>> Good evening.

Welcome to Prime Time.

I'm Bruce Haines.

Daniel Pointers studied philosophy and religion.

He was named a MacArthur Foundation young innovator.

>> He was invited to speak at academic institutions throughout the world, advised more than 100 social enterprises and was a professional software engineer .

Daniel Poynter spent nearly all of 2019 studying climate full time interviewing more than 300 people working in environment related professions throughout the Midwest.

>> And from that process Daniel and his colleagues distilled the strategy for carbon neutral Indiana carbon neutral Indiana is just a way to clean up your carbon trash but also making it finding connecting to the community and making it bigger than just ourselves.

>> I'm involved in a lot of national or even global organizations in conservation or in the environment.

But I think the fact that it's Indiana based there's a network of like minded people where you can meet other people that care about this issue.

>> I joined carbon neutral because I thought it would give me a way that was really quite easy to make an impact on my little piece of the world in my carbon footprint through a charitable organization where I had confidence in how my money was being used, I joined carbon neutral Indiana because racing is kind of the opposite of carbon neutrality.

Just doing my part to bring it into racing because it's is needed.

>> You think about carbon neutral Indiana as an investment in the future.

>> To me climate change is the number one issue facing humanity and the planet and so anything I can do to make a difference I'm going to do it.

Daniel Poynter is the executive director for Carbon Neutral Indiana.

He joins us in studio and you can join us by phone.

You can call in your questions and comments the number that you see on the screen as we widen out and welcome Daniel Pointer to the program.

>> Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for inviting me.

My pleasure.

Our pleasure.

And I know this is everybody's first question what does carbon neutral mean?

>> Carbon neutral just means that for all of the greenhouse gas emissions that we create we take responsibility for them and remove the same amount somewhere else in the world.

It follows the timeless principle of do no harm the idea that our carbon footprints actually harm the world and we can remove that harm and try to be neutral.

>> What contributes to a household's carbon footprint?

>> Well, a good analogy is I call it carbon trash.

So when you heat the water in your home or you fly on vacation for vacation or you buy stuff at Target or you drive your car, all of these things release greenhouse gases and usually people only think about electricity and natural gas but basically everything we do creates carbon emissions and this is a way to try to put a picture to the words tell us what we're looking at here.

>> Oh yeah.

So our nonprofit helps households and businesses measure their carbon footprint.

>> This is an example of a two person household in Fort Wayne .

>> This is a pretty average situation.

This is where someone's carbon emissions come from.

You can see that some of it comes from travel and electricity and natural gas but a lot of it comes from things like buying goods and services, fixing your car, buying health care services and so on.

>> So when somebody is seeking to be carbon neutral they may not necessarily know how much it can be included in that in that definition.

On the other hand, within that definition some may say well I have solar panels aren't I trading off?

>> I buy green power.

>> I should be able to say that's a reasonable exchange.

Yeah, some people think that if they have solar panels they're carbon neutral.

But as you could you saw from the graph, electricity is only one part of your carbon footprint.

You also burn natural gas.

You also have propane for your heater.

You also buy things at the store so people have solar panels.

>> That doesn't mean they're carbon neutral.

There's still a lot more stuff that they have to reduce.

>> Let's go back to your journey through 2019 when you were doing all of the interviews, the study and so forth.

>> What struck you through all that research?

Two things I interviewed over 300 people working on environment in the Midwest.

I learned two major things.

One of all of the greenhouse gas emissions in the country half come from just 10 states.

>> One of them is Indiana.

The other thing I learned was psychological.

A lot of the people trying to work on this issue and others are have a defeated mentality kind of like a football game that's never won a football team that's never won game.

>> So there's a lot of defeatism basically an environmental community in Indiana this led to as we said at the open a strategy to develop carbon neutral Indiana.

>> Their are some high stakes in play in understanding climate and climate change.

>> One of those I believe is the goal of becoming carbon neutral as a planet by 2050.

Correct.

Some of the viewers may have heard of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.

>> I like to say that it is the largest group of scientists ever assembled in human history which is pretty awesome and every couple of years they put out a report saying how many greenhouse gases is a human is that is humanity creating?

