards that this is an important issue.

- That's fascinating.

- And I would say also processes that can process plastic.

I don't think the medical world is going to go away from plastic.

- Right.

- Because they want the ability to get something cheaply that they don't have to sterilize.

[Scott] Mm-hmm.

So how do you recycle that?

If there was a way to reprocess this, like we do for glass, that would be a huge step forward.

- Yeah.

You mentioned nutrient pollution.

What is that?

And where is that happening?

- Nutrient pollution is largely nitrates and phosphates, fertilizer.

- Okay.

- So the nutrient pollution is a result of using excessive amounts of it that aren't consumed by the plants that we're trying to fertilize.

And so it gets into the streams and into the rivers, or using so much of it that it goes into the soil and then the soil runs off.

- Got it.

- And what happens is when they get into, like, the Gulf of Mexico, the end of the game is you have a dead zone.

Because you've stimulated this production of phytoplankton, which consumes all the oxygen and sinks.

And now you've got an area that is deoxygenated and can't support life.

- Deoxygenation.

What is that?

- Well, it's basically the reduction in the amount of oxygen that's dissolved in the water.

And it comes from a few factors.

One of which is if you heat the water, it can hold less oxygen.

Also, when you heat the water, you tend to stratify it, which means that you can't mix it as easily.

So you're not gonna be able to reintroduce oxygen that might be held down deep.

So it's a reduction in the oxygen.

Oxygen, it's obviously critical for life.

It's also where we get, one of my friends says, every other breath that you take comes from the oceans.

So if we start seeing a severely deoxygenated ocean, we're gonna have consequences.

The World Meteorological Organization, about 20 years ago, put out a report that said that the oceans are "hot, sour, and breathless."

And they're not independent.

And so if they're hotter, they're gonna be breathless; they're gonna be deoxygenated.

- Very interesting.

Is there ways to reverse that, or how do you deal with that?

- Well, there, it's folded in with many of the other issues we've been talking about in terms of climate change.

And so if we can start tempering the heating of the oceans, that will minimize the stratification.

It's interesting that one of the factors that's contributing to a bit more oxygenation is the turbulence, if you will, the storm activity that we're seeing in the oceans.

And if there's more energetics in the atmosphere stirring the oceans a little bit more, that will help.

So that's, I suppose, a silver lining to some of the consequences of climate change.

[Scott] Right.

- So the places where we see deoxygenation happened are primarily the places where we were already having, we called it the oxygen minimum zone.

So those are becoming more intensely deoxygenated.

And then the areas where we have nutrient runoff going down streams and creating dead zones.

And that's a different cause.

- Right.

- So one of them is the nutrient supply and dead zones.

The other is primarily the warming and stratification.

- Right.

And they can get compounded in some places?

Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Well, let's talk about oil.

Oil spills.

We're familiar with them.

How many do we have in oceans today?

- Annually there's about 150 oil spills of all sizes.

- Yeah.

- What we typically look at is the large, which are those that are more than 700 tons of oil or about 5,000 barrels.

And the interesting thing is that number's gone down by about 90% in the last 30 years.

- Oil spills, yeah?

- Of the large-- - Of the largest.

- Variety of fuel.

- It's gone down by 90%.

- Gone down.

Yeah.

- Well, that's a good trend.

- That is a good trend.

It's attributable to some better navigation tools.

The fact that we have double-hulled vessels now that we didn't have before.

And better international regulations associated with ensuring they don't happen, and then dealing with them when they do.

- And how does that impact sea life?

- Some of our best information comes from a decade-long study after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf.

And BP didn't influence the research at all, but they gave $1/2 billion-- - Yeah.

- To research.

So the science community was able to get in to look at the plume and how the plume was interacting with the water, what was happening at the surface, what the impact of dispersants was.

One of the major findings from that was that the impact, especially on larger sea life, it was acute at the time, but it was also chronic.

And so there were chronic impacts on reproduction.

The endocrine system, effects on the heart.

So that was both oil that they might have swam through, but also all of those organic chemicals that are part of petroleum.

It's not just the oil.

And even very small amounts were very toxic.

[Scott] Interesting.

- And then you have the impact on sea life around the coast.

And there, one of the huge impacts is on the sea grasses and marshes, because those are the nurseries for many kinds of fish and smaller organisms.

- Yeah.

- And the final piece most people don't know that there are coral reefs around the Gulf.

