How do we conduct science when there isn't a single isolated variable? What does that mean for carbon removal not taking place in a controlled environment? How does science even work?!
Today's show originated from a question of how open-system carbon removal research can be conducted given that in a less-controlled environment, isolating for a single variable with replicability is less obviously possible. Does the scientific method really demand that, or is that some sort of pop culture understanding of science that needs to be challegned?
To answer that question, host and co-founder of the Nori carbon removal marketplace, Ross Kenyon, asked Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo and Anu Khan of Carbon180, to read two books and come on Reversing Climate Change to discuss them.
The two texts are some of the foundational works of modern philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Paul Feyerabend's Against Method.
Kuhn argued that paradigms are the collection of foundational beliefs we have about how science and knowledge production is conducted, and that they are quite hard to see outside of since most people work so deeply within them. It can often be a generational effort, as older scientists die and new ones take their places.
Feyerabend goes further, arguing that we shouldn't just look for where one paradigm supersedes another, but be protective of competing systems of knowledge and the valuable ways of seeing that they unlock.
The show applies their learnings to the state of the CDR industry, and attempts to ferret out carbon removal's existing paradigm, whether the world is ready for credits that are not tonne-denominated, and how much time we can afford in retooling and letting "normal science" work within an imperfect paradigm vs. trying to create an entirely new paradigm ex nihilo.
N.B. At the 8:55 mark, I contrast Ptolemaic with geocentric and I meant to say heliocentric. Feyerabend said that the quality of predictions between Ptolemaic/geocentric and heliocentric models was similar.
Resources
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on Wikipedia
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hey everyone, I’m your host Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of the Nori carbon removal marketplace. I almost never do this, but this is a rather unique show. I began programming this show because I have a lot of questions about open systems carbon removal. That’s removal that takes place in a less controlled environment, like the ocean or soil. How can we do science when there really isn’t a single variable one can isolate?
As a non-scientist, I feel like my model for understanding how science actually works is extremely limited. Predictably enough if you listen to the show, my answer was to read some books on the philosophy of science that I’ve neglected, specifically Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. These are huge books for their discipline, similar to reading John Rawls and Robert Nozick in political philosophy. I’m going to explain them a bit here because Doctor Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo and Anu Khan of Carbon180 and myself dive in super quickly here and bounce between the books without, frankly, a lot of concern for the audience.
And that’s probably my fault. It’s hard to do a book club kind of show like this where there’s a lot of asymmetry in information between the speaker and the listener. So here’s what you need to know. Thomas Kuhn was a philosopher and historian of science active during the second half of the 20th century. Prior to Kuhn, a dominant idea in how science works is that there is just a gradual building of ideas within a coherent whole of science. If you compare it to geology, it’s uniformitarianism. There aren’t that many big cataclysms that shape the world, just slow and steady change.
Kuhn argued that scientists and really all knowledge workers have certain beliefs that shape their world that are very hard to see and challenge for both methodological and sociological reasons. Methodological because, well, let me put it this way. I think I’ve told the story on the podcast before, but during my time in Chicago, I had a communist friend and he denied that prices convey meaningful information. But pretty much every conversation you will have in your life takes for granted that prices are important because most people you speak with are liberals in the broad sense, both conservatives, progressives. Most people are broadly liberal in their political tradition, if you zoom out enough.
His denying that prices convey meaningful information was basically having to go back to the equivalent of the Cartesian “I think therefore I am.” What are some foundational things that we can build on from the very, very most lower bottom of reality? And it’s actually really challenging to go back that far and reframe the entire discussion, both because we have very little practice doing it in our everyday lives, especially when we’re talking about politics. We’re not often going to that level of depth, and we have a lot of downstream knowledge that was produced upon the foundations of things like property rights matter, prices matter, constitutional government is important, things like that that you take for granted.
Most of our political discussions have been really far downstream from that. So since I was working within a broadly liberal paradigm and he was working from within a Marxist paradigm, that inter-paradigm conversation was pretty difficult. I don’t think we made any headway at all, frankly. And so this is sort of what Kuhn and paradigms are like. It was actually really hard for me to imagine a world in which prices didn’t matter because I believed that so strongly. And it was really hard for, I think, my interlocutor to think the converse.
And so breakers of old paradigms and establishers of new paradigms — those are typically the names of scientists and many world leaders whom you know: Copernicus and Galileo for geocentrism, and then Einstein taking us from classical physics to relativity. People like that are the people whose names the layperson thinks of when they think about science. Most of the scientific work that happens accepts a paradigm and then works within it for knowledge production. For instance, if we know that force equals mass times acceleration, how does that help us put a rocket into space?
You know, one of those is extremely foundational — that equation, that conceptual understanding of how the physical world is governed — and then how we apply that knowledge to achieve some end state. And that application is what Kuhn deems normal science. That’s often what people are doing when they’re practicing science. Sociologically, why it’s really hard to speak between paradigms: this has a little bit of a conspiratorial whiff to it. It doesn’t have to, but it kind of does. It reminds me of that line that’s often associated with Douglas MacArthur, that old soldiers never die, they just fade away. So in this case, it’s old paradigms never die, they just fade away. Scientists are the ones who die and new ideas come along.
