There is no ESG without accountability, and energy poverty, hypocrisy, and pollution will continue without action. Which side will you be on?
Energy poverty is one of my biggest concerns, and my conversation with Captin Kelly is one of the most fun yet emotional I have had. We could have gone on for another hour with his wealth of experience, solutions, and working programs, but I had to stop.
Captain Kieran Kelly, Commissioner and CEO of the Ocean Integrity Group, is a fantastic resource of oceanic knowledge and has a mission to take that knowledge and turn it into action for humanity and our environment.
Please follow and support his movement on his LinkedIn HERE: Https://www.linkedin.com/in/captain-kieran-kelly-
00:00 – Introduction
01:06 – Explaining your current activities
02:53 – Strategies for combating poverty while cleaning the oceans
12:32 – Addressing the financial sustainability of ocean cleaning initiatives, including recycling efforts and their impact
14:09 – Captain Kieran Kelly discusses a partnership with a beer company aimed at removing plastic from the oceans
16:09 – Discusses concerns about wind energy, corruption in carbon offset industry, potential harm to marine life from offshore wind turbines, plastic pollution, and preserving marine ecosystems
26:53 – Questions the long-term sustainability of U.S. wind farms due to tax subsidies, carbon neutrality timelines, and maintenance costs
31:14 – Criticizes the misallocation of $3.9 billion earmarked for ocean plastic issues and the importance of addressing local waste management
33:32 – Highlights the overuse of climate change as an explanation for environmental problems and the importance of tackling local waste issues
38:52 – Addressing the needs and aspirations of the next generation
40:59 – Explaining the support received from hotels that back the Captain Kelly programs and their role in environmental preservation
41:58 – Discussing environmental and ethical concerns in the transition to sustainable practices, including child labor, pollution, and poverty in developing nations
49:31 – Informing how people can support and contact you for poverty elimination initiatives
51:35 – Outro
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ENB Podcast https://energynewsbeat.co/industry-insights-2/
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– Get in Contact With The Show –
Stuart Turley [00:00:03] Tell everybody, Welcome to the Energy News podcast. My name’s Stu Turley, president, CEO of the Sandstone Group. I got us a gigantic treat today. We have Captain Corrigan, Kieran Kelly. And I mean, this is phenomenal. I’ve been stalking him on LinkedIn and around, and he finally said yes to coming on the podcast. And he’s with Ocean Integrity. And I’ll tell you what, you’ve got some great things going on out there. Captain, thank you for stopping by.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:00:35] Hey, good morning. Good morning from Indonesia. Couldn’t speak with you.
Stuart Turley [00:00:39] Oh, I’ll tell you, you know, you sit back and we were just chit chatting before the show and and you hear really I was like, hey, what’s important to you? And it’s like everything. I mean, Captain, you do everything and you’re over in Indonesia and you’re the largest polluter, if you would, as deep polluting a word, or you’re picking up the plastics out of the ocean, [00:01:06]tell us what you’re doing there. [0.9s]
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:01:09] Well, we we operate globally tracking plastic waste. We look at the problems, of course, that we face today. The two single biggest problems we have, of course, globally, poverty and of course, pollution. And of course, one kind of feeds off the other. Right. So some years back, again, my background is is very different than what you would consider an environmentalist. I am in the environmental space. I’m very passionate about the environment, but very passionate about it in a practical way, doing the right thing. We’re doing something that actually makes sense instead of just writing and spending all kinds of money on mindless policies that are not going to work, never. There’s no way possible for these to work. But do something like, you know, that is of course, that is tangible. So we started looking some years back as the problem of plastic waste initially was in the US. We were targeting the backside of hurricanes to scoop up the the plastic waste as the runoff came off the islands of the mainland. Right. That was that was the whole idea. Shortly after that, we were asked to look at a problem in India. India was India when to from India to Africa. Africa, of course, like to to where I am today in Indonesia. We’re a very, very different organization, very, very pro-business. Look at ways how we can how we can help corporations to fulfill the fulfill their goals. And we do that by fighting poverty at the same time, eliminating plastic waste.
