Carbon is not bad, in and of itself. The problem is that it’s currently in the wrong place. The Center for Carbon Removal (CCR) is on a mission to accelerate the development of scalable, sustainable, economically-viable carbon removal solutions that capture excess carbon from the atmosphere and put it back where it belongs—in soil, building materials and underground geologic formations. The Center is founded on the belief that we can enjoy a prosperous economy AND a safe environment at the same time.
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 Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Reversing Climate Change with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe. Dude, I almost said Christophe Waltz again. Just to make Kristoff insecure. Kristoff Jaspé in the house. He’s as good or better than Kristoff Walsh. So don’t let me make you feel too bad. Still here in Oakland at the WeWork. We have two guests with us today. Kristoff, why don’t you introduce him?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, still in the very trendy WeWork. Get your flavored water here. It’s good. Sitting across from the table, we have Noah Deich and Giana Amador. Got it. I remember the first time I met Noah, actually, that was in Washington, DC, and he was speaking at the United States Energy Association. It was a panel on negative emissions. It wasn’t a gotcha question, but I remember raising my hand. It was like, all right, so like, how is direct air capture really going to move the needle? And Noah was like, well, okay, you’re working for Klaus Lochner.
Like, I was hoping you could tell us that. And then it was pretty clear. It was like, okay, we care about the same things. And it was very apparent that we did because Noah, shortly after that time, graduated and went off to found a nonprofit called the Center for Carbon Removal.
Ross Kenyon: Just to put it on your resume or something?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, that LinkedIn was getting pretty empty. I’m pretty sure it’s just a shell organization. They don’t actually do anything. We’ll find out if they do anything on this podcast. We’re big fans. They do a lot of great work. But without any further ado... Sorry, Noah. Let’s let you introduce yourself. You got wrangled into this. We just were chatting with Julio, who’s a carbon wrangler. There’s a different type of wrangle here. How did you get involved with the Center for Carbon Removal?
Giana Amador: Yeah, Noah has done a lot of wrangling and got a lot of great people to help support this cause. And I’d like to think that I’m one of those. So I met Noah back when we were both at UC Berkeley. We founded the Center for Carbon Removal together out of the Berkeley Energy and Climate Institute. They give us our seed funding to start a nonprofit that focuses on igniting action on carbon removal solutions. Since then, we’ve transitioned into an independent nonprofit and the rest is history.
Noah Deich: Yeah, we were actually really lucky that Giana was not eligible for the Energy and Climate Institute program that she applied for because she had already done it the previous year. And the administrator of that program was also the one that we were talking about getting funding. And she basically said, Giana, do you want to go work with this crazy organization that is trying to do carbon removal at large scale?
Giana Amador: Yeah. And I knew Noah from this class we had together where he would sit in the back with his like racquetball gear and just raise his hand and ask questions about carbon removal. And I was like, who is this guy? Like, why is he taking all this airtime?
Ross Kenyon: I can see why you guys became friends.
Noah Deich: Yeah. Makes perfect sense to me. I was in business school at this, I think it was a law school class or it was cross-listed with the energy and resources group, all actual students. And I was the business student in back that, yeah.
Unknown speaker: I bet they loved you.
Giana Amador: I do think you were the favorites. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Keeping things spicy in there. Yeah. All the environmental scientists and policy people. Just lobbing carbon budget questions right and left.
Giana Amador: Someone’s got to ask them.
Ross Kenyon: Just like throw in the NBA speak that everyone hates. Get that jargon in there.
Giana Amador: Synergy.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Giana Amador: Connectivity. What are there? You got to level set first.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. First thing you got to do. Win-win. She’s got it. Always got to go for the win-wins. So, okay, the Center for Carbon Removal. What’s the elevator pitch here?
Noah Deich: So we’re looking to build the ecosystem of public, private, and civil sector support for an economy that removes more carbon from the air than it emits on net. And that economy will be growing and prosperous all at the same time. We got a lot of work to do there. And so there’s a big role for nonprofit organizations to support the creation of many of the pieces of this ecosystem that are missing.
Ross Kenyon: So what are you doing? Are you writing policy papers? Are you trying to do some analysis for people to use? Where do you fit into this exactly?
Noah Deich: So I think there are three key legs to this stool that need to be stood up that we’re working on in parallel. First is research and development. We need to essentially create an Apollo scale effort for R&D devoted to this space where we’ve essentially had None in the past. So this is where we’re working with our partners at Arizona State University, where Christophe was when we first met amongst a number of other national labs and universities. Second piece is all of that work coming out of the research effort needs to be brought to market.
