Dr. Holly Jean Buck is a postdoctoral research fellow at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Dr. Buck joins Ross to discuss how her take on climate solutions differs from traditional left-leaning views, explaining the aspects of geoengineering that should be in the hands of the people and the risks associated with Nori’s premise of treating carbon as a commodit
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
🎧 Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
Paid subscribers get this episode ad-free. The ads in the free feed are inserted by Spotify when you press play. They are not in the file I make.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, rolling solo. Kristoff and Alessandra are at Verge 19. I stayed behind because I read a book. I do that sometimes. And our guests could make it here this morning. So I decided to stay behind to make sure we got this podcast in the can. Very excited to have her here. Dr. Holly Jean Buck, research fellow at UCLA and the author of After Geoengineering, Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration. Holly, thank you for being here.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I’m super excited to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. As you like to say, you’re breaking the fourth wall. You’ve crossed into podcasting land from listening. And thanks for being here. Actually, Nori gets mentioned in the book. There’s a couple pages involving mostly Kristoff and Paul. That took place a couple years ago when you were speaking with them because you came to Reversa Palooza.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I did. Early days.
Ross Kenyon: Early days. Yeah, we were talking about this on another show the other day. And it feels like a lifetime ago was a year and a half ago, April 2018, I think. Yeah. And we gathered a bunch of people who are interested in what a carbon removal marketplace, how it might work, what it might look like. And I thought, I know it takes a while for a book to get published. So that’s what you were saying, right? Yeah. You’re like, some of this Nori stuff could maybe be updated later. I don’t know.
It seemed pretty accurate to me. I think you may have been a little hard on it. But Holly, I really like this book. It’s the first piece of writing that I’ve seen that came from a sort of like left wing perspective that was pro geoengineering or pro carbon removal. Supposing it’s done in the right sorts of ways, which doesn’t seem that common. Of course, I’ll link to this in the show notes, but you have a Jacobin article on the same theme. So it seems like you’re kind of doing your own thing or is this like a new type of research?
Is there anyone out there that’s doing this like you?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: That’s a great question. I think there’s people on the radical left that are talking about the place of industrial technology and how it can be directed for communal aims. Not so many, maybe not applied to climate change yet.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I mean, it’s sort of like baked into the title, right? Critical theory. I think there’s a tendency, if something exists, there’s sort of a tendency to problematize it and just sort of be critical. And of course, technology... I guess the like whiggish view of history and like the progressive idea that technology is universal good. And then you read some of this work inside of critical theory or Marxian scholarship and you’re just saying like, actually, no, there’s like a really deep seedy underbelly that is buried in all of this. And in many cases, you’re just not even looking at it.
But here we are to disturb you and present it. But you’re saying, actually, there’s some good stuff going on.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: There’s a few threads.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a few threads of good. Yeah, well, fair enough. Well, how would you introduce this book? What inspired you to write it? And what’s broadly its thesis?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: You know, the book doesn’t have an extremely strong argument in that it wants to put all of these things up for consideration and start a conversation, which I think is maybe its drawback and its gift. It’s saying, you know, I think we’re going to have to remove... Large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere because reading the science, that’s what it tells us, right? So how do we go about doing that? Which ways? What are the choices? Not just the choices and the technologies, which I think people have tended to focus on.
You know, often these are presented in this kind of like, here are the items you can pick and put in your shopping cart and drive off with the technologies you like. And I’m trying to change the conversation to You know, what are the choices about how we use those technologies? What are the policy choices? What are the choices about who’s doing the labor of them? What place do they have culturally? All these other aspects that I think we should also be talking about. The main argument is like, hey, if we don’t engage with this and talk about these in these formative years while the technology is being developed, then we’re choosing to get left out of the conversation and the outcome is going to be much, much worse.
Ross Kenyon: That’s like the if you’re not at the table, you’re being eaten. So you’re saying we need like popular movements and labor unions and groups like this to actually be talking about how this technology could and should be deployed.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, it’s critical. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s a pretty fair point. And so I can’t remember if this is actually mentioned in your book. I think it is in the intro, but maybe I just am applying it on. But do you think it involves the seizing of the means of geoengineering? Is that like broadly the goal here that this is in the hands of the people rather than technocrats or corporations or something like that?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, definitely. I think about that in basically three different ways. One is just the Physical ownership of assets and infrastructure, right? Including the land on which these things are deployed. The material means to remove carbon for farmers. That means one thing for people working in industry another. But then the second thing is really financial flows. So who owns the means of those financial flows? Is it worker-owned collectives or is it going to elites basically? And the third thing is that I try to pull up in the book quite a bit too is – And seizing the algorithms, the information flows that are helping make decisions about how it’s all done.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, those are great sections. I like the book because in the first half or so, it’s a very good introduction to various methods of carbon removal. So like if you’re new to the space and you want to learn more about carbon removal, there’s a lot of good information that catches you up to speed on enhanced weathering and direct air capture and regenerative agriculture in a very readable way. And then if you wanted to view it through a sort of radically left lens, this is probably the place to begin and to do it.
