Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:00

Hello listeners. This is the risky planner podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Hey Albert, hey Nate, how you doing?

Unknown: 0:13

Man, I'm all right. How are you I am living the dream. You know, normally at this point, we would say it's been a while, but it hasn't. We

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:21

would say that, and you would say it has been a minute, so we would, but it hasn't. It hasn't. It's not been that long. So we're not gonna

Unknown: 0:30

do that. We're back on the saddle after what, like

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:32

a week, yeah, which is important. We have a lot to talk about, and we do. We're starting to get feedback from our listeners. My neighbor listens to this podcast and again, oh, really, yeah, and he gives me, you know, thumbs up every morning. He's like, man, that's awesome, great.

Unknown: 0:53

My dad hasn't given me any pointed feedback in a while. I'm gonna see if I could get him to spill the tea a little bit,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:01

yeah, yeah. Anyways, it's Yeah. I'm excited this. The topic that we're going to talk about is one that I'm really interested in, yeah, climate Yeah, climate change. But in particular, you know, like I was in Thailand. You know, for example, I was in Thailand about a year after the that crazy, the devastating tsunami. So I saw, you know, the effects on like, trees and foliage and the beaches, you know, stuff was being rebuilt. You

Unknown: 1:37

know, was it like a positive experience to see, or did it feel like gloomy and fatalistic, or did it feel more hopeful, like people were really coming together, like the what experience did you have? I'm curious. That's a good question. I mean, you know, the

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:53

locals in Thailand, I think, sort of tolerate, you know, I was a backpacker, was, you know, is not really a tourist. It was backpacking, right? They kind of tolerate you. So I don't really, I didn't really get insight into, you know, how the locals felt, right? Sure, you know, because they, I guess they don't really, they're not conveying that to like me, for instance. But you know, when I talked to like the bartender, yeah, there was like, the front desk, yeah, I think people were like, hope, like, cautiously optimistic, right? And there was still a lot of work to do, so I think it was, it was just a pain in the ass, right? Yeah, yeah, try to bounce back a emotionally from something like that, and then physically go out and rebuild stuff like that's just exhausting. So for sure, cautiously optimistic. And then even before that, when I was growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, we would go and boogie board and like, surf at the beaches, you know, Folly Beach and stuff, when there was, like storms, and there was this one tropical storm that we went out on, and then the day after, it was like half the beach was gone, right? Like it was just these storms and the weather. It just changes the landscape.

Unknown: 3:21

It does. And like, I think a lot of people you know, when you mentioned Thailand, that's the kind of place that most Americans and Canadians imagine when they're imagining a climate impacted zone, you know, like they're thinking about a faraway land that they may one day visit on vacation, or that's home to a mostly anonymous group of people that they will never meaningfully interact with I'm not saying that's the right way for people to interact with these kinds of disasters, but it does. Disclaimer, yeah, totally, yeah. Little virtue signaling, yeah. I'll let you know. I don't feel that way about it myself, but that's the prevailing opinion. Let's see that's that's like the vibe when you have that conversation. But, and the reason I bring it up is that I believe that we have a lot of climate impacted zones much, much closer to home, like South Carolina. I mean, you know, when I talk to Canadians about South Carolina, you know, just a little background, we, I think we mentioned this once every other episode or so. Nate and I are both American Canadians. That's right, folks, citizens, dual citizens. You can hate us for two reasons. Anyway, South Carolina is a lot of beachfront, like a lot,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 4:29

a lot, yeah, and Charleston is all lowlands, right? It's called lowlands for a reason.

Unknown: 4:33

That's right. So you know, out closer to the to the water, you've got places like Wilmington and I was on vacation in a town that was appropriately called Surf City just last year. And let me tell you, if something really gnarly happens to those places, they're gone. They are. They're right on the coast. And that's that's like Heartland USA, you know,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 4:53

it truly is. I mean, the you know, the Hurricanes are becoming more.

Unknown: 5:02

More frequent,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 5:04

yeah, everything right? Like in the flooding is bad. I mean, we've seen, just in the last month, like a crazy amount of disasters in just the North America alone.