Stuart Turley [00:02:47] You’re kept in your head. And every single one of my hot buttons this all right now, [00:02:53]how do you fight poverty while you’re cleaning the oceans? [2.6s]
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:02:57] Well, we looked us again. I come from the commercial fishing industry. I work for fishing companies on the East or West Coast, United States. I also have them through Central and South America. That was my day job, you know, for years and years and years. And I was very good as harvesting seafood. People like me actually have no business on the ocean. I was very, very good at what I did. And, of course, I did this on an industrial scale, which wasn’t really a clever thing to be doing. So I became quite wealthy. All that to live the American dream with lots of money. And so I started looking at how can I give something back? How can I do the right thing? And when I when I started traveling around the world doing what I’m doing now, and I’ve lived here actually about five years ago when I started looking at the. To bring it. The problems that we face. How can we fix these brutal problems, especially with pollution? And of course, that goes back to one thing fishermen, people working on the ocean can remove plastic from the ocean. The environmental world is in a very, very strange place, very fast as virtual signaling regarding regarding problems, all pointing fingers at people and blaming the wrong people for some of the problems we face. They have absolutely demonized the fishing industry from an indigenous fisherman to an industrial guy like my like me. I guess years ago, my past, they they put everyone in the same category and absolutely destroyed them. So I won’t hear from really strange. That’s when I went into these villages. I tried to relate to these indigenous guys. This today I’m only eight and they looked at this white guy that was saying he was one of them and they didn’t believe me. They saw me as an environmentalist and there was no way they would relate to me, speak to me, deal with me. I mean, you just would not talk to me. So I saw a guy one day and the same thing happened in two countries, which is actually really unusual. And now I use that in all the villages. I go into fishing villages. So this guy had a ripped up net and he was trying to repair this net. He was making a real poor attempt at doing that. So I took the money for a needle off and they said, Excuse me, can you give me those? And he just looked at me and handed it to me, and he was amused, I guess. So instead of repairing this mess and they were shocked right away, like, I can actually do this, right. So they came along and they were just shocked. And after I repaired, then I spent the whole day repairing the net. The guy said to me, Why do you care? Perfect, perfect English. And I said, I thought you couldn’t speak English. And he said, I listen to you on the phone today. I can speak better English, the new. So it was kind of a little bit funny. So we we we started to talk and I said, Can you show me again the the biggest concentrations of plastic on the ocean floor in this area? If you’re a mentalist, you’ve said bad things about me. He said, I. I’m here. I trying to feed my family. I want to eat. I’m not one of them. I’m one of you. I said, I come from a little fishing village in Ireland, just like years and actually smaller. I said My family have been involved in industry for multiple generations. And of course, eventually he believed me and he brought me to sea. And I was shocked to what I saw. Absolutely shocked on the ocean floor. Say, just north of Jakarta or just west of Mumbai or just east of Chennai is massive cities around the world. The volumes of plastic on the ocean floor are staggering up to seven meters here on the ocean floor that is higher than the home you’re probably sitting and speaking to me from now on. The plastic. Seven measures between sediments, plastic, sediment, plastic. So we started looking at then about how what kind of money are these guys earning? What do they earn a week, a month, and so on and so forth. That’s what blew my mind away. In India, these guys earn approximately $3 a day. They work 20 days a month, so approximately 20 days a month, some of them less. That is $60 a month. They are so extreme poverty. We look at here in Indonesia, it’s there. They are a little bit more, but not a lot more. So we looked at Africa, we looked at the different regions around the world where we’re operating. And the figures were the same. Right. Just really, really, really low ball price, I guess, salaries. So we patented different technologies then for harvesting plastic. These nets that we call impacts microplastic elimination devices and where we can target plastic all the way down to 65 microns. Also, the larger particles, the plastic, which we call them pads, plastic elimination devices again, and keep it very, very easy to keep everything very simple. So we got these guys to drag this plastic. So what we do now, we do it in a very different way. Track and trace of everything we do is crucial for us. So we have everything is app based. So what we did was we, we, we built this app, this application. So this app now say Mohamed in Jakarta is collecting plastic. First of all, we collect all Mohamed’s data, his family, wife, kids stolen. There’s a reason for that. I get back to that in a second. Okay. So we collect all the data. So, Mohamed, he goes in his vessel when he once he starts going through the water to collect his plastic. We’re tracking it. We’re tracking his movements all the time. He’s carbon footprint, if you want to call it that. So we’re measuring his carbon footprint, how he’s moving, moving along through the ocean. Mohamed is mostly taking photographs of what he’s doing and he’s uploading that photograph on to the application. He has a unique QR code that’s just for Mohamed. He this one collector. Each collector has their own QR code. So as he’s collecting this plastic and what he’s got to come ashore, he sends a signal to the truck term. So the truck driver then arrives. And the truck driver, of course, we measure the truck drivers carbon footprint coming to Mohamed because he has the application too. So then once we transfer the data to Mohamed Mohammed, scans say you’ll see the truck driver is full and he transfers all the data photographs to the latitude, latitude and longitude, all timestamped onto his phone. The plastic then heads from there to the warehouse where a separate is sorted. Independent auditor meets the meets. He’ll have at this stage scans the full case, all the data, the QR codes onto the order. His phone that’s also taken by the warehouse. The plastic is separated into different piles for recycling. QR codes go from there at that stage and it goes to window plastic wherever it ends up. So if it ends up back in the supply chain, say it is a plastic, whatever it is, they contract the plastic right back to the very, very start. How we eliminate poverty. The reason we collect the data. Is, of course, two reasons. One of the reasons, the family reason for that we pay no ill are Muhammad. I was saying stuff about we pay him $200 a week. So now he’s earning $800 a month. Now he’s going from extreme poverty right into the middle class. Now, we found that that’s cool. So, yeah, high salary in this part in any of these these countries. But there’s conditions. There’s there’s a lot of conditions to it. The reason we collect the family data is to stop human trafficking, stop child marriages. Now it is mom has to his kids have to go to school. They can’t get married before they’re 18 years of age. They have to get an education. If that doesn’t happen, we remove them from abroad. We kick them off to both. The kids. Grades have to improve. Mohammad asked me all the time. He’d say, Hey, how come you only make like two ton of plastic week a treat on a passing week because you have a family to raise? You need to make sure that your daughter is getting a good education. You want to make sure she’s not going to get married as a kid. She has to. She has to get educated. She has to again, be able to take part in the in the future of our global economy. She has to get a proper education to do that. You have to help her with that. You have to we will help. We will do our part. But you have to do your part again so you can connect 1 to 1 across the UAE. That’s it. But we will pay you $200 every week to do it. We will supply you the tools to do that. We will give you the net. The impact, Steve, depends. We will give you all our technology to it. But you will only do that one tunnel week.
