Good morning, and welcome to episode 130 of The Driller Newscast — two and a half years' worth of weekly updates on the news and stories impacting the drilling industry. That's right, news and stories covering the construction, environmental, industrial, water, and geothermal industries are all brought to you by the team at The Driller. I'm your host, Brock Yordy.  

This week in the news, we'll start with the 2018 Farm Bill expiring. That's right, it's dead. Next, we're going to head over to California Central Valley where regulators are cracking down on the groundwater sub-basin over pumping that will impact 1 million acres of farmland and 250,000 residents. For this week's feature, we're going to cover the UN's general assembly at Climate Week where all the world leaders came together to adopt a pact for the future. It’s been several weeks since we've hit the news, so I'm really eager to jump in and talk about what's impacting our industry. But before we do that, I have a quick safety challenge.

Safety Challenge 

It's fall. On November 3^rd, it'll be daylight savings, and all of the excellent daylight that we've become used to for the past six and a half-plus months will change. The days are going to get shorter. Our operations are going to be impacted by this. I want you to challenge your teams to consider our commutes to projects, our hours of operations, and working in low-light conditions. These are all things that, as we get on these job sites, we start thinking about it being fall — slippery, wet, low lights, slips, trips, and falls. All of these increase along with all of those unknown hazards that come with not being able to see as well. I challenge you right now, leaders, how are we going to operate safely heading into fall.  

Let us jump into some news. The last few weeks have been coverage of the geothermal drillers tutorial in Boston, and man, was that rewarding! But we've had a lot of news that's happened, so let's jump into it and start with the one that's right on the top of my mind. 

The 2028 Farm Bill Expires  

At midnight on October 1st, Congress failed to extend the 2018 Farm Bill. We saw this coming. We've been covering it. I truly believed we’d get it passed before we got to the election on November 5th. Sadly, the plan was to replace this farm bill, not renew it in 2018, and part of that comes from the Farm Bureau. Economists report that the budget numbers created in 2018 in today's inflation dollars are 80% of what they were. Please consider that the 2018 Farm bill was $900 billion and now the new one that was proposed, which is dead, was $1.5 trillion. Now, with less than a month until November 5th, it's up to a new Congress to take over in January to sort out this problem.  

What does that mean? It doesn't mean everything will stop immediately. We have plans. There are laws in place that jump back to the 1930s and 1940s farm laws. It's 2024, everybody. So, first and foremost, not all programs will shut down immediately. If you remember last November, as we had issues and President Biden renewed the extension to the 2018 Farm Bill, we heard from the Western states who needed USDA funding in conjunction with the Department of Interior and Reclamation to continue water withdrawal impact studies. That was all funded by the Farm Bill.  

Luckily, local crop insurance and emergency food assistance programs are not impacted. So, those impacted by Hurricane Helen and these other possible extreme weather events that we could have pop up between now and January, our farmers are protected. 

However, the inability to pass the farm bill is directly related to the division amongst the funding that included climate smart agriculture, rural electric infrastructure, how to appropriate the funds for the Inflation Reduction Act for decarbonization and farming and the big one, the supplemental nutrition assistance program. That's right, SNAP. It's a big deal as we talk about Justice 40 and everything else that's happening; the SNAP program is vital to our farm bills. If we dive deeper into this, farmers who can't count on the programs in place for the farm bill are not able to invest in the future. That includes new equipment, irrigation, and maintaining existing infrastructure. I want you to consider the future and the impacts of not getting the farm bill passed. 

San Joaquin regulators are cracking down on the groundwater sub-basin over pumping

Next, let's jump into the news coming out of California's Central Valley—specifically, the largest agricultural-producing valley, the San Joaquin. California water regulators, specifically the State Water Resource Control Board, have voted unanimously to put the tool groundwater sub-basin on probationary status for over-pumping. That may not seem like much of an enforcement for over-pumping, but this over-pumping caused damage to a canal that affects 1 million acres of farmland and more than 250,000 people. 