So that’s where we’re working to stand up a technology incubator, an accelerator. Calling it carbon recycling labs, basically bringing innovations to market. And then the third piece is to change policy. So there actually are large scale markets for these solutions in the future. And so that’s a combination of the policy analysis that you envision a traditional think tank, as well as the education and outreach efforts to policymakers directly so that we can help them create policy and regulation that supports the whole field.
Ross Kenyon: I want to dive into that, but you might have a stronger organizational sense here. What is stopping carbon removal from happening on a policy level? What might be a good thing to change moving forward?
Noah Deich: So just getting people to understand that it would be a good thing to clean up carbon from the air, both for climate and economic reasons.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Why is it a good thing? Yeah, exactly. No, it’s a serious question. I mean, we always like to start with why. I mean, I can tell you, I’ll tell you why I think it’s a good thing because the greenhouse effect happens to be real and keep us alive. But there are too many greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And the only way to stay alive long term is to Okay, so... So we talked about the climate math with Julio on the last episode. And he told us it’s pretty bad. When you add everything up, there’s around 53 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere each year.
And that needs to be zero. Yet there’s all this excess. So we need to get good at pulling it back out. And that’s basically your motivation. And somehow people don’t know that or don’t think about that.
Noah Deich: I have a couple of theories for why there. I think one of the main reasons is when we think about pollution, there are very few long-lived pollutants like carbon. That acid rain and ozone and all of these other... Pollution problems have been you simply stop putting the pollutant into the air. And in a couple of weeks, months, years, that pollution is completely out of the system. It just rains out. Right.
Christophe Jospe: The solution to pollution is dilution.
Noah Deich: Exactly.
Ross Kenyon: That was good. One more time there.
Christophe Jospe: I’ll say it. The solution to pollution is dilution.
Ross Kenyon: I felt like it all blurred together. So it was the same word three times.
Noah Deich: I couldn’t tell which was which. It’s like the 1970s bumper sticker for environmentalism, right? And I don’t think we’ve had a reboot since then. And I think the idea that we are going to actually need to manage both the amount of carbon pollution going into the air, but then in the other account, figure out how to clean up the excess carbon pollution is fundamentally new to people that are thinking about pollution. And it’s also something that turns out to be really challenging to do at the major scale that we think it’s required.
And so people have focused their energy on the first part because that is a much more tractable and near-term challenge in most people’s minds.
Giana Amador: Yeah. And I think Noah and I have tried to come up with endless analogies for how this works. Yeah. We’ve done a lot of brainstorming, but I think the one that is just the simplest and make the most sense is that if you want to lose weight, you don’t just diet. You don’t just cut back on the number of calories you’re putting into your body, but you also exercise to help burn those calories. So we need both. We need to both reduce emissions and clean up the carbon that’s already in the air.
Christophe Jospe: So we’re drastically overweight. We need to stop eating McDonald’s, but we also need to go to the gym to burn off all that excess calories.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Julio is a man of many analogies and idioms, as you probably know. But that was one that he chose, too. That seems like people usually talk about addiction as the sort of analogy that everyone uses for this. But I guess maybe that’s falling out of favor now.
Christophe Jospe: I got another analogy that I want to throw back at you. And actually, this is Noah’s analogy. So he has to talk about it at the end. So it’s the bathtub analogy. When we think about the atmosphere of having too much carbon dioxide, it’s a little bit scary because it’s like, okay, we’re filling up this bathtub with water, but the water is really the greenhouse gases. And we don’t want the greenhouse gases to overfill the bathtub because that would be bad and create this big problem. Traditionally, there’s been a drain in that bathtub and that drain is actually clogging up.
So carbon removal is adding a new drain so that other drain can work better. How am I doing?
Unknown speaker: This is so on track and I got such a tortured analogy by the end when you’re adding a second hole to the back. You have to add a second.
Christophe Jospe: I mean, it’s well, if you’re really going to be geeky about like the carbon in the atmosphere, you have to remember that 50% of what we put up there. Goes to the oceans and the biomass. And of that 50%, 75% goes into the oceans, which acidify the oceans. And if we’re suddenly talking about, okay, we’re removing carbon from the atmosphere and the concentration is going down, the oceans might begin to out, or the oceans not might, they will outgas as they equilibrate. And so here, the oceans are a sort of drain, which is getting clogged up.
I don’t know. How’d I do, Noah? Did I get that analogy right? Do you want to...