Stuart Turley [00:12:08] Captain, before the we started, I had said I everything you’re saying is right down my alley and I’d have to like, give you a man hug and then hug you on the podcast. But now I’m tearing up because this is just cool. I’m sorry. Now, when you’re talking business, are you selling the plastic? So this is truly a business environment in order to recycle it. [00:12:32]Is that what you’re doing with it, or is it just going into recycling at no charge? How is the money or sustainability going on in this? [8.5s]
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:12:41] Yeah, just sustainability is a couple of different fronts. What can do with what we do with corporations, right? We look as we look at two different things. We look at how can we how can we help corporations achieve their sustainability goals now? So we do that in a way that is not going to cost the corporation any money. Right? So and how can we still make money by not taking money from the corporations Our are costing the corporations any money. How can we make money doing that? And so so we are looking at, again, the environmental charges that corporations can push on to on to the end user onto their customers. For the most part, we work with a lot with the logistic industry. We look with the logistics companies where the logistics companies are moving container from A to B, whatever it is. Okay. That container for me to be the logistics company said he put $25 on a container. They’re passing that directly onto our customers. But again, for a very, very small charge of $25 or $20 or $10, whatever it may be, we’re removing plastic for that. The companies get a recognition that they’re actually removing this plastic. We can track and trace our plastic. Of course, independent audit of everything that we’re doing ever now on the blockchain, we track and trace everything we do. We’re unique. There’s nothing like us on the planet.
Stuart Turley [00:14:09] There’s this is.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:14:09] Cool on the planet. Track and trace is crucial for us. The environmental world is corrupt to the core. Yes, the greenwashing that goes on and it is unreal. So we we were able to first of all, we were able to prove what we did. That’s easy. That was the easy for well, it wasn’t easy for us. We put a lot of a lot of i.t with the guys he involved in the whole the whole process. But but right now we can we can go with corporations like a beer company that’s just coming on board right now for every bottle of beer they will sell. Then we will take the equivalent of 20 grams of plastic from the ocean for every beer that’s actually sold at Go beer company any money. But the beer company itself will remove tens of thousands of tons of plastic every one, hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic from the ocean every year. And of course, it doesn’t cost the company anyone but the company itself. For the company taken partners, they are true environmental heroes for doing it. And we can promote our beer. And of course people can buy a beer to clean the ocean up instead of throwing money at corrupt environmental organizations.
Stuart Turley [00:15:21] In killing your.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:15:22] Enemies.
Stuart Turley [00:15:23] There you. And amazing because like four or five years ago on my podcast, we were talking about Putin selling carbon credits because he had a bunch of trees sitting over in Russia. And so people were buying that. That to me seems like a scam. This is like about as real as it gets. When you have the blockchain tracking, you have a job, you’re helping the economy and you’re also helping carbon credits, I think are in that scammy range because it still allows the people to write, pollute and then they just buy it. This is different than that. 100% different.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:16:09] Yeah, we’re we’re partnered with we partnered with Penn State University there a few years ago, and we’re partnering with a large university. I can change their name now. You’ll see it on LinkedIn being announced there shortly. Not too far from you, actually. Oh, cool. And the university itself like that is this has to build another layer that we actually need. I’ve been very vocal about the carbon space. The carbon space, again, is corrupt, corrupt to the core. You know, it’s this whole thing about planting trees to to offset a company’s carbon footprint. They plant trees in many places around the world. By flying little Cessnas, their small aircraft at three or 4000 feet, try and stop things out the window. I mean, it’s it is so laughable. It’s unreal. And they are charging companies for something that they’re choking out a window. Do they survive the vast majority? Of course. No, of course they do. The whole space itself is corrupted to the core. What is pushing what is pushing? This whole green agenda is organizations like BlackRock, BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street are pushing this. BlackRock, especially BlackRock, BlackRock have made it very clear and they were public about that they would drop corporations who wouldn’t invest in in the ESG platforms that are there right now. What what does that mean? It means absolutely nothing is doing absolutely nothing for our economy, which transitions from, say, from wind and solar. I see wind energy being probably the single biggest threat to to marine life. But we’re still proceeding like, you know, 100% with that. It makes absolutely no sense when they speak about wind energy. Right. Nothing is nothing has been no environmental assessments has been carried out. These these wind turbines are being placed in the ocean in numbers that we have never seen structures to be in the ocean before. The problems with that, as we have seen in Western Europe, again, where we operate, we saw in Denmark, in in Denmark what happened because of wind energy, because of this so-called green energy, completely devastated marine life. And how it did, it was really interesting. I spoke with this. I debases these so-called environmentalists that are really lobbyists for they for the offshore wind companies, which are European companies that operate in the US, by the way. Right. But when I spoke to them, the thing that shocked me the most was that the the sheer the sheer, the sheer number of these platforms are going to endure in Denmark when they built these offshore structures, what goes on? The structures are filter feeders, small