Unknown: 5:17

Oh yeah, let's talk about Central Texas. I mean, those floods that sane, the Guadalupe River going over sad. It is, it's, it's terribly tragic. And there's all kinds of things that compound the tragedy and make it feel much more preventable. And you know, whenever something feels like you could have done something about it, and then you didn't like that. Just, that's the worst, right? Yeah,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 5:38

I can editorialize and but, I mean, it is just a really sad and unfortunate situation,

Unknown: 5:44

totally and like, but it's going to happen again, right, like, on that river sometime in the not too distant future. I mean, this isn't the first time the Guadalupe River over, you know, spilled over its banks in a hurry. Like, I'm from Texas. I'm from Southeast Texas, so not really, you know, Central Texas. Guadalupe River is not, you know, close to where I grew up, but I'm from Houston, and we got hit by hurricanes regularly. Yeah, you know, you were talking about the rebuild in Thailand, and what a huge pain it is, and all the work that has to be done. And, you know, there's, there's a Houston, Texas is not a is a pretty wealthy part of the US, like a lot of oil business there, most people are middle class, like, it's a, it's a, it's a fairly affluent city, and it took a year for the for Houston to bounce back from Hurricane, Oh, yeah. What's the one that was like Hurricane Ike? Like Hurricane Ike, by the way, ripped the roof off of our office, like Nate and company, the company I worked for at the time, faithful and Gould, we were co located with our, our parent company, for months because our office had, you know, like the the elevator vestibule, or the elevator thingy, like, up at the top of the building, roof completely ripped off. So all those hurricane like rainfall, all that hurricane rainfall went right down the elevator shaft for days. So that building was, isn't that crazy? Yeah,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 7:07

I was gonna say, like a couple years, like the early 90s, before I was in high school, like the tornado took the top off my high school. Yeah, yeah. By the

Unknown: 7:16

way, Hurricane Ike, well, I mean, I have a tornado took the roof off my house, story too, but I was too young to really remember it. Yeah, exactly. I have merely been informed that it happened by my parents. But, yeah, like that Hurricane Ike, I think was 2008 when that hit so and that's starting to feel like the distant past now.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 7:36

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, I think that, yeah, it's been, you know, when you when you reach this age? Albert, yeah. Well, anyways, let's move on, like I want to, let's dive into the discussion, because you talk about preventable, you know, the like occurrences of, you know, impacts and the negativity and stuff. So yeah, now we'll transition to talk about capital projects, which we usually do. So you're imagine this. You're 18 months into a $2 billion infrastructure project. Everything's on schedule, on budget. Your Gantt charts are beautiful. Your stakeholders are happy. The client's happy. All of a sudden, a 1000 or 100 year flood hits. Except it's the third one in five years, right? Because we're starting to see that more and more and your site's underwater, and then, not to mention that your supply chain from Southeast Asia has just disappeared. So it's not just a story, or, you know, fiction. This is real. This is what's happening to capital projects? Yeah, it puts $1 figure on all this stuff. Big time. There's a lot to unpack here, and it really boils down to risk. It

Unknown: 8:48

does, yeah. I mean, the risk profile for your average capital project, especially if it's being built in a climate zone, which, as we indicated earlier, those are both numerous and getting more numerous by the day. I mean, by the way, I can put a, I can put $1 figure on one of those. Like I mentioned, I'm from Southeast Texas. I did a bunch of work in the refineries down in the in the bay town, slash Beaumont, slash Texas City. That's a very large geographic area I just described. But bunch of oil refineries right on the coast there. And let me tell you, man, they get flooded regularly, and it gets real hot, okay, like again, you know, this is project experience going back 15 plus years. And even at the time, we had to shut down our work sites for whole days because of the heat. And when the work sites were open, we had to supply fairly costly infrastructure for people to cool off and get shade and make sure that they were being well hydrated and such like, because, you know, the concrete jungle effect down there is real, like, if you're standing on, you know, the foundation for a refinery, it is 10 degrees hotter. And that's that's in Canadian temperature too. So it's even worse in American temperature.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 9:56

In American, in American that's about 100 degrees. Texas, yeah, that's in the heart of Texas

Unknown: 10:01

in American that is, oh, my God, it's too hot degrees, and we literally did lose multiple days per month entirely, just gone, wow, due to productivity loss. And that was then, and it's, it's worse now, I was did a little homework on this one, and the International Labor Organization released a report called working on a warmer planet that indicates by 2030, projects will have lost$2.4 trillion to productivity lost, and that's just from heat. That's

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 10:33

not even talking. We're just talking, what? Who are we talking about, productivity? Are these, all of the outside workers? Is this everything for the project, or is this, well, you want

Unknown: 10:43

to talk about outside? I mean, yeah, of course, it applies to everything. I mean, for one thing, a lot of the world is not built with air conditioning in mind. That's right, there's a lot of places that are passively cooled because the general ambient environment is at a nice, pleasant temperature, or even, you know, like it is hearing in Canada that's actively cold a lot of the time, right? But, you know, even here, like, I just had an air conditioner installed in my apartment in Calgary, right this year, because Calgary is reliably nice and cool and dry, but you know,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 11:15

yeah, it's more like negative 40, like you're like nine months out of the year now,

