Professor Dowlatabadi joins Ross and Christophe to share his frustration with the lack of evidence-based policy employed by governments as well as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change temperature targets. He offers his insight on geoengineering, explaining why he is so confident in its inevitability. We debate the ‘unobtainable goals’ of Elon Musk and compare Nori with Professor Dowlatabadi’s 2005 Offsetters program.
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Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospak.
Ross Kenyon: Welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m here with Christophe Jaspé. We’re still on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and it’s beautiful today. It is. I brought my sunglasses. You did, yeah. I didn’t expect to have to use them, but they’ve been in use today.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, well, we’re sitting across the table here from Hadi Dowlatabadi. Did I get that right?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: You did that. That was beautiful. Excellent. Very nicely done. Here’s an experience.
Christophe Jospe: I practice it a couple of times. I’m sure our listeners will figure out at the end of this podcast why we brought him on, but probably the best way to kick it off is to let him introduce himself. So what’s your background and maybe why are you on the Reversing Climate Change podcast?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: I should be asking you the last question. So my background is, as you guessed, come from Persian heritage. Born in Germany, educated in Britain, and then did a postdoc in the U. S. and then faculty at the U. S. before coming to Canada. My degree was in physics. I wanted to be socially useful. Could have designed things to do with- Did that work out?
Unknown speaker: Are you socially useful?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: You know, I’ve lived under the illusion that evidence-based policy takes place.
Ross Kenyon: Okay.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: And the reason I’m taking early retirement is because I finally realized after 37 years that it doesn’t. So, has it worked out? I’ve met lots of really smart students and some really smart people, and that’s been really enjoyable. So it’s been a little bit more enjoyable from that perspective, but not in the sense that, you know, if you want to change the world, teach people how to do evidence-based research and policy, and then send them out into the world to make policymaking a healthier, happier place. That really hasn’t happened.
Ross Kenyon: So you got from physics and then it seems like you’ve had quite a long path.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: So from physics, I was interested in something that was useful. We looked at acid rain. I joined the group in Carnegie Mellon that was doing acid rain research and developed things called integrated assessment models. Then I was hired back at Carnegie Mellon to run the climate program at Carnegie Mellon. And we built the first really significant integrated assessment models of climate change and policy. And that kind of has a soup to nuts character to it, characterizing everything from demographic and economic change all the way to intricacies of the climate system and its impacts.
And including all the uncertainties, because what was missing in the policy space, and in fact, the IPCC research, What we did and didn’t know about this whole messy system, essentially, and how that should influence the kind of activities we engage with in terms of policy, in terms of research, prioritizing the Applied research that was necessary in order to make better policy and so on. So we got given a lot of money to do this research. We continue to be given a lot of money to do this research by the U.
S. government, but that’s their excuse for not having policy. We’re giving more money for people to understand, although we’ve had really clear path for action for quite some time now that they’ve tried to delay by just giving us a little bit more.
Ross Kenyon: Just to refine the models or try to figure it out better?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: I actually don’t think we’ve learned much at all with respect to policy-relevant science since 95.
Ross Kenyon: Conclusions are already clear to you?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Yeah, absolutely. The policy interventions necessary to get going were evident to us back in 95, is what I’m saying. We’ve spent a lot of money trying to argue about the details of the science, but the details of the science are irrelevant to what the policy necessary in order to make the first steps forward are.
Christophe Jospe: As someone who studied physics, you very clearly understand that greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere and stay there and warm the planet. And there’s a limit to the amount that the planet can handle. And all these models can tell us, well, maybe it’s going to warm by X. Maybe it’s going to warm by X plus one or two. We’ll know with greater certainty, but the point is we’re not doing what these models are telling us anyway. And it seems like there’s a bit of fuzzy math going on.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: In what sense?
Christophe Jospe: Well, first of all, I have to call you out on an acronym. We said no acronyms and you used IPCC.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Oh, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those guys, right.
Christophe Jospe: And so they agreed. They got all the countries to agree. We want to live in a world with less than 1. 5 degrees Celsius, maybe 2 degrees Celsius.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Yeah. They said 2.
Christophe Jospe: I’m going to call Well, I’d like to finish my point, but I want to go on a side tangent here. Looking at you, Paul, why don’t you like those limits anyway? You had such a beautiful analogy. I want it from your mouth.
Paul Gambill: One and a half to two, you mean? Yeah, I’m always talking about how I don’t like these temperature targets because it’s such a So it’s not an abstract number and doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. It’s hard to realize that. And I’ve always felt like trying to find an average global temperature is like finding an average global phone number. What’s more interesting is to think about the actual atmosphere carbon content levels. That metric is so much more tangible to understand. And if we say it’s 410 parts per million now, and it was less than 300 before the industrial revolution, then that’s our target is trying to lower it to that number.