So once people have been trained in a paradigm, that’s their way of seeing and doing their science. They’re trained in the tools within their paradigm of how things work. It’s really difficult for them to throw it away. Once people have been trained in doing things a certain way and they have decades of their life potentially built into the system, they’re reaching the end of their career, the top of it. They don’t really want to see their life be thrown out by saying, oh, this is actually — we made some paradigmatic wrong turn. Most of the normal science within this is invalid or belongs in the graveyard of many of these discarded scientific ideas that we look back on, like Galenic humors, as being like, oh, isn’t that quaint?
I think there’s a sociological reason to want to avoid that happening to your legacy as an individual. And of course, professions have this too. And you can see fights, even recent fights that have happened on this. With plate tectonics, I’m told, was an extremely nasty transition within geology. Surprising how brutal that was within that community. And there’s just a lot of really strong feelings and protection over the knowledge that has been produced within a system. So there’s a lot of inertia built into that. So Thomas Kuhn spends a fair amount of time dealing with that.
And obviously it makes sense — if you’ve ever had a religious conversion experience or a political one, it’s a bit like that. If you have to tell your friends, your family, your social network that you are actually no longer a Muslim or a Christian, or you are no longer going to venerate your ancestors, or that you have become a libertarian or a socialist or really anything like that, you will know that there is a lot of social pressure against group defection. These ideas are probably not blowing your mind for the same reason that if you go watch Citizen Kane, it looks a lot like films you’ve already seen, because it pioneered a lot of the visual grammar and the storytelling techniques that followed it. So if what I’m telling you seems like a “well, yeah, duh,” that’s because the book has just been that influential.
OK, so Paul Feyerabend — they’re contemporaries. So Feyerabend and Kuhn, they’re working around the same time, the second half of the 20th century. And Feyerabend often calls himself an epistemological anarchist. Epistemology is the study of what we know, of knowledge. And he’s famous for the phrase “anything goes.” It’s sort of hard to read him in a non-postmodern way in 2024 because of a common belief in contemporary times that power operates through language, which is decisively not neutral, and that science is a reflection of those very same power relations. Knowledge production serves those in power, not truth. And what even is truth anyways?
Holly checks me on leaning too heavily into this reading since it may put him too neatly in a box that he doesn’t belong within. Feyerabend makes the case that Ptolemaic astronomy was comparably accurate in predicting astronomical events as the geocentric model. If a method of knowledge production produces a useful result, it might still be useful, even if the foundational assumptions are incorrect. Feyerabend is more like someone concerned about the loss of linguistic diversity around the planet. As the world becomes homogenized and there is a hegemonic way of understanding how the world works, languages that slice up reality in entirely different ways lose their place ordering the world, despite them having produced important understandings that are perhaps absent in other ways of structuring reality in our understanding of it.
Feyerabend thinks scientific systems can be a bit like this, and it isn’t that one paradigm is necessarily better than another, or that every one that advances is better than the one previous to it. So we talk a lot about history and historiography, and one of the common schools of thought within history that’s usually panned pretty hard — it’s not super well respected and it’s more common in popular histories, especially older history — is called the Whiggish view of history. The Whig being an English political party, but the Whigs being people who thought the world was progressively becoming better over time. Humans are perfectible in a way, our institutions are getting better.
And while that is true in some sense, I think many people would dispute that that is the case. And in fact, there are times history seemingly goes backwards and results in more barbarism, more cruelty, things like that. It isn’t clear that history has a teleology, an end point that we’re driving toward, something that’s associated with someone like Hegel. This is more something like it’s chaos, basically. There is no God, there’s no one in charge. It’s just chaos, and I think good things happen, bad things happen, and there’s no sequentiality to it. There’s just sometimes good, sometimes bad.
So I personally think Feyerabend is a much better critic than a builder. In Nietzsche’s words, he called it someone who philosophizes with a hammer, and those people are often pretty fun to read. But he does offer valuable prods against us getting too comfortable within any one paradigm. But I was left wondering what shape capital-T Truth is in after Feyerabend, in a very similar way to how I felt after digging into postmodernism and post-Rawlsian political philosophy within the analytic tradition. Just like — what? What do I do with this information now?
Is there actually some foundationalist work we can do that allows us to build the something that is syllogistically self-evidently true? Does truth survive a way of understanding knowledge production in this way? So I end up getting caught there. Holly and Anu do not seem to get nearly so stuck on that idea. But that might just be how our brains work more than anything else. Now, if everyone can just join my meta-paradigm where we swap paradigms akin to flipping through filters on a kaleidoscope, we could all live as philosopher kings and queens. That’s probably not going to happen, but that’s sort of where I like to hang out. So I hope that is a pretty decent start to help you work your way through this.
Oh, then one other note that doesn’t fit into this big Kuhn–Feyerabend part nearly as well, but I wanted to say: I tell a story in the show about how JFK stood down Curtis LeMay during the Cuban Missile Crisis and decided against launching a preemptive strike against Cuba, which would have almost certainly triggered nuclear Armageddon. And just to make an even stronger point about the role of contingency in history, Kennedy was reading Barbara Tuchman’s excellent, outstanding book — you should absolutely read it — The Guns of August, about how the nations of Europe sleepwalked their way into World War One almost by accident.
And so if you want to talk about contingency, what are the odds that Kennedy just happens to be reading that book at exactly the moment that he needs it? That’s a beautiful, beautiful, terrifying idea. So hopefully that’s a good start. Hope you enjoy the show. That’s the longest intro by far. But I love this content, super important, and thanks for listening.
Welcome back to the show, Holly. You’ve been on Reversing Climate Change I don’t know how many times, and Carbon Removal Newsroom, at which you are a regular panelist. I’m glad to have you back.