Noah Deich: I think it’s attributed to a professor at MIT who might take some offense of you calling it my analogy.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, you’re right. Academics get sort of proprietary over there. So you can have the McDonald’s weight loss one. I think it’s just... Okay, sorry.
Giana Amador: I wouldn’t say that the drain is necessarily being clogged, though. I think the oceans point is well taken. But I think we have a drain now, like rocks, biomass, oceans, draw down carbon. But it’s really about how do we increase the size of that drain? And not about how do we create a second one? Because we have a lot of the tools today. We know forests draw down carbon. And of course, we should also develop technologies that can sequester carbon. But it’s really about harnessing the things that we have now, expanding that drain, and then developing the technologies in the future that can bring that one size bigger.
Ross Kenyon: Awesome. A lot of bathtub modifications going on. Just got a new tub at some point. Yeah, bathtub’s going to file the patents for the double drain patent.
Christophe Jospe: I can freely talk about it on our fanciest of bathtubs.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we never got to the policy. Yeah, let’s go.
Unknown speaker: Let’s go back to the policy stuff. So, OK, so you gave us one. So you need awareness. That’s the first barrier.
Noah Deich: Nobody’s going to do something they don’t know or care about. And then I think the second is in this insane political environment. It’s all about figuring out how to build. A robust constituency of people that are really passionate about changing policy and socializing those policy ideas with a wide segment of stakeholders that are passionate about it. And we simply haven’t done that when it comes to carbon removal at a meaningful scale that when we think about Healthcare or corporate reform or all of these other types of topics that are in the news.
There’s this huge wealth of academic, NGO, even corporate thinking and activity around these topics. And we haven’t really gotten started when it comes to carbon removal policy yet. And I think that’s the biggest barrier is getting a community of people together who are All have different interests in the specific solutions and figuring out how to craft policy and regulation that is both meaningful for the climate, but also benefits all these stakeholders so that they are supporters of it going forward.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think there is much that needs to be positively done or do they just need to stay out of the way as this sort of field comes to pass?
Noah Deich: So there’s a lot of positive action required. I think we need way more funding for research and development.
Ross Kenyon: This is like basic science of it.
Noah Deich: Applied research as well. So there’s definitely the basic science piece, but throughout the full technology innovation lifecycle, there’s way too little funding. And this is something that has historically been the purview of the government because industry has been unwilling and they continue to be unwilling to invest in some of this really early stage research that will take decades to eventually turn into these large scale economically viable solutions. Second piece is to create markets that actually Yeah. And there is also a demand pull for those projects in a way that doesn’t exist.
And then there’s the regulation piece of how do we make sure that the government is not actively impeding what the market would want to do because the regulations are too onerous. So it’s a combination of those three levers, all of which need policy change to result in any meaningful scale.
Ross Kenyon: And you work on all of those things. That’s sort of in your active purview right now. That’s what you’re up to.
Christophe Jospe: I want to get into the weeds a little bit because the Future Act just passed and 45Q went through. And this seems like a great win on the policy front to give a price signal that valorizing carbon removal on an industrial scale can actually happen. Janna, you’re nodding your head. What’s the skinny there? How does 45Q work?
Giana Amador: Yeah, well, I was actually going to say, no, I think you’re doing... A little bit of a disservice to the policy sphere, just because I think the traction that we’ve gained already and that a number of other NGOs and players in the space have been able to create is really monumental and really exciting because it shows that there actually is the potential for bipartisan support for some of these carbon removal solutions. And that’s something that we can really capitalize upon is bipartisan climate action. The tax credits that you mentioned, Kristoff, Are a really exciting kind of market opportunity for both carbon sequestration, CO2 use for enhanced oil recovery or utilization.
And this actually, for the first time, puts a price to say, like, we will give you a tax credit if you use this carbon in a way that’s beneficial to society. And that is really exciting. And so now there’s a lot of work to be done to make sure that those companies can actually access those tax credits and that the CO2 actually gets sequestered.
Noah Deich: I really think this is comparable to what the wind industry went through when it got its production tax credit a decade plus ago, where it was something that was kind of on the fringes of the energy system and now is a very mainstream energy technology. And I think this is exactly the same type of production tax credit. It’s just for this whole portfolio of carbon capture, conversion, removal approaches. And so it could be really exciting. Which fundamentally makes it very different though, because, okay, you’ve got a Wind turbine.
Christophe Jospe: And that’s well and good because when I build a wind turbine, I know that it produces energy and then I can make different estimations on, okay, what’s sort of dollars per watt and how does that come down over time? But here we’re bundled... Rangling in all forms of carbon wrangling, which we learned to mean capturing carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and stopping it from getting there in the first place. And you’re saying, okay, well, A, I can stop it from getting there in the first place and I can use it.