And recently they said that we have to get to carbon neutral as a as a world by 2050.

>> So when I saw that I thought my gosh, that means that America needs to get there by 2050 but even that's too much which means Indiana has to get there.

So I thought OK, I'll plant my flag here and I'll say for the next 30 years I'll help Indiana get there.

>> But even that was too much.

So the way you eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

So I OK, we're going to start with households and businesses.

>> We're going to measure their carbon footprint will help them invest financially in projects that reduce emissions elsewhere and then over time will help them reduce their direct emissions.

>> And that measurement I'm sure is the next area of questioning from many who might well be interested in pursuing the carbon neutral Indiana works with households and businesses to try to measure something that sounds like it's hard to get no around.

>> Yeah, for a lot of people it's hard to even imagine one city councilor was very proud.

>> I've helped over 300 people measure their carbon footprints and one city councilor was very proud that him and his family planted about 100 trees, which is a really commendable.

His children will remember that forever.

But after we measured his household's carbon footprint I told him that he would have to plant several thousand trees every year to balance out his family's carbon footprint.

>> And so measuring your carbon footprint even if you just do that, it kind of puts things in perspective.

>> This is the part where you say we're going to go in a conceptual way rooting through our carbon trash I guess, right?

Yeah.

To try to understand what the depth and breadth and height of the carbon usage in a given household is and I believe on the website which will share as we go along this starts with a 15 minute phone call.

>> Yeah.

And while that might sound overwhelming that you have to plant thousands of trees actually in reality we've helped over 200 households in Indiana clean up their carbon trash.

>> They measure their carbon footprint.

They take responsible for it and they invest financially in projects to reduce the same amount and almost to a person at the end I ask how do you feel?

>> And they say actually I feel lighter and a lot times they laugh and they say I had a vague sense of dread and anxiety before the call but now I actually feel like I took a step forward.

>> It's not so bad if we all just do this.

It actually brings a lot measurement to the problem and we can actually solve it.

What does it mean to clean up your carbon trash?

>> How much does that kind of thing cost?

How do you put a number to that?

Well, for households and businesses think about for a household usually for one individual it costs about 15 dollars a month for them to clean up their carbon trash.

So it's similar to Netflix for the household.

It's similar to their water bill.

>> So for people who feel like we're in a climate crisis, that's not that much right.

If people are employed and they have a little bit of spending money for a business we help businesses to if you look at their annual revenue one quarter of one percent of their annual revenue that's the cost to be carbon neutral.

>> And the cool thing is about 70 percent of consumers are happy to pay 10 percent more for an environmentally friendly product.

>> So if it costs a quarter of a percent of your revenue to be carbon neutral but your customers are willing to pay 10 percent more, you can just pass that cost on if your company is not competing based on price if you if you're providing something higher than a low price.

>> So this gets to the concept then of carbon offsets I believe and I'm not sure what I just said.

>> Correct.

So going into this situation during twenty nineteen when I interviewed a lot of people I saw so many awesome solutions to reduce carbon emissions in Indiana but I ran out of life savings and I thought where's the money going to come from to do this?

There are some amazing things.

For example we all think of carbon dioxide but there's many other greenhouse gases.

>> One of them one of the most noxious is called refrigerants refrigerants are the chemicals that are in your air conditioner in your refrigerator.

>> Right.

And they can be 7000 times worse than carbon dioxide.

>> Seven thousand times worse.

Now Indiana has 700 grocery stores and every year they leak 25 percent of this chemical into the air and the EPA has a free program that helps them reduce that leakage out of 700 grocery stores.

Guess how many are enrolled in this free program?

>> I'm guessing it's a low number one.

>> That's a low number.

So if you think about it, why aren't we helping those grocery stores reduce their leakage?

>> It's very cost effective.

It actually saves the money.

So if you think about a carbon offset when I first started thinking about it, I thought it was like an indulgence in the Middle Ages with the Catholic Church.

>> I just thought it was greenwashing.

>> But that's the buy side.

That's a cynical view of the buy side.

If you look at the supply side so people that reduce emissions like reducing the leakage of refrigerants, they have to get paid.

