Andrew Himes is a partner at Carbon Innovations, currently working with the University of Washington’s Carbon Smart Building Initiative. The project seeks to transform the built environment from an existential threat to a net carbon sink that absorbs more than a billion tons of CO2 each year by converting captured carbon into useful building products and creating market demand for carbon capture.
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 Jospin.
Ross Kenyon: Hello, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe. We’re here in Seattle now, which is very lovely. And we’re going to talk about wood building materials and green building technology and how that can remove carbon from the environment today. Would you say that’s fair to say, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And we might even throw in some surprises along the way. Sitting across from us here is Andrew Himes. He’s a partner at Carbon Innovations. There’s a lot to unpack here on the podcast. So how about we just jump right into it? Andrew, first of all, happy birthday.
Andrew Himes: Hi, thanks. Thanks. So I would like to make a little detour here to let you all know, first of all, it is my birthday. This is January 31. Secondly, There’s a full moon. Thirdly, there’s a big moon, a super moon, which means that the Earth is closer to the moon than almost any other time. Next, there’s an eclipse of the moon today. And finally, the moon is rising. Apparently from the point of view of the Earth is very orange because of the total eclipse of the Moon. All of those things taken into account together happen on average throughout the history of the Earth once every 255.
And that’s extraordinary enough. It’s called a super blue moon with an eclipse. That’s the kind of technical term. What’s even more extraordinary though, is that this is an Andy moon, which means that on average in the history of the earth, all of these things have come together on my birthday once every 96,000 years.
Ross Kenyon: This is very special. Does it make transforming into a werewolf more difficult for you when it’s all concentrated like that?
Andrew Himes: I’m not sure that I appreciate that question. There were things that I’d ask you not to divulge in this public pot.
Ross Kenyon: Confirmed werewolf, yes.
Christophe Jospe: It only happens once in a blue moon anyway, so.
Andrew Himes: And a blue moon, of course, is when a total or rather a full moon occurs twice in one calendar month. So we’ve got two of those in January.
Christophe Jospe: Great. Thanks for the distinction. So let’s start with you and start at the beginning. How did you get involved in where you are? And take us from the time where you graduated college and went off into the world.
Andrew Himes: Well, I’m not sure that you want to go off all the way back to there. That would be a very long story since I’m my birthday today. I’m 68 years old. So I was born in 1950 and I never graduated from college. Instead, when I went to college, I spent all my time Making trouble and getting arrested and going to demonstrations and passing out leaflets for anti-war demonstrations and civil rights demonstrations. I was pretty much a full-time political activist. By the time I was in high school, really, I was attending civil rights demonstrations and so on and passing out leaflets for Eugene McCarthy’s failed presidential bid in 1968.
Unknown speaker: You did McGovern after that?
Andrew Himes: And then I did McGovern and I lived in Boston at that time. I was working for a foundation for At the age of like 21, I dropped out of school and the name of the foundation was Resist. It was a social justice foundation. It was probably the first foundation in the history of the country that gave a grant to a gay liberation organization and to civil rights organizations and the anti-war movement and so on. When McGovern was running for president in 72, I was part of the campaign and I fully believed that he was going to win the election because everybody in the state of Massachusetts that I ever spoke to said, oh yes, I’m voting for McGovern.
And it turned out, of course, that Massachusetts was the only state in the country that voted for McGovern. Everybody else voted for Nixon.
Unknown speaker: You got bubbled, huh?
Andrew Himes: Yeah. Yeah. I’m really good at bubbles, I guess.
Christophe Jospe: So fast forward, it turned out that world compassion became something that was really important for you to spread and to think about how all that played out. And I’m interested in kind of following that. And also fast forward to you landed your way into Microsoft and we’re working on some very early technology applications.
Andrew Himes: Before I went to Microsoft, I was the founding editor of Mac Tech, which is the leading Apple Computer Technology Journal. It was really for programmers on Macintoshes back in the 80s. I founded that kind of accidentally, that magazine. And then after a few years, Microsoft came calling and said that they wanted to do the same kind of thing in the Windows world. And so they They hired me to help start the Microsoft Developer Network, MSDN, at Microsoft. And my first job was editing a newspaper called MSDN News. But I had really been focused.
I was really into a set of technologies, including scripting languages and hypertext systems and expert systems and multimedia authoring systems, visual programming systems that turned out to be the foundation of the web. So when I first discovered something called the web browser, when I was at Microsoft, I really got excited. And my team then built the first website at Microsoft. We were the platform web team. So we produced all the platform websites for Windows and IE and all of that. Ultimately, I left Microsoft and I was really interested in taking all that technology background or expertise or ignorance that I developed.