Christophe Jospe: So here’s where the fuzzy math gets in. And we’ll put something in the show notes that shows very nice lines, which over time go up and then go down in parts per million in the atmospheric CO2 concentration. They make all these assumptions that there are technologies or solutions out there that can make up the rest of the math, whether or not those things actually exist or we’re actually going to do this.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: So for the one and a half target, is that what you’re talking about? R2. Well, I mean, there are actually a number of things embedded in this conversation which I’d like to unpack. First of all, I couldn’t agree more with you that the idea of using a temperature target is dumb. The reason why a temperature target is dumb is because the instantaneous temperature change, whether average or local, is a combination of an unknown rate of equilibrium, rate of change to equilibrium of temperature change, and the actual sensitivity of the system to the forcing that we’ve imposed on it.
So if, for example, we are now 0. 8 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial era, we actually don’t know whether that’s a consequence of a sensitivity of 12 degrees, which is actually feasible in inversion of climate data to the state, to double CO2, which materializes very slowly because the oceans have a very large thermal mass that they’re going to finally, you know, give us our karma. Through 12 degrees of response, or in fact, it’s an instantaneous response, essentially instantaneous response of about one and a half degrees to a double CO2. So we actually cannot differentiate between those two with the evidence we have in hand today.
And one of the challenging things about the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s work so far, as far as I’m concerned, now relates to the second part of the conversation, which we just had. Part of it is that, first of all, they’ve used baseline scenarios which are entirely untenable. So the recent papers that we’ve been publishing shows that you cannot, in fact, get to RCP 8. 5, their radiative forcing of 8. 5 watts per meter squared, which is their baseline before policy is implemented. We don’t have enough coal to burn to get to that high rate of radiative forcing.
We believe that 6 is much more likely. 6 watts per meter squared is a much more likely target, which then makes 2 degrees and 1. 5 degrees much more attainable. With less emphasis on negative capture from the atmosphere than an 8. 5 baseline would require, which is really, really good news from that perspective. And as you know, the 1. 5 degree target collective study is in review right now. It’s a 1,000 page report, which is being reviewed by various experts around the world right now. The other side of it is the IPCC in its wisdom, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Once you define it, you can say the acronym.
You’re allowed. I’m going to try and not to use acronyms. Have chosen a range of sensitivities to publicize to radiative forcing, double radiative forcing range of one and a half degrees to four and a half degrees, which is basically not changed since the Charney report of the 1970s. Now, My social science professor friends tell me that this is because below one and a half degrees doubling is not policy relevant and above four and a half degrees change in response to doubling of CO2 is not amenable to public policy. It requires such draconian mitigation that no one’s willing to talk about five degrees or seven degrees or 12 degrees.
The really challenging aspect of this is that we’re now aiming for two degrees without knowing what the sensitivity is. One and a half degrees without knowing what the sensitivity is. Using a baseline, which is questionable. And using a sensitivity range that’s questionable. So all three parts are not well defined. Let’s put it that way. However, the nice cool thing about a much higher sensitivity and a lower baseline is that it is way less expensive.
Unknown speaker: You would define yourself as a contrarian, wouldn’t you?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: No, I’m really keen on being extremely transparent about what we know and what we don’t know, which is why I’ve always been really interested in kind of characterizing the known and unknowns about any system that I have to work on.
Ross Kenyon: That seems good. I guess I don’t get the sense of that when most people talk about like the science is settled, which is a way to discourage people who are like too far the other direction, but you’re just trying to do good science, it sounds like.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: I think there’s a big difference between applied science for policy and pure science because I would like to learn more about the climate system. And I think that, yeah, you want to spend more money on how the climate systems intricacies work or more money on making the climate models more accurate. First of all, we’re a long way from being able to actually reproduce the physical processes of the climate system anyway. Both on the computational scales that we need are just way beyond where we can actually achieve in my lifetime. But I don’t think they are at all necessary for the policy steps that need to come and the knowledge necessary to be confident in what policies we should be adopting.
So please differentiate the two questions. Do I believe there’s new science to be learned about the climate system? Absolutely. Do I believe it’s relevant to what we do as time goes on? I don’t.
Christophe Jospe: The physicist that I worked for, Klaus Lackner, also put it in a way. The point is, there’s a limit. We don’t know what that limit is of what the atmosphere can handle. It may be 400 parts per million. It may be 350. It may be 550. And the models can tell us with greater certainty that there’s this limit. But we’re kind of driving off the rails here because even if we wanted to decarbonize the global energy system as quickly as possible... We’re not doing it at the rate needed. And there’s growth happening that sort of outpaces the decarbonization almost.
So I’d love to hear your perspective. Let’s make you king of the world in solving climate change, Heidi. Well, okay, you don’t want it.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Please don’t go there. So the unknown cliff edge model I don’t like for the following reason. Because the impacts of climate change are already cliff edges occurring in micro locations all over the world, right? So the whole notion that it’s at some distance Future, which is unknown to us quite how far it is, etc. I think that’s just rubbish. It’s rubbish in the following sense that if you look at coastal communities that are getting inundated right now, communities that were built on permafrost that are no longer stable in their substructure, all of those things are happening right now.