Unknown: 11:21

yeah, well, nine months. I don't know about that, but it's a it's, it's, it's pretty brutal for a solid three months. But you know now we're getting a three month window when it's when it's genuinely hot and like this just illustrates the problem, right? Right? Places that never had to consider heat before are going to have to adapt to it, and even if you've already got an air conditioned supply chain, right? Like your warehouse, your office workers, everybody's got air conditioning coverage, except for your outdoor workers. What happens when those outdoor workers put down their tools for the day? You think everybody else just keeps on trucking? No, right? Like, the stuff stops when the work face, you know, is paused. So it's really a huge impact. So if you put your workforce, you send them home for their own safety, then that puts the brakes on everything that your project was doing. So likely this

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 12:14

is fundamentally changing, sort of the approach to project controls.

Unknown: 12:19

It should. I don't know that it is yet. I mean, I was, I was chatting with the Dr David Hewlett at the AC conference about this project. And actually, you can hear some of this in our in our interview episode, which was the last episode. We just check it out. Dr Hewlett figures prominently in there. But one of the things he said is that historically, as a as a profession like we don't do a great job of predicting what our projects are going to cost and how long they're going to take, and that's considering the last 100 Years of project performance that hasn't included as many climate impacts as we're going to have in the next five, right? So whatever risk management paradigm we've had set up for the past 100 it wasn't good enough for that, and it certainly isn't going to be good enough for the world we're about to be moving into. I mean, just just to give you another quick statistic here the IMF recently documents, was in 2023 a 40% rise in World Food commodity pricing, including a 38% single month jump in wheat pricing. That's just in the last few years, and

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 13:22

that was before tariffs, folks. Yeah, that's pretty

Unknown: 13:25

tariff. So, yeah, you know, this is accounting for all kinds of things like, you know, you may remember, in 2021 there was a massive flood in Malaysia, yeah. So that disrupted global semiconductor supply chains. Automakers started, you know, having difficulty sourcing the little bitty computer chips that go into absolutely everything, like a flood in Malaysia four years ago is making it more difficult to build an electric car today, right now. Yeah,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 13:52

that's wild. It was. Who was it that was, I think it was the the new prime minister from Singapore that talked about, you know, tariffs not being able to impact an interconnected world. So if these, like, you know, efforts to either bring people to the decision making table, they're not going to have an effect. Anyways, it's a little tangent, but we can get back, yeah, a bit of a tangent, yeah. So let me ask you the question that is sort of in my mind is, yeah, you mentioned heat related productivity losses, yeah, by 2030 you know, how are project managers supposed to start playing for that? Well,

Unknown: 14:36

I think there's, there's, there's two ways to answer that question. You can answer it micro, like on any individual project, and you can answer it macro, right? Ideally, those of us in capital project space, we're working to improve the world in some way. We want things to get better. We want to increase productivity. We want to increase, you know, comfort and safety and the livelihoods of people like that's the reason why we do capital projects, right? Yeah. So I'm gonna answer the macro question. First, I think it's incumbent on us to stop thinking about climate change as a problem that we can solve and start thinking about it as a situation that we need to adapt to, not because it wouldn't be great if we solved it. Of course it would, but the ship has kind of sailed on that. And speaking of ships sailing, we're gonna have sea level rise of two to six feet by 20 190% of the world's freight is going to be impacted by that. So, you know, I can't mention ships sailing without talking about that anyway. Point is that you've got a pretty serious issue on your hands, and we already missed our window for for curbing the the most dramatic effects of it, so we have to adapt like that's where we're at right now. So if you're planning a capital project, a there's a fairly good chance in the next few years, because it's like a $90 trillion shortfall of infrastructure development for the next 50 years that we're going to need to make up for, just to to adapt to our new and changing climate. Wow. So there's a pretty good chance that you're going to be, you know, spending some of that money to do a climate adaptation project sometime in the next five years. Okay, that's, that's where the money's going. It's to adaptation. So that's, that's the macro answer is, like, you better start thinking about, what is your next project going to look like? It's probably in that, there's a good chance that it's in that, in that kind of scope realm.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 16:21

Was that? Sorry? Oh, sorry. You were just gonna say macro. No, interrupt me. Do it micro. I think the, you know, the idea of climate, you know impacts as, let's say, like a line item on your risk register. I don't know if I'm using the terms correctly, but I'm certainly going to try. Maybe you have a frag net for it. You probably don't have a frag net for it. Nate, no, I'm definitely not using that correctly. But look, so it used to so is climate like a line item on a risk, you know, plan or where is that figure in?