How do we get money to flow to these projects to get stuff done?

The way you do that is with the carbon market with carbon offsets.

>> So basically when an individual or company has a carbon footprint they try to reduce it as much as they can but they can't reduce all of it.

>> They still by virtue of being a citizen in this country you have a carbon footprint.

>> But there are so many opportunities out here where you can take that amount and reduce it elsewhere at a cost effective way like reducing refrigerants.

>> And the way you do that is with a carbon offset and the funds raised are what project driven perhaps are project allocated as you're saying to whether it's refrigerants or perhaps something within forestry I believe carbon neutral and as a part of the Indiana Forest Alliance correct on its way to being its own 523.

>> Correct.

We are 523 but we're part of the Indiana Forest Alliance and early next year we're going to break out for my own nonprofit.

>> Now I don't know if there's any libertarian nerds listening or if there's any free market people that are interested in the free market.

>> But even if you're not interested in the free market, what I'm about to say will be very exciting to you.

>> So theoretically if you create carbon emissions you could plant a thousand trees.

>> It's going to take a lot of time and you probably have the land or you could pay somebody to do for you.

>> When they do that they can actually measure the amount of carbon emissions that they are responsible for reducing and you can pay them to do that right.

And you can quantify it and drive money to it in a cost effective way.

But the most cool thing about the carbon market is it's not just trees, it's also refrigerants but it's also one hundred and ninety eight other things.

Any project that can quantifiably reduce carbon emissions you can figure out the cost to do that and figure out the cost per ton and you can allocate money to the cheapest ways to reduce emissions.

>> One example that is so cool there's a lot of greenhouse gases.

>> One of them is called methane.

It's 30 times worse than carbon dioxide and cows burp up methane all day long, right?

>> Well, in Indiana we have 800000 cows.

They're all burping methane.

>> It turns out if you feed them garlic and citrus or red algae from Asia, a little bit of this food and their diet reduces methane 30 percent no dairy farmers are doing this.

>> They're not regulated.

It is nobody's forcing them to do this.

Why would they spend the money to do this?

It just doesn't make any sense.

Right.

The only reason why they would do that is because Cummins or Salesforce or Eli Lilly or you and me we paid them if we said I'll give you a thousand dollars a month to feed them this dietary supplement.

Yeah, of course.

>> And guess what?

We just reduced a ton of greenhouse gases at a very cost effective way.

And when these evidences come forward my guess is it is flattening out everyone's learning curve which can be rather vertical because education's a big part of trying to get the concept internalized so that you can understand digest that and then be able to take appropriate next steps.

>> Education is the reason why I created this as a nonprofit if I created this as a for profit we could have had millions of dollars of venture capital.

I don't know if your viewers know this but in the 90s obviously there was the Internet boom.

>> A ton of venture capital went to anybody who had an idea to make a bunch of money.

>> We're in the same situation right now with venture capital.

Anybody with a good idea they can make a profitable business for climate can get a million dollars.

>> I did not do that.

I created a nonprofit on purpose because we're creating an educational institution.

We're going to be more like the Boy Scouts or Habitat for Humanity and the biggest way that we can help Indiana is by educating Indiana.

So a lot of people think the best thing they can do is recycle but in fact recycling isn't that effective in terms of reducing greenhouse gases.

>> Very few people know about what I just said about feeding cows garlic.

Very few people know that it only costs a quarter of a percent of revenue for a business to be carbon neutral.

If we really are in a climate crisis, why wouldn't every business pay a quarter of a percent of revenue to be carbon neutral today?

>> It just makes sense, right?

So people don't know this and this is why we found it.

>> I found it as a nonprofit because education is the biggest lever we can pull in Indiana and we're finding that this is not only taking root here in the Hoosier State but there are other states that are experiencing and experimenting with ways to control carbon .

>> Yeah, actually most of our members are from Indiana but tons of people contact me from around the country and say can you make me carbon neutral too?

>> So I went ahead and bought the websites for every state carbon neutral Alaska carbon neutral, Ohio carbon neutral Israel carbon neutral UK, Canada we have websites for all over the place.

