There is a lot going on in the world today. One, I am battling a cold, so I apologize for my voice. But the other thing is a civil war ended in Syria this week, which is amazing. Hopefully they get some peace. And apparently the next president or the incoming president of the United States is trying to annex Canada, which he can't because we're a sovereign country, wants to make
it the 51st state. And Elon Musk is kind of laughing because The President Trump, the next President of the United States, is saying, hey, if you put in a billion dollars towards a project, you can bypass all the environmental rules and regulations and you can just start your project. So he's laughing his
head off. Meanwhile, wild polar bears have different feces than captive polar bears because their food source is changing due to climate change from billionaires who are doing projects where they're getting their rules and regulations taken away because they can do whatever they want if you have the money. There's a lot to talk about today, and we're going to do that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast with my voice. Sorry about that. Let's start the show. Hey, everybody,
welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And normally I have a very much better voice, but this is the place where you can find out everything you want about the ocean, about ocean conservation, whether it's news, how to
speak up, how to take action. All you have to do if you want more information and you want more episodes, YouTube, Spotify, other podcasts like Fancy Scientist, which is wildlife biology, as well as careers. And we look at aqueducts and Beyond Jaws, the episode I co-host with the famed Lost Shark guy, Dr. David Ebert. You can go to speakupforblue.com to
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at 8 a.m. Easter. Let's get into the show. There's a lot. a lot going on and some of the stuff we're going to cover some of the stuff we're not obviously the war in syria the the civil war is has ended we're not going to cover that because that's beyond the scope of this show but we are going to talk about other politics that are going on It's really interesting with the changing of the administration next year in the US and probably the upcoming change in Canada. So North America is having a
lot of changes. Europe is having a lot of changes in their politics. France government was just, I guess, dissolved and the Prime Minister was kicked out from a non-confidence vote. The government of Canada, probably a non-confidence vote, will be successful soon. The Conservatives have tried it three times.
That means if the they vote non-confidence the we go to an election basically i'm not going to go into too much detail but that is going to change over if it does change over to the conservatives where they don't really have any climate action in place they're ready to cut projects they're ready to cut funds and they're ready to cut the carbon tax and we are going to find out more of what is going to happen when we ignore climate change like we So I want to cover a
little bit about climate change because we also Got news today that President Trump put out on his on a social media platform truth social that he is going to Exempt anybody who puts a billion dollars Towards a project doesn't matter the project where they don't have they'll be exempt of any rules and regulations for environmental policies Nice must be nice to be rich and to be able to do whatever you want I guess when it's that big, it doesn't really matter,
although it does because usually those projects are oil and gas projects like coal or something like that, some kind of fossil fuel based projects, which he'll probably approve as much as possible according to his campaign promises. So we're starting to see the consequences from an environmental perspective of an incoming Trump administration. We knew it was coming, and
now we're starting to see what that looks like. And there's a lot of things that are going on that are consequences of climate change that we end up not realizing because all these policies are being and regulations are being kind of clawed back because of the incoming administration. And so we're going to see a lot of interesting things
that on today's episode, but I want to end it. So stay tuned. I want to end it with five companies that are doing some great things for the environment and that you can support by buying their stuff. I think that's something that we really need
to focus on. We're going to talk about it near the end of this episode is where do we go when governments aren't there to support us, when governments aren't there to help us make the choices that we need to make from a national perspective or even a provincial or state perspective, where do we go When we can't get the answers that we want or we can't get the actions that we need, we have to do
it through our business leaders. And we're going to talk about that in a second. But while all this is going on, while billionaires are going to be exempt of following environmental regulations, while we're seeing all these projects doing in these in these legislations being clawed back. we are seeing some major consequences, especially being predicted and actually being seen. So the first one is we're seeing issues with polar bears in their feces and we're seeing what scientists are
saying. We're going to see the polar bears are going to be different. You know, the polar bears we know very well are going to be different in their makeup and what they look like and what they eat and how they act based on climate change and, and what's happening with climate change. Polar bears have always been the canary in the coal mine for climate change. With shrinking ice coverage, polar bears populations are being more and more threatened. Why do you ask? Because polar bears will feed
using ice floats. They are a marine mammal. They are in the water more than 60% of the time, which is why they're considered a marine mammal, even though they are on land quite a bit and they look like a land animal. They have four legs. and they end up swimming most of the time. In fact, they've been clocked to swim more than 700 kilometers at once. But they are air-breathing animals, and they don't really float very well, so they need to continue to
swim, or they need to rest on the water. Their major food source are seals. They're fat, they're plumpy, full of energy, and they're full of protein, so they have to go out and get those seals. Well, seals are not always gonna be on land. They swim, they're marine mammals as well, and they swim most of their time. So they have to go out at sea to get them. That could be swimming, or that could be on an ice float while they rest. They need ice floats.