Unknown: 16:59

That's a good question, because it kind of depends on where you are. But this gets back to what I was saying initially. You know, climate impacted zone as, like, type of place that exists, like, there's, there's so many more of those now than there used to be. And, you know, I did work for a few years in Lagos, Nigeria, and Legos. I don't think they officially get, like, you know, quote, unquote monsoons, but they basically have the same thing. We have a massive rainy season. You know, the summer is impacted every year. It's really, really difficult to work because of rain. So you plan around it, right, right? So a risk is something that you don't know for sure is going to happen, right? The the inverse of that, something that you do know for sure is going to happen, well, that's called the scope of your project, right? Right? So when you're talking about climate impacts for project planning, right, the rain and Legos is scope. It's not a risk. You know, you're going to have to plan around it, okay, okay, so to us, to a certain degree, people need to stop thinking about weather impacts as risks that may impact their project and start thinking about them as scope that they have to incorporate into their project, right? And this brings me back to my point about adaptation. You actually, I think, totally without realizing it segued me beautifully into point to the micro. Because, if you want mind reader, yeah, because you are the world's greatest podcast host. So

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 18:18

thanks. And this is my impersonation of Johnny Carson when he was

Unknown: 18:22

doing that, would you can't he's doing a program envelope to the head thing. Yeah. So if you are, if you are a baby boomer, or the child of a baby boomer, there is a 50% chance you get that reference. So to the rest of you, I'm sorry,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 18:35

yeah, this is Gen X here talking, yep, child and baby, yeah. And

Unknown: 18:39

as a borderline millennial, I apologize to the rest

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 18:42

of you, yeah, no, but you got it. You knew what I was talking about.

Unknown: 18:45

I got it because I am, like, I said borderline anyway, that's not important right now. What is important is, yeah. So

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 18:51

scope versus risk, yeah, yeah. Like, are we all becoming weather people?

Unknown: 18:58

Well, it's funny. You should mention that, because one of the things that's taking over project planning right now is hyper local weather forecasting. Oh, okay, so there is a a move towards using private services that use things like drones and local sensors and like privately owned weather measurement infrastructure to deliver a hyper local weather forecasting on an hourly basis, to project sites,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 19:24

I need to, I need to get a, I hope there's an app for that, because the weather apps that I have just are horrible. So I'm in. Is there an app for that? Or is that,

Unknown: 19:34

can I buy if there, I mean, you can, if you want to spend a whole ton of money, you can certainly, but in the not too distant future, there may very well be paid weather services that you can get to from your phone. And in fact, I'm saying that as if it doesn't already exist. I bet it does. It probably does, yeah. But the the point is that projects planning, project management groups, are starting to use those services to avoid weather impacts and plan around them, right? Like they say, an ounce of prevention. Executions worth of planned of cure. I've said on previous episodes, $1 spent in planning is worth $5 in execution. Like that includes near term planning, right? So if you think that you might be in a climate zone where work is going to be impacted by things like heat or flooding or rain or God only knows what else like, I've also done some work in the arboreal forests up north in Alberta, and talk about getting cold in Calgary. It gets real cold up there, and it stays cold, right? So you know, you got to know how many days you're going to lose to that sort of thing. And the best way to know when those days are going to be is with a hyper local forecast,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 20:38

right? So can you give me a example of how that forecast might trigger. Like, yeah, totally, yeah.

Unknown: 20:47

Like, so you know, on the one hand, you need to have planned for extra days in your schedule, right? Like, and to answer your earlier question, just really, really briefly about, is this a risk? It kind of, I mean, my answered it in part by saying, like, it's, it's scope, right? You have to plan around it, but you don't know when you're going to have to execute that. So that does kind of make it, it kind of puts it into risk space. But I'm thinking of it more as like a, you know, if you think about that, your project as one of a certain class of projects, like, I'm doing an energy project in Southeast Texas. All right, your average energy project in Southeast Texas probably experiences some number of days of delay due to rain like I'm going to give you a number that means nothing. I'm going to say 20 days a year of weather related delays. Okay, so if you know that you're going to have 20 days a year weather related delays, you can't just buffer all your activities to encompass those extra 20 days, because that's going to show your plan. You know being, you know, ahead, ahead a head and then suddenly behind, and then ahead, ahead and then suddenly behind. You need to pick milestones in your schedule that you're going to protect with schedule buffer and carve up those weather days as part of your general scheduling contingency to just include so that those this milestone is going to get delivered on this day. The details before that management doesn't really need to care about. They just need to know that there's contingency in place so that I know when to spend those days, right, right? And here's where the forecast comes in, if I if I have buffer days in my schedule, I need to know when to use them. I need to have a high degree of confidence that I'm not wasting them, right? So what if I'm looking at the National Weather Services forecast and it says, well, Southeast Texas is going to get a big old rainstorm, so send everybody home, and then you do and then it doesn't happen, right? You've just burned a contingency day and taken on all of the impacts that that entail entails, and you have gained nothing from it. So what