And if I use it, it might go back there, but at least I’ll get a second use and that’ll be better from the climate perspective. Or I can stop it from getting there and I’ll store it. Or I can get it out and I’ll use it. Or I’ll get it out and I’ll store it. And so now we’ve got four pathways with different levers and they all kind of fit. And so I don’t disagree with you that it’s the same production-based tax credit. I think it just gets a little bit more complicated and it sort of segues us into the next part.
Of this conversation, which I think is what are we even talking about? We’re talking about carbon removal, but we’re also talking about using carbon dioxide and the carbon recycling labs partly does that. And so what are the technologies that fit in carbon removal? What are the technologies which are critical and tangential to carbon removal that will advance this state of innovation, which is kind of the tide that lifts all ships? And how does the Center for Carbon Removal think about these sorts of things?
Giana Amador: That’s a good question. It’s basically kind of doing what photosynthesis does on the land side, but then tries to mimic that with a chemical reaction. And that’s where you get some of these new technologies like direct air capture, bioenergy with CCS, mineral weatherization, and... All of those forms that I kind of mentioned permanently store the carbon, but there’s actually ways that you can capture CO2 and turn that into fuels or other short-lived valuable products. And those, while they don’t actively or permanently store the carbon, they are valuable pathway technologies that can help us bring down costs in the meantime and provide first markets for that CO2.
Noah Deich: So I sort of think about it as carbon removal being... The icing on the mitigation cake, if you will.
Giana Amador: Another analogy.
Noah Deich: Where mitigation is absolutely essential and you need to have a lot of it very quickly. And the problem is many times we can’t put the icing on the cake until we have the cake. And so what we think about as an organization dedicated to that ultimate vision is figuring out how we get there as quickly as possible, as Giana said. So for us, it’s the market might only bear a... Carbon capture from a point source that initially comes from fossil fuel and turning that into a fuel that eventually gets into the air.
But if that’s creating a pathway for new technologies to emerge, so you’re substituting for that fossil energy with direct air and you’re substituting for that energy. Fuel conversion pathway to some other conversion pathway that’s permanent or just sequestering it underground. We want to encourage those stepping stones so that we’re not aiming for something that’s impossibly far away, but putting those steps one in front of each other so we’re actually building a bridge to make that future possible sooner than it otherwise would be.
Ross Kenyon: I want to connect this back to the previous topic with regard to subsidies and tax credits and all that. I tend to not like those very much. I would much rather see us, I don’t know, the oil and gas industries receives like how many, is it in the trillions per year here? And subsidies, whatever it is, it’s a giant number. Like rather than making like more of these like little carve outs, why don’t we just take those away? But is that just politically impossible? So it’s way easier just to add subsidies, which that’s a sad state of affairs for America.
I feel like that’s just like it’s complicated and confusing and prone to like being like a little corrupt. So like, am I wrong about this? Is this the wrong way to think of it?
Noah Deich: Yeah. Why is that? It’s just not how policy works at the end of the day. It’s easier to add them than to take them away. Policy is the art of the possible. And in this environment, we’re facing so many headwinds that make what is possible far from what is ideal. And when we think about policy, we try and aim towards an end goal and use policy as an instrument to getting the new carbon economy that we seek. And if that requires the best available solution being inefficient, economically speaking, tax credits, so be it.
We’re not going to fix everything that’s wrong with the American political system on our pathway to figuring out carbon removal. And so it’s a function of... Just approaching the world as it is and trying to make the best of a very messy political situation.
Ross Kenyon: It’s such a bummer too because I feel like a lot of these things would be more competitive against oil and gas if there just wasn’t a huge subsidy in place for a lot of those industries. A lot of these things might have happened just because they would be competitive in the market. And then we have downstream, we have to subsidize things which would have had a chance to fairly compete but then don’t get that shot because of those handouts. I don’t know. That thing always gets to me. But I respect the opinion that sometimes it is just the art of the possible and you just have to, the art of the deal, you could say.
Christophe Jospe: I think that’s part of the problem. Well, we’re throwing more platitudes out there, right? Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of good. At the same time, you said, let’s focus on the end goal. What is the end goal? You’re on the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m going to put the words in your mouth.