And from the perspective of that very community, that’s not at all some kind of average temperature change effect that I have to worry about. It is something that is impacting me now and essentially destroying the foundation of what was a community in a particular location and their lifestyles. We’re doing that all the time and we are completely blind to it. That I find is amazing. An aspect of the way policymaking has gone so far, which is completely against my ethos. My ethos is not one of an aggregate climate change damage function, which is similar to the average temperature argument and average climate damage function, which Yeah.
From that perspective, any change in climate, any change in atmospheric conditions is unacceptable if you take that perspective. And actually, that’s my own personal perspective.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve never heard that before, but I guess the parts per million cliff idea is one that is very common. And I guess the idea is like, we have this much time left and then you can do the Indiana Jones, like roll under the wall and grab your hat as the wall closes behind you. But of course, like there’s, that’s not really what’s happening.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: In fact, it’s funny. Some people who’ve bothered to look at some of the stuff that I have online will be able to find a debate that Richard Linson and I had. About his insistence that global average temperature change is going to respond only half a degree to double CO2. So Richard and I had this debate, I don’t know, 15 years ago. And what was really funny about it is that all the things, all the nits he picks about the state of science are right. So you can’t complain about them. You really can’t.
But right at the end of the kind of discussion, we were saying, I says, Richard, it says half a degree globally. He said, yeah. I said, does that mean that some places will be more? He said, yeah. And some people said, yes, yes. And I said, is that place where it’s a little bit more consequential? He said, yes. I said, so it really doesn’t matter what the half degree is or one and a half degrees average. It is consequential climate change. He said, yes. I said, okay, so that’s the end of the debate.
That’s really the point. It’s consequential climate change. And consequential climate change isn’t measured globally. It’s measured locally. Consequential climate change is with respect to other human beings. What is our responsibility? I was teaching today in If I may, I would just refer to it. I have someone sitting in the classroom and actually we were building a model of the climate system and I was putting in all the intervention steps in and I said, what about geoengineering? And one of the students said, no, can’t have that. I said, why not? He said, no, it’s intentional.
I said, no, okay, it’s intentional. Do you believe in climate change? He said, do you believe in anthropogenic climate change? Yep, I do. Do you consume any fossil fuels that emit CO2? Yeah, I do. You do that intentionally? He said, yeah, so you’re not geoengineering already? Oh, I am. So the funny thing is how we manage to partition this stuff and kind of walk away from the problem using one set of arguments that you can use exactly in the same way and bring you back to the table and say, oh, no, I am complicit in this.
So are we doing geoengineering? Yes. Are we complicit in it? Absolutely. Should we do something about it? Yeah, I think we should.
Ross Kenyon: Kind of want to take it that direction. Do you want to go that direction? He opened the door. Let’s walk. So are you interested in geoengineering? You think that might be a solution? Can we define geoengineering first?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Intentional modification of the climate system is generally considered to be geoengineering. So you can intentionally change the rate at which carbon is captured out of the atmosphere. You can intentionally change the solar balance. That’s about it that I’m prepared to talk about. I don’t think there is very much more that I’m prepared to talk about on that.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think that the world should consider those techniques in part of their arsenal in combating climate change?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Absolutely. I actually think we’ll end up doing it anyway.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, really?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Yeah. I think we’ll end up doing it because I don’t think we do anything sufficient either on the mitigation side or on adaptation. And some geoengineering initiatives are inexpensive and quick to deploy.
Ross Kenyon: Like which?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Like aerosol.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. So you want to increase the albedo of the planet?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: I don’t want to. I may be forced to do that in response to getting close and observing the cliff edge that we talked about, although I don’t like that analogy. But if you get close to a cliff edge and you decide that you need to release aerosols in the short term in order to right the ship, essentially.
Ross Kenyon: Just buys you some time, perhaps.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Buys you very quick, inexpensive time. And the big issue is that you could deploy it quickly. You can deploy very significant change in solar radiation reaching the upper atmosphere or beyond the upper atmosphere. You can do that very, very quickly and not for very much money.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, one of the reasons why I guess I haven’t been as interested in that as other things, I’m relatively new to the rest of the team for climate change and earth sciences. Ocean acidification is a thing that really gets me hung up. So, oh, I see a smile and a knowing nod. Do I even need to continue? Do you want to chime in there?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Nobody is suggesting that geoengineering solves all the problems related to greenhouse gas emissions. It just buys time. To remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Ross Kenyon: Is that the dominant perspective among geoengineers?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Were people amenable to that? Actually, so, you know, talking about stuff that hasn’t changed, essentially, David Keith and I wrote a paper about geoengineering back in 92, which kind of laid out the physics of it, the economics of it, the necessity of testing it out so that we knew what we were going to do when we actually had to do it. We had a huge reaction of people saying, how dare you even think about it? From the governance perspective and from the need to understand it before we deploy it, we really have had zero progress until this year’s U.