The oil, especially the oil that floated and then sank, smothered the coral reefs.

And that oil stayed around for a long time.

So we still see the impact on reproduction of marine mammals, tuna, mahi, and so forth.

- Interesting.

- In the Gulf.

- There are a lot of natural oil seeps in the Gulf as well, aren't there?

- There are a lot of natural seeps - All over.

- All over.

In fact, half of the oil that we see in the ocean comes from natural seeps.

- Natural seeps.

- Yeah.

- What was the total release of that oil compared to the natural seeps in the Gulf?

- It was huge.

It was huge.

But it was also a one-time thing.

- Yeah.

So the volume, as Margaret said, being pretty large coming from the natural oil seeps, but it's a steady low-flow.

It's not an Exxon Valdez.

They've had the time to adapt versus the traumatic impact of a major spill.

- Right.

So good news is they're going down.

Bad news is, when they happen, still big impact, and through time.

- Yeah.

- We talked about shipping a little bit, an essential industry for sure.

How does that impact ocean health?

- There's the indirect consequence of having emissions associated with shipping and greenhouse gases and all the consequences.

- It's actually a big number.

- It's a good size, yeah, for transportation in general.

- Right.

- Noise is another factor.

These large vessels are known to make certain amount of noise.

It's been measured and monitored.

There's a lot of questions about what the impacts are, especially on marine mammals.

There's another consequence from ship strike.

[Scott] Okay.

- In which especially highly endangered species like North Atlantic right whales, where one or two ship strikes can make a big dent in the population.

- Okay.

And are there ways to remedy or reduce those?

- There's a big move right now to develop a net-zero fleet.

So can we use hydrogen fuels?

Can we use fuel cells?

Can we use other kinds of approaches?

With respect to impact from things like ship strike, there are moves afoot of more of a policy nature establish vessel speed rules where ships can only go no faster than certain speeds certain times of the year in certain areas of the ocean.

And then, of course, on the sound mitigation, there's a lot of efforts to try to build quieter vessels, quieter propulsion systems, or redesign hulls, so that they are quieter as they move through the ocean, which of course is an area of interest for a lot of sectors beyond just the commercial shipping.

- How about coastal erosion?

Where's that happening the most and what drives that?

- Well, what drives coastal erosion is largely sea level rise.

And sea level rise is happening as a result of warming.

So warm water occupies more space than cold water.

So half of the sea level rise is due to the warming of the ocean.

And the other half is due to the melting of glaciers on land, whether that's Antarctica, that's the big one, or Greenland.

And sea level rise is accelerating.

In low-lying areas, even a small amount of sea level rise has a big impact because the slope is so low that a small amount of sea level rise will go inland a long way.

Not just the water during calm times, but the water during storms goes further inland.

And then you have cliffed areas like the one in the picture in back of you where you under mine; the sea level rise under mines the base of the cliff.

- And there's also seawater intrusion, which it may not manifest on the surface as water flooding over the top, but there's some question, for example, in South Florida when those condominiums collapsed a few years ago, how much of that was a consequence of seawater intrusion into the sub-layers and the foundation of that particular building as a result of sea level rise.

- Which affects the water supply.

- Exactly.

- Yeah.

- So while I was living in Florida, Fort Lauderdale had to move its wells about six miles inland because they were becoming brackish.

- How much of the coastal erosion is also related to just human development?

- Well, we're using coastlines.

We're developing more coastlines and using coastlines where we didn't before.

Places like Hawaii, there are major, major developments that were once untouched beaches.

And so that in itself may not be affecting sea level rise in that place, but it is definitely raising the consequences and the damage that will come from that sea level rise.

- Let's kind of recap.

So high level, what are some of the promising solutions to the various challenges that we've talked about today?

- I'm excited by the fact that what I call environmental intelligence, our understanding of the environment, has just exploded over the last 10 or 20 years.

We know things about the ocean.

Every major expedition that goes out comes back with new discoveries, new findings.

So that encourages me, and it tells me there's still a lot more to learn, which means there's probably some solutions lying deep in the ocean to many of the kinds of problems we talked about in terms of food supplies, energy, addressing the challenges of climate change, and basically helping mankind.

So I'm encouraged that we have looked over the edge and seen this extraordinary array of new opportunities to discover more.

- That's nice.

How about you, Margaret?

- One of the big things is that people are beginning to realize that the ocean influences them and every aspect of their life, even if they don't live on the ocean.