Noah Deich: Okay, so I’ll challenge that, that Reversing Climate Change is going to be very hard. Reversing global warming, more on board with that. But we’re already seeing some fairly irreversible impacts of climate change today. What we’re aiming for is a growing prosperous economy. That removes more carbon on net, sends us in the right direction. Pretty sure we don’t have a theory about what the right number PPM wise is for the atmosphere eventually, but we know we’re heading in the wrong direction. So if we can at least get the ship sailing towards the right direction towards that pre-industrial level, then we can have a much more reasonable fact-based and hopefully optimistic conversation about what that ideal level should be.
Christophe Jospe: Totally. And we’ve said on previous podcasts, we know that as a company, we’re not Reversing Climate Change. That’s so bold and ambitious and like kind of crazy. But if you set it as a mission to say, hey, we don’t accept the status quo as it is. And we look at climate change as the function of the greenhouse effect. And if we manage the greenhouse effect, then we can manage this other problem. Yeah. The Arctic by that time may have melted and there may be feedback loops which are causing real problems that we cannot reverse.
But if we can reverse the overall long term effect, that’s really how we see it. And if it ruffles some feathers along the way and more people suddenly start paying attention to the types of thoughts that we’re pushing out there, I call that a win.
Ross Kenyon: Great SEO as well.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, good SEO. Nothing like creating some controversy along the way. No SEO is bad SEO. Yeah, exactly.
Giana Amador: Yeah, I think the ambition is more.
Christophe Jospe: Is that search engine optimization? We hate acronyms.
Giana Amador: No acronyms. Yeah, no acronyms.
Christophe Jospe: All right. So at the end of the day, there’s a limit to the amount of carbon dioxide, which is the dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. We oftentimes look at end goals, not in terms of temperature targets, but rather in terms of parts per million, because the temperature can fluctuate and look different in different places, and climate change is already happening. And so trying to limit to 1. 5 or even 2 degrees Celsius is not enough and sort of lacks creativity. We really hope that To kind of push back on all these metaphors, you know, you’re saying you can’t put the icing on the cake till the cake is there.
Well, what if you could? What if you could say pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is a necessary part of this equation, if not the end game? And if it’s the end game, Then how does the end game create a game that allows everyone else to win as well? So I’m thinking of like an upside down cake that you already need that layer of frosting. It’s like all fondant too, so it’s like 50% icing. It could be 100% icing if you’re pulling all the carbon out.
Giana Amador: But the icing is more expensive than the cake. So if you’re on a budget, you want to make the cake as big as possible. You want to do the cake and then the icing to be small. Because carbon removal solutions are more expensive and more premature and less proven right now than a lot of mitigation technologies like renewable energy.
Noah Deich: I like eating straight icing, but that’s not everyone’s bag of chips.
Giana Amador: You’re going to get a stomach. Yeah, do you really?
Christophe Jospe: In moderation. I’m going to try to beat this metaphor until it’s dead. Put the icing on the bottom. Until it’s fully baked. Yeah, until it’s fully baked. Put the icing on the bottom. For every ton of carbon dioxide that’s emitted, another ton needs to go away. Now, I’d rather not put that ton there, and that’s mitigation. But the point is, I’m already committed to pulling back billions and billions of tonnes, probably 750 billion ballpark of tonnes, and... That already is the icing that we’re committed to, to having to deal with.
And so future icing should motivate us to build that cake as quickly as possible and do these things which save us money, like energy efficiency. It just boggles my mind that you have incredible... I’m giving the analogy to the baker.
Noah Deich: We’re a big fan of the Great British Baking Show.
Giana Amador: It’s one of the- Center’s favorite shows.
Noah Deich: Yeah, one might say.
Giana Amador: I think you have a point. Strong recommendation. And this is, maybe Julio talked to you about this, is that there’s these sort of like, this idea of sticky sectors, that like, energy efficiency is difficult. A lot of land use emissions are really difficult to decarbonize. Transportation, really difficult to decarbonize. So- In the future, we might actually have to offset some of those emissions with negative emissions with carbon removal solutions. So there’s a point to what you’re saying that we’re not going to be able to decarbonize everything as fast as we want to.
And sometimes carbon removal can be a placeholder for that.
Noah Deich: So I actually think it’s a moot point right now because what we haven’t figured out how to do is even put in motion the research development and deployment of many of these solutions today. So we’re talking about solutions that need to be at a massive scale. I think at the end of the day, people are never going to care about how much carbon they clean up out of the atmosphere. It’s invisible. It’s odorless. It doesn’t affect them personally on a day-to-day basis, but things like the economy do. And so the extent to which we can create solutions towards a economic value proposition and one that cleans up carbon from the air.