Expertise is just understanding how much you don’t know, really. I wanted to take all of that and apply it to what had really originally been. Motivated me back, you know, when I was a kid. Social justice and creating a better kind of world. And ultimately that led me to helping to start something called the Charter for Compassion and the International Compassionate Cities Movement. And the idea was cities around the world. Signing the Charter for Compassion saying we will be a city of compassion. And that can’t just mean some vague sentiment, something about feeling nice about other people or pity on the poor or something like that.
That was nonsense. Compassion had to be something measurable and material and something actionable. A city that signed the charter was saying we will do a whole set of very practical things to create a more compassionate community. And ultimately, I got to think, well, you know, you can’t really create a world of compassion unless there’s a strong business motivation to create that kind of world. So what are the structural causes or what are the structural motivations or exigencies that matter? Manifest themselves in a world of compassion. And climate change then began to really drive my thinking and my questioning.
What it came down for me was, well, what would a set of structural relationships that demanded that we do their The right thing collectively as humanity about addressing climate change. About a year ago, that really kind of crystallized for me into this idea of, well, let’s see if we can’t capture excess carbon from the atmosphere, convert it into a variety of carbon-based materials that can store carbon and then put those materials into actual products that are profitable and useful.
Ross Kenyon: But isn’t carbon removal pretty wacky? It doesn’t work very well.
Unknown speaker: You’re just saying that to be provocative. I can tell.
Ross Kenyon: Everyone’s glowering at me right now.
Andrew Himes: No, they’re not. They’re kind of grinning at you. And they’re saying, well, you did that very well. As a matter of fact, you’re just trying to set up a good question. Well, first of all, you know, carbon removal has been around as a set of possibilities and technologies for a long time. 30 years, probably. People have been thinking about, well, flue gas from coal-fired generating plants or gas-fired generating plants or other manufacturing processes contain carbon. What if we could capture that carbon? For the most part, carbon capture has been focused on You know, oil companies developed that technology so that they could come up with a relatively pure stream of CO2 and then inject that CO2 into geological vaults deep in the earth, created pressure, enabled them to change played out oil fields into productive oil fields.
Enhanced oil recovery. Enhanced oil recovery. It’s like, all right, so they’re capturing carbon, but what are you doing with it? If you’re just figuring out how to use it to burn more carbon and create more problem, that’s not exactly a solution. More recently, it’s become really interesting that there are new technologies and a few new companies, as you know, they’re focused on removing carbon from the ambient atmosphere.
Ross Kenyon: You’re focused on building materials is one of the main things that you’re interested in right now?
Andrew Himes: Yeah, so an earlier way to think about this project would have been carbon capture and storage. Just grab it and put it somewhere. And what we’re thinking about, along with a lot of other people right now, is carbon capture and utilization. So you grab it... And then you put it somewhere really useful and profitable and positive. The project that we’re working on right now, we’re calling the Carbon Smart Building Initiative. And it’s being driven by the Carbon Leadership Forum at the University of Washington, which the CLF operates under the aegis of the University of Washington.
It was founded about 10 years ago by a woman named Kate Simon. And Kate is an architecture professor in the College of the Built Environment at the UW. And she has been focused through most of her long, wonderful career on embodied carbon. Thinking about embodied carbon, or rather it’s probably more precise to say embodied carbon emissions, are the emissions that are required in order to build a building. Most of us, when we think about high performing buildings or green buildings, we think about buildings that are operationally efficient. No heat escapes.
No heat escapes. A really great green building might be one that actually produces more energy than it consumes. You know, solar panels on the roof and really great insulation and so on. So what we’re talking about when we’re talking about embodied carbon, though, we’re talking about what are the materials that building is made of and how much energy did it cost to get them to the building site and then to put them together into a finished building. And so embodied carbon. Carbon is something that most green building specialists, architects and structural engineers and manufacturers of buildings, contracting companies haven’t really been thinking about.
When you think about LEED, which is the energy efficiency metric and designation of the U. S. Green Building Council, that doesn’t even talk about embodied carbon. That standard doesn’t. And almost any new building these days is going to have a LEED designation on it because people want to be viewed as, well, we’re building green buildings here.
Ross Kenyon: It’s very prestigious. I’m sure everyone wants one of those.
Andrew Himes: It’s also marketable. It’s not just prestigious. It’s that it’s hard to sell a building these days if it’s not a lead building.