mussels, corals, barnacles and the likes. All fish when they spawn. Two things happen all the spawn, the larvae, the fish. They swim up to the higher water column. So up to that four or five meters because the ocean saw a lot of a lot of a lot of bad umbrellas on the ocean floor. I guess there are a lot of predators. So once they get closer to the tree or to the surface, the wind farms are place, of course, all the way along the shore, all all the way along. So as the tide flows through these these platforms, the filter feeders eat up all the larvae, the fish. So recruitment back to the ocean floor wasn’t sustainable. And of course there wasn’t enough larvae. These larvae survive in the filter feeders we’re talking invasive to the air is directly in. Does that the international laws forbidding what we’re actually doing in the US again, like I’m doing all over the world, but they say the transition is crucial and we must do this. The problems with it is mind boggling. The we speak about oxygen, we speak about the ocean. We breathe on a daily basis and we speak about, again, better treats the ocean we breathe. Over 75% of that comes from the ocean. It comes from the volume plankton and applied some the in the ocean, you know, the filter feeders that are on these platforms, of course, eats up the planet. Right? So the plankton that reduces CO2 and so on and so forth. So we’re taking one step forward and about four back I was going to say it to back, but about four steps back. This is what we’re doing. We’re killing marine life or damage generation for a transition. That doesn’t make any sense. I predicted with the media there in some interviews in Europe with the last few years, that energy crisis prior to any conflicts, prior to any Ukraine and Russia or any any of this any of this narrative that’s been portrayed by the media today, what’s causing the spike in energy prices? Right. Particularly at a time that energy prices would would spike and would increase over 100% over all of the over over a 12 month period. Right. And of course, what they what they said to me at the time, they said, well, there’s there’s there’s there’s no proof for that. And I said, there is. I said it’s not it’s it’s not is it’s not sustainable since then, like in Europe, like, you know, energy prices have increased 30 to 100%. So you price in Europe will increase at least 200% more. The same thing is going to happen in the United States. It is not sustainable. It is not. The stadium is a very expensive way to produce a unit of electricity. And if you boil by boil down the whole thing and take a step even back further. Right. And look at like little man’s man’s effect on the climate and look at it. Look at climate change itself and look at this whole narrative that’s being portrayed like not how we’re actually killing our planet. Right. And when you start breaking down the numbers and looking at the numbers, none of it makes any sense. We again, we see like the single biggest threat to our planet, of course, is the not healthy ocean. If we lose the ocean, we lose all life as we know it right now is it’s estimated that up to 50% of the price of is dead in the ocean. What’s happening with that is the the the the plastics itself as it makes its way into the ocean, all the chemicals and so on and so on and so on and so forth that enters into our oceans because they lose it through the through the water column. That happens as that happens. They, they, they our governments have made a prediction. Are they made some calculations back in the sixties they reckon that are all man was was vast enough to absorb the amount of toxins actually going into the ocean. And they were somewhat correct actually with that, which is actually pretty sad to say, but they were actually somewhat correct. So but what they never accounted for was. And of course, nobody knew about plastics, microplastics, nanoplastics as the plastics slaughter on the side of the ocean. All the toxins inside the ocean attaches. So to the to these small particles of plastic. Well, no, as the as the larvae, that is fish and as well as that, like the plankton stop as it rises to the surface in the hours of darkness to feed, it looks at these particles as a form of food. And of course, it eats at once. It eats the time to look. Course, it’s like eating a poisonous pill. It kills it. Of course they can. The problem right now is it’s estimated by multiple universities around the world right now that up to 1% of plankton be or is diet there is to improve the problems. I’m not an alarmist. I’m certainly not far from that. But one thing that I’ve seen, I’ve looked at whale sharks and I’ve looked at basking sharks and whale sharks inside the ocean. One thing I’ve seen there with the last couple of years, how skinny they’re starting to get. I’m actually going to be posting a video on LinkedIn later today about this. And we see these giant, big, beefy basking sharks that once used to be big, beefy sharks. Now they’re really skinny creatures, pure skin and bone. The reason for that is trying to run off for food and send your eye. So on the south coast of Ireland, again, the contrary. In my part, I’m a U.S. citizen. But again, the contrary. My part in Ireland, where we get shores of mackerel produce, come into the south coast to feed every year. And of course mackerel they’re filter feeders. Also, the Markle haven’t arrived on the south coast of Ireland. Now with over 20 years and any numbers are gone, they moved They were just completely displaced there. In the other areas, of course, of the fish, the marine life in that area is after being devastated already. Again, the plankton, the the whole life cycle like, you know, there is disappearing in that areas and in that area. And of course they see massive amounts of fish are moving. Is water temperature increasing? Yes. Is create the problem the hundred percent? Most definitely are. We are we seem like, you know, there are an increase in water temperature there globally. Yes. A natural cycle has happened multiple times in the past is happening now again. Is there anything we can do to change it? Unfortunately, not really. But one thing that we have to do, we have to preserve what we have. We have to figure out ways to to preserve our oceans, figure out like how can we protect plankton and say, how can we do that in a way like, you know, that’s sustainable? How can we eliminate plastic waste? How can we do that? Like, you know, want to eliminate poverty and poverty at the same time? Nobody on this planet can do that like us.