So many of the guests that we’ve had, just because it’s the environmental spaces where we speak with most people, most of them tend to be progressive. We’ve had conservatives and libertarians on and a few agrarians who sort of straddle the line in interesting ways. I don’t think we’ve had anyone that comes from sort of like Marxian political economy or critical theory on before. So what is the difference between the sort of methodological lenses you’re using when you’re thinking about social issues Versus someone who’s more of the progressive camp that maybe our listeners are more familiar with.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Well, the thing is, we’ve gotten dragged so far to the right that even if you come up with some fairly common sense things, they sound radical, right? But I guess my lens is informed by a lot of the ecological Marxian literature. I’d say Marxian rather than Marxist. And then I’m thinking, you know, about what does it mean to commodify carbon, right? Marx had a lot to say about that. And that’s something you guys have thought a lot about, too. I remember going to Reversa Palooza and the phrase I kept hearing was, a ton is a ton is a ton, right?
Yeah, so that’s basically it, right? Yeah, that’s right. Turning carbon into this commodity and then the commodity fetishism that comes with that. I mean, that’s a phrase, you know, from that literature that talks about occluding these relations that get obscured once you do that process of commodification. So there’s some of that I bring to my thinking. It’s not actually all that explicit in the book, but I’m expecting that several colleagues of mine will take that up and already have, so...
Ross Kenyon: I’d like to talk more about that as much as you’ll indulge me, but we could also have some of them on in the future. People listening, do they want to know about the theory of the commodity and reification and how all of this actually works? Is this... Yeah, that stuff gets real esoteric real quick. Is there anything bad about treating carbon that is removed as a commodity? Do you think that when people say something like that, it usually means that we’re ignoring how this was produced, that we don’t care about it, that one is as good as any other, that we’re sort of disrespecting this production or this labor in some fundamental egregious kind of fashion.
Do you think it’s bad to treat removed carbon that way?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: And I think maybe you intuit this because on Nori’s site, you know, with the lightning sale that’s going on now, right? You know, you talk about the farmer, Trey, right? And so it’s not just any ton, it’s like Trey’s ton. And that’s part of the story. And that makes it, you know, more meaningful. It’s not like, A ton of carbon sequestered on some palm plantation where people got kicked off their land. It’s a different thing, actually. So, yeah, it makes a difference in terms of both who’s producing it and I think there’s a lot to be said about who’s buying it, too, actually.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I want to get into that second part with the buying. So you’re saying Trey is smiling in his photo. He seems like he has agency at work. He has labor that he’s not alienated from. He’s enjoying it. He sees the fruits of his labor in a pretty direct fashion. And that’s good. But you’re saying if it was just some sort of like sketchy palm oil plantation that had the benefit of pulling some carbon in, you’d be like, this isn’t right.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. So it matters a lot. It’s not just one equals one. Right. Right.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Yeah. And like any sort of phrase you can dig in just under the surface and be like, we wouldn’t feel good if you had, this is like the classic criticism of ecosystem services treated in the marketplace, right? Where you’re saying like, you’ve isolated one variable and you’ve maximized Yeah. So, sustained. What about on the buyer’s side? What should we be thinking about over there?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: So, I think there’s a difference between somebody that’s buying it so they can fly their private jet 50 times a year for pleasure versus an industry that’s manufacturing wind turbines or something through some hard-to-decarbonize process, right? So... There needs to be a process for like who can buy it. And that’s where I see the role of the state in some pretty heavy handed ways if we want to actually make a difference with this.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Could you unpack it a little bit more? Are you saying like the state should just prohibit these billionaire jet setters or they shouldn’t be able to buy carbon removals to negate their emissions? Yeah.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Well, I mean, what do you think about, say, production quotas on, you know, fossil fuel production that are tradable, for example? You know, certain types of fossil fuels for certain uses that have buyers that can, I mean, that’s kind of like a market, right?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Although we’ve seen like the politics of those sorts of cap and trade approaches also just get so dicey. And then there’s like the allocations are never small enough to really encourage it.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. I mean, it would have to be pretty drastic. Like that’s what I’m thinking.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. So assuming that we set that design up and it encourages it. So you’re saying that You would have fields that were very difficult to decarbonize. They would bid on these and get these. So maybe like commercial air travel or I don’t know what exactly you have in mind.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. And you’d have to actually link them to certificates of obligation for carbon removal as well.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I guess if people, I don’t know, this is also, we did a couple, I really hope they asked this question. I haven’t listened to the episode yet and it hasn’t aired yet, but we had someone on talking about Watermark. It sounds like, please ask them because we did an episode previously on Watermark. It’s like, Like you didn’t you always got to ask like a fundamental challenging question to a guest. I think that’s really interesting. But like, why should water be allocated by ability to pay? Like why? Like that person needs to be able to give a compelling reason why that’s the most efficient way rather than queuing rather than some sort of social justice allocation.
