RMI

When you really dig into this paper and start looking at the authors, you might start to get an understanding of why they were so emphatic that gas stoves are bad.

If you've ever heard of the Rocky Mountain Institute, this is a group of people who believe that none of us should be using fossil fuels at all.

And the lead author of this study is actually an employee of the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Rocky Mountain Institute actually partially funded this study.

So I'm sure you think that's perfectly fine and there's no conflict of interest there at all, right? But basically these researchers that authored this paper took one number from one of the studies that did show that cooking with natural gas could cause an increased risk of asthma or asthma exacerbations.

And then they modeled that number.

Initially looking at the financial industry funded all of this, including the AI platforms are out there now.

And so like my question and even this question to you is like, where's the banks been in this whole conversation as it relates to putting solar onto people's homes? And, you know, I've been going through some stuff at the Rocky Mountain Institute, which are great.

And coming from the credit card industry, all I could do is similarities.

I could just take the similarities.

We did kind of intentionally pick Colorado because of that history.

There is a really strong culture and community of passive solar designers back in the 70s and 80s and Rocky Mountain Institute, Amory and Hunter Lovins, all of them.

So there was like a lot of people already working on the concepts behind the passive house standard from Colorado.

And it was middle of the country.

The previous tool I was talking about in terms of that early assessment for a retrofit, we are working with...

Well, we started with, uh, Neen Flats Architecture, Tim again, and RMI, the Rocky Mountain Institute, was supporting that, part of that tool, and we've been just developing it since then.

This current one, the DFMA, for architecture, so it's, we're calling it the IC Arch tool, so it's the industrialized construction for architecture.

And we're, we started with, uh, Rhino as our modeling software 'cause that's the most common software in schools of architecture.

Well, it's great to be back, Kurt.

Auden, you started your career working at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank that basically proposed that many social and environmental problems could be solved voluntarily because it just made economic sense for firms to do so.

Why did that make sense at the time and why did that idea kind of latch on?

It's an incredibly sexy idea.

You know, when you actually had the boots on the ground and you had to do this work rather than recommend the work.

Was there a moment when you realized the opportunities might be more limited than you had expected?

I left Rocky Mountain Institute super excited to deploy its ideas in the world.

And the easiest thing you can do in corporate sustainability is change light bulbs.

Uh, you know, the use of EACs.

Okay, now we can go back a few years when the Rocky Mountain Institute had worked to put together a green steels, green steel buyers consortium, and they wanted to consolidate a couple million tons of green steel supply and help use that demand to generate a, a, a, a supply chain of green steel.

And it-

Mm-hmm

I may not have said that correctly.

No, it, it, it, it is, but it's, there's different ways that green steel is gonna be implemented, uh, across the supply chain, depending on what a, a, a company's objectives is and what they're trying to do.

But I'm gonna take a step back, uh, to complete a thought that I had on this Rocky Mountain Institute and the Green Steel Consortium because they couldn't put together what they intended to do, but they've come up with a solution around EACs, and there are plenty of companies out that are, that are helping to develop the market for the EACs.

You know, assurance of accounting, make sure that, yeah, what you're paying for is what you're getting.

And so I was very fortunate to be able to be part of two separate teams.

One was led by Rocky Mountain Institute and the other was led by Syracuse University, whom both, and there were many other team members, Tatum, Cycle Architecture, Stangle Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley, National Labs.

I'm sure I'm missing a few, but it was, they were two, I guess what I would refer to as powerhouse teams with little tiny TKF and its concept also on these awards.

So, Yeah, it was great to have the, I guess, trust and faith in those institutions to be able to say, yeah, let's do this.

So you can tell I'm really excited about this kind of work.

But before my time at Clean Rides, I've also been working on quantifying the benefits of clean energy and transportation investments after a few years at the Rocky Mountain Institute.

And I had a few additional stints as a civil engineering researcher and also as a U.S. EPA contract.

So I've been on this environmental, you know, beat for a bit now and super happy to be with the network.