So when this when it makes sense we're going to expand this throughout the country and in the world and the idea is that this will be a national nonprofit like Habitat for Humanity with local chapters locally controlled chapters where where people can make their households and businesses.

>> CarbonNeutral and the money will stay locally in the economy and people can see where the money goes and they trust it.

>> And in this way we can bring this ethereal idea of carbon markets.

>> We can bring it down to the local level.

People trust it and we can make financial resources do a ton of good.

>> There is and we're seeing some examples of individuals here in the Fort Wayne area alone who are moving forward with their part to control their carbon footprint through carbon neutral Indiana.

There are a number of other families across the state that are also involved as you can see here, one of the things that this creates is each individual household or business participates.

>> You're creating community and you have a couple of ways of expressing that.

One of them is a little visual, a loop if you will, of what happens when one good person passes on thoughts to another good person talk about this.

>> This is a visualization of our community growing as one friend tells another friend when people become carbon neutral they put up a yard sign and everybody asks what is this carbon neutral mean?

And that's how we're growing exponentially just like eBay grew.

It may take a while at first but eventually because of math it just goes exponential and our ultimate purpose is to make this normal in the same way that it was normal to smoke cigarets in the classroom in the 50s.

>> It's not normal to do that anymore in ten years when you go to a restaurant every restaurant have a sticker that says we're carbon neutral.

>> It'll just be normal to clean up your carbon trash just how we clean up physical trash .

And when you were mentioning the exponential gain from efforts of this order, there is another visualization and you literally set it up next to you.

>> Do you want to tell us what you're about to show for sure?

>> OK, so it turns out that a domino can knock over another domino one and a half times its size and I grew up as a Methodist and I always learned the faith of a mustard seed can move mountains.

This is a mathematical way to demonstrate that.

>> So I hired a woodworker I would go ahead, keep going but I think we're going to need to stop at about that next to the last domino for the sake of the set.

>> But go ahead.

Basically the SD card in your phone which is only you know, less than an inch within 27 dominoes can knock over the Empire State Building.

No joke.

>> So I hired a woodworker to make these for me and whenever I go speak at churches or schools around Indiana I bring this and people may forget me, they may forget the ideas but they remember the idea that one person who lives the future that they want to see they live the CarbonNeutral future.

>> They communicate that their friends eventually we're going to make the whole state of Indiana carbon neutral.

>> It's just it's inevitable what it also seems to represent to is the idea that the well intentioned don't have the accountability necessarily to continue to validate themselves.

I hear of one of the problems with enacting good intentions is this this notion of what lack of smart goals, lack of accountability.

>> Tell me a little bit more about that.

OK, so the USA Today a few weeks ago wrote an article and they said that many cities in the country created climate plans.

They said OK, our carbon footprint for Fort Wayne or Indianapolis is X and over the next few years we're going to reduce that right.

>> If you Google the USA Today article from a few weeks ago, they found that most of these plans didn't work where I live in Indianapolis, one of our universities said that in 2012 they're going to reduce their carbon footprint.

They spent one and a half million dollars on sustainability which is rain barrels and recycling bins eight years later after one and a half million dollars, their carbon emissions went up 30 percent.

>> This is common when when universities, cities, companies make a climate plan, it's very common for it to go in the wrong direction and for them to waste money.

We designed carbon neutral in the a strategy to not come from the top down but from to come from the bottom up instead of hoping that somebody somewhere will fix the problem, each one of us can fix our part of the problem.

And when we become carbon neutral like Ziggler the famous sales trainer said we will be very persuasive salespeople and convince our fellows to be carbon neutral and when there's enough of us guess what Eli Lilly contacted me.

They're going to be carbon neutral.

They're in a working group with me.

They need help to become carbon neutral.

I just visited a manufacturer today who does five hundred million dollars a year their headquarters overseas said you need to be carbon neutral.

He reached out to me.

He's like I don't know what to do.

One of our members started a hospital.

It does one hundred fifty million dollars of revenue.

One of our members is vice president at IU Health and buys over a billion of supplies.

The the supply chain of a hospital is one of the biggest carbon footprints.

So what I'm saying is a lot of people when they approach climate goals come from the top down and it doesn't work because the people leave and they get a new job.

