Knowledge is the only truly infinite resource, and its value multiplies by the number of people who put it to work. How can we put what we know about climate change to work and develop sustainable innovations that either reduce emissions or capture carbon from the atmosphere? And what role might Nori play in accelerating that innovation?
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 the Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here as always with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gamble producing over there, checking those levels. We are here in the Nori office and we are very pleased to have Ramez Naam with us today. He’s one of our advisors. He’s also a sci-fi author. One of his books made a big impact on Paul early in his intellectual evolution. Would you say that’s fair to say?
Paul Gambill: Yeah, definitely.
Ross Kenyon: And then I’ve been reading, started his sci-fi trilogy called Nexus. We should talk about that too. A lot of interesting ideas. I think also the way that you approach tech is very similar to how we think about blockchain too. We’ll get into lots of interesting, weird little rabbit holes today. But why don’t you take it over there, Chris, off and move us ahead.
Christophe Jospe: Sure. And if you’re just listening for the first time, welcome. Please subscribe. We like to think that we have interesting things to say. We try to do the dance around climate change, blockchain. How do you actually reverse climate change with blockchain? What are some of the nuances? My father-in-law recently gave me a backhanded compliment because he’s been listening to the podcast and he said that you’re not afraid to look stupid by asking the basic question. I was like, oh, that’s nice, but also...
Ross Kenyon: But also what do I do with that information? And you do it all the time.
Christophe Jospe: I do it all the time, yeah. So we’re big fans of kind of start with why, what motivates us, but really like now we’ve been starting with everyone’s genesis story, the beginnings of where people came from.
Ramez Naam: Thank you guys for having me here. It’s awesome to be here. It’s awesome to have gotten to know you guys and sign on as an advisor to Nori. And I’m just super stoked. I’ve seen a lot of things in the blockchain and industry space. And I’ve just been sort of really, really dubious. But we’ll get into that more, I guess, a little bit more. But I’m really impressed with Nori and making this possible. Where do I come from? I’m an immigrant kid, born in Egypt, age of three, came to the U.
S. My folks, exchange students, grew up about as American as American can be. Midwest boy, cornfields, U of I, I was one year below. Mark Andreessen, when he was working on NCSA Mosaic, got into tech, computer science degree, worked at Microsoft, ran a startup, ran into the ground, totally failed, learned from that, decided to write some books, fell in love with the planet, wrote a book So that’s me in like 30 seconds.
Ross Kenyon: For as many accomplishments that were crammed into there, that was the fastest that I’ve ever seen it done.
Ramez Naam: Well, as many failures as accomplishments, I’ll say I’m not, maybe I’m not afraid of looking stupid or maybe I am, but I’ve looked stupid a lot and that’s part of how I’ve gotten where I am.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a badge of honor in this space though, right? The more failures you’re like, oh, this guy’s learned a lot. He’s been through a lot in the startup scene. As long as you learn. As long as you learn. Yeah. Don’t do the same thing over and over again. Well, where should we start with from there? I guess I’d like a lesson or two from your failures. Yeah. Why don’t you teach us it? What should we know? Yeah.
Ramez Naam: Look for a real need. And when I think about my startup, we had amazing technology, software to speed up the development of nanotech. But there just wasn’t really a market for what we were making. So look for an actual need. And I think Nori is addressing like something people need, people getting more and more excited about. And I think be the grown up in the room, take the high road, look for ways to add value to others and value will be added to you.
Ross Kenyon: Pretty good policy. And I guess I can respond to your comment about Nexus and this sort of mind meld technology where people are becoming a sort of macro organism or you’re able to think in a way that is less rivalrous or more collective, but it’s done just through economics and the tech enables this to happen. And what’s cool about it in the book that I compared it to blockchain that People tend to be a bit euphoric about blockchain and think it’s all good. And clearly there are applications that are thoroughly dystopian.
And sometimes the people who oppose Nexus in your sci-fi writing, I oftentimes feel like you treated them with a great deal of respect where I understand that like the emerging risks directorate, is that what it’s called?
Ramez Naam: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So it’s a United States government agency that’s keeping track of this new technology because it can be used for coercion and mind control. In addition to liberating people from like more foolish ways of using self-interest or short-sightedness that comes with the way the economic system is set up. You can imagine great things happening with that tech, right? And also really, really terrifying ones.