And so I would say like if some fancy person wants to bid so they can jet set, then maybe that’s fine or maybe not. But you’re saying that we should just by the end just say like this is an inappropriate use of our carbon budget and you’re no longer allowed to do this.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I think we need to be like, you know, rice production gets this much greenhouse gas emissions and aviation gets this much and, you know, just divide it up. I’m not saying that’s popular, but if we were serious about like solving this.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Okay. I keep referencing past podcasts, but we just did like yesterday, including a short one that did like six or seven. Have you read Ted Nordhaus’ essay, The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I thought that was a very interesting essay, primarily because if you do think that we only have a little more than a decade to radically change the economy to avoid the worst of climate change, it seems like many of the proposals are actually... The Green New Deal seems way less radical than conservatives think it is if it’s as big a calamity as people expect it to be. Climate change, I mean. So I think suggesting stuff that is... I don’t know, less politically palatable, but is serious. I’m sort of surprised I don’t see more of that.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: A lot of the responses seem tepid, like plant more trees. That’s good. But doesn’t that ship kind of sailed?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I think that people just are challenged thinking in terms of scale and big numbers. I do the exercise with my students where we have a bunch of numbers that are like things that cost in the billions. And they’re always shocked to figure out like how much they all are. And then they have to like line them up, you know. From 1 billion to 500 billion, what can you buy? And it’s the same thing goes with hectares and gigatons. We’re not fluent, so I think it’s easy to make those kind of mistakes.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t have any sort of referent that I’ve ever experienced in a tangible way. I’ve walked over the acres of friends’ properties or whatever who live in the woods, and I get that. Once you start talking about large numbers of hectares or a gigaton of something that’s invisible and odorless, I don’t know. It’s just a mystery. And then also just big numbers of money, too, given that I’ve never seen anywhere close to it. I don’t even know what that’s like. Well, fair enough. But I do like that. I wish people were like, maybe you’ll take issue with this, maybe not.
But if you do think climate change is going to be apocalyptic and we only have a decade, why aren’t we sort of gung-ho on something like nuclear energy? Even if it was risky, and I’m not sure that it is as risky as people think, you would think a couple nuclear meltdowns is better than the climate change that the most apocalyptic predictors are saying. Right. Like how many meltdowns is it worth to avoid the worst of climate change? And I would expect that people who were really serious about climate change to be willing to say climate change is so scary that I’m willing to risk this.
But I mostly just see kind of tepid stuff or like a jobs guarantee and other stuff that’s like gets most of the heat. Where’s the disconnect? Like why? Why aren’t people talking more radically about solutions?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Great question. And so what I’ll say is speculation, not data-based. But I think that when it comes to nuclear technology, for example, we’ve seen countries like Germany choose to move away from it. And I think that there’s kind of an uncanny fear when it comes to that in terms of tampering with nature at these kind of deep levels.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely, yeah.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: But it’s also because that – so why is that stronger than the fear of climate change? Well, I think we’re going to get to a tipping point pretty quickly where climate change is more palpable and more uncanny. Like, I don’t know. Yesterday I was getting all these, like, emails throughout the day from my kids’ preschool about this wildfire that was, like, a mile from the school and they’re watching it and, like – You know, ashes coating all the black clothes I just hung out in my backyard to dry, right? And this happens to me regularly now.
It’s not just this one weird thing, but it’s still uncanny. Like when the winds pick up and the weather changes, you feel it and you’re alarmed. And that’s going to be an experience for more and more people, wherever they are. I mean, it won’t be wildfire, but it’ll be something else that makes them feel ill at ease, you know. Hard to focus. Creeped out, basically. And so then maybe weighed against that, something like nuclear power will look like a better option. I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: Or, I mean, as you argue in the book, I mean, maybe that also involves solar radiation management or altering the atmosphere to increase the albedo or something like that. Like, does that start to look less uncanny when you have wildfires right next to your children’s preschool?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I wonder. The thing I wonder about that is... I mean, I have this in my book, a scenario where people have just, you know, adjusted to slightly wider, more urban looking skies and they don’t even think about it anymore. Right. I think that’s one possibility, especially if people are increasingly disconnected from nature and living inside the Internet most of the time. I can see that as one outcome, but I can also see that it will be uncanny to be living in that environment. Especially since there’s been, I say this every time, so, so little ecological research about what modifying the type of solar radiation coming down does to plants and everything else in the ecosystem.
Vastly under-researched. So there might be some pretty uncanny stuff with that turns up.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, absolutely. I didn’t even mention this. I should have, but your book has a number of the intro is unlike any I’ve seen either with the choose your own adventure style. It’s like a funny way of integrating narrative into what would otherwise be a straightforward nonfiction book about the climate and geoengineering. So I like that. That was a nice addition.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Thanks.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Unique. It definitely made me think. I like that there’s a section in there about, I don’t even know what you call it, but like people who live in a UBI house. It’s like, that’s definitely going to happen. They would definitely have those. Your... Correct me if I’m wrong. You’re favorable towards many of these approaches to carbon removal. You’re just very careful about noting their attendant risks in each of them. So one of the things that Nori that we’ve said before that we get excited about is we think that there is a lot of potential for companies that are thought of as villainous right now, like oil and gas or mining or agriculture, to actually promote Pivot and have a large role in becoming drawdown focused companies and becoming like major drivers in that way.
Do you think we should be less Pollyanna about that? Are we a bit rosy and we should be more suspicious?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: You know, sometimes I feel like I’m watching really smart, kind people in the carbon removal space who I respect a lot. Like watching them start to date a really bad person. And like, they’re so excited and happy that you don’t want to be like, by the way, I know that guy is like trouble. Don’t go for it. And you’re just kind of watching it unfold. That’s kind of how I feel when I go to conferences like this one. Sometimes I think that, you know, although there’s the huge potential for the oil and gas and coal industry to just be using people like Nori or colleagues in You know, in this kind of enrolling them in these advocacy coalitions that enable enhanced oil recovery, right?