So, what does probationary status mean? It brings additional state oversight and requirements for well owners to report how much they are pumping. Ten months ago, on the newscast, we reported about the Department of Justice being involved in evaluating many of these California groundwater districts and how they are managed, and what experts they're using. So I want you to consider that of those 250,000 people, there are 550 private water wells that are now at risk of becoming unproductive. California has cited that a review of the groundwater plants found a lack of oversight in lowering the groundwater levels, which impacted water quality and caused subsidence of the 152-mile canal, the current canal. It also stated that the subsidence had impacted as much as seven feet of subsiding. 

In 2014, California developed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. This is the law that local agencies use for developing plans for the curbing of over-pumping with a goal of managing groundwater. Sustainability by 2040 put this law in place in 2014. It's 10 years later. In nine years, we saw seven feet of subsidence. Of course, we've seen the biggest drought impacts as we've talked about Hoover Dam and Lake Powell. This is further proof that what we're doing today impacts our future of being sustainable, which is going to lead us right into our feature this week - the UN's PAC for the future. 

UN's pact for the future

We can't save this planet in isolation. It takes every country and every individual understanding their impacts and what happens as we move into the future. Our feature this week is on the future and that comes out of the news from 2024 Climate Week, where on September 22nd, the world leaders came together to adopt a pact for the future. 

This is exactly where we have been going from the past Climate Weeks and COP 27 and COP 28 - as citizens of earth, we have to move towards the future. And as stated by the UN, this PAC covers a broad range of topics including peace and security, sustainable development, climate change, human rights, future generations, and how we handle data and AI and digital cooperation throughout the world. The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Gutierrez, made this statement, “The PACT for the Future Global Digital Compact and the Declaration of Future Generations opens the door to new opportunities in untapped possibilities.” 

Our UN General Secretary is a phenomenal man. Before 2017, he was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from 2005 to 2015. In that decade, he saw firsthand refugees becoming climate change refugees, which, as we can see today, is becoming increasingly prevalent. 

So, let's break down this pact. It starts with peace and security. Again, extreme weather and climate change are major multipliers to countries' peace and security. The UN has comments that start with the Security Council reform, which plans to improve the effectiveness and representation of countries in Africa. Next, complete nuclear disarming followed by prevention of a space arms race, and then fair and equitable exploration of space with measures to prevent the weaponization of autonomous weapons. What does that mean? Skynet? That's what that means, everybody. We can't have Skynet. When you look at how we start with peace and security, climate change, that fight seems so much more attainable, especially as we compare it to eliminating nukes, creating the real-life Star Trek, and ensuring everybody has phasors set to stun. 

Okay, let's get out of that insanity. Let's get to the big piece of this pact: sustainable development, including climate financing. The goal is to create financing that is better represented for developing countries. It starts by giving developing countries a more significant say on how decisions are made at international financial institutions. It's mobilizing more financing from multilateral development banks to developing countries, helping them meet their needs, and evaluating sovereign debt architecture so that these countries can borrow sustainably to invest in the future. This includes pulling in key players from the IMF, the UN, and G20. 

A primary focus is on addressing the challenges of climate change by delivering more finance to help countries adapt to climate change and invest in renewable energy. Let's think about this. The developing countries that are being impacted the most, do not have the best credit to be able to get out of the hole they're in, that we as the developed world are impacting. This is a big deal of considering how we release these funds and how we build up the developed world collaborating with the undeveloped world. 

Within this section, the UN addresses the idea of ways to introduce a global minimum level of taxation on high net-worth individuals. Yeah, that's a tough one. How about we think of it this way, those with a high net-worth, why don't we enforce them to build their own personal ESG practices, environmental, social and governance practices? Here's the secret everybody, from the moment of the industrial revolution to today, the reason there are high net-worth individuals is due to carbon production. There is no two ways around it. 

Okay, back to the UN pact, which ironically, the final piece for sustainable development and climate financing is rooted in the confirmation of the need to keep global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or above pre-industrial levels and to transition away from fossil fuels to achieve our net zero emission goals by 2050. 

