Q&A: Jerry Schubel, Aquarium of the Pacific

Art: Our guest is the president and CEO of the Aquarium of the Pacific, Dr. Jerry Schubel.

Jerry: On May 24th we will be opening our new wing, Pacific Visions.

Art: It is a beautiful expansion to me that looks like a giant whale but it’s a gorgeous piece of architecture and it really will add to the attraction of the aquarium.

Jerry: It is in a very unorthodox expansion for an aquarium It’s not about bigger tanks for bigger marine animals. It’s about the one animal that is putting all the other animals at risk. It is about us.

Because of our belief that art and science together are powerful ways of telling stories it starts with an art gallery, then it goes into an orientation gallery that shows how the relationships of humans and the earth and the ocean have changed throughout time. It makes the point that the future depends upon the actions that we take – particularly those that relate to energy, water and food. Then they go into this immersive 300-seat Honda Pacific Visions theater. It has a 130-foot-long screen that’s 35 feet tall and a projection disc on the floor. We can simulate the sights, sounds and smells of the world ocean and even the seats will move.

Art: I’ve been to other aquariums over the years and I can’t think of any one that involves not just the display of the colorful fish but the kind of research and work that you’re doing to change our future

Jerry: There are a lot of wonderful aquariums in the world that have great exhibits and in fact some of them do more research than we do I don’t think there’s any aquarium in the world that brings the latest in research findings to the general public the way we do. This wing will take it to a new level.

We get 1.72 million visitors a year and when we have the new wing open for a full year I expect our attendance will go to two million a year. When they leave this theater they go into what’s called the culmination gallery through interactive exhibits about the choices that people can make to make this a glorious future. If you read most of what’s in the media it paints a pretty grim picture of what’s going to happen. If we change the ways we deal with energy, food and water we can have a glorious future and that’s what this is all about.

Art: I remember seeing some video footage of this giant pool in the ocean called a garbage patch. Tell us about that.

Jerry: Plastics are being added to the ocean all the time. When they get into the ocean gyres concentrate them and so it’s a problem. If you’re looking all the threats to the world, ocean plastics doesn’t make it into the top five. Climate change, warming of the ocean, increasing ocean acidification and decreasing of oxygen levels in the ocean – these are the big issues that we have to have to deal with.

Art: Only two percent of the world’s water is potable and then the rest of the 98% is salt water.

Jerry: We have to do is look at the ocean in new and different ways without any preconceived ideas about what we’re going to be doing in the future.

Sea level rise is a consequence of climate change and if you look at Long Beach the impacts of climate change take different forms. If you live along the peninsula or in Naples or other low-lying areas sea level rise and coastal flooding will take a big toll. If you’ll live along the 710 it will be deteriorating air quality. Throughout Long Beach the prospects of drought and also an increase in the number of hot days will be present throughout the city

Art: So eventually the homes and developments that are facing the water or on the water will have to withdraw?

Jerry: It depends on how close you are to the water and how much above sea level you are. Sea level is projected to rise by 2 to 3 feet by 2050 and it could be three to five feet by 2100. Those are huge rises and it could even be greater depending upon what happens to Greenland and the Antarctic.

Art: What steps can we take as Californians to address this?

Jerry: We have to mitigate; that is reduced the driving forces that means significantly and rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We also have to adapt because what we do locally in mitigation doesn’t mean a thing globally. We all share this atmosphere. It’s a common; the other common is the world Ocean. The atmosphere has a mixing time of less than a year, so that means that whatever happens in Asia determines what the kind of air quality we will have. The solution must be global.

Art: How do we get the attention of the world with all of the other things that are happening?

Jerry: You have to look at it realistically. What are the most effective and the cheapest ways to have clean energy sources and not burning coal or drilling for oil or using natural gas. But also renewables. Solar and wind don’t solve the problem but they contribute to the solution. The largest source of clean energy is nuclear; nuclear must play a larger role. Nuclear power plants don’t blow up. They have the best safety record of any source of energy on the planet.

Art: The irony that something that we think of as catastrophic is really a solution to this huge problem.

Jerry: It’s got to be a part of it. California has made mistake of scheduling its second nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, to close early. We can’t provide the base load that we need without Diablo Canyon.

Art: So ocean rise needs to be addressed or it will consume us?

Jerry: If it’s going to continue to go up and we can determine how much it goes up by the actions that we take. We are a leader in renewable for electric energy but in California 40 to 50 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector. Our public transportation system is not very well developed. We are a society of automobiles. We need different approaches and we need to increase as population grows moving them into existing cities and towns so that they won’t have to commute long distances.

Art: On one of your prior visits to our show you mentioned fish as a source of food and the fact that right offshore there’s this abundant supply but we can’t harvest it.

Jerry: What we’re not doing is farming. There’s the opportunity to grow a lot of animal protein in the ocean fish to replace and reduce some – not all –of the cattle that we grow. Cattle drink a lot of water and they also emit a lot of greenhouse gases, mostly methane. The ocean can play a big role in our future but it’s hard to get the permits in California. We have never issued a permit for a fin fish farm in state waters or in federal waters of the United States.

We need to relax the permitting requirements without relaxing standards. Right now permitting strangles innovation in California The only time fresh water gets used in the processing of the fish. The average cow can drink somewhere between 120 and 150,000 gallons a year and we have five million beef cattle.

What we do now and over the next two to three decades will go a long way in determining our future. The last time CO2 levels in the atmosphere were this high was [several] million years ago. The average temperature of the Earth was 78° Fahrenheit higher than today and sea level was up to 100 feet higher. We think of glaciers as melting and adding to the water supply but they also grow and reduce the water supply.

Sea level goes up and down but this is the one time that it is being ruined by human actions and particularly by our use of fossil fuels; secondarily though by our land use practices and by agriculture. California should be the world’s laboratory for designing, deploying, testing and refining strategies to live in this new normal

Art: And we are prevented from doing that by earlier regulations that inhibit this experimentation.

Jerry: We have this wonderful state of contrasts and contradictions and enormous wealth but if you look at the latest survey and you adjust for the cost of living something like 40% of Californians live at or below the poverty line. We have the highest homeless rate outside of the District of Columbia. We have a long way to go. We have these wonderful colleges and universities, both public and private, and some of the best in the world and if you look at our K-12 educational programs they rank down about the 40th in terms of the amount of money we invest per student and in the performance of our kids.

Art: So we need to get the political system more involved in the aquarium and get their attention.

Jerry: We need to get people’s attention and also make them aware of the options. Depressing them is not enough. We need to be able to show these are the actions and these are the benefits. This whole new wing is designed to let people explore pathways to alternative futures and to discover how the decisions that we make collectively over the next 10, 20 to 30 years will determine the future we live in.

The decisions we make over the next couple of decades will determine the future [kids] live in so we have responsibilities to do everything we can to set us on a new trajectory to a better future. We have to rapidly and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions so we have to get ourselves off of fossil fuels and I think we also have to acknowledge that we need to remove some of the CO2 already in the atmosphere and lock it away.

Art: Long Beach is very fortunate to have the quality of the Aquarium of the Pacific and having someone like Dr Schubel, who’s passionate about the work that he does and helping inform the public about what needs to be done.

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