And just using them for that and then discarding them once they’ve gotten, you know, incentives for ER happening.
Ross Kenyon: You gave an example of that in the book, which I can’t remember which environmental organization it was, but I think it was related to 45Q. Do you remember what I’m referring to? Yeah. Did I just make it up?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: No, I mean, yeah, I put stuff into about 45Q at the last minute because it was just unfolding as I was writing.
Ross Kenyon: The truth comes out. It was one of the biggies that it was like they were along for the ride and they thought like carbon capture and storage or use could be done in a carbon negative way. But then once the credit passes, like, OK, actually, this is just going to be used for EOR and we don’t support this for EOR.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I mean, a lot of people signed on opposing it for that reason. A lot of groups, 600 plus, I think, signed that letter. I do agree that there might be various actors in the fossil fuel space. Like it’s not a homogenous space, right? And there may be some that are the worst of the worst and some that are trying to be forward thinking. But at the end, they are right now subject to the same market logic of capitalism, right? So they have to make a profit that will involve, you know, supporting shareholders over things that cost more and are more So, I mean, what I would like to see is maybe nationalize some of these companies, have them under worker control, have them be public, and then transform into carbon removal companies.
Ross Kenyon: So, no few small changes there. No. Some biggies.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: But a fair amount of precedent, you know, in history, with varying results, I might add. So that’s why my support is a little bit qualified there. But I do think that there’s a lot of nationalization that could happen under a best case scenario.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, sure. The details of which matter a lot. I mean, if climate apocalypse is as serious as people think it is, then it probably would be time to start taking, at least be having some of those debates about how to do something like that if it were truly necessary. Yeah. Which is why I guess the Green New Deal seems rather tepid in comparison to something like that. I guess you have stuff like Jeremy Corbyn talking about nationalizing industries and like that is coming up now. Or you have I guess antitrust is now back in the zeitgeist too in this country and I’m sure in others as well.
Yeah, I think about this market logic point quite a lot too. And I’ve mostly thought about it on a sort of personal consumptive level with the free rider problem of climate change and the game theory of it. It’s just like. I changed my personal consumption habits. I really scale back. No one else does or not enough people do. So really I lost twice because climate change still happened. And then I had a less enjoyable consumer experience than I might otherwise have had. I could have been riding my Humvee limo into the apocalypse rather than taking the bus.
I lost. I think that’s true, too, with companies. And correct me if you think this is incorrect, but I could see any oil company that acts unilaterally, if they don’t receive enough benefits from the PR or increased revenue from becoming a drawdown company, some other oil company is going to buy up their assets and keep it running, too. It’s like they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to grow and to make profit. And that’s a risk because it’s like the only people that can act are most often doing so unilaterally.
But under like prisoner’s dilemma logic, like if they defect, then they’re the ones who get screwed in this case. And then what happens? Does the system actually change at all? Does individual leadership matter as much as we think it is? Or is it more a systems change kind of dynamic that we should be looking for?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. I mean, you could have one really standout oil company.
Ross Kenyon: But there’s six others, right? Right.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. And I really think that what happens with the fossil fuel industry has to be a question for civil society that we are all invested in and we should all be talking about and making decisions about. And I think in some ways it’s a little bit I understand why the left villainizes fossil fuel companies, right? But just putting all of them out of business at once is not a viable option. Because as I point out in the book, the majority of oil production is done by national oil companies. And so if you’ve been to a country that’s dependent on oil, you’ll see what would it mean for the people there for that.
Ross Kenyon: You talk about spending time in Azerbaijan. I do.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. And then there’s a number of countries in that situation. Right. So I just haven’t really seen a really good international political economy plan for phasing out fossil fuels worldwide.
Ross Kenyon: You know, it would not be popular there. You’re like telling people basically who maybe crawled out of Poverty or near poverty or at least precarity and then saying, actually, your main source of revenue is now gone.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. So we have to get so much smarter about how we talk about phase out. And that’s actually what I’m trying to focus my research on now, because all of this energy is put into looking at. Innovation and starting up clean energy. And we know that, I mean, we have to do that, but it’s not going to be enough on its own. We have to actively discontinue this other thing that’s killing us.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And there’s people dependent upon it and there’s all sorts of justice concerns in there too. I don’t even know what exactly to do there. So I just ignore it.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, that’s what I mean. I’m not super prescriptive in this book because it’s a collective conversation. I don’t have the expertise or the knowledge. No one person does write. And if they do, I’d be pretty wary of them.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s good. I think humility is a good quality to have. I’m suspicious of people who do have all the answers.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: But I know that the conversation should be going in that direction and I don’t think that phase out has to be a scary thing. We just haven’t invented the right language for talking about this.
Ross Kenyon: Like Esperano or something else? Silly joke. One of the things I really like in this book, too, is there’s this partition between natural climate solutions and engineered or industrial climate solutions. And I’ve seen a lot of environmental activists who are they’re very excited about natural climate solutions. They want they want regenerative ag. They want a forestation or reforestation. They like these things, but they’re very suspicious of things that are, I don’t even know, machine driven, straight lines, the organic approach, you could say. Why? I feel like we need all of it and we need it all very quickly.