I want to put this into perspective — 25 years, two months, and 23 days from now is 2050. I'll be 70 years old and our goals are based on what we can get done in the next five years, two months, and 23 days. That's right. The amount of carbon we produce and what we do from now to 2030 will determine what percentage of polar ice caps we have left and what our world looks like.> In The Driller Newscast, episode 123, we discussed the European Union's ESIS climate change study that stated that we had breached the 1.5-degree threshold for at least 12 months, and that study came out in February of 2024. We all know that July 2024 was the second hottest July on record in the world, with 2023 being the hottest. 

I want you to consider the 2015 Paris Agreement, the treaty among the 195 nations to fight climate change. That's when we set that 1.5-degree threshold because breaking two degrees Celsius will start a catastrophic failure of melting Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets, and it'll be irreversible. At two degrees Celsius, 50% of the world's glaciers will disappear, increasing sea level rise by 3.5 inches. Furthermore, that 2.7-degrees Fahrenheit increase…  

All right, drillers. I figured if I went to three and a half inches, it was time for me to say 1.5 degrees Celsius is 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. So, if we break this, the 2.7-degree Fahrenheit domino falls over. It knocks over the extreme weather domino, which hits the energy production domino, which knocks over the domino that turns off the lights. No, it's not quite the end of the world, but I want you to think of it this way. 

Extreme heat and extreme cold require extreme amounts of energy, so everything goes dark in the United States. This happened twice in Texas in the last couple of years. We see rolling brownouts across major metropolitan cities around the world, and that's just the domino that knocks over the energy sector - not the one that's knocking over the impact of the water domino, which hits the food scarcity domino just in the United States. Consider us as a developed country, our Farm Bill and everything we're talking about right now and how we experience extreme weather and climate change impacts. 

Now let's go to developing countries and day zero scenarios for water rationing and food security. So the world's 2030 goals are very important because it's our future. The Paris Agreement nine years ago in 2015 had wide scale adoption for what we had to do. And I want you to think about this, we needed to transition away from fossil fuels and that's what we were asked to do with the Paris Agreement at COP 28 last year in Saudi Arabia. Nearly 200 countries said “Yes, we're in” and now with the COP 28 being so important, we're just a few weeks away from COP 29 where we will see how we're doing.

Recognizing the future – Envoy created to empower young people and the decisions that influence our future 

Therefore, the next step in the UN's pact is to recognize the future.  We've seen in this Newscast already that the future started yesterday. From the 2018 Farm Bill to the water laws set in place by California in 2014, we will examine how ten years of drought have changed our landscape. The UN has plans to empower the youth and future generations in its pact. The UN has the first-ever declaration of future generations, which has concrete steps to take into account future generations in their station of making decisions and having an envoy for future generations to be part of the UN. The UN is committed to providing more meaningful opportunities for young people to participate in the decisions that shape their lives, especially at the global level. 

This is what it means to be part of the United Nations. As we roll into less than a month until Election Day here in the United States, this is what the UN is doing. Yes, it's a peacekeeping force. Yes, it is helping with OCHS and all of the things happening worldwide, but it's about including everybody around the world. So beyond recognizing the importance of future generations, the PACT has strong human rights and gender commitments, starting with strengthening their work on human rights, especially equality and women's empowerment. We see in the water world that women and girls spend most of their day carrying and providing water, and we need to get to a place where they can professionally grow and be the global citizens they are. 

So, as a clear call to action on the need to protect human rights defenders, they will achieve this with the engagement of all stakeholders in global governments, including local, regional, governmental, civil society, and private sectors. There's also a big piece in the pact that focuses on how we get there and how we recognize protecting people, the future, and the planet. The last piece is on digital cooperation, including AI governance and connecting all the people's schools and hospitals to the internet, anchoring digital cooperation in human rights and international law, and making the online space safe for all.