Stuart Turley [00:25:59] I’m impressed. You’ve got it down to a science. And in the oil and gas space, the orphan well projects, when you know, the oil and gas industry was not always good in the back in the past with ESG and just would walk away from Wells. And Texas is now really doing a good job of funding and plugging abandoned wells. What I’m now seeing, Captain, is that with the well, with the wind farms, I’ve interviewed folks up with the right whales and all the deaths that are going on, on the East Coast is just pathetic. And it’s the sound, the the sounding that they have to do for all of those.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:26:48] Yeah, the acoustic noises and. Yes, seismic work and so on and so forth.
Stuart Turley [00:26:53] And it’s just killing our wonderful whales. But what I’m seeing across the U.S. is that this is. Everybody was saying wind farms are going to last 30 years. No, they’re not sustainable from day one without tax subsidies. All the numbers that I have is that with tax subsidies, they are no longer fiscally sustainable after eight years. Well, they don’t become carbon neutral, you know, as we say, carbon neutral until ten years. So you’re supposed to have 20 years of carbon neutral free power. Well, the maintenance is so expensive on these things that you really can’t do it to six years. So these things are not even if it’s impossible.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:27:41] Well, let’s take a let’s take it even a step further than that. Right. If you look at if you look at wind, right. One wind energy, one thing on land. Right. And of course, is brutal for the environment. It kills all kinds of birds on land and so on and so forth. The first thing, what they say when it will say debatable, they say, well, cats kill a lot more birds. Okay, That’s true. Right? But they don’t they don’t kill large. They don’t kill eagles. They don’t kill large marine bird robins, which is lots of there. They don’t kill these giant endangered birds. The American eagle, of course, is a symbol of strength, a symbol of the United States. Eagles are being slaughtered by these on shore, but offshore is a bigger problem. Offshore is a much bigger problem. The carbon footprint to put a plant off shore is about four and a half times higher than the one on land. So if it’s going to take ten years on land, it’s going to take 40 years offshore to do the same things because they’re.
Stuart Turley [00:28:39] Not going to last 40 years.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:28:41] After the last. They’re not going to last. They can’t last. The problems, of course, with the marine life, what they’re doing, there’s no doubt about that. Brutal problems, the discharge out of the out of the out of the platforms themselves. Right. You have so you have 30, 20 turkey wind turbines, then 2 to 1 power station. And before it sends this energy ashore, the cooling towers out of these, of course, it creates a massive problem, millions of gallons of hot water being pumped into the ocean. Again, they are pulling in hot water, killing the space distance from the ocean to sea life, killing them, trying to missile and then spitting it back out right on top of the other ones that you didn’t suck up that are just by your killing them also. There’s there are so many problems here. There are so many problems. There is no environmental assessments whatsoever are being carried out. None. Zilch. This was being done by, say, the former president of the United States. Right? They would be. And I again, I’m nonpolitical. I’m nonpolitical Democrats, Republicans, not the means ultimately only what is done by the former president. They would be hell to pay for this. They would be absolute hell.
Stuart Turley [00:29:57] You see more humanitarian and ecologically in then political. It’s I don’t care. I don’t like all politicians. I’m just going to be quite honest with you. I’m not a.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:30:12] Fan where we’re connected at the hip there because, again, I don’t like Republicans or Democrats. You know, that’s the way that the way they spend money. Do you know that at the end? Here’s one for your listeners. At the end of the Trump administration, there was a bill passed for $2.5 billion to tackle ocean plastic pollution, to collect ocean plastic and to stop it. That money was was distributed there under the Biden administration. It was signed off under the Trump administration, and it was handed out over to the Biden administration. It is estimated that there’s a 2.9 billion, not million, billion dollars that less than a metric ton, less than one metric ton of plastic was actually collected $2.5 billion of taxpayers money gone? Absolutely gone.