I think that’s how we get this started. Then we can start to get the solutions out of the lab and out of the ideas that people have and into the field and into actual businesses and markets. Then we can start to think about more what are the right policy designs? What are the appropriate uses of these solutions alongside other climate technologies? Because I think these are great questions, but we just need to get started on the build out of this really a new economy. And we need to do so right now.
Christophe Jospe: I mean, you told us we’re here. We came here to record a podcast and talk about this new carbon economy and mentioned a little bit with Julio on the last podcast. But what is the new carbon economy? Who’s leading this thing? How’s it all coming together? And how will it help people, specifically governments, but kind of more broadly, people with money understand how and where to invest their money in this whole ecosystem?
Noah Deich: So a new carbon economy conceptually is a growing economy worldwide that removes carbon from the air on net, which is fundamentally different because we’re in a world where, as you mentioned, we’re pulling tonnes of carbon out of the ground, putting it into the air. The question is, how do we build that? How do we make that economy that we all envision something that’s just the economy? And that’s where the New Carbon Economy Consortium comes in. It’s a group of universities and national labs that are all working together towards the And they’re taking a very broad lens that they’re looking at all of the solutions that Giana mentioned earlier in the land sector and the technology sector and are bringing a multidisciplinary lens to the problem.
They’re saying, how do scientists and engineers How do we do that today? How do we do the foundational knowledge?
Ross Kenyon: So you’re talking about the new carbon economy. This is a way for people to monetize carbon removal, carbon sequestration, something like that, right? That’s like what we’re looking forward to in this new world.
Noah Deich: We’re looking for a world where we can continue to enjoy increasing prosperity and economic growth while also figuring out how to do so in a way that cleans up carbon.
Ross Kenyon: So just any way possible that it gets all those goals. Okay, I understand.
Giana Amador: And the research consortium is specifically focused on how do we take CO2, which we think about as a liability or a waste today, and actually turn that into an asset and transform it into valuable products and services.
Ross Kenyon: They’re stealing all my good lines. This is what I like to talk about.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I mean, we’re all about it. And when we looked far and wide on how to most efficiently create a voluntary marketplace with the supply of carbon removal credits, we saw that it would come from soils, which when they store more carbon, they’re actually way more profitable. They are way more resilient to climate disasters like drought because you’re retaining more water. And by the way, not putting nutrients into the streams and rivers and lakes and causing big word eutrophication, which is when you basically fertilize the water. All these great things and you’re making your farms more productive and all you need to get right is the measurement of the physical removal of CO2 and then you can create a marketplace on a blockchain.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve heard of a group doing this.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, we’re trying to do it, but we want to work with anyone else who also wants to do it and kind of share ideas on how to get the carbon accounting right and present a signal to entrepreneurs, not just those who are in the soil carbon field, but really anyone who can remove carbon to say, if you want to get paid and prove that the carbon has been removed, there’s a new way to make all this happen. So I’m going to put it back to you. You obviously know what we’re doing a little bit, but How do we fit?
Let’s say Nori shows up and a year from now, we suddenly have a marketplace and suddenly there are entrepreneurs saying, hey, I want to come in. How does it all fit together without putting you on the spot or anything?
Noah Deich: Well, so in order for a marketplace to actually function, there needs to be some sort of validation that the transaction that is happening is legitimate. And moving from the general to the specific with soils, it’s not a straightforward assessment to understand. How carbon cycles through soils and the microfauna in those soils and how deep that carbon goes and for how long and how permanent. All of these questions are very much questions that are in need of additional research treatment. And that’s what we’re hoping to really kickstart with this new carbon economy consortium, is to identify those research questions that have direct market implications.
That in order to make these market applications work, what are the most urgent research needs in front of us? How do we go out and do the testing at a broad enough scale? Do the science so we simply understand how microbes in soils work when it comes to depositing carbon and Cycling, not just carbon, but all of these other nutrients that you mentioned. And how do we understand how to create incentives for farmers to adopt these practices? I think all of that’s essential to have a really robust marketplace. So figuring out how to stand on the shoulders of that academic and research enterprise, I think is critical for markets, policy and investments, both from the private sector and the philanthropic sector to succeed.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’ve talked to lots of different groups for different methodologies that are all in the testing phase or it’s still very early days. And that’s why carbon removal wasn’t spoken of for a long time, both for the moral hazard reasons for which it’s very famous, but also because the technology just wasn’t there for either like verifying that this actually happened. Or if you’re looking at something like direct air capture, the price was just so outrageous or maybe not even feasible a decade ago. But it’s coming though, right? Like carbon removal is time is now.
It’s here. It’s here.