>> We're coming from the bottom up.

All of many of our members work in institutions once they get a taste of the future then they can get the institution to follow suit.

>> It's a very intentional strategy and then seems to combat the loss of institution or memory of somebody who said well three five years ago we agreed and who all was in the room then who's in the room now that that's also another challenge.

The other I think probably is when you hear a lot of so let me ask is there a reluctance on some people's part to try to take a local response because they're kind of thinking, well, how does this effort of mine make a difference if major companies and countries don't do anything with their carbon ?

>> Yeah, people say I'm just individual.

What can I do?

Right.

Well, guess what?

A few years ago I was a software engineer.

I didn't know anything about climate.

I just dove in last summer not to brag.

I really am just a regular guy.

Maybe I'm intelligent but I'm not I'm not Einstein.

>> Senator Braun invited me to his home.

Senator Braun most people don't know he's a Republican from Indiana.

>> Obviously he created the bipartisan climate caucus in the Senate, a Republican from Indiana and he said in his living room most Republicans are worried about climate and he also said that he's for a market based approach.

So I'm a regular guy.

I just dove into this and two years later I'm in the living room of a senator.

>> Right.

Two years later Eli Lilly is looking to me and my friends for guidance.

Two years later I'm advising a five hundred million dollar company to go carbon neutral.

I'm not bragging.

What I'm saying is is that every one of us could be like this.

All we have to do is be laser focused and guess what?

>> You can lead elephants around the room.

These huge institutions are elephants and all we have to do is educate ourselves and try to walk the talk and guess what?

>> The elephants will follow us.

How does CNI fit into the larger climate movement?

>> So whether you're conservative or liberal you need to know Michael Bloomberg .

>> Michael Bloomberg spent billions of dollars on on climate or at least hundreds of millions of dollars.

One of the things that Michael Bloomberg did was he spent he gave millions of dollars to cities around the country to help them reduce their carbon footprints and every I think year or two they create a document called America's Pledge and in that document they it's basically the cutting edge analysis of how America's carbon emissions are going and they said that there's three buckets to reduce carbon emissions.

>> The first bucket is we need renewable energy whether that's nuclear or solar or wind.

>> We need to get rid of coal, natural gas.

We need renewable energy.

The second bucket we need to electrify everything.

We need to electrify cars.

We need to electrify buildings .

>> We need to get rid of natural gas.

We need electrify everything.

The third bucket is we need natural carbon sinks.

So the Nature Conservancy told me that there's eighty thousand acres of farmland in Indiana that is degraded and can be reforested.

Who's going to pay for that?

Well, those of us who become carbon neutral can pay to reforest farmland.

>> But of these three categories the Bloomberg people said that there's actually a higher leverage point called carbon pricing.

>> Carbon pricing means that instead of just throwing the trash out the window out of sight, out of mind, you actually have to internalize the cost and pay to clean it up.

You can't just pollute.

You have to clean it up right now when you do that you can still be a libertarian hyper capitalist.

The markets can still work as you hope they can.

>> But when you internalize the costs resources are allocated to low carbon solutions.

>> It's a very efficient way to reduce carbon emissions.

So what CarbonNeutral Diana does is we focus on this high leverage solution called carbon pricing.

>> Usually people come from the top down.

They want a carbon tax or carbon fee, something like the California cap and trade system.

>> We come at it from the bottom up because in Indiana people don't want to be we don't want to be told what to do but those of us who are Boy Scouts, we learned that you need to clean up your your campsite.

>> Our mother told us that we need to clean up after ourselves so why wouldn't you clean up your carbon trash voluntarily?

So that's our approach is to voluntarily pay a carbon price for more information.

>> There is a way to go.

You can allow your mouse to find all of the additional details by going to carbon neutral Indiana.

Doug, you see the phone over there as well and Daniel Poynter is the executive director for Carbon Neutral Neutral Indiana.

>> We'll continue to follow this and appreciate the positive spirit about neutrality.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

>> And for all of us with prime time, thank you for allowing us to be a part of your evening.

I'm Bruce Haines.

Take care.

We'll see you again soon.

Goodnight