Podcast Alert: Ben Abbott – BYU

Ben Abbott: [00:00:00] Most Americans, over 70%, are concerned about climate change. There still is a vocal minority that’s disengaged or even dismissive about it. That’s one of the things I try to help people understand climate change isn’t about decades or centuries from now, we’re living in climate change and already suffering the consequences of it.

AJ Maestas: Hello and welcome to the Navigating Sports Business Podcast. I’m your host, AJ Maestas, Founder of Navigate, a data-driven consulting firm, guiding major strategies and decisions in sports and entertainment. We started this podcast hoping to share the interesting stories and experiences of the amazing people we get to work with that Navigate, and even though they’re visionaries and famous in many instances, their true stories aren’t often heard since they’re not on [00:01:00] the playing field, our hope is you get to know them better and learn from them as we have.

Today I’m happy to be joined by Ben Abbott, Assistant Professor of Ecosystem Ecology at BYU. How you doing Ben? And thank you for joining us.

Ben Abbott: I’m doing really well, AJ. Thanks for having me on today.

AJ Maestas: Yeah. I’m so happy to have you, and I’m sure a bunch of my friends in sports are thinking, what is this about ? But I think this is of paramount importance, you know, the future of our planet, and I think we have a role to play in sports.

So I’m so excited to pick your brain on that, and I think you’ll all really enjoy this. I know I’ve learned so much in our conversations about what to do, how to do it, so I’m super grateful you’re here, and I hope people stick around to listen to the whole thing.

Ben Abbott: Yeah. You know, sports is one of those unique areas that’s, we’re not totally polarized on both in the country and globally.

And so it’s actually a really important platform for people to engage on both about sports itself, but about all other different [00:02:00] dimensions of our lives.

AJ Maestas: I’m so glad to hear you say that. We tell people all the time, you know, there’s very few things that bring a community together and yeah, I can really only think of one that’s consistently positive, you know, war and other threats.

You’d think a global pandemic would some of those things, but you know, you wanna see a town vibrant, watch a team, maybe a long-suffering team, make the playoffs, right, Or make a championship run. Yeah. It has an amazing opportunity to unify. The problem with that is and you’ll hear this throughout as we chat, I’m not impressed by what we do with the stage that we stand on, you know, with this megaphone that we hold in sports.

So if you could layer in recommendations on what to do, my friends, our peers who listen to this are the people who often are making big decisions on where a team is located, building facilities, how athletes present themselves and use their time, treasure, and talent to make the world a better place.

So don’t be afraid to preach. Is there anything more important than this one planet we have here to live on? And I’m not counting Mars as a hospitable place, as an alternative. Get this one right, or you’ve got everything [00:03:00] wrong. And if sports is, as you say, a unifier, it goes across, you know, socioeconomic classes, political classes.

It’s just, it’s the right way to go. Before we begin though, I have to mention, this is so fun. You’re married to a great friend of mine from Fairbanks, Alaska that I grew up with. You got your PhD in Alaska. I assume that’s how you met ratio. Yeah.

Ben Abbott: Yeah. So we met here in Utah when she was doing her graduate work, but then I followed her up to Alaska when she started her PhD and was so enamored that we stayed for five years and both of us did our graduate work there an amazing place.

AJ Maestas: Enamored by the place that’s one way to say it. A bunch of your work is on permafrost, I’m guessing most of our listeners don’t know what permafrost is. Can you tell us what in the world you’re doing on permafrost?

Ben Abbott: Permafrost is permanently frozen ground, and that may seem really distant and unimportant, but actually a huge amount of organic carbon is stored in these northern ecosystems that are out of sight out of mind for most of us.

But as climate change progresses, the permafrost is thawing and then, you can think about what would [00:04:00] happen if you unplugged your freezer or refrigerator, you know, and left it there for a few months. Everything’s starting to rot, and that’s releasing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. This is one of the thousands of reasons why we need to restore earth’s climate and kind of clean up our energy system so that we can ensure that there’s a wonderful place to live for future generations.