In fact, if you go a certain time of the year, you will see polar bears go in a town called Churchill in northern Canada. And you will see them actually wait for the ice floats to come in and they'll get on those. They'll swim out to those ice floats and they'll ride those ice floats out or they'll swim beyond them and wait for the ice to break up so that they can rest on the ice floats while they wait and feed on the seals. I told you my voice was
really bad. I apologize for that. So there was a study that looked at how the animals are changing in terms of their protein diet, right? How are they getting their energy in the wild compared to those in captivity? So there was a research team from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that spent a week on the Hudson Bay in Churchill, Manitoba in 2018, studying the
creatures and gathering data about their gut microbiome. So they collected the fecal microbiome of wild and captive polar bears, and compared their findings to understand how the changing climate affects the bears' diet and health. Yes, they looked at their poop. They looked at captive animals' poop, and they looked at wild bears' poop, and they compared the two. The interesting thing is captive polar bears are on a long-term, high-protein
diet. This has exhibited a more diverse and distinct fecal microbiome than their wild counterparts, likely due to dietary and habitat shifts. That's what the Dalhousie News said, the press release. So wild polar bears, which usually eat high-fat seals, are missing out on their marine mammal-based diet because of the human-caused climate change and the rise in global temperatures, and resulting in a lack of sea ice, which forces them
to remain on land for longer periods of time. So the study mimicked these changes by feeding the captive animals a diet of heavy in mackerel and seaweed, as polar bear populations suffering from decreased ice coverage and longer ice-free seasons are turning into low-fat, high-protein diets. So we don't know how
this is going to affect polar bears in general. There's going to be a change, and that could change their composition, that could change how they digest food, that could change how they get their energy, and it could change the makeup of the coastline for these Arctic habitats. It's just interesting to hear news comparing how the diets are changing based on food availability due to consequences from climate change. We're not
seeing anything better in terms of ice coverage. We're seeing a reduction in ice coverage as global temperatures get hotter and hotter and hotter. In fact, I just read a headline that in 2024, probably gonna be the highest temperatures we've ever had. This is going to be interesting to look at the patterns of food availability for polar bears as well as other arctic animals to see how they're going to shift in terms of survivability. Will
this be a sustainable diet for these polar bears? These are seven feet tall, they weigh a lot, they need a lot of food, and they're used to having seals. Now we look at other animals and other habitats around the world, coral reefs, which are another sort of canary in the coal mine for climate change. And you see that we're going to start to have a shift in the makeup of corals. We're going to see corals that do not react well to high sea surface temperatures.
We're going to start to see a decrease in the availability or abundance of those corals. And we're going to start to see more corals who tend to be able to allow for higher temperatures or survive in higher temperatures. It doesn't mean that there's going to be the end of coral reefs, but it's going to be the end of coral reef makeup as we know it. It's going to be less of the stony corals that have a very narrow range of sea surface temperature and more of the hardier corals that can handle
it. How is that going to change the makeup of our reefs? I'm not too sure. I'm not a coral reef biologist, but it's definitely going to change the makeup. It could change food availability for humans that depend on fishing and reefs for protein and for their diets. You just never know how it's gonna change, but things are changing. Now, the other thing I wanted to highlight before we go into the companies is that a Florida map was recently revealed that cities that
could be underwater in 2050. I thought this was kind of interesting because Florida is not only a state where it's beautiful, very nice weather, you get nice coastlines, Miami's very diverse, it's almost like a melting pot of the Caribbean and maybe even South America, And it's also a home for a lot of people in Florida, but it's also climate central. And so there are, it is vulnerable to sea level rise and it's vulnerable
to flooding due to climate change. This one, we're looking at, you know, what were, what's going to happen to these areas and what's going to happen to these cities that are going to actually be prone and vulnerable to flooding and sea level rise, or may not even be there in the next 20 years, right? Or the next 30 years. So in 2050, there's gonna be some that are gonna be like, hey, you know what? These cities, they were great, but they're not gonna be there anymore. Let's just talk
about what is projected to rise. So sea level along the US coastline is projected to rise on average by around 10 to 12 inches by 2050. That doesn't sound like a lot, that's actually quite a bit. According to the projections of NOAA, this increase is equivalent to the total rise observed over the century from 1920 to
2020. So people living in low-lying coastal land like river mouths are already facing higher flood risk because of the 20 to 40 centimeters or 8 to 15 inches of sea level rise measured along the U.S. coastlines over the past few decades. Their communities can expect the worst of the impacts as water levels continue to climb. This is from Peter Girard, who is a spokesperson for