S. budget, which put money aside for geoengineering, which was quite interesting to me.
Unknown speaker: Really? They did that?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: They did, yeah. Part of the federal budget.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, and we can link an article to that in the show notes. I thought that was pretty exciting. And I think at least we should know what we’re walking into if this indeed is an option that might need to be deployed.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: It’s like the restaurant at the end of the universe in the Douglas Adams trilogy involved.
Christophe Jospe: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: It’s like the story of, I will buy you dinner at the restaurant at the end of the universe if we don’t deploy geoengineering. That’s how confident I am. We will walk towards that cliff and we will approach it rapidly and unpreparedly and deploy geoengineering because we will be fearful of falling off the edge.
Ross Kenyon: And then Snowpiercer happens, right?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: We’re on the train, right? Yeah, I’m not sure. I never really understood Snowpiercer as a movie.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we mentioned in another podcast too among people who are interested in geoengineering and we had a good scoff and a laugh over that.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: I mean, I think you need to understand that, you know, humans have been engaged in geoengineering intentionally and unintentionally ever since agriculture was invented.
Ross Kenyon: There’s aspects of it that we think are pretty interesting too. This might be too far afield, like Elon Musk wanting to nuke Mars to create an atmosphere. Are you okay with that? Have you heard of that, Paul?
Paul Gambill: I don’t know enough about that.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Actually, I used that particular vision of Mr. Mosk to come up with an alternative valuation of the ecosystem services of the earth. So as you know, there’s a, you know, Robert Costanza back 20 years ago came up with a, do you know him?
Ross Kenyon: Oh man, I thought you were going to do a Seinfeld reference on me. I was like, your reference game is so good for me.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Anyway, not that Robert Costanza, right? Maybe his name isn’t Robert Costanza. It was, wasn’t it? Yeah. So Bob Costanza wrote this paper, and I think it was Nature of Science that said, The Earth’s ecosystem services amounted to $33 trillion a year. And then there’s a recent update of that number, and I think it’s $50 trillion a year now. And I absolutely hate this kind of calculation because, as Einstein said, not everything worth measuring is measurable, and not everything measurable is worth measuring. And from my perspective, there’s so much in the Earth system that is not measurable, that the whole idea of just measuring the human-valued services as the kind of the value of Earth is just dumbfounding for me.
So I did the alternative. I said, okay, so Musk wants to make Mars habitable. What I’m going to do is calculate what it takes to take every human from the Earth to Mars, because what we’ve done is decided that the ecosystem services of the Earth are not suitable, so we’re abandoning. Okay. So let’s imagine there are no more ecosystem services on earth. However, we want to count them. We have to pay to take all these people to Mars. And let’s say Musk manages to transform Mars for free. And it’s beautiful and it’s lovely.
And you know, the climate is gorgeous. It’s $10,000,000,000. To take everybody from here to Mars. And that includes the learning function. You know, there’s the economic learning of if you do something more times every time you do it. So that’s even saying that every time I dabble the number of passengers to Mars... I reduce the cost per passenger by 15%, right? So that’s with a 15% learning function. If it’s going to cost us $6 billion, the new Mars mission is priced at $6 billion to take folks to Mars. If I take those numbers and I apply it to 8 billion people, it’s $10,000 trillion.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think everyone’s meant to go, right? It’s just a hedge.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Yeah. It’s a hedge against us probably ruining this. I am so happy with this notion of treating the earth as a disposable entity, right? Let’s just throw it away.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think he wants to do that, but it’s an option, right?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Anyone who thinks about these things as options is thinking of a throwaway earth from my perspective.
Christophe Jospe: Okay. Okay. Yeah, I think I’m on your side, Hadi. I’d like to keep living on this earth and make space for the children I don’t yet have to live on this earth too.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: And others who are here and try and make sure that their lives and livelihoods are as comfortable as they should be.
Ross Kenyon: We could do like a New South Wales thing and send the convicts out to Mars and let them terraform it. Are you okay with that?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Oh, gosh. No.
Ross Kenyon: This conversation went off the rails.
Christophe Jospe: I’d like to pull this back just a little bit. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Keep in mind, you’re still shy of the world in solving climate change, but it’s going to require a portfolio of options that we may or may not have that we may need to improve. We need innovation in certain spaces. So just generally, it doesn’t have to be about carbon removal, although we’d like it if it were a little bit. What types of decarbonization innovations really excite you and why?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: The decarbonizations that I find interesting, again, is a conversation that started with David Keith. And David and I were thinking about what would be the most economically rewarding, so highest priced market niche for a fossil fuel substitute. And we realized that naval supply vessels providing jet fuel to the U. S. aircraft carriers actually carry the most expensive fossil fuel on Earth. Because the tanker has got escort vehicles, it’s got planes flying over the top of it to make sure it’s not attacked, etc. That’s the most expensive fossil fuel. Liter of fuel, given your audience, gallon or barrel of fuel transported from the refinery to the end user.