Unknown speaker: Like a commercial building?
Andrew Himes: A commercial building. The market is demanding green buildings that are efficient, that don’t cost as much to run and so on. And so that’s been really a great advance over the last 20 years that wasn’t true 20, 25 years ago.
Christophe Jospe: So I’d like to take a step back. Here you are on the Reversing Climate Change podcast, and we’re going to talk about Reversing Climate Change. And what you’re saying is buildings, which historically have been a major cause for greenhouse gas emissions, which accumulate in the atmosphere and cause climate. Climate Change can actually be a key part of the solution when you count up all the inputs that go into creating that building and shooting for those inputs to be zero and all of the actual stuff that fills the buildings and saying, let’s make this as my So we can actually go less than zero and make them negative and position this as truly the next level that is beyond lead or beyond whatever certification and empowering the buildings to do that.
We are audacious and have big goals and think it really has to talk about the rate. Like how quickly can we do this and how quickly can we talk about massive drawdown? And here you’re coming at a different angle to say, hey, well, we build a lot really quickly and let’s somehow... Somehow standardized or think about a framework that helps us create this rapid decarbonization in buildings. And we realize we can’t do it all at once. We realize there are a lot of different pieces that have different elements to them.
So how do you get going? How do you start? And how do you split these things up so they enable this rapid decarbonization?
Andrew Himes: That’s a really good summation of the overall project, actually. It’s just to pinpoint or to really focus on a couple of things that you just said. Buildings, the built environment, it’s not just buildings, right? The built environment includes ports, roads, bridges, buildings. Infrastructure.
Unknown speaker: Roads?
Andrew Himes: Infrastructure, roads.
Unknown speaker: I mean, when you- You’re going for it all, Andrew. Don’t get greedy.
Andrew Himes: For everything. We’ll try to leave something for somebody else to care about. But quite frankly, this is the kind of initiative that ought to involve virtually everybody on the planet, ultimately. Not just the building industry, but anybody who lives in or commissions the creation. So the problem overall... Is that 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions on the planet Earth today are due to buildings or the built environment.
Unknown speaker: 40%?
Andrew Himes: 40%.
Unknown speaker: 40%. Crazy.
Andrew Himes: Actually, in the United States, that number is closer to 46% or 47%.
Unknown speaker: Because we like bigger houses.
Andrew Himes: Probably so. That’s a great observation. I think it must be true, but I don’t know. So 40% globally, and that number is going to potentially get worse. It’s now 2018, I think. So 32 years from now, by 2050, we will build more than 2 trillion square feet of additional infrastructure. Floor, Space, and Buildings.
Ross Kenyon: Is that including on the planet Earth?
Andrew Himes: On the planet Earth. So what that means is it’s an average every 30 days of constructing another Manhattan.
Ross Kenyon: That’s hard to wrap my head around, really.
Andrew Himes: Well, I was at a Compassionate Cities conference in Pakistan, in Karachi, Pakistan, three years ago. And I sat in a room with a bunch of architects and builders. And one of the architects gave this just extraordinary presentation with some amazing slides. I wish I had those slides today. But he said, you know, here’s a startling fact. 20 years from now, the 20 biggest cities in the world, four or five of them exist today. There’s going to be an enormous amount of building that takes place. It’s really critical to think about what are those buildings made of?
How efficient are they at using energy? And what we want to do, the vision here, is we want to turn the built environment, convert the Part of an existential threat to the future of humanity in the world. 40%, we want to get that down below zero. We want buildings, the built environment to be a net carbon sink. Just like Christophe described.
Ross Kenyon: Did you say that like 15 of the 20 biggest cities in the world haven’t been built yet?
Andrew Himes: Have not been built. They haven’t even been named or constructed or designed yet.
Ross Kenyon: Did you just spit out your biryani that you were eating?
Andrew Himes: I was like... That’s a shocking number. But to solve that problem, so what I just said was like turn buildings from a net problem to a net plus or a net part of the solution. What that requires is every new building should be carbon net zero in its use of energy, like perfectly efficient, right? Every new building should be that. Secondly, New buildings need to sequester at least a gigaton or a billion tonnes of carbon per year in order to get there. Thirdly, all existing buildings, enough of them need to be refit so that they’re operationally efficient, so that they’re high performing buildings, that the amount of embodied carbon and operational carbon associated with the construction, maintenance and refitting of buildings goes way, way down.
And finally, we need to store carbon in buildings.