Holly Jean Buck: It’s a delight to be here, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: A delight. I love that. That’s great. And Anu Khan — Anu, we have not had you on previously, but I’m really happy that you were able to come on the show.
Anu Khan: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. And I love that I’m here for this conversation because it’s a wild topic.
Ross Kenyon: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It gave me a great sense of power that I could incent two very busy scholars to read some challenging books. Several of them — they alleged to have read both of them to some extent. It’s pretty good. I can’t believe I had that amount of Svengali-esque power over each of you from a distance.
Anu Khan: I think you’re not accounting for what a big nerd I am. And I was like, an excuse to read this book!
Ross Kenyon: So it’s not — yeah, not me, it’s your own individual nerd.
Holly Jean Buck: I feel similarly, though. I’ve known about these books for a long time. I was familiar with the arguments but had never sat down and read them. So I liked the opportunity to have read these.
Ross Kenyon: The books that we are reading and discussing today are Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. Just broadly, did you enjoy it, this process? Was this new to you? Is it old news in the general sense of it? How was this?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, it’s kind of nice to go back to grad school mode, because being a professor is actually a lot about administration and bureaucratic tasks. And so it’s fun to like, dive into some books.
Anu Khan: Yeah. Similarly, I spend a lot of my time thinking about carbon removal standards and like really in the weeds of like reading methodologies and like how do they do that energy LCA part of this methodology versus this other one. So it was really fun to take this sort of, you know, 30,000-foot view of what are we doing here when we’re doing carbon removal science, and how does it fit into this broader — how do you describe it — historical and pedagogical framework.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s what inspired this show. Nori, the company I co-founded, we worked in soil for a long time, which is a type of open systems carbon removal. And I’ve done several shows with scientists where the question of falsifiability has come up. Ideally, in a perfect scientific system, at least as pop culture wants to believe, you have some sort of physical system that is being observed, and you have isolated a single variable and are making a change on it. You can have a result that can then feed back and then form a new theory. But the type of science that’s being done for open system CDR is not really like that.
I’m not sure how it could ever be like that, because how could you have a single variable in a place like the ocean or in soil? I don’t know. So what does science mean if you cannot have that simple falsifiability that you associate with people like Karl Popper and the caricature of positivism that people just have in their head just because that’s the dominant ideology of civilization at this point? And I didn’t know where to go from. Now, I knew these books maybe had some clues. I’m not sure if all these clues pointed in the direction I had hoped they would, but it did make me think. And that’s really the best thing I can hope for from a book at this point: did it make me think or not? But I’m not sure it helped me solve this open system CDR “how do we practice science” question. Solve it for either of you. That’s probably too high of an expectation, I think.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I can say that for me, this reminded me about where we started from, because I just feel like we’re so much in a different point with what we mean by science right now versus even when these books were written. And so since then we’ve had this idea of, quote, survival science, or crisis disciplines like conservation biology that are emerging in response to ecological collapse. And like you’re producing knowledge under this different set of conditions, which definitely means that you need to act before you have absolute certainty and you’re mixing in intuition. At least that’s what the scholars who have written about crisis disciplines have talked about. So, you know, there’s that. There’s the whole thing about post-normal science. I think both of those modes are really familiar to people working on a problem like carbon removal. But these books were kind of being written as that turn was beginning to happen. So it’s fun to read.
Anu Khan: Yeah. Yesterday I was in a workshop that was all about what are the research gaps in carbon removal? How should scientific research centers, new and emerging and existing, think about supporting carbon removal as a field? And one of the things that was really interesting that emerged was this idea that we need to make a list of things to measure. It’s not just one thing, but there’s like — there’s some list that if we measured all of these things, it would tell us what we needed to know. And then the next phase of the conversation was we need to prioritize this list somehow because we can’t measure everything.
And then the next phase of the conversation was, what are we prioritizing for? Are we prioritizing to get really smart about techno-economic analysis and how quickly we can drive down the cost curve for certain technologies? Are we prioritizing for ecological impacts and environmental impacts and reducing harm or doing no harm and generating co-benefits? Are we prioritizing for any number of other things? But I think the big ones were the cost of carbon removal itself and everything else that happens. Oh, and there’s a big conversation around, are we optimizing for resource management and all of the things that we could do other than carbon removal, and fitting carbon removal into that framework?
And so I think that is what emerged for me in this sort of like “what is carbon removal science” conversation. It’s very much about what is the problem we’re trying to solve for when we do theory-directed and applied science in the context of carbon removal. And it’s not always just do we know where the carbon is, which is itself a hard enough question to address.
Ross Kenyon: And I wonder if that’s even science or if it’s engineering. I mean, if you’re making like a list of things to measure, which bucket would you put it in?
Anu Khan: Yeah, I think it’s some aspect of both. And I think we were just talking about this, that the work that we’re discussing is from, you know, the 60s and the 70s, post — sure — big chemistry and physics revolutions. And at least my scientific training in like the 2000s was much more in this interdisciplinary — we recognize that our science is much more applied and directed towards things that we’re going to build in the world. And so I wonder if my conception of scientific training is really different from what these authors had in mind, because I was trained in a paradigm that was inherently interdisciplinary. You were told over and over again that like your science is applied science. It is for something, and only — they’d let super-duper smart people get to do fundamental science, which is just math.