Noah Deich: It’s just not here at the scale we need. And that’s a function of, again, the research, the technology commercialization, and the policy ecosystem all needing to come together to make sure that we can take these exciting sparks and turn it into a real fire.
Ross Kenyon: Is this Arthur C. Clarke’s quote? The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed. It’s like current rules just isn’t, you know, it’s on everywhere yet.
Christophe Jospe: You know, you saying that quote, and then you saying these kind of three prongs, you’ve What was the third one? Commercialization. Commercialization. Within all of that, there are ideas on how to do things and how to do them better. And part of what really gets me going is when people have an idea that could be done better and they hold it to themselves versus publicly and openly sharing it and saying, hey, we have this challenge. It’s in soil carbon sequestration. We have all this data on this field and we have a baseline on how to measure that data after that field and it’s improved, yada, yada, yada.
One role that Nori sees that we can play to this is as more data goes through our system, we can put things out completely in the open that can point to key innovations, particularly on the measurement side, that you can be sure that more carbon has been removed immediately. I think to your point that there is great uncertainty ranges of how much carbon has actually been removed. We look at that in a tiered system and look at things that could remove carbon and mineralize it in a rock as like the safest, highest level.
Yes, I’m sure that happened. And something that, okay, I’m only kind of sure. Well, you have to wait a while to get paid carbon removal credits. And as more data is generated, that gets better over time. And we hope to do this in a completely open and transparent way, kind of working methodology by methodology with the best experts in the field who can build probabilistic models. So while we’re not, you know, sure, okay, there’s 100 carbon removal credits generated from that, we can give you a probability as to the certainty that at least works.
I kind of took the conversation in a different direction. Ross, you look like you want to throw something in there.
Ross Kenyon: You’re reading my body language incorrectly.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, okay. Well... Here’s where we’re going to take it then. We talked about the carbon recycling labs. Let me wave a magic wand. What does success look like for this incubator?
Noah Deich: I think it’s companies that did not exist today that do exist in the future with the support of The network of investors, corporates, and philanthropists that want to see the companies of the future emerge in this carbon space. And so it’s going to take a while for all those companies to have enormous climate impact, but we think that they can get into existing markets today, that there are huge markets for cement, fuels, and plastics, chemicals. The list goes on about ways that you can use CO2, make money doing it, and have a climate impact.
And so while those might not be the best and only pathway to getting carbon removal in the future, we think that by creating dozens of startups in the space that we’re going to get some really amazing businesses that will be foundational in the future.
Ross Kenyon: Stuff like beverage grade CO2 or enhanced oil recovery when you send carbon dioxide underground to pump out harder to get oil. Stuff like that is not, it doesn’t thrill us always, but I at least know like if someone’s using that technology, it’s going to keep getting better. And then like the more marginal use cases will like become more profitable. And so it might be like a little unpleasant there for a while or not nearly as good as you might want it to be. But hopefully the good stuff’s coming. Is this a similar attitude to yourselves or?
Giana Amador: Yeah, I think that’s right. And that CO2 that they’re using for enhanced oil recovery or for beverage carbonation has to come from somewhere. So if you can increase the supply of CO2, when you develop these technologies that then turn CO2 into fuels, cements, plastics, then you have this supply that’s already ready. And that’s like supplied for a very cheap price that can then be fed into that new industry. So you might feel uncomfortable in the meantime, but it’s all about that sort of Ecosystem development and how do we bring down the cost of technologies so that in the future they’re ready for us?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Julio yelled at us when he was saying, what was it? The technology always improves or something like that.
Christophe Jospe: I don’t think he was yelling. I think he was trying to inspire us to all say it together.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah. It’s true though. So like a lot of people, sometimes they always get hung up on the first step, but you’re like, this is like, this is like the start, you know, like we’re just seeding this process and technology is going to get better. Sometimes people get hung up there a little too early. I’m sure you run into naysayers and carbon removal too. And you’re like, just give it, give it a minute.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. So, I mean, you guys are the Center for Carbon Removal. I don’t know of any other centers for carbon removal or really any other nonprofit that takes on carbon removal as a whole topic. And it’s commendable and wonderful, but you must run into some misconceptions all the time. What are the biggest misunderstandings about carbon removal?
Giana Amador: They get our name wrong. We get the Center for Carbon Renewal a lot.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, man, we had that happen with a lawyer meeting. Yeah, they keep on calling what we’re doing a carbon reduction.
Giana Amador: It’s like, no, not exactly. But maybe you can speak to some real misconceptions that we face.