Ross Kenyon: Can I interject? Can we define embodied carbon? Because actually the first time you told me about this, Andrew, I was kind of confused by that term and I thought it meant the opposite of what it actually means.
Andrew Himes: I was confused as well. And it is a confusing term because we’re talking about two different things coming together here. The term embodied carbon has been around for a long time, actually. It was essentially a counting technique. It said, well, we need to actually account for the emissions that are required to build a building. So when you put one concrete block on top of another, that concrete block embodies carbon emissions that aren’t obvious when you just look at the block.
Christophe Jospe: And to make that concrete block, I need to make the clinker and I basically separate the lime from the limestone and there are all sorts of emissions. And you show off over the end of that.
Andrew Himes: And you need to put that concrete block on a truck and then transport it to a building site. And that truck is giving off fumes and emissions as it travels to the building site. And if you’re creating a skyscraper and you’re using a lot of steel, for example, that steel may have come from China.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, it definitely, we don’t make steel anymore.
Andrew Himes: Well, that’s true, actually. Yeah. We remake steel, actually. There’s a fairly sizable remaking. This is actually unique to the United States. We have a remaking steel industry. Other parts of the world have a steel industry. The remaking steel, the reuse of steel is So, embodied carbon, it’s not just... It’s not just embodied carbon, it’s embodied carbon emissions. It’s an accounting practice, right? So with embodied carbon, we want to reduce embodied carbon as much as possible. We want to reduce those emissions. We’re adding a new idea to it, which is we want to add the amount of physical carbon that is stored in buildings.
And by doing so, we’re reducing embodied carbon even more. Steve McLaughlin Architects, structural engineers, contractors, and materials suppliers that are part of the Embodied Carbon Network. All of them focused on reducing embodied carbon. And now all of those people are talking about, how can we reduce even more embodied carbon by adding carbon to the building material? I apologize for the world.
Ross Kenyon: All of it?
Andrew Himes: All of it.
Ross Kenyon: When you talk about embodied carbon too, I’m thinking about like people like lifting up rather than having machinery. You’d have like people like pulling on pulleys and like building the pyramids. With their bodies. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Himes: With their bodies. Yeah. I knew that you were going to be a troublemaker the minute I saw you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. That’s my job. I’m the resident goofball here. Kristoff has a serious question though. Fine. Well, we hope he does.
Christophe Jospe: Well, a lot of things come to mind. So let me just try some things out on you and then try to tweak a question in so doing. So we’re talking about efficiency in buildings. Actually toured a passive house this summer and it was awesome. Passive houses can They don’t even need to do that. They don’t need to heat or cool to spend... Virtually nil on the heating bills and the air filtration is a big difference. So people in the house actually enjoy being in that house. But a comment that was made to me is, okay, well, all this is well and good and the efficiency is much better.
The people who are buying passive houses aren’t buying it because it’s good for the planet. They’re buying it because it’s a more comfortable home. And so I wonder if it’s things like that are really going to make the biggest gains where people do things because it’s a more comfortable home. And so, I think that’s a very important part of this. Then what’s conventionally on the markets or if we’re talking about making graphene, which is way stronger than steel and can use carbon as an input. So can you talk to us a little bit about some drivers which are not saying to the architects, hey, do this because climate change is real and you need to be part of the solution, but do this because this is a better way that creates more benefit value?
Andrew Himes: Well, I’d say that people are going to make good decisions based on three different kinds of motivations. Some people will say, well, I want to buy a passive house or I want to live in a high performing building because I deeply believe that climate change is the existential threat to humanity and it’s immoral or unethical for me to live in a different kind of house. Some people are going to have a powerful conscience or consciousness that drives them toward what they think of as ethical decisions. Some people are going to want to live in a house like that because it’s beautiful and it’s comfortable.
An example is... You know, houses that are built entirely out of wood with cross-laminated timber and other mass timber. They’re beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful houses. And they’re comfortable to live in and they’re quiet, you know, because a massive amount of timber between you and the street noise is really endearing. But a third really important motivation for a lot of people is going to be, is it cheaper? Can I build this building less expensively and in a way that is more durable and more comfortable if I’m a builder or a designer or an architect?
Because it makes economic sense. I would argue all three motivations in some ways need to be part of the enlarging consciousness of the market about what we can do to transform the market and transform the supply chain so that it ends up with the result that we want. Your example of the passive house is an extremely interesting one that my guess is that most of the people who design and build and live in passive houses Don’t think about. And that’s this. The carbon emissions associated with that passive house in the state of Massachusetts or Ohio might be almost in large measure created by the operation of the house or the building.