Why do you think that people are scared of direct air capture, industrial carbon capture?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, there’s a number of reasons. I mean, one we’ve already talked about is, you know, allowing an industry that’s harmed a lot of people to continue.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s deeper than that.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, that’s just one, right? So I agree with you. I think another part of it is just that this nature society is a master binary in our culture. So you see kind of it mapped on to a lot of things. And the thing I point out in my book is I think that this binary around agriculture has been mapped on to climate technologies as well. So... Within agriculture, there are all these binaries of local versus global, small versus large, but also organic versus industrial. And that’s a binary that touches people because it’s your food.
It’s making up your body, right? And part of it is to the social relations that have changed in that agricultural transition from smallholders and many farmers to just a few large corporations or family farms working with corporations, etc. And what that’s meant for societies around the world, really. And I think that all of that gets mapped onto discussions about energy technologies as well.
Ross Kenyon: So you think this is best understood as some sort of popular versus elite sort of dynamic that’s taking place?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: That’s a good point. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way. It has to do with kind of control over your own production and resources and some big actor, you know, coming in that you don’t know. Right.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, so there’s some direct air capture company that’s pulling out gigatons by the year and you’re worried like, well, if I were a farmer practicing regenerative ag, I would at least have some sort of stake in the system or involved in it. Now it just feels like some external agent that’s acting upon the world without any input from me or something like that. There’s like an element of control or something.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: And the other thing worth pointing out, I mean, there’s been a lot of sociological research on perceptions of CCS and what informs them. And, you know, especially with fracking, there was induced seismicity, right? And so that’s another reasonable worry about, well, nobody knew there were going to be earthquakes in this area. And then there was fracking and now we have earthquakes. And so how do we know this isn’t just the same thing? So there’s those type of concerns too that are a bit more place specific I’d say.
Ross Kenyon: So it’s more of a maybe a precautionary principle. We know what happens when more trees are planted. We know what happens when people farm. We don’t know what happens when people are sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: It’s underground. It’s not seen. It’s tricky to monitor. You can’t really monitor it yourself. You have to rely on experts. And there’s been unintended consequences of all kinds of technologies. You see this a lot. You start talking to people about their concerns around solar geoengineering in particular, which is quite different, but the reference points are really salient examples of Producing plastics now it’s in the ocean, you know, all these, you could list dozens of them, really. So how are people to know that this isn’t just one more instance?
Ross Kenyon: I guess you don’t. But a lot of these people are alarmist. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean, like they are genuinely alarmed. And you would think like having increased earthquakes like that happens through fracking, like that’s a minor problem relative to like the worst climate predictions.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So like, wouldn’t you rather make that cut that deal if you’re if you believed all those things?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I mean, that’s why I call for large investment in geologic carbon removal in my book, precisely for that reason.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I didn’t mean that to sound like I was pointing a finger. How dare you, Holly? Yeah, I think that’s true. But people are pretty bad at estimating risk. I think that’s true. I think there are some genuine justice concerns involved in how that works. And there are risks that will be placed upon people who are not very well able to adapt to them or the cost will be borne by them and not someone perhaps more deserving or more widespread and distributed across everyone. Yeah.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: And also most people haven’t been told about what we’re facing with the climate crisis. I mean, journalism only got good at this in the last couple of years, I would say. And still, a lot of people aren’t accessing the New York Times. They’re looking at other things, right? So there’s just vast amounts of people that don’t know what we’re up against.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s changing quickly. And then again with the Ted Nordhaus, we were talking with him about this too because he cites a bunch of research about how when you try to persuade people We’re all going to come together globally and deal with this problem. Do you think that’s rhetorically a good strategy to stress the danger we’re in as opposed to the opportunity? This is also... Question I was going to ask you anyways about Nori, since our tone, we try to be optimistic and solutions oriented. It’s at least partially because we want people to feel like they have agency and scaring people, I don’t know, is always the greatest way to get them to act rationally or well.
Do you like that approach?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I think that there’s some research that shows that you can pair these messages together for a good effect.
Ross Kenyon: So you spook them and then you say, and then you can do this.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I think you have to do both. Okay. Okay.
Ross Kenyon: Well, then we’ve failed in our communications mission because we have not adequately spooked our audience, I don’t think. I really want to have. Have you read David Wallace-Wells’ book? Yeah, that thing freaked me out. The uninhabitable earth. And I want to, we’re coming for you, David, David Walswells. We’d like to have you on the show, but there’s also a bunch of books. I got one called Climate Wars. What people will be killed for in the 21st century. I haven’t, I haven’t read it, but with a subtitle like that, why, why wouldn’t you buy that on an Amazon late night binge?