Ross Kenyon: You’re just a normal scientist, as Kuhn might say. Whenever you say paradigm, I want it to be like a Pee-wee’s Playhouse where that’s the word of the day and we all scream. I don’t know if you guys grew up watching that.
Anu Khan: Not really.
Ross Kenyon: Holly’s smiling, so maybe, maybe a little bit. God, there’s so much to say about this. I don’t even really know how to dive in. The interdisciplinary part of this is pretty important. I wonder if there — this is clearly a response to maybe scientists being so cloistered that they forgot about the world outside. They’ve become so enamored with their ideas that they forgot about the social repercussions of them. Or that there are other disciplines that can bring in ideas that might reinforce their work or challenge their work in important ways. Do either of you know what led to that change and how the Academy was structured?
Holly Jean Buck: I wouldn’t say it’s really changed yet. Those things were — it’s more of a buzzword than actually realigning institutions and incentives.
Ross Kenyon: How do they incent that in the Academy?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, like, if you wanted people to do interdisciplinary work, then you need to like, revise tenure and promotion criteria to make that work legible. So it’s like, read from different people, or, you know — yeah, I think that’s one of the main things people talk about. But I mean, even just setting up like jobs in this space, right, even now, most people — they’ll hire you to do interdisciplinary work, but you need to be like in a department of X or Y or Z. And that’s like kind of what really matters to your career trajectory. So, you know, we recognize the ideal of interdisciplinarity, but haven’t mainstreamed it yet.
Ross Kenyon: That track with your experience, Anu?
Anu Khan: Oh, I got out a while ago. I left in grad school, so I’m a terrible metric for interdisciplinarity. But maybe it tracks in the sense that I left grad school and now I work in carbon removal, very much trying to figure out where the threads are around industry and academia and policy and the whole kind of like nest of weird stuff that is necessary to grapple with if you’re thinking about carbon removal as a public good that we don’t quite know how to measure yet.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’re going to get to that. That’s pretty far downstream, but super important. I think we should start pretty close to the fundamentals here with philosophy of science. And probably since you’re on, I need to quote the Bible — it’s just sort of something that I need to do when you’re on the podcast. But I don’t want to go all Pontius Pilate on us. But what is truth? Like, what exactly is objectivity and truth? Is this a possible ideal within science? I think the average person, if you ask them, would say yes, it still exists. Yes, it’s possible, it’s desirable. And people like Feyerabend are just saying we need a pluralism.
There’s multiple knowledges that can be constructed, and we do well for ourselves, and we do not have power saying this type of knowledge is legitimate, this other one is not. I’m also nervous about that too. The expression that I’ve heard for this — it’s not a very careful phrase, but don’t let your mind be so open that your brain falls out. I also don’t want to do that either. I think if you take Feyerabend seriously, you have to start biting the bullet that there are things that are maybe not true, that are maybe more mythological, that are symbolic. And I’m not sure how you evaluate truth claims within Feyerabend at that point. I don’t even know what to do with it, but I like the ideas. So anyways, is there truth? Is there objectivity? What do we do with all these ideas?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I mean, did you read this book as being just completely postmodern? I mean, I wasn’t sure that that’s what Feyerabend was saying. Like he says, anything goes, but I don’t know if that exactly means like every truth claim is equally valid.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s right. I think he does a better job of breaking things down than building up something else, but I’m not really sure how we evaluate truth claims or how to even approach a statement like I just made from within an “anything goes” kind of framework. In a sense, it almost sounds kind of like positivism to me. Like, does it lead to results that are actionable? In which case, OK, anything does go if that’s the case, and how you get there is sort of irrelevant to the results. But I could be reading him wrong, so feel free to push back if you think I’ve misread.
Holly Jean Buck: For me, the interesting question — I spent less time with Feyerabend, so maybe less able to assess those questions, but the question of like truth is just so gnarly. I feel like I would need to read — I would need to spend years thinking about that question.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, they killed Socrates for questions like that. It’s pretty annoying.
Holly Jean Buck: I get it, yeah. True.
Ross Kenyon: No, I mean, so what do you think is the main project of this book?
Holly Jean Buck: So I think the project is to just open up how people approach science and to encourage them to, you know, proceed against intuition and test out new and different stuff, because that’s what they needed to do at that time. So, you know, I think how we would read the book today — we’re really in a different space, because we had postmodernism in so many forms. And now, you know, we’ve really opened up this question of what is science? What is truth? Is every perspective equally valid? We have a lot of robust, interesting conversations around Indigenous science and, you know, how to include that in something like impact analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act. Like, these kinds of questions are our thing now that would not have been a thing at the time this book was written. So, you know, this question about what is truth — I don’t think that was part of the main project necessarily.
Anu Khan: I think what jumps out to me from what Holly was saying about the opening up of the process and the conversations that we’re now having about things like including traditional indigenous knowledge in the scientific enterprise is how incomplete that activity is. And thinking about it specifically through the lens of sort of carbon removal science and carbon quantification science, the extent to which going back to like normal science is still very much the way that we think about chipping away at uncertainty. And what we’re trying to measure and the list of things that we’re trying to measure. This whole like — we are in a different place than when these books were written, and yet we’re very much in an incomplete transition phase, in this period between revolutions, or even we’re still in this paradigm and we’re incrementally chipping away at something that might come next.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s a nice little point to make. And I agree, Holly, I don’t think the fundamental nature of truth is really what Feyerabend’s after. I link this to my undergrad degrees in history, and one of my favorite courses I took had a strong historiography focus. It was very much about how we practice history and some of those meta questions. And what I liked about it is that as any type of scholar, you should be able to flip between paradigms relatively fluidly. There’s something that I always find disappointing about someone who only has one way of seeing things and that’s all they can do.