So here we are in Austin.

Your program is "Energy Switch," but we're talking about the ocean.

- Yeah.

- Twenty-five years ago, that might not have happened.

[Scott] Right.

- So I think that the more that we're aware of what we do and the consequences, the more that we're careful about it.

- Yeah.

- And then I think the second thing is the young people today.

When I was a graduate student, people in oceanography wanted to go into oceanography almost exclusively to go out and discover.

Today, the students want to discover because they wanna solve problems.

- I was responsible for developing something called the National Ocean Sciences Bowl.

It's a high school competition.

We started this about 25 years ago.

The teams were only from coastal states.

That competition now has teams from all over the country.

When I went to graduate school, you were either a biological, geological, chemical, or a physical oceanographer.

Never will those intersect.

And God forbid you should get involved with atmospheric sciences or climatology.

Now, I think we talk about Earth system sciences.

And so what I see is these students coming out of these institutions with a systems approach.

They understand how the ocean and atmosphere and organisms interact.

And I have seen more and more effective organization among the youth in the world in the last four or five years than I've ever seen before, whether it's at major climate conferences around the world or local professional society meetings.

The young people are organized; they're smart.

They're goal-oriented, and that gives me great hope.

[Scott] That's really nice.

- I'll second that.

It's a different generation, and it's a generation that's motivated and connected.

You know, we wring our hands about a lot of aspects of social media, but it is also a powerful way for them to tell other people what they're worried about.

In addition to social media, I think that what we're seeing in the use of AI is people being able to get around the complexities of comparing a ginormous satellite data set with fisheries data.

And we used to say anytime you wanted to do anything, it was a master's degree because it took 80% of the time just to wrangle the two data sets together.

All of that is going away.

It's allowing us to look at the complexities and also pointing out some of the, you know, where things don't fit the model.

[Scott] Sure.

- And that's going to allow us to take a far less amount of time to get at answers to really complicated questions.

[Scott] Yeah.

- And boy, climate and oceans are complicated.

[Rick] They are.

- We've covered so much turf and ground.

So much water.

- So much water.

- A lot of water.

- On this.

- Oceans of material.

- Oceans of materials.

[laughs] That's right.

Really highly educated audience.

What would you leave them with?

A thought or two that you wanna make sure that they remember from our dialogue?

- So you're right.

We've covered an extraordinarily diverse set of issues here.

Certainly something that we've discussed here has piqued the interest of each member of the audience.

Take that particular area of interest, whether it's pollution, whether it's climate, whether it's commercial shipping, whether it's fisheries.

And spend five minutes trying to find out something about that.

On the web, call a friend, learn a little bit more about it.

That's all I would ask.

- Yeah.

- Is just raise your awareness, and I encourage you to pursue that interest.

- What a great challenge.

How about you, Margaret?

- Everybody sees a lot of images like this one.

Or, you know, dead fish or oil on the beach or all of these things.

And what I want people to remember is that this does not mean that the ocean is gonna die.

Because all of this development is providing answers.

And so don't be discouraged.

Be activated.

- Yeah.

Love that.

Love that.

Get on after it.

- That's right.

- Let's go.

Well, look, thank you both for being here.

I really have learned so much here today.

Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

Margaret, thanks.

- Wonderful.

Thank you.

- Thank you, Rick.

- Thank you, Scott.

Appreciate it.

- Nice way of explaining things.

- Thank you.

[Scott] Scientists estimate there could be 200 million tons of plastic in the ocean, and we're adding 11 million tons each year, because countries have recognized the benefits of plastic, but haven't quite met the challenge of its disposal.

NGOs and governments are starting to use capture technology in oceans and at river mouths to manage this better.

Fertilizer runoff is also causing nutrient pollution, encouraging plankton blooms that deoxygenate coastal waters for other life.

Oil spills have declined significantly since the advent of double-hulled tankers, storm tracking, and other technologies.

But new research on sea life has revealed that when they happen, they're more damaging than once thought.

Coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion into freshwater wells are increasing with sea level rise.

But the younger generation is interested in studying ocean science and how ocean systems interact with other systems with better tools.

Hopefully, they'll help us all make progress to improve ocean health.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Announcer] Major funding provided by Arizona State University.

Home to the Thunderbird School of Global Management, redefining management education to empower transdisciplinary leaders.

Arizona State, The New American University.