So we’re talking about operational efficiency. If you want that house to do a better job, you focus as the US Green Building Council and as the lead standard is focused in the past, you focus on operational energy. But for a passive house, a high performing building, the majority of the carbon emissions associated with living in or working in that building are embodied carbon emissions. In the Pacific Northwest, we have a relatively clean electrical grid. And if you’ve got a house or a building that meets high LEED standards for operational efficiency, and it’s drawing clean energy from a relatively clean grid that’s driven by water going over dams, As we have here in the Pacific Northwest, in the city of Seattle, it’s about 100% clean energy that floats the grid.
In the Pacific Northwest, already today, a majority of the carbon emissions associated with buildings is from embodied carbon, not from operational efficiency.
Ross Kenyon: Your bit on the motivations I find very interesting. It’s a recurring theme here that I think altruism tends to be a somewhat weaker motivator than cheaper or more beautiful. So it’s nice that side of things is catching up, though. I do.
Andrew Himes: This is a combination of a philosophical and a psychological conundrum. If you ask most people in our city, How important is climate change? How big a deal is climate change? My guess is that the overwhelming majority of citizens of our city would say it’s really important. It’s a big, big problem. In the United States, something like 65, 68% of Americans say this is a big deal. It’s a really big problem and I care about it. I’m concerned about it. If you ask people, well, what are you doing about it? The answer is typically going to be, I don’t know.
I take a bus sometimes.
Ross Kenyon: It’s inspiring.
Andrew Himes: I compost. I compost, yeah. I recycle. I try to turn off the light in the basement when I’m not in the basement. But the problem is that I think that for most of us, we see the danger at a global level. We don’t know what difference anything that I do... We lack agency, or we feel like we do. We feel like, well, and we lack agency because practically it’s difficult to see it. I rode my bicycle over here this morning, and I feel wonderful about having ridden my bicycle instead of driving my car.
It’s true that, you know, that much, I’ve reduced my carbon footprint by that much. What was my carbon handprint though? The idea of the carbon handprint is what can I personally, individually and collectively do in my life and in my community’s life? What can we do to actively create a solution to climate change?
Christophe Jospe: So you’re kind of setting us up, Andrew, and I’d like to take the conversation there to make this about us and about you, about us and you and how it all fits together and we reverse climate change and then go work on some other problem. We’re building a voluntary carbon removal marketplace. That means that we believe that there are people out there who lack the agency. And if they had the agency and knew it were as simple as possible to pay for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, that they could do that in a play no favorites software platform.
And software platforms resonate with you, I think, because you sort of come from that world. So let me just kind of play a scenario out on you and then see how it works. Got a building, you make it out of wood, you know where those trees have come from, you put those trees in the building, you do all the math that’s needed on the embodied carbon, and you determine that building has, as you add it all up, has removed 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That building can actually generate carbon removal credits that can get paid in the Nori marketplace.
And so now we’ve suddenly added a new incentive to Well, I love that idea.
Andrew Himes: It seems to me that, well, we’ve talked about this a little bit before. One of the significant challenges that the Nori marketplace is going to face is how do you validate that this thing has happened that actually removed that amount of CO2 from the atmosphere? That’s the value proposition. That’s one of the reasons that I’m interested in your idea, the idea of your company and your market, because I want to drive, I want to accelerate the adoption of carbon-based materials being used in construction. I want to accelerate the local production.
I want to accelerate any possible industrial process or diminish the amount of transportation that goes into making a building. I want to accelerate the amount of carbon that’s used in carbon materials. And it seems to me that anything that a Business does to construct a building with less embodied carbon and more carbon storage ought to be something that’s practically and effectively measured and is tracked and monitored and then potentially marketed as a credit or as, help me out here with, what’s the terminology that you guys are using for? Is it a carbon removable credit?
Is that what it is?
Unknown speaker: Yeah, carbon removable credit.
Ross Kenyon: A CRC. CRC. A Cersei. I don’t know if that’s going to stick. I’m going to make it stick. Game of Thrones there.
Andrew Himes: Well, so what we’re talking about is, from my perspective anyway, what we’re talking about is creating a mechanism for bringing together partners around the world and creating an actually measurable understanding of what it is that the built environment can do to store carbon. And we’re working with a set of partners. This is what we haven’t talked about yet, actually. The Carbon Smart Building Initiative is a Global Collective Impact Initiative. And what that means is that we plan it and we execute it as a collaboration among all of the potential partners, including the NGOs.
So part of our planning process have been people from the U. S. Green Building Council, from the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute, from the Eco Trust Building Network.