And we realized that the nuclear power plants on aircraft carriers were perfectly capable of generating as much hydrogen as we wanted to. And that an air capture technology on the aircraft carrier, again, would be perfectly suited to the scale of an aircraft carrier. And we could do air capture directly on an aircraft carrier and make the fuel for the jets. Jet A or something like that, synthetically using the nuclear power plant’s output. And that would be economical compared to delivery. So that was when we first thought about taking stuff out of the air and whether it would be economical or not.
Christophe Jospe: So just to simplify that a little bit, you’ve got... A power source, uranium or what have you, could be anything. And you’re pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, taking water, zapping both of them with electricity and taking the C’s, O’s and H’s to make high quality jet fuel. And it’s totally sustainable. And you’re not even using fossils. Sounds like a great idea.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Let’s do it. But yeah, so exactly that was the first steps in what David then later on went to do, which was How expensive is it to take CO2 out of the atmosphere directly rather than at the power stations where it’s a lot more concentrated? And the concept was that this would fail. That in fact, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was not high enough for to be economical to capture. And what the first pilot plants near Calgary displayed was that it was actually quite feasible.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I mean, I hear a lot of times chemical engineers who say, oh, well, Sherwood’s rule says that the dilution in the atmosphere, the costs of capture scales linearly with that dilution. So if you’re 0. 04% or 400 parts per million versus 12% what’s coming out of a coal-fired power plant, you’re probably 300 times more expensive, which is categorically wrong.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: It’s demonstrably wrong because those stacks in which the air from the atmosphere is passed by beads which are covered by chemicals that interact with the air to capture the CO2 are very, very efficient, much more efficient than everyone imagined it would be.
Ross Kenyon: This is the resin coated beads?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: It’s not resin. It’s essentially, do you remember your high school experiments in which you bubbled CO2 through calcium hydroxide and got calcium carbonate salt forming and making cloudy beads?
Unknown speaker: I think I missed that day.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: It’s essentially that. It really is. It’s a modification of that, which is informed by the chemistry of paper manufacturing, for which there’s a lot of efficiency gains from that world that’s been brought into this one. And I don’t know, have you interviewed folks at Carbon Engineering?
Christophe Jospe: I mean, we’re actually headed up to Whistler tomorrow and plan on knocking on some doors in Squamish. Maybe they’ll give us a little plant tour.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: I was there at the plant opening and...
Christophe Jospe: That’s right. So Hattie, you’re actually an advisor to carbon engineering. Is that correct?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: I don’t know if I’m an advisor. I was there when it was started. Okay. I was there before it started because Klaus and David and I can’t remember who else asked me to oversee a meeting in which proponents of different ways of carbon capture from the atmosphere were discussing the relative merits of their technologies and the economics of the different technologies and whether one of them was shooting for the moon in terms of technical sophistication or aiming to be essentially a Russian tractor so it would be able to work no matter what happened.
There was a two-day meeting that eventually led to the initiative that Klaus and David chose to take on as an R&D effort and then commercialization. Now, the interesting thing about that initiative is that I think that it can completely substitute liquid fuels. And the barrier to how much liquid fuels that initiative can substitute is how much of our liquid fuel market we convert to electricity beforehand.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, so let’s go into some of the dynamics there. So we’ve got an internal combustion engine, uses liquid fuels, and we’ve got batteries. My general understanding is that a liquid fuel packs around 100 times the punch of a battery per unit of mass. Yeah, for what you have to carry with you. Right. And so I have a much longer range, and I also can hold on to my liquid fuel for days, months, weeks, years. Not years. Okay, months. But my battery, I need to charge... Diurnally, basically. So there are trade-offs and values.
But when I hear we’re going to electrify everything, I get a little bit skeptical.
Ross Kenyon: Is that like, we’ll put everything on the blockchain?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Not everything needs to be there, guys. The Long Island iceberg. I’m very skeptical of the vision of total electrification. I am aware that the public, when they see no tailpipe, believe that they have no footprint, which is also very troubling to me because you go to the Midwest, all the electricity is coal-based and they’re really proud of their Teslas and you’re saying, well, aren’t you a really good citizen? But I mean, those are the kinds of the public conversations we need to have. For example, the transportation sector is going to be extremely hampered by the notion of electric lorries.
I’m interested in seeing which the next pyramid scheme of Mr. Musk is going to be.
Unknown speaker: Oh man, you got so many harsh words today.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Seven cents a kilowatt hour electricity anywhere in the US is part of that long distance hall contract. Seven cents a kilowatt hour? Where the hell is he going to get that from?