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 22:39

that in my mind, I have an just a question, like, okay, so you're describing sort of a best practice, right? Like, what are, what's, what is the biggest mistake that I could make? As a PM, if I'm trying to plan these contingency, it just sounds so complicated. It sounds like there's a lot of mistakes that could be made. Oh,

Unknown: 22:59

well. I mean, those are two different thoughts, right? It doesn't have to be complicated, but there are lots of pitfalls, like lots of ways to make a mistake in this regard. Like, one thing is the you know, and this probably made it sound more complicated than it is, but I was talking about protecting specific milestones, all right, okay, so my, my Southeast Texas energy industry projects had a lot to do with like refurbishing existing equipment on site, right? So one of the things we need to know is in service dates. So every in service date for a particular piece of equipment is an important milestone. So I have those milestones in my schedule. And the way that I was originally trained to do risk in schedules was to do a risk unimpacted schedule as your baseline, and then put all of your contingency days at the end. So if I'm installing 10 new pieces of equipment, I've got 10 intermediate milestones, the last of which represents my final handover milestone, and we would put all the contingency against that. Well, here's the problem with that. That guarantees, or it tries to guarantee, the end date of the overall project, but it doesn't tell you anything at all about when you're likely to actually receive each of those nine other pieces of equipment that aren't happening all the way at the end. Yep. So the right way to do it is to carve up your contingency so that it's protecting your intermediate milestones, and you know which milestones those are, by talking to your project sponsor, by talking to your stakeholders, by interfacing with the operations team by, you know, doing basic project management stuff. But the real trick is knowing how long those contingency durations need to be, right. And weather is particularly tricky because it's seasonal. So in when you have a schedule that's being risk impacted, right, the activities that are that are seasonally sensitive, like the rainy season in Legos or the winter in the arboreal forest, those places need you to be specific about what work you're planning inside those timeframes, right? So

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 24:56

it sounds like you need a data set of just weather to draw. Occupied,

Unknown: 25:00

hence this hyper local stuff, right? Does that happen? It absolutely happens, yes. And it's happening more because the thing is, all of these things boil down to value proposition. Like, if you want to invest in in hyper local weather that you're it's exactly that. It's an investment, right? Yeah. And I keep talking about this as if it's the only example of this, but it's just a good, like instructive example, I think. But in order for that investment to make sense, there has to be a return on that investment, and right now is when we're starting to see it. Probably could have been helpful 10 years ago, but thanks to things like the democratization of drone technology, for example, and the fact that you can go buy basically any electronic component on like AliExpress for nothing, right? Yep, there's a, there's a ridiculous profusion of technology that didn't exist just a few years ago.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 25:53

Yeah, the AI that to totally emit trends, yep,

Unknown: 25:58

AI is doing better at predicting local weather than national weather services in you know, like the in the US in particular, but in the in the world generally, like AI is taking local trends and doing better weather forecasting than professional meteorologists now, yeah, so, yeah, trend

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 26:14

prediction, right? Like when it's going to rain, maybe that means the rip the weather report will get better, not that I really listen. That's, you know what? That's a bygone era, right? Like, when you're like, Hey, what are the weatherman's Like, right? My watch, yeah, exactly. My parents would listen the radio, or what? Like, yeah, there's still talk radio, but I'm just not, I'm not, it's not my thing. But is there, like you talk so you've talked about, let's just say, all these risks related to, like the whole project and supply chain, but then, and for the sake of the discussion, it's like a disaster, right? It's rain or it's flooding or but heat, heat, just heat, like you said at the top of this episode, can be a hugely detrimental obstacle to sort of the progress of a of a project, yeah, totally because of the impact that it has on the people that are Outside actually doing the work.