Unknown speaker: Are they monetizing their carbon removal right now or is that something that they’re trying to find a way to do that?
Andrew Himes: Right now, if you go to the websites of a lot of the big companies in the building industry around the world, they’ll talk about how important it is to reduce carbon emissions. And in some cases, they’ll talk about how they want to embed or store success. They know that more and more governments and companies and buyers of buildings, Around the world, especially, and we have to keep in mind, this is a global problem and a global initiative. But around the world, companies and governments are thinking about how do we sequester carbon in buildings.
They’re starting to do that partly because the global goals for sustainability that were proclaimed by the Paris Agreement and by the United Nations include the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere.
Ross Kenyon: But they’re not being paid right now for their carbon removal services.
Andrew Himes: There are companies that are today selling concrete that is made using cement that emits far less carbon than it used to. The traditional way of manufacturing Portland cement, you create one ton of Portland cement and you’re releasing one ton of CO2 into the atmosphere. There are new ways of creating, manufacturing cement that emit far less CO2. And there are new ways of sequestering carbon-based materials in the aggregates. That’s a significant component of concrete. So there are companies doing that today. They’re being paid to do that by their clients or customers.
Ross Kenyon: Just because it’s environmentally better or because it’s better quality?
Christophe Jospe: It’s more efficient and it’s saving money because you’re requiring less material and you can use the carbon dioxide to cure the concrete. And so what ends up happening is it’s only an emission reduction. And so if it’s not theoretically. As emission removed or as carbon removed. And it certainly could be. And it’s a kind of obvious pathway to get things going.
Ross Kenyon: But none of them are getting carbon credits generated for this service.
Andrew Himes: None of them that I know of.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. Hmm. I wonder if we knew anyone. Maybe that’s something. Help them out with that.
Andrew Himes: So another thing is like if you get on an airplane once in a long while, you’ll get an airplane. And this has happened to be like once out of 100 flights that I’ve been on. And the steward walks up and down the aisle and says, we’re selling carbon credits if you pay us $10. On this $1,000 airplane flight, we’ll assure you that a tree grows in Australia or somewhere like that. And at $10, there’s not much that actually happens as a result of your buying carbon offsets for My sense is, if there is, you wouldn’t really know that it was really happening because there’s no real validation process.
When I’m an airline passenger, I don’t really have any evidence if I pay $10 to the airline for a carbon offset that something will really happen that makes a significant difference in a permanent way.
Ross Kenyon: I would never take that deal if it was offered to me. Same thing to whenever there’s like a charity or whatever. I’m always like, I need to look into this. I can’t just like give money to an organization I heard about on the street or like we’re growing a tree in Australia. I’m like. Tell me more about this tree. It sounds good.
Andrew Himes: I’d like to know more about that tree. And I love the idea of planting trees. You know, trees are really cool. Sure, yeah. And they sequester carbon. Typical tree, you know, turns into lumber. About half of that lumber is carbon. A tree growing in Australia somewhere, a live tree, something like 15% of the tree is carbon. So it’s a good thing. We need to plant about a billion trees around the world. But how do I know that makes a difference? I want to figure out how to validate that. Andrew, we love the vision of what you’re about.
Christophe Jospe: It seems like there are a lot of allies. There are also a lot of hurdles and challenges and things that you need to have work. Can you talk a little bit about some of the biggest hurdles ahead?
Andrew Himes: Yeah, so I think it’s so important to say what you just said, that there are massive challenges here. We asked this question of a lot of people. Back in the fall, we were building this comprehensive plan to turn the built environment from an existential threat to a part of the solution. And so we did a survey of a bunch of people who were part of the Embodied Carbon Network. And we said, well, here’s the vision. And what do you think about it? Is this like insane? Totally insane? Or is it really doable?
Or is it reasonable? Or are you excited by it? How do you feel about it? And the typical response was, that sounds like a really great idea. I’d love it if that could happen. It might be impossible. So why might this be impossible? It might be impossible because if you’re building 2 trillion square feet of new building space, you’re going to be emitting a bunch of carbon to do that. You just can’t help it. It may be more or less, but you’re going to be emitting a bunch of carbon to do that.
So far, we know that we can reduce the amount of carbon emitted by building materials closer to the job site using local materials. Using aggregate and concrete that comes from right within five miles of where you build the building is a lot smarter than trekking it halfway across the country. And that’s actually one of the reasons that carbon aggregates are doing a better job nowadays because we’re doing a better job of local sourcing of the aggregate that goes into concrete. But still, you’re going to be driving that truck. You’re going to be, you know, bringing steel from somewhere.