In the historiography course there was, OK, well, the great man theory of history was a thing that was important back in the day. Like Napoleon — if there was no Napoleon, the course of world history would have changed. And then you had other approaches, especially I think associated with Howard Zinn and New Left historiography, of saying like the masses are basically what matters. Like the broad tides of history and the quantity of humanity is what makes up and drives history.
But there’s also cases even inside of history where — the example I like to think of is during the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK stood down Curtis LeMay, who wanted to have a preemptive strike on Cuba, and JFK said no, and he went for the quarantine and the blockade approach instead. And if there was a different president, different personnel, the world would have ended. We would have had nuclear war because someone would have listened to Curtis LeMay and JFK didn’t. But it’s also possible that we would have ended up in the same spot anyways, just because all those historical forces pushed us to that place.
So I’m able to use both of those paradigms at the same time to have a nuanced understanding of this. I think that’s what Feyerabend’s trying to do too. And your linkage, Holly, especially to Indigenous knowledge and what’s happening now — I think if you can say Western science teaches us this and other systems of knowledge might add this to the mix, I think being able to hold those and swap between them without being too obsessed with any one of them that you lose track of the broader picture, I think that’s what he might be pointing toward. Or maybe that’s just my bias, because that’s a conclusion that I want.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I would agree. I mean, he has this passage where he talks about voodoo and the Hermetic writings and how they influenced Newton and all of this stuff. And it’s like you get something from these other forms of knowledge and belief systems. You know, it’s all valuable — that was my takeaway from that passage.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I read a history of the occult recently, and Newton being into alchemy and being pretty strange in that way was a surprising fact to me.
Anu Khan: I have a question. Does Against Method have its own definition of a paradigm? Because one thing you said in your last question was like your ability to switch between paradigms — and is it a paradigm if you were able to switch between them?
Ross Kenyon: I think Kuhn would say no. I think he would say you kind of live within it. You were trained in this. All of your incentives sociologically are to not stray from the paradigm. Paradigms change when old scientists die, essentially. No, I’m not using it in a Kuhnian way. I’m not even sure I’m using it in a Feyerabendian way, if that’s even the correct adjective. I think I’m just using it in the colloquial — I mean, Kuhnian paradigm. Before Kuhn it was just a weird Greek word that no one used. I think it was basically him. Now it’s an idiom. Now it’s everywhere. But you are correct, I think procedurally I am not using this word carefully.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, it’s interesting, ’cause I think what you’re describing is like what in Kuhn he had as like a change of worldview, a change of view, not a change of the world. That you’re looking at the rabbit and the duck, and you’ve gotten yourself to a place where you can just see lines and call it a rabbit or a duck if you want to. But that was like the breakdown of the visual analogy with the paradigms — of the paradigm you can’t get out of.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m saying, well, I’m so smart and so cool that I can see both the rabbit and a duck depending on what serves my interests at any given time. Yeah, you’re right. That’s probably not the right way to use it. I don’t know what I would call it instead. It’s just a way of seeing. Or I think all of those paradigms, or whatever we want to call them in the way that I use them — they illuminate some things and they obscure some things as well. They do that at the same time.
Anu Khan: It’s also interesting that you mentioned the sort of like great man theory of history or historiography, because Kuhn is in that frame too. Like he’s challenging all these paradigms and then right in there he’s like, also funny thing, these were all like young men that decided how to change science. Like, well, that is itself a pretty small box in which to contain your expectations about scientific revolution.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s true. If it wasn’t Galileo or Copernicus, would it have been some other person several weeks later that would have done something quite similar? I don’t know. I think some people would say yes, it would have happened. It was almost inevitable once the forces of history were at work. There’s a dramaturgical sense of that too, right? Like we’re on a stage. There are actors who come to play this role, and if someone is left out of this role, someone else will come in. I don’t know if you’ve seen Synecdoche, New York, that Charlie Kaufman movie, but I think that’s a way of seeing history. I would say — is this show going off the rails, or is this fantastic? I can’t tell. Holly, what do you think?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I’ve been thinking about this a lot in relationship to solar geoengineering actually. And you could imagine that that field in particular is one where an individual and their psychology and their ego, whatever’s going on with them, might have an impact on world history in that kind of way that you describe the Cuban Missile Crisis or whatever, where it’s just a little bit random in a frightening way. So I do think we have to think about like the whole person that’s doing the science and their psychology and motivations and bring that more into our understanding of what’s going on.
Ross Kenyon: Anu, does this help you with your MRV work, or is this just entirely external to your thing? Like, will this inform any of your work?
Anu Khan: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Thank God. As I mentioned earlier, making things about MRV is my useless superpower. I think what jumped out to me in reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and this discussion about paradigms and how they are both social and sort of like technical and psychological — I think we, or I hope we, are at a point of a potential paradigm shift in how we think about carbon removal and carbon markets, where our like social construction of the problem, and therefore the science that we do within that construction of the problem, is very much about markets and carbon as a currency as the dominant form of carbon removal activity.