AJ Maestas: I love that and I love sharing stories about permafrost, like houses sinking into the earth. You know, it’s kind of a mind boggling concept for someone living in the lower 48, as Alaskans call it, to understand that the ground is permanently frozen under you. So without good insulation. Or a million other things like buckling roads and highways because of, you know, that short summer season melting, you know, melting the earth,

Ben Abbott: That’s such a, such an important point.

In many areas. The effects of climate change can be difficult for somebody to see, right? You have to kind of know, oh, hey, that storm system was associated with climate change. But in Alaska, it’s completely visible. It’s totally in your face. There are areas where [00:05:00] the coastline is eroding tens or even hundreds of feet each year because of the loss of sea ice on the Arctic ocean, and the loss of that stability of the soil.

So that’s one of the things I, I try to help people understand, climate change isn’t about. decades or centuries from now. We’re living in climate change and already suffering the consequences of it.

AJ Maestas: Well, those are good examples because you’re right, If you’re in a more moderate climate, it’s not as extreme for you.

I mean, certainly us living here in the West, I’m in Arizona, you’re in Utah now, you know, we see and feel it with drought and fire. But you know, I would always take guests when I’ve taken ’em back to Alaska, to one of those glaciers. There’s one in the Kenai Peninsula in particular, where they’ve measured how far out the glacier was over the years, and you can just see the rapid acceleration, you right as it recesses back into the draw, back into the mountain.

So yeah, you can’t miss it in Alaska, and that’s always true for places in the extremes, right? You see these things show up there first. All right. So let’s get to it. What can we do, What can Jane and John [00:06:00] American do to fight climate change and leave this place better than we found it.

Ben Abbott: Thank you for that awesome question.

Most Americans, over 70%, are concerned about climate change. There still is a vocal minority that’s disengaged or even dismissive about it, but both political parties and independents agree that it’s an issue. The real question now is what do we do about it? And I used to get asked often, is climate change real?

Is air pollution something we should be worried about? Now I’m being asked that same action question, what can we do? And so one of my idols is Katharine Hayhoe. She’s a Texan, so not far away from Arizona. She’s also an evangelical Christian, interestingly, and one of the world’s top climate scientists.

And she talks about the number one thing we can do to stop climate change is talk about it. And that sounds kind of flippant. It sounds like it’s not gonna be effective. Now talking about climate change clearly isn’t sufficient to solve the problem, but it is necessary to try to depoliticize these issues, [00:07:00] help our elected officials understand that this is a priority for us.

And then also as we talk about things, we learn a lot more about it. So that’s item number one. And you don’t have to talk about Al Gore, right? He’s not everybody’s jam . But talk about your values. What do you want for yourself, for your family? If you have children, for your children? Talk about why you care about this amazing planet that we live on, and that really has a big impact.

But there also are these amazing changes going on. We’re living through what’s been described as the renewable revolution. You might have heard about the industrial revolution, right? Starting in the 1800’s. The changes in the energy system that we’re seeing now are actually faster than that change from biomass and whale oil to oil and coal.

We’re now seeing this transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy that is happening decades faster than anyone predicted it could [00:08:00] happen. And because those changes are coming down the pike so quickly, you’re gonna hear a lot of misinformation and debates about them. And so, don’t just describe the doom and gloom, we need to start talking about solutions, and that’s a change that I’ve had in my career.

I used to just study ecosystems, the environments that are being damaged by climate change. And as I came to understand how serious these things were, I have transitioned my research program into the solution space. How can we get these renewable technologies deployed as fast as possible so that local communities can reap the benefits of them and also so we can avoid these global scale threats that are facing us.

AJ Maestas: Right. I love that. If you don’t mind, I don’t wanna dwell on this too much, but can you give me some highlights of the stuff you used to have to tell people it’s bad, it’s real. Can you give some highlights for those of us who might not be?

Ben Abbott: Yeah, absolutely. The number one reason why we need to transition away from fossil fuels is the human health impacts of this energy [00:09:00] source. So pollution from oil, coal and natural gas causes 12 million premature deaths every year. And, you know, we’re not used to kind of talking about global scale numbers like that. It’s approximately one in four lives on Earth is being cut short substantially by our choice in energy.