Albert Brier: 27:22

Well, it's and it's not just that. That's a certainly. If you are a work face planner of some kind, like if you're a site superintendent or a four four person, then you obviously care the most about the health and safety and productivity of your workers, hopefully, in that order. So in those situations. Yeah, that heat is directly impactful to your team, and so you care about it deeply. But if you're the a planner or an engineer or, you know, take a step back a whole organization planning their portfolio of work, you have to think not just about the safety of your workers. You also have to think about materials, like, what are you actually buying to place in this spot that is hot and getting hotter, right? Is the stuff you're installing going to be, need to be replaced in five years because it broke down, because there was too much like, you know, going back to my Southeast Texas experience, we had to get, you know, 1000s hour salt spray coatings on everything. It was like 4000 hours. Like the those things are crazy expensive because we're right on the coast, and we don't want all of our stuff to rust immediately. So that's one example. And the more the more hurricanes and that sort of thing you get, like, the more seawater starts flowing into your facility, the worse that resting impact gets. So climate has a big so we're going to start seeing those specifications change, materials like concrete that do a very poor job of actually, they do an incredible job of storing heat, if it's the right kind of concrete. So right now, most concrete that gets poured on project sites is very reflective. It has a super high albedo. It's not particularly porous. It stores a lot of heat, but it also reflects a lot of heat back up, you know, into the and it doesn't have to be that way, right? There are other materials that can be selected that do a better job of isolating workers from heat. And it isn't just an issue during the project, right? Yeah, people have to walk on that concrete for the next 50 years, you know, yeah.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 29:20

What is a I mean, with all of these upgrades on materials that comes a price, it gets more expensive. Yeah, your budgets are gonna go up. They're gonna go way up. Like, yeah, how do you sell that through? Like, let's just say, I mean, you're, you're, you're a sponsor, and you're of a project. And, you know, due to climate risks and material I mean, are we doubling the project costs? Are we tripling like, what are we looking at?

Albert Brier: 29:46

It's hard to know, really, and it's going to depend on the region. Like, what the specific impacts are like, I couldn't say, but it is definitely going to be a hit, right? And some, some places, it'll be worse than others. But you. I can say is that even though you're going to spend more money on the capital development of your project, you're likely going to save money in the long run by avoiding the need to do a bunch of upgrades in the future, or mitigations, like taking that heat as an example, if I install a bunch of really poorly chosen materials that are going to make the workplace hotter for people and make things degrade faster and that sort of what do you think that does to your operational budget over a 50 year timeline? And we've talked about this before, like capital projects run from anywhere under a year to maybe five to 10 years, and then those assets are run for the next 20, 5100, years. Yeah, right. So the operational cost of an asset dwarfs the capital cost. Okay, yeah. So with that in mind, it's, it's, it's really easy to make the case to a project sponsor if you talk about total life cycle cost. So that's, and I've started writing a little bit about this. I shouldn't say too much, because I haven't actually written very much of it, but I would love to do some research on this. But in my own personal experience, capital project teams are beholden to people who steward capital project budgets and whose bonuses and performance evaluations hinge on how effective they have been at spending those capital budgets, and the operational budget never enters the picture until you get all the way up the rung to like, the executive levels of approval. And even there, they're still mostly looking at those success factors I just mentioned, like, are you continually going over? Are you delivering on the value? But that value needs to be measured against the total lifecycle of the project, or else none of these adaptations are ever going to make sense on paper. Yeah?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 31:47

Like, what are you what are you doing now to you know, what are you investing now to gain later? And that's like a board like, that's a board level conversation, yeah, but that shouldn't be not where it should be. Much lower is

Unknown: 32:03

what, yeah, it should. It should come right down the ladder, like the folks I was working with and working for when I was doing that work in Lagos and in Southeast Texas, all they cared about was, was capex, right? Yeah. They cared about their capital budgets. They cared about spending them effectively. They cared about getting the most bang for their buck, right there. So they were constantly looking for cost saving measures, right? So if a climate responsible engineer puts in a bunch of, you know, porous roadway surfaces that, like, trap water and channel it away, you know, for put it into cisterns that can be reused in the sprinkler system, like, that's obviously a good adaptation for a change in climate that might get torrential rain, right? But it's also going to cost you twice as much per cubic yard as it would to just do the normal stuff. So as soon as that thing shows up in on a planner's desk, someone like myself looking for cost cutting options, I would immediately flag it, throw it out. Yeah, totally. I mean, not because I'm a jerk who hates the climate, but because I'm doing my job like I'm my job. I mean, you

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 33:05

are a jerk that hates the climate, which you basically walked

Unknown: 33:10

right into that one. But every time we get together, I talk to you about how much I hate the climate. It