Stuart Turley [00:31:14] What would you have done with that amount of money and how many tons? So let’s say this again, Captain, for my listeners, because this just irritated me to death. I’m now worked up $3.9 billion for how many tons did we get? One one tonne.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:31:38] The less than one ton 900 kilos of plastic, less than one metric ton of plastic. And the $2.5 billion vamoose gone, finished less than one ton of ocean plastic like the money was earmarked for. The money went to ROI papers to say how bad oil and gas these other companies are. And of course, that’s where all the money went. The money went to write, write about to say how bad the problems are instead of coming up with a solution and doing it like the same amount of money, that amount of money but ourselves. We could we could definitely remove well over a million tons of plastic, well over a million tonnes of plastic. So we do firmly believe that we could probably in a year do 3 to 4 million tons a year of plastic. That’s just ourselves. We in the space, if you look as if you look at the there’s very few companies in the world that actually tackle ocean plastic. Very few, lots of them have the word ocean. It could be for whatever the word ocean is in there somewhere, but they have nothing to do with the ocean. But again, it is just because it works, right? The hashtag works. So we became a picked up society. We became a hashtag. So so whatever the popular hashtag is, it was the media wake up, I think of the morning really early, these guys and they all text each other and say, what are we going to go with today? What’s going to be the narrative today? The narrative today is going to be it’s going to be collusion or it’s going to be plastic or is going to be big oil or it’s going to be yeah, we’ll be right there. It’s going to be something, right? It’s going to be starting whatever it is. We all agree with that. And that’s the later on. Unfortunately, that’s the way the environmental world is.
Stuart Turley [00:33:18] [00:33:18]How do we how do we franchise ocean integrity so that we can get you money and then you can fan it out and teach other people, [9.4s] but you got to franchise how you’ve done it. Does that mean we.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:33:32] We already do that We already franchise that there globally right now we’re already doing this but we we stay on top of it there we hold on to 51% of all the corporations again just to just to make it clear I was there.
Stuart Turley [00:33:45] I just thought I had a brilliant idea. I went to Oklahoma State. I thought it was brilliant. I’ve already done it. Okay. This is great job.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:33:55] Yeah. We look as we look at we have a couple of interesting projects there. Next year. We were putting the we started working there last year looking at ways to collect the sargassum, the seaweed just coming ashore on the coast of Florida and through the Caribbean and so on and so forth. We plan next year of intercepting that off the court, the four off the coast of Fortaleza in Brazil to Cuba. We’ll intercept that in the ocean before it ever, ever comes through. So that’s an interesting project for us. Of course, they they sargassum, once it comes ashore, it rots. That generates methane, kills marine life, it kills animals on the beaches, is absolutely brutal. But when intercepted there prior to whatever coming ashore, the reason we to do it do it down there, of course, is is it’s a lot of the vast majority that comes through the Yucatan Straits. And of course, those are waters I’m well familiar with. I spent my whole life in the US. So anything on the ocean for me is, you know, it’s as very easy for me, I guess, like, you know, to to tackle ocean problems. I understand the ocean. I definitely understand the ocean. Then the vast majority of people in the environmental world, which wouldn’t be really hard they the environment for like I said, it shocks me so much all the time. You have you have you have tens of millions of people after creating an economy by destroying other economies. Right. This they created this. They made themselves relevant by pushing a narrative which for the most part is like we saw the floods in New York City a few weeks ago. The floods, of course, the first thing I was I saw climate change has created a flood in New York, right? So I contacted a friend that’s a I a he’s in the fire department in New York, and they said, I write you bad floods. He said, We did. He said, plastic is there’s crap everywhere. He said the drains are all blocked. Right? And I said, but I said my my colleagues in the environmental space. And he started laughing. I know what you’re going to say is that they’re saying climate change. They’re actually they actually want us to pull back on the narrative that they were saying, like, you know, that is plastic waste and trash on the streets in New York. Right? That’s up the block in the drains and crazy, the floods. And of course, this one totally against what they were saying. They were saying it, you know, which had nothing to do with that. I saw floods this week in in in Ireland. Right. There was floods right where I came from in Ireland, Waterford this week it was the same thing. Drains got blocked right, Drains got, there was rain that created floods. Floods have been there since as far back as we can go. Right. We we know that flooding has been a problem on. I posted a video yesterday where we haven’t had rain here. It’s a dry season. It’s just come towards the end of the dry strike that ran up for five months. And of course, see which is normal. There’s nothing abnormal about that. Right. But it’s going to start raining any day now. We had a small bit of rain there yesterday and I was getting getting gas in my car. I drive a gas powered car. And as I was putting gas in the car, I saw the guys trying to unblock the drains. Right. The drains are all blocked off. The first part of the rain arrives and a blocked up the drains. Try a plastic once in a block to drains. And the reason I put up the post on LinkedIn yesterday under my LinkedIn page captain here in Kelly, I put it up because they said they’re going to blame climate change for this one. This has nothing to do with climate change. This has something to do with a problem like, you know, with local authorities and not a proper waste management program, let alone the developing world where very fast, like in the US and Europe, to point our fingers at countries in developing world. Right. Well, we have it in New York. We have a lot of cities. We have badly managed cities where our politicians let me be Democrats or Republicans, but our politicians didn’t do the right thing, didn’t make sure that our cities are clean, our streets are clean, they are full of trash. Our trash is going to block up the drains. But when the when that happens, please do not do not run with the inconvenient lie and turn around and blame climate change for it has nothing to do with climate change. No to do with bad management.