And so for me, that may not be something that we’re used to talking about in these environmental discussions, but every environmental issue, is a human issue. The reason why we need to take care of the planet is to make sure that we’re not inflicting all of this disease and even death on one another.

The World Health Organization estimates that 99% of the population of Earth lives in areas with polluted air, and in some areas it’s very visible. You know, I live up in the mountains here in Utah. We get these temperature inversions. You can see the smog, but actually the most polluted area of the United States is the midwest and the southeast.

All of us are living in a polluted environment. One of the [00:10:00] things I’m most excited about, about the change in the energy system is we’re looking forward to a cleaner, more comfortable, and more abundant future. That’s why we want to bring this in as quickly as we can.

AJ Maestas: When you talk about 12 million people a year dying because of pollution, you’re controlling, right? For some people are gonna die for other, you know, airborne issues, right?

Ben Abbott: Yeah, so that number in particular, 60 million people die each year, right? Year after year career approximately. And we’re talking about excess deaths.

So deaths that wouldn’t have occurred in that year, but come earlier and in air pollution, it’s really hard to, to kind of understand this when somebody’s in a car accident, you see the cause and effect right there. There’s no disputing like what caused that death. But with air pollution, it’s like smoking. And it took decades of research to establish the links between smoking and all of these different health issues, especially heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer [00:11:00] reproductive disorders, right?

We have to take the long view, collect the data and control for all of the other factors to arrive at those numbers.

AJ Maestas: I was hoping you’d say that I figured as much as a professor, but I just had to ask those things. There’s such wildly varying statistics when something is new and some category is not mature.

So what about us personally? Can you tell me what behaviors I personally should change to lower my footprint?

Ben Abbott: Yeah. Climate change is being caused by greenhouse gases. And so what is producing the greenhouse gases, the number one source in the United States? Is transportation, cars and trucks. So it’s the way that we are getting around.

And the absolute best way to reduce your transportation greenhouse gas footprint is to use your body. So ride your bike, walk, take public transportation if you have to use a car, transition to an electric vehicle as quickly as you can. And you know, that used to be a big economic sacrifice. But now actually there are EVs available, there are over 130 electric vehicle models available in the [00:12:00] United States now, many of which cost less than the internal combustion engine alternative, especially when you look over the lifetime of that vehicle. So this is a great opportunity for you to save money on your transportation costs and also reduce the negative impacts you’re having on the environment.

So number one thing you can do personally, change the way you get around. The number two source of greenhouse gases in the United States is agriculture. This is one that people don’t think as much about, but producing food. We create fertilizer using fossil fuels, produces a huge amount of greenhouse gas.

We also destroy habitat, natural ecosystems that store a lot of carbon on their own and convert that into agricultural land, which is a major source of greenhouse gases. About 80% of the fertilizer, water, and land that we use for agriculture is used to raise livestock. And the meat and dairy that’s produced by those livestock only provide around [00:13:00] 6% of the nutrition that we need.

And so again, for cultural reasons, you maybe don’t wanna take this choice, but one of the most effective things you can do is change your diet. So eat less animal products. There was a study a couple years ago that found an 85% decrease in the dietary greenhouse gas footprint. By switching from the typical American diet to a primarily plant-based diet.

It doesn’t have to be completely vegan, but eating mainly plants. What I think is really cool about that is, it’s also much healthier. You know, there are all these positive personal health outcomes that come from eating plants, grains, and fruits and vegetables. So you’re gonna see improvement in your quality of life and personal health, while also substantially reducing your greenhouse gas footprint and that 85% decrease is substantial. That means that we could be feeding nine people for the resources we’re currently using to feed one person. So again, as we’re thinking about how are we gonna take care of, of [00:14:00] course everybody in our country, but thinking about the human family spread out around the world, these are two really effective things you can do.

Reduce your use of fossil fuel transportation, and switch your diet to eat more plants.

AJ Maestas: Alright. That’s super helpful. I’ve tried on my diet and I just, I haven’t really been able to stick with being a vegetarian, and I don’t think I would have decent shot at all being vegan, but I do have an electric car, so I feel good about that.