Ross Kenyon: Self-driving trucks on the blockchain.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Self-driving trucks on the blockchain using seven cents a kilowatt hour electricity anywhere in the US, right? Using the next share offering as the capital to provide the mechanism. I don’t know how he, he’s got a great imagination. Let’s put it that way. I wish he would make movies instead of take people’s money to make these kinds of promises.
Unknown speaker: Paul’s so well-behaved because he’s like the biggest Musk fan I know.
Ross Kenyon: He’s sitting there taking all these blows. Paul’s body language. He’s crossed his arms. He’s sitting there going, I seem to like this guy before, but I don’t anymore.
Paul Gambill: I think that Musk sets goals that often seem unobtainable now and that will be obtainable at some point in the future. When that is, is up to his imagination. I agree with you there. I think of it like Moore’s Law. Like Moore’s Law, the Yeah, I think that’s true. And that’s how I kind of see these goals that Elon Musk puts out. But it’s also important to remember even his biggest Fans often make fun of the Musk time whenever he says, oh, it’ll take 18 months for us to be able to deliver the next version of this vehicle that we’re building or the next thing for SpaceX or something.
It’s always almost twice that.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Yeah, I think my PhD students make the same kind of fun out of me because I tell, okay, so that’ll take me two weeks to do so. Why don’t you get it done in a month? I say, okay, I’ll see you in six months time. Exactly. But I’m in awe of his vision. I’m not always confident that what he chooses to visualize and promote are the things that I would because I know that there is limited capital, both intellectual and human.
Paul Gambill: Sure. I’m curious then, if you were an Elon Musk position and you had his resources available to you, what would you be doing differently?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Okay, so example of a poor decision is to put all of these lithium-ion batteries at industrial scale in Australia, right? Because a lithium-ion battery... Is designed for lightweight and being able to carry energy in lightweight form. Flow batteries are way more suitable for industrial application like that. You know, the kind of showboating that’s going on with these lithium ion giga, what is it called? The gigafactory. All of that stuff. I’m glad that stuff is going on for lithium ion batteries, but don’t misuse them. It’s a poor application. Mm-hmm. I would like a little bit more realism in some of the work that’s going on and addressing the kinds of problems that would actually solve more problems.
I don’t think selling Tesla Model S has solved the problem, right?
Paul Gambill: Right. Yeah. I’ll agree with you.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: I don’t have much sympathy with Tesla going to the federal government right now, which they did, saying, why did you put a Let’s say 200,000 cars sold cap on what the subsidy ends.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, something around there. Completely agree with you there.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Hey, rich people are demonstrating their pro-environmental proclivities. I don’t need to subsidize them.
Paul Gambill: Right. Because they’re getting a valuable product out of it on their own anyway.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Yes. If you haven’t owned one of those monolasses that has run into trouble, you will believe that’s a very valuable product. Right.
Ross Kenyon: Where should we take it from here?
Christophe Jospe: What else we got on there? Well, without so much as saying so, I want to turn the tables back to Nori and talk a little bit about putting money into solving climate change. Nori aside though, where do I get my biggest dollar for dollar impact?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: So I don’t know if you know this or not, but in 2005, James Tanzi and I co-founded Offsetters, which is a voluntary offset program that we initiated here. And as long as I was its technical director, all of our programs involved in transparent and measurable GHG reductions. So forestry wasn’t part of it, for example. Yeah. Heat pumps in replacement of gas boilers was. Biomass instead of natural gas and much better insulation in the greenhouses was. So for example, all the greenhouses in southwest BC were retrofitted by us to have better insulation and to use biomass as their fuel source.
Instead of natural gas. And at the time, they were actually making savings because of that. But today, biomass as a fuel source is much more expensive than natural gases. And so they are not particularly happy for having made that transition.
Ross Kenyon: Are you talking about like, what are you talking about biofuels?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Wood.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, well, actual wood. And you’re gasifying it.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Yeah, gasifying it. We’re just burning it, just combusting it. Now, wood waste supply was reduced because of the lumber dispute between Canada and the US, which meant a lot of the wood processing went south of the border and the wood waste supply in north of the border was reduced. And so the price of wood waste went up dramatically. In fact, there are quite a few wood waste based energy systems around southern British Columbia that are idle because there isn’t sufficient wood waste for them to be used. Now, going back to Nori, the whole point was this.
We wanted to make sure that people who were so inclined would offset their emissions through investment in reduction of emissions directly. It’s a bit different to what you guys are planning, which is to actually take the stuff out of the atmosphere. We were taking money not to put it in the atmosphere. Now you’re saying, hey, the horse bolted. And what we need to do is to start sucking some of that stuff back down again, which is why I was really interested in whether you would include it in a system that would, for example, recycle all the carbon that you would use for a hydrocarbon-based system.