You’re going to be cutting down a tree. And by the way, just cutting down a tree and putting it into the building is not necessarily a good thing. How was that tree harvested? Was it harvested? Was it harvested in a sustainable way or was it harvested in a factory forest where a great big industrial timber company just cuts down a bunch of stuff and shoves it into products and then thinks later about whether they’re removing more carbon than they’re storing?
Christophe Jospe: So I want to wave a magic wand. Okay, waved it. Open source software relates to what you’re doing. The blockchain somehow relates to what you’re doing as well in terms of supply chain tracking. The open source side of things, you essentially have... Let’s call it carbon accounting or lifecycle assessment that is free and open and you have all the information. You’ve got visibility. Visibility. If I want to go and trust and check it, I can prove it. And you’ve got a global network that can handle all this. Am I going down a path that might make sense?
Not trying to force you into the blockchain world, but I would make the argument that a new form of thinking about Sharing ideas rapidly and building them in a way that isn’t kind of, this is just about one consortium, but this is really about something that we want to make accessible to the public.
Andrew Himes: Does that resonate? It does resonate. I’m not entirely clear on exactly how it resonates. I want to get back to the blockchain just a second because I’m still learning about the blockchain and Ethereum and I’m still learning about Nori. And I’m excited and happy about what I’m hearing. And I feel like I’m learning something, but I’m not sure that I can speak back to you what I think that I’ve learned. So I want to focus on something you said a second ago about open sourcings. So when we think about, well, so is it really going to be possible to sequester or store carbon in the built environment?
In order to get to that answer, you need to do some complicated calculations. You need to understand a whole lot of things about a whole lot of carbon. You need to think about how much concrete was used in the world last year and what kind of concrete was that? What’s the supply chain that would lead carbon storing concrete materials to the people who need to use them? And you need to think about how do you measure all of that stuff and you need to think about how do you validate and publish the measurements that you take and all of that.
My partner Jeff and I just sat down like several months ago and made a back of the hand calculation of all of that stuff. And we decided, well, it’s reasonable to say that we might be able to do that. And by gosh, let’s try it out, you know. So all of these professionals came along then from the built environment and they said, well, I think we need to have a much more comprehensive and detailed understanding of that. So there’s now a team of Work by people in the embodied carbon network who set themselves a collective task of writing a white paper that did that analysis at a deeper and more detailed level.
And that’s great. That’s kind of the beginning of an open space. It’s the beginning of a community-based approach to understanding the world. And that white paper is going to go out into the world along with a question. Help us really understand this. We want a thousand people or 10,000 people around. We want people around the world to be thinking about this together and improving the analysis, increasing the amount of data that’s available. We want there to be a lifecycle inventory database that’s an open source database that’s available to anybody in Through the entire supply chain of it?
That kind of analysis, you’ve got to have a really big database and a lot of great inputs that are verifiable. It’s not just me and my brother or my sister Sue went, logged on to some database and created We need to make sure that it’s great information and that it comes from, there are environmental product declarations for all of the products that go into any building and it’s possible for anybody on earth to look at that. And no, for sure, that’s reliable data and that’s reliable analysis. And how do you get there?
Well, the first answer that I know about already is it’s got to be an open source database and it’s got to invite the activity and the contributions of thousands and thousands of people. And now I think you’re about to tell me how it requires the blockchain.
Christophe Jospe: I don’t know. I just wanted to put the magic words in your mouth and hear you say it. Drop all the terms and then be like, make something out of that. No, I think it’s on the verification piece and the confirming that the data you’re dealing with is indeed true.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a problem for all of this too. Is anywhere you have human involvement, the inputs could get shoddy or people can cheat.
Andrew Himes: Oh yeah. And what is an environmental product declaration? Well, you know, there is a definition that But it’s also true that almost anybody, whether they’re a professional or not, can make one up and put the data out there that they’ve made up. How do you know that’s a phony EPD? Life cycle assessment. This is not a methodology or an expertise that most people in the building industry have. Most architects don’t know a lot about life cycle assessment. Most structural engineers don’t know a lot about LCA, don’t know how to use the tools, don’t know how to publish the information.
Kate, Simon and our partner at the UW wrote a book called Life Cycle Assessment and the Carbon Leadership Forum has been one of the most significant leaders in the world at any institution in really helping people start to get what embodied carbon is all about and how you track it, how you monitor it, how you report on it, and how you engage with the idea of embodied carbon to shift how you design or build a building. We’re still very much at the beginning process of that educational transformation in the building industry.