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 33:14

does. Folks, Albert is he's, he's got the climate in his crosshairs. No, just kidding, but seriously though, you're missing, like your example, like in that situation when you cross that when you sure it's double the price, but you're missing this huge opportunity for downriver savings. That was my best attempt at, like an Albert metaphor, by the way, which it didn't go very well, but yes, ice time, but you're absolutely correct is that it is a myopic planning view. And it's it what we should be advocating for is a holistic sort of, you know, what comes what, what is put in, and then what we get out of it, long term, especially mine, and when you're operating these assets, like you said, 50, 100 years,

Unknown: 34:05

yeah, I mean again, like there's, there's no comparison between the capital and the operating costs for something like that. And it does mean that, but projects need to be planned from the top down, with those kinds of vision statements in mind, right? So that you can have a toll a whole group buy in to something like, well, we're not just building a roadway, we're building a sustainable roadway, like one that is meant to be a climate adaptation. It's going to accomplish, yeah, it's going to accomplish the goal of cars can go over it, but it's also going to accomplish these other goals like that needs to be a top down decision, like the, you know, I said this on another topic recently, that ultimately it's all about money. Like, if no one's going to dedicate the money to actually doing these things, then it's then it's not going to happen. And if your only goal is to cut costs, and it's not going to happen either. And actually, you know, I've spent a lot of time dunking on the California high speed rail project, again, that comes up quite a lot on

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 34:58

we talked about that in our last. Last in the interview. Episode, yeah, exactly our last episode. Albert went to the AAC conference in California and talked to a bunch of people on the floor. It was great. Yeah, it was cool. And

Unknown: 35:10

I asked all of them what they thought of the high speed rail project, and it was an interesting set of answers. But, you know, a little bit of digging for this episode, we found that one of the reasons why the California high speed rail project got so expensive is because they incorporate a lot of climate mitigations into the project scope. Yeah, like, for example, yeah. But there's gonna be like 552 acres of solar panels built as part of that's just the Central Valley section, okay? The part that's actually approved for construction. So that's 417, football fields worth of solar panels.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 35:41

I love you. You just Americans will find anything to measure, anything except for that, like, you know, proper. Oh, yeah, right. So yeah. I mean, we're behind

Unknown: 35:51

500 to measure 65,000,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 35:56

you know, cucumbers.

Unknown: 35:57

Imagine how many puts, millions of postage stamps.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 36:01

I love it, but that is a large that is a lot of solar panels.

Unknown: 36:06

Oh, yeah, it's huge. And the idea there is that the rail line should be grid independent, if it can be. And that's also an adaptation, right? Okay, localizing the grid, because what's the first thing that happens when there's a big old windstorm, power lines go down, right? You're done. So if you localize your grid, you're less dependent on that sort of thing. And by the way, in order for that to be true, like the classic counter argument to solar is, what if it's cloudy or the sun's down, the answer to that question is, you need storage, right, right? So there's 124 megawatt hours of battery storage and scope too. Okay, so Wow, there's gonna, yeah, I mean, and again, like it's an easy project to dunk on, because, by the numbers, it's a total failure, right, right? At least so far, like, I hope and pray that that changes, but you know for now, you know we'll see. But the 120 ish miles or so that are currently approved for construction contain all of these things. They're incorporating 300 wildlife crossings. There's going to be almost

Albert Brier: 37:01

3000 acres of habitat restoration. Okay, yeah, so, like, it's a train project. We're putting a train on rails, putting people in the train to go from A to B, but it's also all of these other things, right? So for large, publicly funded infrastructure projects, you can expect to see more of that. Another good example the Delhi, Mumbai expressway, there's rainwater harvesting systems every 500 meters. Okay, okay, that's approximately every five and a half football field lengths, by the way, just in case.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 37:30

Wow, yeah, I always gonna add, like, I'm always give

Unknown: 37:34

it to me in football fields. You got it? Nate, I

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 37:37

don't know other measurement works for me. Indeed. It's like, when I'm measuring, like, smaller things, I'm like, that's a that's a point, like, 075, you know, football field? No, I'm just kidding.

Unknown: 37:49

Like I'm getting quotes from contractors. Like, I know you've given this to me in actual units, but can you tell it to me in football fields?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 37:56

I like that. I'm going to do it next time.