Ramez Naam: Yeah. That’s blockchain too. I can think of that. That’s absolutely right. I think every tech is greeted with some degree of fear by regulators or law enforcement that sees it as a way to do harm because every tech has some way to do harm. But the story of humanity, I think, there’s this amazing book by Robert Wright called Non-Zero that I’m a huge fan of that influenced me. And he talks about the story of humanity being one of developing more and more ways to coordinate together that are positive sum games, where both people benefit.
And it’s not saying there are no negative sum actions. Of course. Of course, there are actions where someone just hurts somebody else or it’s zero something. They hurt someone else to take something. And there’s actions that are negative somewhere. All parties get hurt. But basically, over time, humanity has found more ways to have these win-win situations. And I think cell phones are part of that. I think the printing press is part of that. I think Nexus, this idea of digital telepathy from person to person will be part of that. And I think blockchain in the best cases is part of that, can create more coordination mechanisms that give more people the ability with lower friction to interact and create win-win situations.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, there’s a lot there. When we were thinking about starting Nori, it’s a challenge of coordinating incentives and financing. And when you get that right and things can happen out in the transparent sort of way that other people can check and say, yes, indeed, this is true, then you have an infrastructure that just kind of makes it all work in the background. But I want to go back to it. You’re on the Reversing Climate Change podcast. So ostensibly you care about Reversing Climate Change.
Ross Kenyon: Because he fell in love with the planet.
Christophe Jospe: You fell in love with the planet. So tell us about your romance, the love story.
Ramez Naam: I had the most cliche environmental awakening that is possible.
Unknown speaker: Was it Rachel Carson?
Ramez Naam: No, that’s good too. I can talk about that. No, I was on a road trip in the Yucatan in Mexico with a buddy. Over the holidays, this is, I don’t know, 11, 12 years ago, we were visiting Mayan ruins. I’m a Mayan ruin junkie. And we ended up in this beautiful town that now everybody knows about called Tulum, but it was relatively undiscovered there. And we just had a day at the beach and we were on this deserted beach. And there was like a quarter mile away, there were some kite surfers.
And my buddy wanted to lay on the ground and I just splashed around in the ocean. For hours, for the entire afternoon, just sort of jumping over the waves as they were coming in. And the water was this crystal clear, like, azure blue, sort of insane color you only see in pictures. And up on the beach, there was some litter. And as I was there, just like all by myself, basically jumping around in the water, I thought, what’s up with that litter? And I’ve always been a techno-optimist. I’ve been somebody who believed that technology would solve problems.
But all of my friends, almost all are liberals. I have some conservative friends too, of course. But people have been telling me the environment’s a problem. I’m like, oh, we’ll solve it. But as I was there, I was like, you know, maybe it really is a problem. I should look into it. I should figure out what is the state of the planet and what’s my responsibility as a human being. What’s my personal responsibility? And years and years later, I just read everything I could. That led to me writing my own book, The Infinite Resource.
Basically says, yeah, huge problems, but we also have huge innovative capabilities and we could solve these problems if we innovate fast enough. And that’s what we should do. That was the moment right there. Beach on vacation in Mexico.
Ross Kenyon: And what is the infinite resource?
Ramez Naam: It’s me setting you up with a nice little t-ball and take a swing at. The premise of the infinite resource is that most environmental thinking, for a while, it’s changed a bit, but most was in one of two camps. Camp one was... The problem is dire and we’re fucked. Pardon my French, can we swear on this podcast?
Unknown speaker: We’ll put a tag on iTunes.
Ramez Naam: We’re beeped. We’re really beeping beeped. And that beep came down to either we were screwed because And that meant there’s no room for the next 6 billion people that don’t live Western lifestyles to rise into affluence. Other side of the story was people saying, oh, there’s not really a problem, just deniers, or people saying, oh, technology will automatically solve the problem. And so I wanted to write a book in the middle that said, look, the problem is obviously real. And at the same time, the price of solar has plunged by, you know, 250x plunged in the price of solar panels.
And the ozone hole would have killed us all. But we solved that. And the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, like, caught on fire in 1969. And we passed the Clean Air Act. And the economy didn’t stop growing. So the infinite resource in my mind is innovations. It’s ideas. It’s new knowledge. It’s the new knowledge that allows us to make solar panels that are radically cheaper, allows us to make batteries and electric cars that are radically cheaper and use less resources to accomplish more. The right knowledge is a force multiplier. It can reduce the need for any physical resource.