Ben Abbott: Hey, you’re taking a bite out of it and I just love to judge people AJ, so thanks for bringing this up. Now I’m looking down at you and this is what we environmentalists love to do.

AJ Maestas: They say that’s a key part of positive psychology is to like place judgment on others as much as possible. So yeah, I try to practice that daily. You know what by the way, we put in solar thinking that was meaningful, of course, you know, they punched some holes in the roof and so we’re, it’s raining inside our house during rainstorms now, so no good deed goes unpunished. I do want to ask you about solar and some of the other things that we can do, right?

We just had Tim Leiweke on the podcast. He’s the CEO of a company called Oakview Group they’re building dozens of arenas all over the world. But [00:15:00] they’re the people behind Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, which is pretty cool if you know the story. But in the middle of it, they made that commitment to zero carbon footprint.

They went and ripped out all the gas pipes. I always thought gas was, natural gas was pretty good relative to alternatives. They electrified everything, you can imagine the challenges this created, right? Everything from equipment and locker rooms, you know, to food service vendor, you know, they’re just not used to having to electrify everything.

So they electrified everything in the place. And that reminds me of a book he recommended for me, by the way, called Electrify Everything, which I did read. I was worried he was biased toward Electrify Everything, but, but I’m, I’m on board. Of course this building goes way over budget. It goes like 2X what they thought they were gonna . Spend.

Yeah. So sticking with that theme of what we can personally do. You said, you know, drive electric or transport yourself electric, eat less meat in particular. What realistically can sports teams and venues be doing to lead by example? You also mentioned your colleague saying get the word out.

Well, that’s something we can do in sports, right? We have a heck of a stage, heck of a megaphone as we discussed. Yeah. Huge platform. Realistically, can we do [00:16:00] this with our buildings? Is solar, did I make a mistake with solar? Is that part of it? What would your advice be to those in sports, to, A, get the word out, and B, follow your steps as far as what I can do to lower my carbon footprint.

Ben Abbott: Yeah, let me take that, the renewable energy question first and then I’m gonna get more specific about sports. Wind and solar energy have come to entirely dominate the growth in global energy. So last year, 2021, over 90% of all new energy production capacity built globally was wind and solar. I mean, it is just dominating the global scene. Now, in the United States rooftop solar is quite expensive.

That’s not because of the panels themselves, it’s because of all of the permitting and hoops that you have to go through to get it installed. We don’t, except for in a few areas of the country, we typically don’t have a competitive energy market. We have controlled monopolies, and so the utility is used to being the sole producer of electricity, so that really jacks up the [00:17:00] price.

You didn’t make a mistake by going solar now, and in fact, those early adopters are really important in testing out the technology and creating a market. For the businesses that are building these things. So you absolutely had a positive impact on the environment by doing that. As far as whether it saves you money, depends a lot on what the local regulations are.

So that’s another way that an everyday citizen can get involved is call your state level representative or your city council and ask them to streamline the installation of renewable energy. There’s something like seven steps here where I live to get solar permitted on a roof. It’s easier to drill a natural gas well than it is for me to put a small 12 kilowatt array on my house.

I mean, it’s just totally backwards. So here we really need to streamline, remove, cut through that red tape and that can help bring the cost down. Then you don’t have to make a personal sacrifice, you know, when you’re switching to these renewable energy sources.

AJ Maestas: Well, you know, if I can interrupt you there real quick.

That book you [00:18:00] recommended Electrify Everything. And we’ll link to these books in the show notes so people can check ’em out if they want to. I was, Lacey and I were both a little disturbed by finding out, you know, local municipalities, sort of fighting that progress, to your example, clearing the pathway for fossil fuel industry right, to tap and drill and all these hurdles for the equivalent solution, which is cleaner. And by the way, she went on to read that other book. What? There was one about regulation you recommended.

Ben Abbott: Yeah. Short Circuiting Energy Policy by Leah Stokes.

AJ Maestas: Yeah. She said real fun read.

Ben Abbott: You know, that one’s much drier, right?