Yeah, we need to do something like that because we have overrepresented the sort of optimistic we can do this vibe. That isn’t the whole story. I’d like to see this research is basically what I’m rambling about. What’s the correct way to do this?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, no, I struggled with that in my book as well, which is why it ended up with this kind of awkward subtitle, Climate Tragedy Repair and Restoration, because I didn’t want to imply that it was just going to be like, we can restore it all or that it was just going to be Tragedy, end of story forever, right?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, those are basically anytime you have like a Boolean sort of pairing or you have like two options. We can talk dialectics if you want, or we can just skip that whole part. But yeah, the truth is not... I think that’s the way we best think as humans. It’s really easy to contrast like that, but... The details of all these things matter a lot. I think that’s generally the point that you make in the book is that there are very good ways of doing this. There are also some very scary ways and people need to not just straight out deny the possibility for carbon removal or geoengineering, but we need democratic movements to actually be thinking about how these could be done in a just way to create the future that you want should these things become truly necessary.
Did I read the book correctly? Yeah. Awesome read.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, no. And I would add to that Kind of the default or the most likely case is that either A, we get a really poor implementation of carbon removal or B, nothing happens at all. See, I don’t see it happening without that popular demand for it.
Ross Kenyon: It’s out of fashion now. Have you seen any sort of left of center movements seriously grappling with geoengineering and not just we must never do this, but maybe this could be the way to go if we needed it?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Not geoengineering, but I have seen, you know, Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion at various points talk about demanding drawdown as a goal. And then that’s kind of shifts. That book is wildly influential. Yeah, it’s amazing. Yeah, it’s only been out for a couple years, but that discourse is definitely much more prominent now. Yeah, it’s a vocabulary, which is really critical. So maybe there will be popular demands for carbon removal coming up. I hope. If I was a climate philanthropist, I would be investing in that because it’s the precondition. I’ve been to these, here we are in the Bay Area, kind of carbon tech events.
Well, you’ll have these VC people that are like, oh, carbon removal, but I’m only going to invest in it if it’s going to Make some money and it’s only going to make some money if there’s government policy and there’s only going to be government policy, I think, if there’s some level of popular support. So that’s where I would start.
Ross Kenyon: That makes sense. Yeah. We’ve been, I don’t know, agnostic, I guess, towards policy issues. I’m always super wary about policy being created just because I know people are going to get their hands in the cookie jar once the I think there’s something... Important about like we as a society saying this is important to us as opposed to this just being done on a private level like I haven’t read this book. Have you read that winner’s take all book?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I did. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, this is me badly paraphrasing a book I haven’t read. But my understanding is that like and this is I’ve also seen left wing critics of charity for the same reason. You’re sort of like charities and inherently like subservient relationships of like if you depend. This is sort of non-democratic or it doesn’t say anything about the society in which you live. It’s just about some person who got super rich and is now sort of trying to solve their guilt or something like that. And being able to say like we as a society or we with this government have issued a policy that says every person is entitled to the basics of life or to a stable climate.
There’s something that’s sort of beautiful about that. And so I can hold all of these thoughts in my mind and I’m large and contain multitudes, I guess. Or I’m just I’m just confused. Yeah. So I get that. I guess we’ll probably see what policy comes out in the next couple of years. I don’t know what to really expect. I know people are working on it.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I know people are trying to get things ready in the US should the winds change to be ready with kind of a policy plan.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know, Trump’s squirrely. I could also see him just one day waking up and changing his mind on climate change too. He’s a southpaw. I never know what that guy’s going to do. But okay, I’ve already asked you a couple of questions kind of like this. So Nori, Carbon Removal Marketplace, if you’re listening, you got to know this already, right? This is not a surprise to you. We use market logic. We wanted to design a system so that even if someone didn’t care about anything except making money, that there would be a chance for them to participate and do good.
So this is sort of like you go back to... To the old school, the real old school, like Fable of the Bees by Mandeville or something like early capitalistic writing. What do you do when people are purely self-interested and how do you direct them in a way that benefits society? So we want to make sure that even those people were on board. And we use market logic to do so. But I think if you are of a sort of leftward persuasion, basically what I’m saying is, why were you so nice to us in your book?
I could have seen like a version of this book where it’s like, Nori, dirty eco-modernists. They’re techno-optimists who are reliant upon dirty blockchain technology. And they’re trying to commoditize the natural world. Why didn’t you write that in the book?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: You know, I was reading Adam Greenfield’s book about kind of radical technologies where he talks about blockchain as a means for harnessing joint intention. And I was thinking of Nori when I was introduced to it more as a platform than as a market, kind of as this place where buyers and sellers could come together. You did a great job at Reversa Palooza of illustrating this via a game where people would play the roles of buyers and sellers. And, you know, it wasn’t quite clear how Noor was actually making money from providing that service, right, as a platform.
But I guess I get more nervous when commodities become financialized, right, once you have, like, futures traders and weird derivatives start coming up to even speculate and – That’s like a next level. I don’t see you being there now. I think that for this particular problem of getting farmers to store more carbon in the soils, this could be part of the solution. I mean, ideally, I might rather see government support for that, which we’re starting to see in some states. But if that doesn’t exist right at this moment, I’m not going to like Bash Nori for not being the other thing that doesn’t exist yet.