And I think I see elements of like crisis and transformation, that maybe we’re moving towards something that isn’t just carbon crediting as the way we think about and do carbon removal. And we’re thinking about things that are more like sector-level accounting of fluxes and other funding mechanisms, and the science and infrastructure and apparatus and instrumentation that would arise from that alternative paradigm. And as I was going through the book, I kept — like, he would talk about different things that show up in crises and I’d be like, oh, I think this is happening in [unclear]. I think people are like discontent, and proliferation of other — yeah, yeah, there’s some anomalies. There’s some mere facts that are being transformed into evidence of a shift.
So I found it really, really interesting to apply this sort of like framework of revolutions to a lot of what I’m seeing and how we think about carbon removal. Like, is carbon a currency, or is there some other way of thinking about this problem? And in particular, the MRV piece of it I think is the like puzzle-solving character. If you think of the puzzle solving in the paradigm for carbon removal, it’s we’re definitely going to get a credit out of the end of this thing. And the puzzle solving is like, how do we do the pieces of MRV in order to get a credit? And it’s like, you could come up with really cool and clever ways to do this, or you could be like, wait, why am I assuming there’s going to be a credit at the end of this process? So all of that to say, I love this book and I have a lot of thoughts about how it applies to carbon removal.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, I think everything Anu just said about the possibility of transformation is exciting and also daunting. And so I think there’s like a good version, which for me would be in a more public good or even socialist frame. And then there’s the dangerous version where people implement these practices out of more of like a religious motivation, which again, could be good, but it could be bad, it could have bad impacts. So I guess I’m informed not just thinking about carbon removal, but thinking about solar geoengineering, which has a lot of these uncertainties. And you could imagine that, you know, some people in the future decide to undertake it based on faith because they might not have the rigorous infrastructure for monitoring set up or whatever, and they just keep doing it out of like ritualistic hope.
I think you could see the same thing with carbon sequestration in different forms too. And, you know, there could be a spin on that where it’s like, oh, we’re in this happy, you know, post-whatever old paradigm where we’ve opened up the box in how we think about this. But you could also see it being a disaster. So does that make sense? Those different features.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like old climate paradigms as cargo cults essentially. The focus on carbon crediting is something that I think a lot about. I work at a marketplace and there are parts of this that I am uncomfortable with as well. And one of our team members — I’m sure he’d like a shout out right now — Patrick, who’s our head of product, he would very much like to be selling the assets that we’re creating based on acreage for farmland converted to regen rather than tons of carbon dioxide. But we’re so path-dependent.
The world’s been thinking in terms of a ton of offset or a ton of fossil fuel, even though that’s wrong, for a very long time, assuming that it’s just like classical offsets, but trying to educate them — it’s been 30 years and they’re still pretty bad at it. And we’ve been talking — I remember being a kid hearing about the CDM and Kyoto. And still, they just have that one idea in their head and that’s all that it is. And so having to do a business that’s already difficult and educate them about something else when someone else is selling them like the product that they’ve come to be educated to expect, that’s really hard as a business.
So I’m not sure how — maybe you just said the solution is something that’s more socialist, something that’s more industrial policy, as [unclear] might say, something else. But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that as a business person, because it’s pretty tricky. I think that actually might be a good solution, but then my job is just yelling into the void perhaps. But I think business people change their models when there’s some new viral idea that reaches a certain tipping point and they’re hearing from the messengers that they respect. Don’t you think this happens a lot?
Holly Jean Buck: I guess. But who are the messengers they respect?
Ross Kenyon: It’s probably not me. It’s probably people like Al Gore and whoever is on stage at TED, or whoever is going to Azerbaijan this year. It’s not going to be me. So am I just like isolating myself from the dominant paradigm here?
Holly Jean Buck: Maybe you just need to keep making podcasts that sneak the idea to other people.
Ross Kenyon: I think they’re listening to a show with their peers on it. I think I’m running like a weird little freak show over here that I’m proud of. But I don’t think those people are. If you’re out there, John Kerry, if you’re listening right now, send me a note. I’d like to know.
Holly Jean Buck: I think it does make a difference if we — well, paradigm change because you’ve clearly articulated an alternative, right? And I think that piece has been super challenging, because the dominant paradigm isn’t just about climate. It’s about like our entire society and like capitalism and blah, blah, blah — like all these things, right, that are so deeply tied to our well-being as individuals.
Anu Khan: I think there are three sort of threads that I wanted to pull on in response to what you and Holly were saying. The first is the challenge of clearly articulating an alternative paradigm. The one that we’re in is so pervasive. It’s not really about carbon or climate. It’s just like about everything and how we operate in society. So articulating an alternative just for the little bit that’s a carbon or climate problem, and that’s sufficiently compelling, I think is one of the problems that I spend a lot of time thinking about. And even just like, are there narrow slices where we can articulate an alternative to crediting that’s just, you know, for this pathway in this point in time? Can we do acres or something like that?
The other thread that came up from your comments, that sort of like John Kerry and Al Gore and like who’s influential — I talk to a lot of folks about this question of like who gives companies permission to purchase in an alternative paradigm, right? Because you have like the whole net zero, SBTi corporate goals, those have to be tied to metrics that are tied to finances or your CFO can sign off on it. So thinking a lot about like who does give companies permission to try different things, because what they’re doing is spending money on climate and getting some numbers out the other side.