AJ Maestas: But, but you’ve inspired her to look into what’s going on in our local municipalities and it’s not good. It’s embarrassing what Arizona’s doing, especially when you consider, to your point, Utah, Arizona, the sun. Here we are every day of the year. Really embarrassing that they’re disincentivizing a move toward deregulated power systems, which have been shown to be more efficient and effective, embarrassing stuff that policies are standing between us in the future. So I just had to call that out in case anybody wants to go deeper on that subject or read on that.

Ben Abbott: To build on that, there’s a common misconception that wind solar batteries are only succeeding because they [00:19:00] receive all these subsidies.

But actually, if you look at where the government subsidy is going, it’s overwhelmingly to fossil fuels. They receive four times the direct subsidy. These are tax breaks and incentives and financing, subsidized financing than renewables do. And if you include the environmental pollution that fossil fuels aren’t paying for, that number raises to 34 times more subsidy toward fossil fuels.

And so I like the way that you phrased this. All that we need is a level playing field to take a sports analogy. Right, And if we have that, then this transition’s gonna happen a lot faster. But that requires each of us to get involved and a little bit informed about what’s going on in our local communities.

It’s not enough for the global economy to change if we’ve got outdated laws that are picking winners and losers and subsidizing the fossil fuels that are creating these problems, it’s gonna happen a lot slower than if we update and again, have these market solutions.

AJ Maestas: Well, Lacey’s on the case. I agree.

It’s [00:20:00] kind of disturbing if you think about it. Just to take this to sports, you know, like our job is to see around the corner for the future of innovation. We do a lot of work with this company called . Populous. They build the majority of sports stadiums in the world, and that’s one of our jobs, right?

Is to future proof it, right? What the future generations want in it. And so we get to have all these fun, futuristic conversations, one of which is around cars. And you talked about transportation being the top contributor to pollution. Tell me how legitimate this is or isn’t. You know, we talk about self-driving cars and is it more efficient?

Parking, there’s something like eight times as many parking lots as cars in the United States, and it’s a major issue, you know, congestion, egress, regress. Do you think we’re silly in thinking that the world’s, you know, there’s gonna be actual drones dropping people off and that there’s gonna be, you know, sort of the demand that, the load here on traffic will be massively relieved by autonomous vehicles and, and ride share. I assume you study these things when, if we’re talking about the number one problem is transportation. What can we learn in the building of stadiums and people going 81, 41, [00:21:00] whatever times per year to go see their favorite team?

Ben Abbott: Awesome question.

Well, I really hope that we soon can access stadiums by drone. Cause wouldn’t that be awesome? Just drop off in your little bat suit and fly down to your seat, no lines.

AJ Maestas: In theory. There’s a few things I’m concerned about

Ben Abbott: For sure. Oh no, me as well. Again, talking to my traffic engineering friends, the jury is still out on whether autonomous vehicles are gonna solve this problem.

In some ways, they can actually increase the number of vehicle miles traveled, so they are not a panacea or silver bullet. But there’s good research on mass transit and one of the really positive effects that stadiums can have is they create a transportation node. You’ve got a lot of people that are going to the same place and leaving the same place at about the same time.

And that is a perfect recipe for having a rapid transit bus line or a light rail line. And we’ve seen that here in Utah where the college stadium has become one of the most popular transit lines. [00:22:00] So in general, using mass transit is much more efficient than individual vehicle. If you’ve gotta use individual vehicles, then use an EV.

And what we could do is, have those parking spaces be multipurpose, so cover them with solar canopies, for example. If you look at the footprint of parking spaces, it actually gets us about half of the way there. For the amount of energy we need to completely decarbonize our economy. If we covered all parking spaces with solar panels and then, yeah, you use ’em when you need the 40 times a year or however often you’re going to sports events, but every single day it’s putting clean energy onto the grid and so there’s huge opportunities for this and what I love about that too is every time somebody visits the stadium, they’re gonna look up and it’s raining and they’re protected from the rain or from the sun. So they’re getting a personal benefit. It’s increasing the love factor toward renewable energy, and that’s actually really important. You know, we live in an epoch that’s called the [00:23:00] Anthropocene.