Stuart Turley [00:38:14] You know, Captain, you’re so refreshing. I love that post on LinkedIn. I almost feel like a stalker. So when do you start looking over your shoulder? You know, it’s major. And, you know, because I love your ideas. Everything that you’re doing is sensible. And it seems like education is one of our biggest problems coming around the corner. How does somebody because you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve got that entrepreneurial spirit, you’ve got the self-motivation that you’ve had all of your life. How do we talk or get our next generation involved in things? [00:38:53]How do we how do we look at that next generation? [3.3s]
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:38:58] You know, I spoke I speak with universities all the time. And one of the things that I always say to them, first of all, I always ask the professors to speak before they like to speak. When I when I finished, but I fell that once, only once, I didn’t fall flat after that. So I make sure that they have to leave and say whatever they have to say first. And I would come in after them. Right. And one thing I always say to the students, I say. Please do me a favor. Scrutinize everything you’re told. Stop listening to your professors. What they’re telling you is not true. And of course, that never goes down well in the universities. What is the truth? Like, you know, we need our. Our kids need to start thinking about what they’re being told, to tell our kids to live in a basement and climb under a rock and, you know, to survive like that, to save our planet, not to have children, not go on vacation, not to do anything to to become depressed, to second guess, like in all their life as we know it. Right. Right. Is very harmful, very harmful for society as a whole. So what I say to the youth is go on vacation. Party like a rock star and save the planet at the same time. And he said, How am I going to do that? So we give you a list of hotels to go to hotels. But again, they’ve removed every night you stay or these hotels are taking one or £2 of plastic from the ocean for you. So you call that hotel, that hotel, the sponsors clean up so that you’re actually helping save the planet. You go along and you buy a beer and they’re charging three or $0.04 on a beer you’re drinking. You can drink beer and save the planet. How cool is that? Think about in a more positive way. Go back to basics school. Be a teenager party. Do not do not listen to what they’re telling you. That is not the way forward.
Stuart Turley [00:40:59] [00:40:59]How do you like a rock star at a hotel that supports the Captain Kelly programs? And you’re going to save the planet. [9.4s] How cool is that?
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:41:11] Well, not a.
Stuart Turley [00:41:12] T-shirt party like we are on on Captain Kelly. I like that. We’re going to have that made.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:41:22] Yeah, well, you know what? We have to get back to basics, right? We have to get back to basics. And we have to look at things in a more positive way. How can we fix the problems we have? And they’re all fixable. Right. That’s the beginning part about us. We can fix the problems. So we actually have the if we’re looking of pollution, there’s no doubt about it. Pollution is the single biggest threat to our planet, right? There’s no doubt about that. We see the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico that are expanding, constantly expanding, and, of course, leaking or creating problems, you know, all kinds of pollution from people, from.
Stuart Turley [00:41:57] Sugar.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:41:58] To fertilizers to different chemicals to so on and so forth that are creating this. We have to we have to look and make sure we have a healthier ocean. But the the transitions we’re talking about are ludicrous, are absolutely ludicrous. I see the world that the likes of Exxon and these guys are doing is absolutely amazing. I see Exxon on this stage right now will be a world leader in recycling of plastics and the car companies circularity with them. Exxon, like, you know, an hour they have a plant up and running there in Texas. That’s that’s again been very, very successful in getting a plastic break in the plastic dump back into an oil and turning that oil back into plastics to get a complete circularity like, you know what are doing. Exxon are looking at about a dozen more projects there globally. And I applaud them. I applaud them. I’m an environmentalist and I applaud an oil company for actually doing the right thing, you know, which is great if we look at where the amount of money that we’re spending, just like the story regarding the money that was spent on the for the one ton of plastic, the $2.5 billion imagine has got $2.5 billion was spent on R&D work to produce an engine important fossil fuels. That is what can be more fuel efficient if we spend a fraction of the costs that we’re spending right now into more fuel efficient vehicles, they can either be sold to gold, we’re selling hybrids in India, in Europe, in the US the last few years, and these hybrids are same largest cars can do 25 miles to the gallon. We’ve been selling cars in Europe that can do 25 mpg with 40 years, you know, But they were never sold in the United States. Right. So, you know, to reduce consumption, if that’s what we need to do, there’s technologies already there, There’s engines already there. If we put more, if we look, I guess, at the and ways to research and look at ways to actually reduce fuel consumption, there are so many ways to do it. We work in West Africa. I’ve seen West Africa. I see what’s going on with the with the Corp of Mines. I’ve seen what the exploitation of our people say in these these areas. I’ve seen where kids are, where children are mining for 15 and $0.20 a day so we can feel good. Is that is that a way forward if anyone thinks that is the right thing to do, shame on that. Absolutely.