The UN’s Digital Cooperation and AI Governance 

The UN, for this digital cooperation, has asked all countries to make laws concrete by 2030. This isn't something we thought of overnight. General Secretary Guterres had a beautiful discussion, a speech he gave on World Environment Day back in June, three and a half months before this discussion. And he made the following speech that's titled, Our planet is telling us something. It’s time to finally listen. I've read this a couple of times, and I implore you to go to YouTube to watch it or read it on his LinkedIn. go It's a fantastic speech, and I'm going to hit on the parts that have struck my soul and my mind as I think about this. And like I say, I encourage you to go read it.  

He starts by saying, “Humanity is just one small blip on the radar like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. We're having an outside impact on the climate. However, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We're not only in danger, we are the danger. We are also the solution. So dear friends, we are at this moment of truth”. He goes on to outline how quickly we are burning through our carbon budget. That budget is 200 billion tons of carbon dioxide. That's the breaking point that's going to take us beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Currently, we're producing 40 billion tons a year. So let's do the quick driller math on that. If we’ve got five years and we're doing 40 billion by 2030, we're there now. Do you understand why it's so important? The next part that hit me, he says, “We need to fight harder. Now the truth is the battle for 1.5 degrees will be won or lost in the twenties. That's right, right now to 2030. And it's under the watch of all leaders today. And it all depends on the decisions those leaders take or fail to take, especially in the next 18 months”.  

Election Day is less than 30 days away. And I want you to think about the states with the most house seats in the country and what climate action we're taking. As we see zombie orphan wells come back online and we see carbon production and we see that this is a hoax, the dollars that are being used to greenwash or make these big arguments or drillers how we can be drilling for ground source, geothermal loops, or we can even be going as complex as hot rock geothermal. 

Back to General Secretary Guterres’ speech from World Environment Day, he says “It's crunch time and the decisions made at G7 and G20 and what happens in the near future at Cop 29 requires maximum cooperation with maximum action”. This speech is full of so many beautiful yet startling points, and he closes with this: “Dear friends, we do not have a choice between creating tipping points for climate progress or careening towards tipping points for climate disaster. We can solve the climate crisis, but we can't solve it in isolation. This is an all-in moment. United Nations is all in working to build trust, find solutions, and inspire cooperation, which our world desperately needs”. He continues with, “To the young people, to civil society, to cities, regions, businesses and others who live in the leading edge towards a safer, cleaner world. I say thank you. You're on the right side of history. You speak for the majority. Keep it up. Don't lose courage. Don't lose hope. It is we the people. Of course, it's the polluters and the profiteers. Together we can win. But it's time for the leaders to decide whose side they're on tomorrow. It'll be too late. Now is the time to mobilize. Now is the time to act. Now is the time to deliver. This is our moment of truth”. 

The UN General Secretary said, “We the people of the world”! I encourage you to read the Newsweek and New York Times and Variety and all the other outlets that covered the incredible things that happened at Climate Week two weeks ago. This was just a blurb because it's the UN and we have a lot going on and it gets washed away and we think they're going to be talking about Ukraine and Russia or Israel and Gaza and those things are just as important. But I want you to think about right now, as we are here and we are also global citizens and climate change impacts water, it impacts our drilling. And we, as he stated about the meteor, we are the meteor triers. We are Harry Stamper that lands on that meteor, drills into the middle of it, sets that loop, and blows that bastard up! That is what we can do right now. 

Thank you for joining us for episode 130 of the Driller Newscast. How the heck did we get to 130? There's been a lot going on. There's been a lot to support. I appreciate every bit of feedback and collaboration and comradery that have come from this. And we're going to continue for another 130 episodes. 

Who knows where we'll be in another two and a half years! We better be installing as many ground source geothermal loops as possible. We better be conserving our water. We better be considering how we can be better global citizens. And it's not about “They're going to take our barbecue grills”—It's not. It's about not breaking that 200 billion tons of carbon, that tipping point, because we'll have plenty of new fresh water going into the oceans and raising it when that happens. 

Thanks, Driller team! I can't do any of this without you. It's been an awesome ride. Appreciate all the sponsors. This isn’t the end. This is just the beginning. Let's get empowered and do what's right. Check out thedriller.com for all the greatest content. 

Thanks everybody.