One thing I see on the critical left a lot is a tendency to String together kind of anecdotes or stories like the story of Nori, like other things and saying that, you know, these together pose a threat to this other way we want to do it. And I don’t mean to be dismissive, but I don’t see Nori as a threat to like achieving these other goals of, you know, state support for carbon in soils. Right. Sure. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we want to be compatible with those. Just want to make sure that it doesn’t. I like the guarantee of it, but also I like the nimbleness of market actors too. So if there’s a way we can, I don’t know, make sure they’re compatible, that would be good. But it’s not my intention or Nori’s intention to stifle that development. We’re friends with people who are working on the policy level. And if you think that’s the correct way to go, that’s your right as a citizen to pursue that.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: And there’s going to be some farmers, you know, I’ve been interviewing farmers this summer. Some of them aren’t going to want to sign up for government programs. They find that there’s a lot of paperwork involved and they have other preferences sometimes. A lot of them will. And so hopefully we can like streamline that with 21st century tools, right? Yeah. But if somebody wants to choose to work with Nori instead, I’m not gonna like, I mean, the situation is just so dire, we need a few things happening. Now, I mean, if Nori was trading, I don’t know, I think that for the soil health thing, it makes a lot of sense in particular.
Ross Kenyon: What do we do moving forward? So if we wanted to make sure that we proceed in a way that people of the critical left, as you’re, I’ll have to use that nomenclature. How do we make sure that we take the concerns of the critical left seriously? Like, do you see, are we sort of on a collision course with people from discourses such as that? Or are they going to be more like the way that you think?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I think there’d be a fair amount of critics just because of this basic thing we talked about, about commodifying the carbon and trading it as a commodity. And so that’s going to be a stumbling block. And the other thing that, you know, I was drawn to Nori about was this emphasis on being open source. And so then I know now you have a partnership with Granular. I don’t know what that entails, but I hope that this kind of open source logic will continue to be a part of it. I think that if Nori became kind of a thing where there is a lot of, you know, data being gathered for big companies type of thing, that would have put it up to a lot more critique.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’ve actually been pretty strict on this of Nori. The data always belongs to farmers and Nori doesn’t take proprietary ownership in any of that farmer data. Because I know that’s a way that groups are trying to monetize outside of just like Nori makes money off of transaction costs when suppliers sell their carbon removal certificates. But I know other groups are looking at how to use that data to also generate revenue. We’ve just made a point of saying no. And open sources is a bit hard. Like for instance, our platform itself, like you couldn’t just fork our repo for like the marketplace itself or like our website, like our smart contracts are open and like peer review processes is generally pretty open and publishing a methodology, which in many cases in carbon markets is proprietary and you have to pay to get access to it.
And it’s hard to comment on it. So I don’t know if anything has ever like Well, there are some things that are like 100% open source, but it’s more of a scale in between. But we do try to be as open source as possible. Is that satisfactory? Is that not?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: No, I just, if I think about kind of different directions Nori might evolve in, like, I would hope it would continue to be open source.
Ross Kenyon: Be like a data-consuming monster that people have no control over. Yeah, I think we value that a lot too. We’re trying to... We would love it if people could develop their own methodologies or pitch them to us and have this sort of be very much taking the wisdom of the crowd and people being able to pitch stuff. I think that’s a pretty core value. Also, I’m happy to hear that you... And I saw this in the book as well, that you see blockchain as having some liberatory or beneficial properties because a lot of people just get hung up on the energy consumption.
And I get that. But if that’s like the sum of your knowledge of it, then I think you’re missing. I have a fair number of left-wing friends who think blockchain is really interesting for its potential to not just disintermediate various industries and make them cheaper, more accessible, but having like a public entrustable ledger like that. I’m like surprised I don’t see more left-wing discourse about blockchain. So I don’t know. Why do you think that blockchain is useful, at least for your perspective?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I’m not going to claim to know a ton about it, but from what I understand, with climate change, we have a whole bunch of people that need to be involved. We need to organize action on it. Maybe this can be one of the tools.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, fair enough. Normally trying to get into the habit, because sometimes I forget, and I think it’s a little unfair if I ask some people this and not others, like, who do you think, I know you’ve already told me that you’re not even sure how to answer this, but who do you think is the person that would either argue against this book or, or like, who’s the best critic of your work? Or who do you think once they discover this new book would be the best critic of this book?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I guess the critic I imagine would be like, you know, this is just too optimistic. We know how these actors behave. We know how they work. We know their logic. We know they can’t be trusted. So why would you even, you know, consider, entertain the prospect that there could be some type of responsibly managed research program on solar geoengineering, for example? I mean, given kind of how flawed The system within which we all work is. You know, and then I think another reasonable criticism that I could imagine is saying, you know, discussing this legitimizes it.
I mean, this is a big thing with solar geoengineering, that if you talk about it, it becomes more real. It becomes more of a thing that people can imagine. And so you’re helping to create it, even if you don’t really like it, which is me. I don’t really like it, you know? So... You’re playing a role in constructing it because it’s an imaginary, right? It doesn’t exist. That is a criticism that I would take quite seriously. With carbon removal, people are concerned that it will enable business as usual, that it’ll just be the same old offsets we’ve been seeing for years and years now.