It can substitute for a scarce resource. It can increase the value of labor or land or capital or reduce the needs for them. It can reduce our per capita impact on the planet while increasing our per capita wealth. So that’s the pitch.
Ross Kenyon: I’m imagining here a race and it’s between one side there’s human destruction that we’re causing and the other side there’s human innovation. You’re just hoping that innovation always stays ahead and how do we foster that and make sure that’s happening. Is that a fair way to say this?
Christophe Jospe: I like to use the metaphor... Climate change, carbon dioxide, it’s a little bit different from a river catching on fire because that’s very visceral that’s in my face. But carbon dioxide is this invisible gas. And the climate change that we’re experiencing today is actually like something from 20 years ago because the planet hasn’t warmed up to the concentrations of today. So it’s like intellectually, we can see that we’re getting punched in the face, but we’re not going to feel that pain until 20 years from now. So maybe in your My metaphor was way better.
No, I’m going back to your metaphor. So in this like race thing, the techno optimist in me needs to sort of say, yes, okay, let’s deal with this excess concentration. But I haven’t yet truly felt the pain to make me want to change the whole system.
Ramez Naam: I agree with both of you. So in terms of the race, it is a race. I use that metaphor a lot. Bill Gates has this thing. He says that if we had 100 years to solve climate change, there’s no doubt we would do it. The tech is getting better that fast. So it is a race. And yet, to your point, Christophe, it is a challenge that carbon dioxide is invisible and I’m a believer in this thing called the environmental Kuznets curve. It’s somewhat controversial. But basically, as people get richer, as they get food, shelter, heating, medical care, transport, they start to be less and less tolerant of obvious pollution.
And the pollution they deal with first is the stuff they can see viscerally and affects their lives. Air pollution. You see China having their environmental movement. Now, and Chinese audiences I talk to a lot fully believe in climate change because they see smogs like, oh, energy might produce pollution. Yeah, but air pollution is like very visceral water pollution. But those are all local to you. The impact you have in your community can fix it. And you see it right now. So the fact that climate change has this super global effect and that it’s invisible and that it’s delayed does make it more problematic.
But the best analogy I have to that is ozone. Like ozone depletion was a very, very similar issue. It was about... One one hundredth the cost of fixing climate change to fix ozone pollution. But nevertheless, you know, in the 80s under Reagan, we got together and said, this is no good. Got to do it. And we phased out CFCs that destroy ozone really, really fast.
Paul Gambill: Do you think then that like passing the Clean Air Act in the 70s, which really cleaned up air pollution in the United States and helped scientists observe actual global warming happening, getting past the global dimming problem, do you think that’s actually been, while a good thing, has actually held back Americans’ understanding and appreciation for the effects of climate change?
Ramez Naam: Well, that’s a good question. You know, I think for the most part, Americans today don’t understand how terrible air pollution and water pollution were in the 70s. And so Americans today on the left, it’s not just about climate change, Americans on the left, Have no historical context and think that we’re polluting the environment horribly, not just in climate change, but in other ways. But they don’t remember what the smog in LA was like in the 70s. They don’t remember the rivers catching on fire in the 60s. So I don’t know.
If we had more smog today, I think there would be more direct calls for action in the way that there is in China. So maybe, but I’m still glad we passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
Paul Gambill: Oh yeah, for sure. That’s just one of those weird moral hazard unintended consequences.
Unknown speaker: I think you just bought yourself a blog post, Paul.
Ramez Naam: Well, I mean, thank goodness in China. I mean, the first time I gave a talk in China, I was super nervous about like how are people going to react to like me talking about climate change and so on. And I got a standing ovation. And it was because like the people there, everybody from the poorest person to the richest person, they all live in this smog in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen. And so they’re like, yeah, duh. Obviously, like industry is causing pollution and we got to fix this.
Ross Kenyon: What’s your connection and how did you find out about the Infinite Resource and what grabbed you, Paul?
Paul Gambill: I can’t remember exactly. So what happened was in 2015, I told this story several times on this podcast. So I had been working on a small business and I got interested in climate change as an opportunity thing to work on because I read this article about how climate scientists were becoming very depressed because no one was listening to them. Started thinking about it in terms of, well, there’s just too much greenhouse gases. Can we just pull those back out? So I founded a meetup group called Carbon Removal Seattle. And I was shopping that out.