Because the hydrocarbon-based energy system is so efficient in terms of all its components. The fly in the ointment for me for a synthetic hydrocarbon-based system The fly in the ointment is whether you’re going to combust it or use it in a fuel cell in a more controlled system so you don’t have air quality consequences. I would opt for that. My problem with ICEs, internal combustion engines as they exist today, is their air pollution problems. I think we can get rid of that by using fuel cells. One of the really nice and attractive parts of using Lithium batteries.
We can have lithium battery ships. I saw an article about that. Maybe that’s the vision of Trump, right? Lithium battery ships that go to remote offshore wind turbines, collect all the energy, and then trundle down to the port and connect up to the grid and do that. That’s possible for sure. I could imagine that. Or alternatively, you could have carbon capture right next to your wind turbines offshore and Make the synthetic fuel and use the existing energy distribution network to distribute liquid fuels.
Christophe Jospe: I mean, for me, that makes a lot of sense. We’re certainly in the fan club of using carbon for anything and advancing that whole economy. As I try to track down the life cycle, well, if you’re getting the carbon from the atmosphere versus the fossil, you get into trouble when you say, hey, let me just put my conversion at a fossil power plant because when you burn that fuel, it’s still ending up in the atmosphere. So it seems like making fuels ultimately has to come from the air.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: It’s a closed cycle. So what you can sit there and say, look, if something like... Eight gigatons of carbon a year comes from using fossil fuels. You take that eight gigatons and keep reusing it so it doesn’t get added to the atmosphere anymore. And one of the ways there is a market for that, by the way, in the low carbon fuel standard regulations, the marginal value of a low carbon or a zero carbon additive is really very high. And so that’s where your market opportunity for introducing such innovations come in.
Christophe Jospe: But just to nitpick a little bit, with carbon engineering, you’re still using natural gas to heat up your calciner. So for every ton of carbon dioxide you’re capturing, you’re producing 1. 5 tonnes of CO2 when that fuel burns because you’re still capturing the carbon from the natural gas. Is that about right? So you’re not entirely carbon neutral.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: No, which is, I said, not entirely. There’s a small, it’s near zero. We call it near zero, not zero or negative. You’re right. But near zero is better than... One, right? And negative is even better than that. The challenge with negative is identifying the motivation that was also the motivation for offsetters. Except that in the offsetters program, rather than Nori, the offsetters program, you’re sitting there going, I want you to invest in more efficient stoves in India, right? You can reduce... One ton for 20 bucks. If you do two tonnes, it’s one stove.
And one stove saves a lot of lives because it improves air quality indoors. It saves a lot of trees because instead of 15% efficiency of combustion, you go to 40% efficiency of combustion. So there are a lot of trees saved. You save time because women and girls who usually go and collect this wood would be spending one third as much of their time collecting wood. All of those reasons then become motivations for joining offsetters as a donor.
Christophe Jospe: And you didn’t even mention the black carbon and the health benefits that you got.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Actually, I did. That was the first one I mentioned. So you go from indoor air pollution of 1,000 parts per million of soot and PM10 and PM2. 5 to something like 100. That’s a huge, huge impact on people’s well-being.
Ross Kenyon: Doesn’t indoor smoke kill some huge amount of people worldwide every year?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: It does, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, like a surprising amount.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Yeah. And of course, those are the people with their least fossil footprint because they’re using wood to just heat water and cook food.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And I’m using it for all sorts of superfluous reasons, just for your enjoyment consumption. Yeah. That’s a brutal irony for sure. It is.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: So the challenge is that. The challenge is creating the demand to put it away. And so if you ask me what would be my priorities, my priorities would be wood stoves first, Then put it away. Let’s solve the energy and needs of people around the world and then put it away. You can do both. I don’t mind.
Ross Kenyon: Is that affiliated with the biochar we’ve been talking about, these stoves?
Unknown speaker: Good question, Ross, but no, there are stoves.
Ross Kenyon: I’m trying. I’m trying so hard.
Christophe Jospe: There are stoves out there which actually generate biochar. And so you have the added value along with a clean cook stove where you can spread that biochar as a soil additive, which ultimately sequesters carbon and produces a better yield on your crops.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Marginal. It also controls moisture in the soil.
Unknown speaker: Dude, you’re totally a contrarian. I don’t know why you push back on me against that.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: No, no, no, no, no. I’m not a contrarian. It’s just that someone says- You’re just correct. My wife would say often, too often. Uh-huh. As I said earlier, I’m really interested in understanding there are a lot of fads, a lot of fads, and I’m interested in making sure that a fad’s substantive.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I mean, we feel the same way by setting up a marketplace focused on carbon removal only. We’re actually not picking any favorites. We’re just trying to... Build the tools that any entity that can remove carbon and ultimately needs to get really good at, which is the carbon accounting, to make that as easy as possible so that they can get paid. But it brings up another question because you strike me as sort of industrialist, perhaps, maybe not. There are many ways to remove carbon. We’ve got trees, we’ve got soil, and here you are sort of convening direct air capture people and saying this is a great way to go forward.