And then I think the third thing, and this is a little bit going back to Holly’s earlier point of what if — what point that I take to be like, what if the alternative paradigm is worse? If you have like crediting, at least you’re getting numbers out of it. You have some data that you generate. And what if the alternative is just like, we just have to deploy as quickly as possible and we don’t have to measure anything. We just have to go, go, go and like do the thing. And that does seem somewhat plausible to me, that we get to a point where climate is like bad enough that this pseudo-rational crediting mechanism is displaced by a more aggressive “we just have to do the thing.”
And I hear that sometimes in sort of spaces and conferences and things, like, you don’t appreciate how bad it is, like you don’t understand, this is so bad, we have to do this kind of thinking. But it circles back to that first point of how do we clearly articulate an alternative and do so in a way that’s like a small enough experiment that you could actually try, right? Sort of this from Kuhn: isolating and precisely articulating the outlier as the first step in a paradigm shift.
Ross Kenyon: I think what would come about, even as a next paradigm — it could be something that was far more holistic and far more policy based. Certainly possible it could be still within the crediting paradigm. It’d be a kind of sub-paradigm. I heard Ryan Orbuch on Shayle Kann’s podcast a couple months ago, or maybe it was even longer, advocating for credits to be denominated in terms of radiative forcing. So that’s a nightmare. I don’t even know how you educate a customer in that. That’s worse than my idea. It might be more true, but it’s not easier to get action on. But I like that it was outside of normal thinking. I don’t think it’s going to be something like that, but it might be something about biodiversity and carbon and the water cycle and the social benefits and environmental justice. It could be something like that. Certainly that is a younger generation set of ideas that’s coming about that might have power. I don’t know. What do you guys think?
Holly Jean Buck: I never really understood why CDR wasn’t just a subset of ecosystem services stuff.
Ross Kenyon: Do you not think it is? I think some people do think of it that way, no?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, when you’re thinking about your credit, are you getting streams from different services, or is it only carbon?
Ross Kenyon: I mean, we have fellow travelers who do try to do a more thoroughgoing ecosystem services approach, but even doing carbon well — and that’s relatively well understood — super hard. We’ve been doing this for seven years and there are still open questions that we try really hard and in good faith to deal with. And it’s challenging. So I can’t imagine also having to deal with water and biodiversity and everything else on top of it. Maybe others can do it, maybe smarter people can figure it out, but I don’t know that it’s super simple. And then also you have to educate a customer, being like, OK, you have to buy 1.3 biodiversity credits for this piece of land and half of a water credit. And I don’t know, my brain hurts even trying to come up with a theoretical here. You can smack me down though if you think this is some way out.
Anu Khan: What comes to mind for me when I hear these conversations about the increasing complexity of generating rigorous and valid, in some sense, environmental attribute credits is the part of a paradigm shift that is not necessarily scientific, but about the aesthetics and like the neater, simpler solution. And I often have these conversations about MRV and carbon removal where we’re like, to make it better, we have to make it so complex. There have to be so many people, so many things we measure, so much that goes into this package. And like, is there a simpler thing we could do?
And the policy shift that I often think about — not to say that this is like what’s going to work, but I think it’s maybe worth testing — is can we do sector-level accounting of fluxes or facility-level accounting of fluxes, taking out some of the additionality, baseline and counterfactual questions that we use for credit generation? And recognizing my own bias is sort of mapped back to scientific revolutions, there’s a part of me that just really likes that it’s simpler. Like, I just want it to be easier for me to do this accounting. And that is like part of the appealing aspect of a potential shift.
Ross Kenyon: Respect the approach. I certainly think we need approaches that allow for ease and scalability. I think the industry has fostered around this idea of precision über alles essentially, and that’s good, but it isn’t good for its own sake. I think if it helps get us faster PPM, it increases trust to the degree that allows us to scale that much faster, then OK. But I think maximizing for any attribute feels asymptotic to me. And it’s like you get to 80/20 and every additional percentage of precision I feel like adds that much more hard work for the suppliers. And it’s like, I don’t even know that it gives you that much more validity to the carbon claim. Maybe it does, maybe it’s worth it, but I think people take it for granted. And I never mind when someone wants to throw it out and start afresh. I’d like to hear more about your proposal. I don’t know what it means for it to be sector-based rather than something else, but I’d love to know about it.
Anu Khan: Yeah. So I should say this is very early days thinking, of just like really desperately wanting to articulate an alternative that we can at least test, ’cause there seems to be so many challenges with the current paradigm. But I think particularly for open system CDR solutions, thinking about crediting being one part of a broader set of funding mechanisms for drawdown activities. Where, for example, if you did want to have like a really robust offset, you could do a very rigorous set of measurements to quantify CO2 and attribute it to a specific activity like at the field scale.
Alternatively, you could imagine a scenario where you are, for example, deploying enhanced weathering for soil pH management as one of a set of possible soil amendments for agricultural reasons and sort of agronomic benefits. And then at the, say like, watershed river system, jurisdiction level, building out a system of river gauges that would allow you to check over time for changes in total alkalinity and incorporate that through the use of appropriate models and parameters in a national greenhouse gas inventory.
So what you’re doing is you’re trying to solve for a soil pH problem that may, in a local context where there’s, you know, lime or silicates available, be an appropriate agronomic solution. And then also checking through a different level of monitoring if there was a carbon drawdown benefit or impact that should be accounted for at the jurisdiction scale. So stuff like that is kind of where I hang out these days.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think about that, Holly?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I guess I’m still thinking back to Kuhn and all this stuff that he writes about puzzles — do you remember this part? It’s like the point of normal science is to better apply the paradigm within the same kind of scope. And you know, people within this normal science, they’re really into solving puzzles with established rules. And when I hear all of this and I think about CDR MRV, I just think about the puzzle solvers and like, I don’t know, maybe we could come at this from a whole different direction than that.