the nonprofit organization Climate Central. We're seeing a lot of these places and if you look at most of them, obviously they're coastal and they're along some of the more popular areas where you're seeing it. So the map shows that the coastal areas in the south of Florida. are most at risk, particularly the state parks
and reserves and the low-lying Florida Keys. Parts of Florida's southwestern coast could also be totally submerged, including the Everglades National Park, which spans over 1.5 million acres and home to hundreds of species of birds and mammals and reptiles. The outer coast areas, the coastal areas of Cape Coral, including its extensive network
of canals, would also be vulnerable to water inundation. So there's a map here, and I'm gonna link to it in the show notes, because you can actually see where these areas, so below annual flooding level, these areas, I'm looking at areas that are within the western part of Florida. So you're looking at areas just east of Panama City. We're looking at anywhere just north of Tampa Bay in the Panhandle. We're also seeing areas like Fort Myers,
Cape Coral, the Everglades National Park is gonna be submerged. Parts of like Southeast Miami along the canals are gonna be flooded on a regular basis. Florida's not looking too good in 2050. And now it doesn't help that like Bahamas will be a lot more submerged as well. So you have some state, a state like Florida, and then you have islands like the Bahamas,
which are home to many people. You also, if you look at the map, it also goes into the low-lying areas of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, those areas that are also going to be flooded, and Alabama as well. It's not looking good. It's not looking good. Meanwhile, we have administrations, not only in the US, but elsewhere, that are ignoring climate
change. But we're going to start to see problems. Now I did see, and this is not to pick on Donald Trump, but he's got some pretty good takes, pretty hot takes on climate change. And he said, hey, you know what? Yeah, if sea level rises, we have more oceanfront. So oceanfront is good. Everybody wants oceanfront. But it doesn't talk about the people who are going to lose their land. people
who can't afford to just get up and leave. for them but for people who can't afford one home or have one home and they can't afford to lose that home because they can't sell it because nobody's going to buy it because it's going to get flooded what are they supposed to do they're going to be what's called climate refugees in their own country and it's going to be it's not going to be good it's not going to be it's not going to look pretty
and everybody tends to just be like hey you know climate change is not that big of a deal it's a hoax by the left and all this should not be political It should be more about people surviving and people coming together and people saying, hey, we need to do something. It's not just left or right. It's about how we survive going into the future and how we can help adapt as well as change, but also buffer the change in climate for a while and try to get back to normal at some
point. What I want to do is and I don't want this episode to be about doom and gloom because I know climate change can be really depressing we get a lot of people get climate anxiety due to that but there should be a time where we start to feel hope and it's really difficult when administrations get taken over national administrations get taken over by climate deniers or people who want to ignore climate or not include climate into their policies, or even remove old climate, like
the carbon tax, and move old climate policies to stop things from working, or stop things from changing, we need to depend on something. If we can't depend on governments during these administrations, then we're gonna have to depend on not only ourselves, but on business leaders.
And there are businesses and entrepreneurs out there who are trying to change, who are trying to help you make better decisions in what you purchase, but also, help you like just in terms of everyday purchases doesn't have to be like electricity and things like that that are highly regulated but it could be other things just your groceries or your beer or where you get your clothes or anything like that there's a lot of things that you could do to
help and finding those businesses and and helping those businesses survive helping them thrive is a good way of doing it and in capitalist societies that's probably the best way to do it Now, there is a company, I guess it's a company, it's a certification called B Corps. And these B Corps are certified companies that are about more than just the profit. They're forces for social and environmental change, aka a triple bottom
line. So they go for profit, they go for social and environmental profit. That's what they go for. Now, what I mean by social environmental profits, it's change. They have an impact on the environment and on social change. So being a B Corps certified essentially means balancing purpose and profit. So I want to talk about, there's an article here and I'll
put this link into the show notes, all the stuff I talk about put in the show notes. So there's gonna be lots of links this time, but there's five B Corps that inspire the team at this place called Alveoli, I think it's called. They're inspired by these companies and some of them are companies that are anywhere in the world like Canada or they're international, but they all have some sort of impact some sort of purpose on their life. So here is Bose all-natural brewing
company. So like I said, it's not just boring companies or fun exciting companies. So this is a first B Corp brewery in Canada. So Bose brews its organic beer using renewable electricity. which lowers the company's carbon footprint by 110 tons every year. It treats its wastewater on site and sends used yeast and other brewing byproducts to a biodigester, which turns them into energy to help power a local farm. So on the employee side, some of their initiatives include