Humans have come to dominate the earth system and the beliefs of individual people of all, almost 8 billion people sharing the planet, really matter. And so when we can have these win-wins, right? It’s a win for the environment, it’s also a win for us. We’re gonna be more comfortable, we’ll have a higher performing car.

There’s not gonna be as much of a wait to get into the stadium. Those are the kinds of opportunities that I think that the sports world is really well positioned to lead out on.

AJ Maestas: Well give me some more recommendations for sports, because that’s overwhelmingly, that’s our audience, right? Like, wind turbines, so I can see solar over parking lots are on tops of stadiums.

I I can see that. I don’t see much room for wind. Well, if we’re probably not gonna be a part of the solution given, you know, electric vehicles and you know, ride share and what have you. What could, maybe getting the word out but, give me recommendations that our listeners could take and put into action.

Ben Abbott: So one of the other environmental impacts of these large sporting events is, of course the solid waste that’s produced. [00:24:00] And here on BYU campus, we’re huge football fans, tens of thousands of people going to these games. I am a mentor for the environmental science club.

You can go raise money by literally using a fire hose to clean out the stadium afterwards. Right? Huge pile of bottles and half eaten food and paper and plastic waste. And wouldn’t that be amazing if you could go, you go to the sports game, if you bring your own container for the soda, you get a discount for that.

Right? Cause you’re not having to generate that waste. Or if you’ve got more healthy and environmentally friendly food options, I would love to buy like a kolache rather than just a hot dog. I love hot dogs too, you know, but have options there. Of course, you’ve got the direct impact of the game itself, but I think the bigger impact is everybody leaves that game and they say, wasn’t it nice that I didn’t have to wade through trash as I left and I discovered a new food that I enjoy eating?

Right? It’s that education aspect. [00:25:00] Nobody does this as well as sports does, so we need to get that messaging in the right direction.

AJ Maestas: You’d be highly disappointed to learn that, you know, people will self-report they want healthier food in a stadium. And you put it on the menu and guess what?

Ben Abbott: They’re still eating nachos.

AJ Maestas: Yeah, that’s right. Exactly.

Ben Abbott: The good news is I’m pretty sure that nacho cheese doesn’t have any dairy in it,

AJ Maestas: It doesn’t have food in it either. So it’s really efficient. That’s great. Are there any externalities to what you’re sharing with me that I wouldn’t otherwise know?

I think people often hear about the externalities. You’ve talked about pollution, you know, killing 12 million people a year. Right. The bad air. What about this, you know, the batteries, the mining for batteries. It seems too good to be true when you talk about the cost being less, it being renewable. I understand regulation and it takes time to catch up, but wouldn’t this make everybody bat shit crazy to not already be investing in this?

So what, what’s, what’s missing here?

Ben Abbott: So that, such a good question. If this is so awesome, then why isn’t it everywhere? The quick answer that I’ll give you is one of our ecological laws, we’ve only got four of them. [00:26:00] One of them is there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. So yes, of course renewable energy has an environmental footprint.

It’s not free. It’s not like a wind turbine just appears out of nowhere. You have to mine those materials. It takes land then to install it and operate it. Likewise, for solar, likewise for batteries, right? You’ve got to get those materials. Just because something has a price or a cost doesn’t mean that we should dismiss it.

We need to be comparing it to what cost we’re paying for our lunch right now. And it turns out that that cost is pretty darn high. So for every one of us, on average in the United States, we’re producing 15 tons of waste each year from the fossil fuels that we’re using. Now, if we were to see that waste, things would change really rapidly, right?

If that was piled up in our front yard. This is primarily the pollution and greenhouse gases that are being created when we combust the fossil fuels. But it’s also the whole life cycle of the land that’s being disturbed and the [00:27:00] potash and the water that’s used to extract and refine the fossil fuels.

It’s this whole life cycle that’s invisible to us. So that’s one of the big externalities, and it turns out when you do the apples to apples comparison, between a fossil fuel driven system and a wind and solar, intermittent, renewable driven system, you’ve got a 90% plus decrease in the waste that’s produced in the land that you need to support that energy system.