So I’m really interested. That’s one of the reasons I’m here, quite frankly. I want to really learn what might be the role of the blockchain and of networks. I’m convinced that change is underway. All the changes that we’re talking about this morning, they’re all underway. This is not stuff we’re making up from scratch. This is a massive transformation in the world. That is underway. But in the ordinary course of events, it could take another 100 years to get there. And we don’t have that time. There’s a time value of carbon emissions, carbon.
And we need to vastly accelerate the degree to which we collectively take into account and take responsibility for the health and the welfare of the built environment and its contribution to the solution.
Ross Kenyon: Damn, I thought you were going to lead us to like a nice uplifting conclusion there. Yeah, this is a revival meeting here. Yeah. To sort of answer your question at a more practical level, what we’re trying to do at Nori is create these methodologies that measure and verify all the different methods of carbon removal. And we want to do so in a very open and transparent way. And so, one of the ways that we’re doing that is We are putting the drafts of these methodologies up on GitHub and then we’re inviting comment.
We want communities to participate. And so when we talk about the sustainable materials that can be used going into these buildings, that’s how we can work together on this to Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: And just to wrap us up and maybe leave us with some hope and optimism. Please do get me in that good, healthy, happy space. It’s possible. We wouldn’t name the Reversing Climate Change podcast Reversing Climate Change if we didn’t think it were possible. It’s a matter of just coordination. And it means having the right people with the right agency and the right tools and just aligning the incentives in the proper way. And we can do it. Not us, not us alone. We. No, not Nori. Just the people at the table.
Just, yeah, no, and the listeners and then everyone else who says, hey, this is an idea that’s crazy enough that it just might work.
Andrew Himes: So I just want to tag team on what you just said. So the title of this podcast is The Reversing Climate Podcast, is that right?
Unknown speaker: Change Podcast, yeah.
Andrew Himes: Reversing Climate Change Podcast. The name of the podcast is not the Carbon Removal Podcast. That’s right. My sense of what that means is this is about shifting the way that the global economy and human society and all of the interactions in this incredibly complex ecosystem work. It’s not just about removing carbon. It’s about transforming human civilization. And so for me, one of the most inspirational books I’ve read in last year, actually there are two, I just want to mention really quickly, The Climate of Hope by Michael Paul Bloomberg and Karl Pope.
That’s a wonderful book that gives you a sense that this dream that we have is not insane. It’s based on real people doing real things in real time. And secondly, the Drawdown book. Drawdown is a book that was edited by Paul Hawken. I think the subtitle of the book is the most comprehensive plan to reverse climate change ever in the history of the world or something wonderful like that. Mm-hmm. We spent yesterday on the phone with somebody from Drawdown talking about how they understand this global drawdown movement and the global drawdown initiative, which is also like the Carbon Smart initiative, a collective.
And it takes place in localities and there are centers of drawdown excellence and action that are being set up around the world now. One thing that I heard yesterday was that the entire country of New Zealand is going to be A drawdown country focused on how does the entire country become responsible and successful for drawing down carbon from the atmosphere and dramatically reducing the impact, the negative impact of human civilization on carbon. What we’re talking about here is Nori being part of, and the Carbon Smart Building Initiative being part of, a global effort by billions of people to rebuild.
Rethink how we interact with each other and with the earth. And that to me really is, that’s incredibly positive. It’s something that gives me great hope and enormous amount of optimism. And I’m going to be thinking about that book when I think about Nori as well. It’s kind of surprising when you look at all those 100 ways in which we are today and can potentially reduce the impact of greenhouse gases on climate change. The numbers five and six contributors to reducing greenhouse gases in that list of 100 were two that you might not have thought about.
One was family planning services and the other was educating girls. Taken together, that’s about supporting and providing Promoting the leadership and the freedom and the ability of women and girls to help create leadership and possibility in the world. And taken together, those numbers five and six are number one for reducing climate change. Why? Educated turn out to be girls who are massive contributors and leaders in their community and turn out to have less children. And women who are given family planning services are also given power and freedom. Fewer being added to the population of the earth amounts to a much smaller carbon footprint for human people.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a lot to leave us with to think about. Thanks so much for being here with us, Andrew.
Andrew Himes: Yeah, this has been fun. I like to look out over Puget Sound as we sit here.
Ross Kenyon: You could do a whole lot worse, huh?
Andrew Himes: Yeah, for sure. I’m jealous.
