I'm Greg Dalton. Today's program is underwritten by Bank of the West.

From coast to coast and everywhere in between, the oceans play a bigger role in our climate and culture than we often realize.

I think a lot of people across the country feel like going to the ocean and the coast is the part of their culture and a part of their family and isn't a right.

Sarah Amenzade is commissioner of the California Coastal Commission.

Her agency's mission is to make the coast a place

for everyone to enjoy and to do so responsibly, which can also encourage innovative solutions

from the private sector. We're looking at all these entrepreneurs who know they want to help

change the planet. They want to help the ocean. Danielle Fernandez is founder and CEO of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, a global organization

that helps young entrepreneurs create startups that have a positive impact on oceans,

and the oceans need all the help they can get right now.

Almost all of the carbon dioxide that we emit through fossil fuel burning eventually winds up in the ocean.

Ken Caldera is a climate scientist with a Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford.

I began our conversation by asking him how our understanding of oceans and climate has changed over the last several decades.

In the 1980s, when I was a graduate student,

it was considered a good thing that the oceans were absorbing both heat

and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

because that was slowing climate change in the atmosphere and on land.

And it was only several decades later that it

really became understood that this heating of the ocean was damaging to marine life. Coral reefs

are the most obvious example. And then also the carbon dioxide when it's absorbed by the ocean,

acidifies the ocean. That's also harmful to marine life.

And so what was once thought of as a service that the ocean was providing to humans

...