Stuart Turley [00:44:27] Exactly. Those mines are horrific. And you see the kids in there working and you see the parents and the moms working for $0.15 a day. That’s when I get worked up on that.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:44:45] Well, the reason we put ourselves through our collection, we touched on there a few minutes, Spock. Both the collections, of course, is to keep kids. They keep kids live Kids be kids. These kids be kids. Make sure your kids get education. I posted up a poster some while back, which was the most horrific sight I think I’ve ever seen. I’m a pretty tough guy. I passed through school. I paid Robbie like to go toe to toe with Mike Tyson. I’d take him. I’d take him out. So I’m a pretty tough guy. But I, I was in a a place and Archie Carter and I saw these children working in a in a sweatshop. They were taking. They were taking mussels, shellfish. They were they were shocking shellfish. What are the kids who are still in diapers but still in diapers? And they were working. She was in diapers. I posted up the poster last year. Earlier this year, I shared a post. I shared a post which you are after. After this. But it broke my heart, right? That’s probably the whole way home. I cried all day long. And again, I’m a tough guy. I cried the whole way. Almost like, What’s happening? What are we doing? What are we doing here? What are we doing to people? Why we’re exploiting people more now than ever before. And of course, we were doing nothing. We’re doing nothing about it. So we have to look at the elephant in the room. And of course, that is pollution. It is child labor, poverty. How so? Connect the dots. That’s what’s so, so important to us. That’s what source. Well, it’s. I see it. I see it all the time. I see it in India. I remember being in India, just outside of Chennai, and I wasn’t sure I was actually indoor in India. Right. And there were these kids on the bottom of a yard. Temperature was. Well over 100 degrees. It was it was so, so hot. They saw these kids. I was with a group, the whole delegation, three or four Americans and a whole bunch of Indian folks. And there were these kids working at the bottom of the yard. And I just I just I walked on towards the kids and they kept calling me back in all. Mr.. KELLY Kumaris, that’s you don’t talk. But I wanted to see what was going on. Right. And these children were mixing up this red dye, this red dye with some standard cement. And it was like and I looked at it, it was like I pictures of my own kids when they were on the beach making sandcastles. Right. They were putting them inside these plastic malls and they were making these these these these brick pavers. I would just read like the kids were covered in red dye, get no shoes on. They were skinny, they were hungry. And there was a little girl and she looked up at me and she had these amazing curly hair and big brown eyes. And and she was covered in this crop. And I had two bottles of water, two plastic bottles of water. And my that in my hand. And I handled one of the bottles and I and I said to her in English, I said. I said, How are you? And I was surprised. She spoke English. She said to me. I’m good. And I said, You like your job. And she just shook her head no. And, you know, and again, I cried again. Right. So the guy came down to me that had the yard and he said, it’s a mr. Kelly. He says, Don’t mind what’s going on here. Come up and talk to me. I said, Buddy, I’d like to know if your teed off right now. You know, and it’s and of course, my teammates, you can speak to that. You can’t speak to them like that. And I was just just appalled. I’m a father. I’m a father. I have I have a son. All right. I have again, like, you know, I’ve seen this happen over and over and over and over again. And now we speak about how we’re going to transition and how we’re going to make the world a better place so we can feel good about making our cappuccino in the morning for breakfast when it’s produced like it all by solar energy or wind energy or whatever. But we’re going to excuse my English. We’re going to piss all over the developing world by doing this. No, it’s not an option. It’s really not a no no.
Stuart Turley [00:48:58] Captain Kelly, I can tell that I need about six more therapy sessions with you because this is not a discussion. This is a therapy session. And I just really appreciate everything that you’ve got going on out there. But I would like to have more follow up sessions with you to find out what’s going on. And I’m over here about ready to tear up this. Thanks. We’re having a party party with Captain Kelly, but thank you for stopping by the podcast today. [00:49:32]Tell us how people can support you and how people can reach out to you to help eliminate poverty. [8.7s]
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:49:42] They a couple of different ways. One of the ways, of course, is to follow me there on LinkedIn. Captain Kieran Kelly, our Local Assets Auction Integrity Group. They’re on LinkedIn or the same on Facebook or so on and so forth. No matter what corporations are saying to save you a little coffee shop, sell you a cup of coffee and remove, remove, say, one plastic bottle for the ocean for every cup of coffee you sell against something really, really simple. Really simple. What would that cost you? Or to fund a cup of coffee? I mean, it’s absolutely nothing. But on the bigger scale, you know, it removes hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of plastic. We just need more and more companies. And our goal is to get into the millions of tonnes of plastic a year. That’s what we are doing. So again, something really simple, something really simple. How can you how cool would it be for your restaurants, for your restaurant that you can have on like the countdown in the US for St Patrick’s Day? You see the clock ticking all the way down, but to see something similar to how many bottles did you pull? The equivalent where two bottles did you pull from the ocean on a yearly basis and we send a dollar every month, every week that you can keep increasing that to shore, like, you know, the people going into your bar to drink some drinks, party like a rockstar and you’re going to clean the planet by doing it. That’s what we have to do. That’s all we have to do.
Stuart Turley [00:51:18] I love that and I’ll tell you. So we’re going to make sure your LinkedIn account for information is in there and whatever we can do, we’d sure love to throw our weight behind getting the story out for you, because that’s what this is all about, is getting out there. [00:51:35]So I can’t wait to talk to you again and buy you a beer so I can party with you and save the world. [3.8s]
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:51:40] I would love.
Stuart Turley [00:51:41] To see winning. What a great way to do that. Thank you, Captain, for stopping by.
Captain Kieran Kelly [00:51:48] Thank you. Thank you so much for having us on.