paid days for volunteering and a ride to work program. Awesome stuff. I'm going to go through these a little quickly, but you can check these out a little bit more later on. Four Oceans, which we had one of the co-founders for Four Oceans on the episode, Alex Schultz. This is a Florida-based company that pulls one pound of trash from the oceans, bays, and seas, and rivers for every artisanal upcycled bracelet, iPhone case, or cleanup kit sold with
the goal of ending single-use plastic. So this is a huge, huge company that's worldwide. Not only does it empower local artisans, but it also hires from the local area. So if it works in Bali, it hires people that live in Bali. So this is not just Florida-based team that goes all around the world and does its work. It's a Florida-based company, but has its work in all these other places, including Haiti, including Bali, and
a number of other places. So check that out. There'll be a link in the show notes. Patagonia, we all know Patagonia. This is probably one of the pillars of a B Corp or of just a company that serves not only profit
but purpose. Perfect example of business practicing of what it preaches. In 2017, the California-based clothing company Gear Company joined a group of organizations suing the Trump government over cuts to the national monuments that include the ancestral homes of Native American tribes. The court cases are ongoing but there's hope. Biden's new government is currently
reviewing the cuts. Pedigree became a B Corp back in 2011 and has been racking up accolades ever since, including four nominations in 2019 as a top-performing B company by B Lab. host
the B-Corp certification. It's also upped its B-Corp score steadily with the recertification, with initiatives including donating all its 2016 Black Friday profits, about $10 million, to environmental organizations, creating an environmental internship program that lets employees spend two months volunteering for environmental organizations with full pay, and funding environmental awareness campaigns. That's what it's doing. Hotmo, which is a B-Labs best of the world list for
socially and environmentally minded promotional products. It's a Montreal based and a Canadian based women owned company. Partners corporations design unique locally made items for media swag bags and employees gifts. So that's a cool kind of thing. I really like that. Nada, Nada is a Vancouver-based company. So these are all, a lot of these are Canadian companies. Package-free grocery store goes
way beyond eco-friendly groceries. In non-COVID times, customers bring their own containers to this Vancouver-based package-free grocery store. to fill up on everything from locally made soaps to bulk chickpeas to homemade double chocolate marshmallow cookies. Yummy, yummy. As for the suppliers, Fornada favors local and sustainable products from other B Corps, as well as carbon neutral, socially conscious, alternative business model and minority and indigenous run operations. That's
pretty cool. I wanted to highlight this article and a number of others because although we are in a place where climate change is rearing its ugly head, we're seeing inaction from
certain governments and the change of certain governments. even the governments who are trying to do stuff about climate change are said not not be doing enough or fast enough but we have other tools in our conservation tool belt to help reduce climate change and that falls a little bit on us right but also it falls on us not just to act responsibly when it comes to using sustainable things for like products and services for reducing climate
change. But it also goes to show that we can help support companies who are out there not only to make a profit as other companies are, but also to have an impact on the world. And if we can use our dollars to support those companies instead of companies who are degrading or buying into a system that's degrading the planet by putting out a lot of greenhouse gases, using a lot of fossil fuels, and not trying the other way. The other companies that are trying to be sustainable may
not be perfect, but they're trying to be. They're trying to be the best that they can, and they deserve our support if we can support
them. Some of these companies, yes, they can be a little bit more expensive than the other companies, but I think we have to look at what we can do, and we have to look at changing the way we live, in some areas drastically, in other areas maybe not so drastically, but change the way we do things and the way we use energy, the way we use products, and start moving and focusing on companies who are doing really good and having an impact on our planet instead
of having a negative impact. on our planet so i want to bring that to you today that's the episode i'd love to hear what you think hit me up on instagram at how to protect the ocean i'd love to hear from you just dm me that's at how to protect the ocean and you can also subscribe to our youtube channel hit the notification bell so you get every episode that we put out or you get notified for every episode that we put out Monday, Wednesday,
and Friday. And of course, if you're on Spotify or Apple or your favorite podcast app, you can also follow or subscribe to that. And there's some changes coming to this podcast and to this company that you're going to really like in the new year. I'll have an announcement for that in the new year. And I'm really excited about this. This is a project that I've been working on for a little bit, and it's not just me. and we're gonna see some really cool changes in
interaction coming up soon. So stay tuned, subscribe, follow, and I can't wait to talk to you on the next episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Loon. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time,