That haven’t worked. So like, why would it work now when there’s this long history of forest carbon and offsetting and stuff not working? Right. So that would be... Like, what is my cause for optimism that we could like radically change the social organization here to enable it to work? And to that, I would just say, you know, I don’t think it’s the most likely, but I think it’s worth trying because this is a climate crisis. It’s an ecosystem crisis, extinction crisis. So we need to think about what it would really take to solve it, including radical social reorganization.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s a lot there. If there were people who are on the critical left that were engaging with these sets of ideas or need to, why do you think they should take this seriously?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, a number of reasons. The first is that gigaton scale carbon removal is necessary for limiting warming. But it’s also a moral thing to do. I think that if we have these technologies, if they exist, I mean, carbon capture and storage exists, direct air capture increasingly exists, and we could reduce harm by taking the carbon from the atmosphere and putting it underground. Why would we not do that? I mean... To me, it would be immoral not to use that technology, actually, given that it’s a global public benefit and also possibly has some reparative value in terms of a country like the U.
S. , which has a huge historical responsibility to put that carbon back underground would be the right thing to do. Right. And so that’s kind of the first thing that I want Marxian scholars and critical theorists to think about.
Ross Kenyon: How do you like? Yeah, I know stuff.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Also that gigaton scale carbon removal is going to involve geological sequestration. That’s something I spend time walking through in the book. That it’s going to require a lot of clean energy, which is a daunting challenge, but also makes it complementary with our other goals of scaling up renewables. And that gigaton scale carbon removal requires the state. I haven’t seen Any plausible pathway for scaling up to the gigaton level that doesn’t involve governments playing a central role in regulation. And that finally, it’s still in progress. There’s kind of a window of opportunity to shape these technologies as they’re evolving.
So I hope people get involved. Let he who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, one thing. Do you like me badly quoting the King James Bible? Is Nori neoliberal?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: See, I guess I think of neoliberal as a specific kind of historical project to roll back the state and to privatize.
Ross Kenyon: Thatcher, that whole scene. Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: And so, you know, in that sense, I mean, the state is not like actively doing much about this. So in a way, it’s not really rolling back reforms, right? What do you think?
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. I’m always curious. I guess we haven’t gotten enough attention from people who use terminology like that. There’s always a question of we use some means that are typically more appealing to moderates or those right of center. We use markets. Markets are not always favored for various reasons by the critical left. We’re always open to that criticism, but we do share concern about climate change and want to actually reverse it. Do we appeal to both groups or none? That’s a question I’ve long entertained. I don’t know. I think markets can be super powerful and good if they’re designed well.
I think the rhetoric around markets is sort of incomplete. I just sort of hate political discourse around it too. One of the books that I thought was really fascinating is Radical Markets. I’ll put a link in the show notes, but it was ways of designing markets that sort of use the really driving logic of how markets operate to drive more egalitarian outcomes. You’re like markets are so much more than just corporations winning everything and crushing labor unions and whatever people think markets do. But we do like them. And given that a lot of political discourse splits along these lines, I think we’re vulnerable to that criticism.
But no, I know neoliberalism has a technical meaning. It’s also just used for the bête noire of the moment for people use it, I think, imprecisely sometimes too. Like you were careful about how you chose to use it.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I think that maybe you use some of the same tools as neoliberals have used in the markets, right? But I don’t think you’re aligned with this particular class project of neoliberalism to kind of dismantle things that are not, you know, market-based, right? You don’t spend your time sitting around thinking about how to take apart, you know.
Ross Kenyon: Denationalizing the British coal industry. Right. Okay. I’ve never done that personally. So I’m safe from that.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. But I mean, it’s a true observation that if you use the same tools as somebody, you probably get bumped in.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. I have been anticipating that for some time.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I feel like I’ve seen this a little bit at academic conferences. They’re just thought criticizing you and you haven’t been subscribed to these academic journals to know about it.
Ross Kenyon: Are we being talked about in academic journals?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: It could be.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, my Lord.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: It’s only a matter of time.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I’m sure. I don’t know. It’s sort of like if you do anything important, you’re going to be criticized and hopefully we do something important enough to be lucky enough to receive that criticism and maybe we can incorporate it. Maybe we disagree. I don’t know. That’s cool. That was a surprise question, but I’m happy to know that. So David Harvey, leave us alone. Yeah. David Graber, you’re so cool. You can send me an email if you want. Okay. I think that is good, Holly. You know, when it’s starting to get real silly at the end, that’s the time to start wrapping it.
Anything else that you want to say?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Well, it’s been a pleasure talking with you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Thanks for coming on. Buy this book. I thought it was really good. After Geoengineering Climate Tragedy Repair and Restoration by Dr. Holly Jean Buck. That was awesome, Holly. Thank you.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: You can buy it from Verso Books or on Amazon if you so choose.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Did you hear the disdain there? I sort of referenced that earlier. I was like, oops. Yeah. Lost some crud. Yeah, do it. And then also I want to hear if you have other guests that we’re not speaking with. We think it’s really important to have as many good voices on as possible. So please let me know. And if you like the show, please rate and review us in iTunes or Apple Podcasts, Stitcher. Tell your friends if you know a great guest that we should have on this show. You can send us an email at hello at nori.
com. Right now, one of the main things I’ve been doing is programming a theology series. So I’m hoping to have that come out in the next few months. I don’t know. Find us some weird guests. Get us some good ones because I want to keep diving in. There’s so many angles to do and I feel like we haven’t even started. So please let me know and thank you so much for listening.