Love your thoughts on the industrial and natural systems and maybe how everything kind of fits together.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Well, when you want transparency, you want the systems that are most amenable to measurement, right? And so it’s always been... If you’re going to try and build trust in the donating community in a sense, because it’s a voluntary donation for offsets, it would be voluntary donations for Nori, you have to be able to create trust and to maintain that trust. Which is why at the beginning I said, are you going to allow afforestation? One of the biggest challenges with afforestation from my perspective, which didn’t allow it to come into our portfolio of projects, Is that I have absolutely no idea if it’s going to catch fire.
I have no idea what’s going to happen to pests. I have no idea whether by some happenstance it’s going to be located somewhere where in a developing country somebody else has claim on that land or use of that land. And that somebody powerful has come and taken away. So it’s really, really, really difficult to make sure that you’re not, through creating this opportunity, harming somebody else. Or guaranteeing that the carbon is going to get captured and stay captured. So that’s the reason I asked the question about forestry. And that’s why almost all of our initiatives were industrial.
Because, hey, you had this much gas bill, now you have this much gas bill. Is everyone producing tomatoes in their tomato greenhouse? Yes, they are. Is the production the same? Yes, they are. Okay, so we’ve changed one for one and we know how much CO2 is saved. So I like that kind of approach to this problem.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, the measurement and verification elements of this are clearly the most difficult. And I think the industrial ones grabbed my attention early on when I got involved with Nori because I was like, yes, this is very clear cut. As opposed to like afforestation or other things requiring new IoT, Internet of Things devices coming along. We’re still sort of working that out.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: We were very keen on zero till when it first came out.
Unknown speaker: Can you explain that?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Zero till was a change in agricultural practice in which instead of tilling the land, which releases quite a lot of soil carbon between the time at which the land is tilled and then seeded and plants start growing. And just kind of essentially inserting the seeds into the land. There’s all sorts of stuff. It saves the tractor on the land. It saves soil erosion, all sorts of stuff. We were very keen to promote zero-till as part of our offsets program. It turned out that if the farmers are actually making a profit doing it, then paying them even more money to do that was contrary to the regulations for offset accounting.
So we couldn’t then do zero-till.
Christophe Jospe: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: All of those kinds of things are important in order to build up trust and create a market that says, okay, you’re doing real stuff with real contributions, which goes back to industrial stuff rather than forestry and agriculture.
Ross Kenyon: I find that attitude really disheartening because if you make them more profitable, more people will emulate it, people will be hustling to do it. Isn’t that good?
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: There’s a really interesting question. If ZeroTool is widely adopted already, Should you be paying the farmers? Or is this just a free rider problem? For removing it?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So you’re making like the additionality claim, like they’re already doing it? So the additionality doesn’t apply. Yeah.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: But they’re doing it. They are doing it, which is fine. Yeah. Why pay them more money for what they’re already doing? They’re not going to not do it. It’s to their benefit not to till.
Paul Gambill: I think the clear argument is that there aren’t that many people doing this yet. By setting a baseline saying from this point onward, we’re going to be paying you for however much is removed, then we’re sending a market signal to all the farmers who are not doing this, that here’s a way that you could subsidize the transition over to this method. Why aren’t they doing it? Well, there are all sorts of various factors, one of which is who owns the land, what sorts of contracts and agreements they have in place with their insurance companies and the seed companies that they’re getting this from.
Are they willing to bear the cost for those first three to seven years as they’re transitioning to this zero-till method? Is this a way to help subsidize getting over that hump? I mean, there are all sorts of different market factors on why they might or might not choose to do it.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: My understanding was that the adoption rate was already high. Maybe its adoption rate is high in some cropping and not in others. As long as you manage to transform a part of the agriculture market that has not adopted it already to their benefit through inducements, I’m all for it.
Paul Gambill: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Let me not overstate my position. My position is that I wish we were able to change practices so that they would be better. I was under the impression that zero till is broadly adopted already and that getting the last 10%, I’m not sure that’s effective as a means of doing this. The additionality question is the one that you want to work for. I’m always for additionality.
Ross Kenyon: I might be willing to tolerate the free rider problem on that if it led to all or most farmers being able to do that. That doesn’t seem like too high of a price to pay. I’m sure you get to a point where you’re like, is this worth it? I’d be like, no, we probably shouldn’t do that. That was super fun. Thanks for having us here at UBC. It was very enjoyable. You gave us a lot of things that were a little controversial or new.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Can you give me that? I’m surprised.
Ross Kenyon: You’re surprised? No, you gave us exactly what we wanted. We’re happy. Alden introduced us. Thank you so much.
Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi: Then Alden knows me. Thank you. Thank you very much. This was fun.