There’s this startup email listserv in Seattle. And I think I sent out an email on that list saying, hey, I’m starting this Meetup group, if anyone’s interested in working on this, come to the first meetup that I’m hosting. And I think probably from there, someone reached out to me and said, hey, you should check out this book by Ramez Naam. And it’s kind of up the same alley. And so I read it. And actually, I don’t, you probably don’t remember this. I reached out to you on LinkedIn back then and said, hey, this is like the thing that I’m trying to do.
I’m very inspired by your book. I don’t remember if we corresponded at all, but.
Ramez Naam: Well, thank you for doing that. Amazing that now that we’re actually working together.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, it is pretty serendipitous. We’re all fans here. I said on Twitter that I wanted to drop this quote, so I’m going to do so. From the book, knowledge, unlike physical resources, is non-rival. It can be used as many times and places we care to without depleting it. Its value is multiplied by the number of people who put it to work. First of all, awesome, right? Because we’ve got this infinite resource, and let’s actually use it. And when we’re talking about sharing ideas, ideas are free. Execution is the hard part, and that’s kind of what Nori’s focused on.
We think we have a great idea, but we need to now deliver it. But also... Costs need to come down. Things need to be easier once you start sort of doubling and multiplying. I mean, even to use that metaphor you have in the book where the guy who invented chess in India basically said, you know, pay me in rice and start with one and then double it each time. And they’re just showing this exponential learning curve. So we’re optimists. It’s all possible. Knowledge needs to be shared. But let me take this a little darker.
Sometimes the wrong knowledge is shared. Sometimes the knowledge that could be a solution is not getting into the right hands. Let me give an example. Yesterday, I bought spinach. It said GMO free. I’m like, I don’t care that it’s GMO free. I actually would maybe prefer if I had GMOs in my spinach because like Popeye, right? Spinach, power food. Maybe there’s some good GMOs there. And yet within the environmental movement, there’s this general conception that GMOs are bad. But that might not be the case because actually genetically modified crops or plants are an evolution of how we can more sustainably feed the planet.
So can you unpack a little bit of ways that knowledge are shared and like what that means to share the knowledge that ultimately is going to help us live more sustainably and push back against some of the misinformation that might be spread around?
Ramez Naam: Yeah, it’s a really good question. And I think so people are tribal thinkers more than they are rational thinkers for the most part. And I’d say businesses have a really strong incentive to be rational thinkers. They’re in sort of a Darwinian process where those businesses Right. Right. Right. Right. And there’s a few core instincts in humanity that it’s really easy to play to. And one of those is the naturalistic fallacy. Really, we idealize the past. We think of our agrarian past as romantic in some way, even though life expectancy was 30 years and there was no, I don’t know, hemorrhoid cream or antibiotics.
I’m here for a good time, not for a long time. I’d like both, personally. So I do think these myths tend to spread. And you see it in conspiracy theories. You see it in a variety of things. So I think on GMO food, there’s this combination of the naturalistic fallacy and people not wanting something that’s unnatural. Shitty ass, the stupidest marketing and the worst PR in the world for the companies making those products and an anti-corporatist sentiment. I understand. Nobody wants somebody else to have a monopoly over the food that we have.
So that’s really hard to figure out. Now, I’d say in the U. S. , the regulators, bless them, are really science-based. So the FDA has just ruled again and again and again. We have a safety process. GMO foods in the U. S. go through three different regulators. The FDA on the food safety and The USDA on the impact on land and crops and the EPA on the environmental impact and the National Science Foundation and their subsidiaries have put out reports and reports and saying, hey, this actually reduces the negative impact.
The regulators in Europe and in a lot of developing world companies that have been heavily influenced by organizations like Greenpeace, who I overall love. So that’s sad, and that’s something that I wish wasn’t true. Nevertheless, at a macro level, truth is winning out. So, over time... We now have finally the first open source free Monsanto’s first breakthrough hit was Roundup Ready Soy 1 that went off patent about three years ago. And now if you’re a farmer anywhere, you can get samples of it from a couple of universities. They’re working on improving it and you can replant it all you want.