Unknown: 37:59

That sounds so funny joke. Speaking of which, I saw, another interesting stat is totally unrelated. But, you know, on the subject of building, we haven't had tangent, so that's okay, yeah, yeah, you don't say, but all the nuclear waste that's ever been generated in the entire history of mankind would fit into a football stadium stacked about 10 meters high. Wow, yeah, that's it. That's it. That's Wow, yeah, but go ahead and be afraid of it for the rest of your life, if that's what you want. But you know, it's actually not that much. No. Anyway, moving on, interesting. There's all kinds of examples of this, by the way, like, yeah, that whole,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 38:32

it's always a football field. No, I, I'm just thinking about a football stadium now full of nuclear waste, yeah, basically, only 10 meters high, though that's not, that's not huge. I mean, that's 30 feet, right? So 33 maybe, I don't know, yeah, anyway, because a meter is more than a yard,

Unknown: 38:48

a meter is more than a yard. Thank you, metric system. Anyway, well, so

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 38:52

you were saying, Yeah, go. You were sitting. You were talking about the the line and and dunking on it, but,

Unknown: 38:58

oh yeah. And then the Delhi, Mumbai, expressway, and it's raining collection, yeah, and then every 500 meters, yep. Another example I pulled up was the the Netherlands, North Sea protection works. Now you want to talk about designing for

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 39:10

that is a crime project. Isn't that crazy? That is a cool, cool project. They're

Unknown: 39:16

existing, investing somewhere between one and one and a half billion euros annually in this project through 2050 the planning horizon for this project is the year 2200 Wow. So

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 39:28

they, and they already have those flood gates. You know, the those, those giant flood No, not flood gates, the storm when there's storm surges from the lagoon, from the Seaway. It's fascinating.

Unknown: 39:43

So there's another interesting example of that that actually gives a good counterpoint to this whole planning for the future thing and climate adaptation. And that's the same kind of system for protecting the lagoon exists in Venice, right? Like they just finished a huge

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 39:57

Oh, yeah, that's true, yes. And that's been going on for a long time. Been going

Albert Brier: 40:00

on for so long, in fact, that now that the thing is actually built, they just have to keep it closed all the time because the storm surge and the sea level, you know, it was designed for what it was 30 years ago instead of where it is today, right, right? So now they're dealing with a whole second set of problems, because the thing was designed to be opened and closed regularly, and now that it's just closed all the time they've got, like, algae buildup, and there's not enough, like, fresh water coming in. So it's just all kinds of problems related to just having had the wrong planning horizon for your project, right, right? So whoever put the initial design to paper for that thing probably wasn't thinking about sea level rise, sure, right? And an additional storm surge, and, like, you know, more El Ninos or whatever, that are making Venice less safe against the water anyway,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 40:47

sell your house to Aquaman

Unknown: 40:51

market. What are we talking about? Everybody got namors Number anyway? Yeah.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 41:00

Okay, Albert, let's wrap up here. What's some advice for a project manager that they can start using right now, right away, to help them adjust their planning with climate in mind? I

Unknown: 41:15

think that we as planning professionals and project managers need to start like a grassroots effort to try to convince the people who hold the purse strings of projects to actually plan for the long time horizons and think about operational costs and total lifecycle costs, instead of this hyper focus on capex and making all the numbers be smaller like we need to, we need to get together and insist on this change, or else we're not going to get important work approved. That needs to happen. You know, like, another good example we didn't talk too much about is like the nuclear industry is infamous for the electricity being expensive because the projects are expensive. Well, those things are true, but they also generate huge amounts of electricity that will last kind of forever, as long as the facilities get maintained. So I mean, isn't that worth it? Like, shouldn't we be thinking about it from the perspective of, like, here's a zero carbon, base load energy solution that can solve a huge percentage of our electricity needs, and, yeah, it's a little more expensive. But aren't those other things important too? Like we need to start putting dollar figures on those societal impacts and climate nature impacts and figuring out how to figure that into our economic modeling, in order for those models to net out the way we all know they should right to point us in the direction of doing the good necessary work, of adapting to exchanging climate and getting really impactful stuff done. Amen, brother, no, that's true. Hang on. Let me get off my soapbox. Okay,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 42:55

no, but that's it's true. Great point. Great point and advice.

Unknown: 43:00

Thank you. Thanks, Albert. Well, thank you Nate. It's been a pleasure.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 43:03

It has all right. Talk to you later. See you next time. Folks.

Unknown: 43:09

Hey everybody. It's Albert here. Thanks for tuning in to the risky planner podcast. We hope today's conversation was informative, and, above all else, inspires you to excellence in what you do. If you liked today's episode, don't forget to rate, subscribe and leave a review. It helps us reach more listeners just like you. I'd also like to thank Thompson Igbo eco for letting us use his excellent music on our show. If you like what you hear, check him out@egbomuzyk.com that's E, G, B, O muzik.com talk at you later. You