Then what’s really exciting to me is, it could eventually become a truly circular system where we don’t have to constantly be going out and disturbing these high quality habitat areas or taking advantage of people to, for example, there’s a famous human rights issue in sub-Saharan Africa extracting cobalt, right?

Thankfully, the new battery chemistries are not using cobalt either as much or at all. So the lithium iron phosphate battery chemistry doesn’t have these problematic rare earth minerals. And so we’re really at place because people are [00:28:00] asking these well informed questions. Hey, what is the cost of this environmental lunch that I’m eating?

We’re really moving in a good direction. Why aren’t people investing in it? Well, the answer is they are. This is dominating the growth in energy. So like I said, about 91% of all new growth in energy last year was wind and solar. That includes China. China installed three times as much wind and solar as the U.S. did.

They didn’t do that because they were doing a service to the planet. They did that because it makes economic sense. We’re seeing the same thing in India. Almost all of the growth in energy production is wind and solar and batteries. Same for Sub-Saharan Africa, and this is a huge human rights issue because there still are almost a billion people globally who don’t have access to electricity.

And we need to be saying what is the fastest, most efficient way that we can get them electricity so that they can rise out of poverty? And the answer is now very clear. Wind and solar. So [00:29:00] nuclear, way better than fossil fuels. It’s just slow and more expensive. And so I ask my nuclear engineer friends all the time.

Make the case, you know, walk me through why it would make sense to do this 10 times slower at five times the cost, and so far they haven’t been able to give me a good answer.

AJ Maestas: I was thinking we could wrap up with a couple of rapid fire questions just to know you a little better. Where’s your favorite place on this planet to travel to?

Ben Abbott: You know, this sounds dumb, but I just love the different environments and ecosystems in the Mountain West, including Arizona, Utah. You travel half hour and you’re in like a totally different environment. It’s gorgeous. Anybody who hasn’t been here, don’t come. It’s not worth visiting.

AJ Maestas: I love it here too, the perception of what happens in Arizona and then hour and a half we’re up 20 degrees cooler, up in pine trees, you know, and the biodiversity is pretty amazing and the climate is exceptional.

I thought you were gonna say France. You lived there, what, four or five years? Right.

Ben Abbott: Yeah, and France is beautiful as well. We lived in Western [00:30:00] France. I worked for the French National Science Foundation on sustainability issues for, as a post-doctoral researcher there for a while. Beautiful place.

Wonderful culture.

AJ Maestas: Yeah, and a very cool experience ratio shared with me all the pictures and just the way you, the, you know, the neighborhood, the beauty, the way you ate from farmer’s markets. It was just the whole thing with like, just utopia. How about one more fun fact from your field of study that we might not know?

Ben Abbott: Carbon dioxide is our number one product as a species, we produce around 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. That’s more than everything else that we make combined all of the cement, steel, and wheat, and it really kind of puts it in perspective. We just don’t notice that because it’s, it’s invisible and that gives us an idea of how big this task is.

We kind of need a wartime level commitment to clean electrification of the economy. But the future that that’s going to create for us is really exciting. And, sorry, you got me talking [00:31:00] about energy again, AJ. But, there was an analysis that came out two weeks ago from the, the journal Joule.

J O U L E, the top energy journal, and they compare to business as usual, where we just kind of keep on going, burning 40 billion tons of CO2 every year versus a rapid renewable transition. And they found that just over the next 20 years, this could save us between five and 15 trillion dollars globally, and that’s not even considering the environmental and climate.

This is just the cold hard economics of the thing. So think about all the cool sports events that we could have with all this, this extra money we’re gonna have. The time, the economic productivity, and the extra life and health that we’re gonna have.

AJ Maestas: It’s a good pitch. I don’t think that one’s gonna land though.

They’ll be looking, they’ll be a little shorter pro forma they’re working from. Just for fun. If you could have dinner with anyone in the world, anyone throughout history long since past, alive today, who would you choose as your special dinner guest?