Noah Deich: There are actually that many misconceptions that are out there. People just don’t know what it is. It’s category creation, not shifting. What a coincidence that the thing that they worked on for 40 years is the only thing that works. They should get all the attention.
Christophe Jospe: So historically, it’s been carbon dioxide removal or CDR was dropping the D just kind of like going from the Facebook to Facebook. Exactly.
Noah Deich: It’s also more open ended. If you want to take methane out of the atmosphere. Awesome. That’s carbon removal. It’s not CO2 removal.
Christophe Jospe: Exactly. Yeah. And essentially carbon is the greenhouse gas that’s causing all the problems, whether we’re talking about methane or- Various carbon-based molecules. Chlorocarbons or various F-gases that cause all these additional challenges. I’m with you. We use carbon removal, so I guess we’re on the same page.
Ross Kenyon: You’re going to say something and I had a stupid joke and I really- Go for it.
Giana Amador: I’m sorry.
Ross Kenyon: No, no, no. You had something to say. Is it gone now?
Giana Amador: I think it’s gone. I think I was just going to say that carbon, for me, as opposed to carbon dioxide, like you learn about the carbon cycle when you’re in sixth grade and like- You know that carbon flows through all of life. It makes up everything that we care about. And so for some reason, that’s just less abstract for people to think about. And, you know, really gives this idea that we try to focus on about the sort of waste to value proposition that can come with carbon removal. And so, you know, carbon is not necessarily bad.
It’s just in the wrong place. It shouldn’t be in the atmosphere. It should be in our products. It should be in the ground. And we just need to tell that narrative. And so for me, that’s why I think carbon resonates more than carbon dioxide removal.
Noah Deich: No carbon shaming.
Ross Kenyon: Carbon shaming? Yeah, I like the positive approach people tend to take because environmentalism used to make me feel kind of bad. And I’m like, how are you supposed to attract people? It’s just like people who like feeling bad who join up. And I like that most of the people we talk to, it’s probably a selection bias thing. I tend to be like pretty optimistic. There’s like ways to do this where it’s either like one, you don’t even notice it. It just like is in a product that’s actually better than what you could have gotten before.
Or it’s like a way to do it where it’s like you can do whatever you want. Just like pay the price and remove the carbon and we can move on with your life. As opposed to like an endless suffering kind of thing where you have to like cut back on everything forever. I know mitigation is the biggest part of the cake. I won’t challenge that analogy or drag that up again. But I do like that’s the approach that it seems like you’re taking at least philosophically optimistic. You think technology is going to help all of those things?
Unknown speaker: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Giana Amador: Yeah. And I think there’s ways to be positive both on the mitigation side and on the carbon removal side. But it’s really about showing people that we can have a prosperous economy that And we can have an environment that’s safe and they’re not mutually exclusive. We need them both together. And so that’s sort of the framing that we’re supposed to bring or that we’re trying to bring to carbon removal.
Ross Kenyon: So you guys aren’t primitivists. You don’t want to go back to the hunter gatherer days.
Noah Deich: I mean, I haven’t had my phone on me in an hour at this point and it’s been lovely. So I don’t want to cross anything out. Yeah, that’s probably not plan A.
Ross Kenyon: You’re basically a hunter gatherer at this point.
Christophe Jospe: One hour without your smartphone. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Once Ross kind of drops into the hunter gatherer questions, I think that’s always a good signal. We should probably start wrapping it up. All the good stuff’s gone. Christophe, are you going to do your eco wrap to send us away? Please. Eco wrap? That’s not every week. Eco wrap? What? I didn’t know that. I didn’t do an eco wrap. No? Okay. I guess I got there. I guess I got there. I got the wrong memo. I thought Kristoff was going to do it. I’m getting put on the spot to have to- Did you do this once?
No, have I?
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think so. Why don’t you do it? I don’t even know what to say.
Christophe Jospe: Blushing so hard right now.
Unknown speaker: You just freestyle.
Giana Amador: We need someone who can beatbox.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I can beatbox. I can beatbox, so I could beatbox, but then someone else would need to freestyle. You’re going to do the freestyle rap, the carbon removal rap. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: No, what? No. This is so clearly going to end up on the cutting room floor.
Unknown speaker: With that attitude.
Giana Amador: I mean, if you just try, it might get cut out.
Ross Kenyon: This is my podcast. You are my guests. And this is all this is over.
Giana Amador: We’ll stay in line.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you for being here, kind of. That was fun. Thanks for hanging out with us, guys.
Unknown speaker: Thanks, guys. Yeah, thank you.