Ross Kenyon: One counter to it that I heard — I was reading that new book Climate Capitalism, and he quotes Noam Chomsky, and they’re saying that it’s too late to [unclear] away from capitalism in time to deal with climate change, and that we essentially need to use the tools in front of us. So maybe we don’t want to confuse the puzzle solvers. Maybe they need to be working on the best way to deliver carbon credits, and something else is probably too far away, requires too much education to switch in time to make a difference. It’s totally open. You can disagree with that as an assertion, but interesting idea.
Anu Khan: Yeah, I personally find that to be a pretty compelling argument. And sometimes I’m in spaces where we’re trying really hard to design an ideal system for like making carbon removal work. And then someone usually with an industry background is like, you just need demand. If you pay people to do it, all the other problems will get solved — like the pipeline, the talent, the MRV, all of it. If you have demand, it’ll just solve the rest of the problem. And I’m like — and again, going back to that sort of aesthetic quality that’s appealing — I’m like, yeah, I kind of see the logic. Like if you just really lean into the capitalism of it all, maybe it does solve the rest of your upstream problem.
Ross Kenyon: All right, Holly’s winding up over here. I can just feel it in my bones.
Holly Jean Buck: No, I mean, I’ve heard these same things too, but it’s just so not true. And we’re forgetting like the main demand, which is the demand of the public to pay for this. And whenever I do like a focus group just with regular members of the public who have never heard about it, they’re like, well, how much is this going to cost? I don’t know. I can’t even afford X, Y and Z because of inflation. It’s like that’s the ask and the demand that all of the people I think in the CDR space are kind of ignoring. Maybe that’s unfair. But so I think about, OK, if we had that demand, maybe — but how do we get that demand? What are the structural obstacles? And you know, I think of things like the political economy of the Internet and so on, to getting to the consensus level about even the shape of the problem to be able to then get to that demand for carbon removal at scale.
Anu Khan: When you think about the puzzle-solving component and how the puzzle-solving process has a predetermined outcome, what is the predetermined outcome that you have in mind in our existing paradigm?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I mean, I think you described it well earlier when you were talking about, you know, a robust credit that somebody can exchange, right? It’s to move along that whole economy of the exchange.
Ross Kenyon: I like it. I think that’s a good way to put it too, because you really at any — OK, I’ll back up a second. Feyerabend has a bunch about John Stuart Mill, which I thought was pretty interesting, that he likes John Stuart Mill so much. I also like John Stuart Mill. It’s come up on the podcast several times that I always forget if it’s him or Edmund Burke, but they both have a similar line that there’s always a party of order and there’s always a party of progress, and you don’t just want one or the other. Well, maybe some people do, but if you only have the party of progress, you end up with guillotines. If you only have the party of order, nothing ever changes and evolves. Probably don’t want either of those for the most part. So you need to have them in tension with each other.
And in that same way too, at a company or even in any organization, you have some people that are outside-the-box thinkers who are coming up with new ideas. But that’s sort of what I am and do. But if you only had a company of me’s, I don’t think it would work very well. You also need those linear puzzle solvers who are actually building stuff in a very stepwise kind of way. Because if you only have paradigm shifters, I don’t think you ever get a chance to solve any puzzle. I think you just sit around in a book club like this, which is fun, but I don’t know that it changes the world in the ways that we need.
So I think having an ecology of beliefs like that — you need different types of personalities, you need different types of approaches. And I think that sort of friction and dialectic can be really powerful in a good way. Also very frustrating. That means you never really come to a finite conclusion that we all walk away happy from. It’s all synthesis and debate. And maybe that’s what we did here today, but it was kind of fun. Did you have fun? Are you not entertained?
Anu Khan: I am very educated. I love the opportunity to think about the paradigms in which we’re operating in carbon removal, and also think about how we are making the sort of progress within the paradigm that we’re in. Like, people are starting to build carbon removal solutions. We’re starting to get more information about what works and what doesn’t work and what the challenges are. And it’s fun to zoom out and think about the overall structure of the problem. But I think most of us are in our day-to-day lives just kind of like, yeah, solving our puzzles and seeing how we do. And thank you for inviting me on. This is really fun. Not what I thought I would spend my Friday thinking about.
Ross Kenyon: More to come, I’m sure. I’m glad to have you on for your first time. And Holly, thanks for being here too. Would you like to have the last word?
Holly Jean Buck: Oh, no. I guess maybe we should reiterate “anything goes,” but I’ll add my cautionary note. Maybe “anything goes” question mark. You know, I think some people would read that principle today, if they hadn’t read the book, as just kind of throwing out the scientific method generally. And, you know, that’s not what this book’s project was about, and also not what we should be doing when it comes to carbon removal or climate science or anything else. I think dangers lurk there. And what I liked that both of you pointed to is like being able to hold up different systems of knowledge and, you know, move between them and understand when one works and when another works. And like, that’s just the level of sophistication that if our society could get there, it’d be really, really exciting. I think it reminds me of negative capability, like Keats wrote about in literature — like just being able to dwell with some uncertainty and, you know, flexibility. Like, could that be our new road going forward?
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com, follow us on social media, and we will catch you next time.