Ben Abbott: There’s so many people that I [00:32:00] wanted to meet. When I was a postdoc in France, I was funded through this Marie Curie program. She is a pioneering researcher in physics and chemistry. One of the first people to figure out to use and understand radioactivity. But she also just, was hugely successful as a woman in this time when science was dominated by men. And I’d love to have a conversation with her and ask her, hey, what was that like personally?

And just see what her personality was like to be so successful and so visionary.

AJ Maestas: Yeah, it was strange, I think about her working with her husband and how it came to be that they put her findings in her name because it’s the opposite of what happened throughout history. You know what I mean?

It is incredible. Maybe even knowing her husband exactly how he came to that place, that he was comfortable with that.

Ben Abbott: Yeah. That couple. How do they interact and support each other.

AJ Maestas: I mean, just, you know, 99.9% of men in history, we know nothing of his wife.

Right. Yeah. He’d had stolen credit and, and more. But that is cool. That’s a good one. All right. I appreciate that. What did I not ask you that I should have? Especially for our sports [00:33:00] audience? What do they need to know?

Ben Abbott: The air pollution stuff can seem really abstract and like statistical, but there is a famous air pollution sports study that looked at batting averages during periods of clean air and dirty air.

And air pollution of course has these long term health effects, but it also affects the level of our neurological and physiological performance. So you see these big performance boosts when you’re living in or experiencing a clean environment, even over the short term. And that for me, reminds me that there’s no separation between people and the environment.

We live in the environment, we depend on the environment for every single breath, gulp of water, and bite of food that we eat throughout our whole lives. And so we’ve really gotta take care of the earth system Sure, for the benefit of other animals and biodiversity, but really front and center, it’s a question of taking care of of people.

AJ Maestas: I love that. Thank you. That is super helpful.

Ben Abbott: Let me think what else [00:34:00] for a sports specific audience. We talked about how sports really transcends the political divides. Sports in many ways has become religion for a lot of people, right? We build these huge cathedrals, we call ’em stadiums, but in previous times, we would’ve thought of the the giant cathedrals or temples that were being built, and the way that we do sports matters.

It’s a reflection of our values and what we care about, but it also influences and teaches us about how we should interact with one another and the world around us. And that’s one of the reasons why I think this is such an important issue. I have a colleague here, Bryan Hopkins, who travels all over the country and advises sports teams or stadiums on their turf grass.

Trying to figure out what’s the right amount of fertilizer and water and what’s the variety of grass that you can use. And it’s been really interesting to hear him. He just got back from a sabbatical doing this all over the country. And these sports teams were really interested in, yeah we wanna have the best looking grass, but they [00:35:00] also were asking him about the environmental footprint.

You know, turf grass is our number one irrigated crop as a country. As far as acreage goes, so making improvements on using better varieties. There now are these hybrid Bermuda grasses that require a quarter of the water of some of the former varieties that we used. And so my grandparents taught me, if you’re thoughtful about what you’re doing, you can do exactly the same thing for half the cost.

And that’s of course just an estimate overall. But we can take that same traditional pioneer view set and say what can we as a sports community, start doing to reduce the waste. Sure. The cups and stuff that we’re leaving behind on the bleachers, but also the air pollution and greenhouse gases that we’re producing.

And I’m sure that we’re gonna be able to still enjoy, in fact, even enjoy more this amazing thing that we call sports while also improving our environmental stewardship.

AJ Maestas: Well, I’m so grateful, Ben. It’s a real favor to hear from you, to teach us in an industry that doesn’t concentrate on this [00:36:00] very much, in my opinion.

And for anybody listening, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to us. I know that he’d answer an email or two from y’all, so don’t be afraid. You can find us on NVGT.com, which is our website. We’ve got a bunch of other good free content on there, and you can interact with us on our LinkedIn pages too.

So reach out if you have a question, comment or follow up, and we will be posting notes so you can see some of these references and books and things that came up on our conversation today. Again, this is AJ Maestas joined by Ben Abbott. And thank you for joining us on Navigating Sports Business.

Ben Abbott: Thank you so much AJ.