So now we’re breaking that corporate control that people were really scared about for good reason. Now it’s really entering the public domain.
Christophe Jospe: And that’s a great response. And I just hopefully I won’t get too many glares from Paul for saying what I’m about to say. But we tried to toe the line between both showing if you’re a part of the organic movement and part of, quote unquote, big ag, actually, you’re all on the same team. And what ultimately I think you want here is.
Paul Gambill: Why would I be glaring at you for that?
Christophe Jospe: Oh, just wait.
Ross Kenyon: I’m waiting for whatever comes next.
Christophe Jospe: I’m feeling a little feisty today. All right. Carry on.
Ross Kenyon: Carry on. Go, go, go.
Christophe Jospe: These four challenges that farmers face that you outlined in your book. On the one hand, there’s deforestation, right? On the other, you’ve got excess greenhouse gases getting emitted from the way we’re doing agriculture. Trying to rely on my memory. What else have we got?
Ramez Naam: Price pressure, water, like soil loss, freshwater impacts, runoffs of fertilizer creating dead zones and oceans. There’s a whole bunch.
Christophe Jospe: All these challenges. And Nori’s coming in and we’re saying, hey, we have an idea here. If you start increasing the soil health and putting more carbon dioxide in your soils, it’s going to shift. And to go back to it, this is an argument that we want both the organic farmers who wouldn’t even consider being in the same room as some of your household names in agriculture with big ag in the same spot. Do you consider yourself a futurist?
Ramez Naam: Yeah, I get called that in as much as I make things up about the future and write them down.
Ross Kenyon: All right, great. That’s all it takes, man.
Ramez Naam: That’s literally it. Occasionally I’m even right, but usually not.
Christophe Jospe: You could be in the reluctant future camp if you want. I think what you’re trying to say, perhaps, is... I had a question. Oh, was there... No, there was. I just wanted to qualify it first. Oh, my God. It’s the wave of the magic wand. How is this all going to work?
Ramez Naam: Yeah. Well, so I actually don’t think that there really is a conflict fundamentally between organic ag and GM. I think GM actually reduces the poundage of pesticides and certainly the toxicity of pesticides applied per acre per hectare. And so to me, it’s fully in alignment with the goals of organic ag. That said, you know, there is a divide in the community and in consumer behavior, especially. But either way, whether you’re an organic farmer, and organic farms are, you know, maybe one, one and a half percent of acres in the U.
S. , organic crops. Or you’re a small family farm or you’re a big agribusiness. It’s about aligning incentives. There is value that you provide to the world if you sequester carbon. You are making everyone in the world a little bit richer now and in the future. You’re helping people in Bangladesh. You’re helping people in Miami. And so if we can help align the incentives to give any type of farmer the reason to capture some carbon, hallelujah. The farmers make more money and the world’s a better place.
Ross Kenyon: We hope that endears us because you wonder, does the right like us because we’re using market-based approaches to solve a problem that the left cares about and that we’re doing it in a sensible way that doesn’t immediately turn them off? It’s not command and control. Or do they hate it because we’re doing that? Or does the left hate it because there’s market-based ways of addressing climate change? Or do they like us because the ends are the same? It’s like, does everyone love us or does everyone hate us is what it comes down to.
We’ll find out. We’ll find out.
Christophe Jospe: So, Mez, you’re probably swimming in ideas. You’ve come across a lot of ideas all the time. And since you’ve made it clear that you have this beautiful romance with wanting to reverse climate change, and you’re so succinct in what you say, so we’re going to try something out on you. We’re going to call it Idea Popcorn. Woo!
Ramez Naam: I was not prepared for this. It wasn’t in the briefing memo. I refuse. I don’t refuse. I’m down.
Christophe Jospe: It was in the fine print. We’re going to talk about sustainable ideas. Okay. All right. Ready for it? First idea that is a great one that we just need more of. You’ve got 15 seconds. Go.
Ramez Naam: Well, more solar, more wind, more batteries, more EVs, and it’s happening.
Christophe Jospe: That was like five seconds. Wow. I’m tight. All right, let’s pick on batteries. Like is lithium mining? Isn’t that a problem?
Ramez Naam: Lithium’s okay. Cobalt’s a real problem. But you see Tesla, for instance, like has shrunk the amount of cobalt per vehicle by a factor of three. And they’re talking about almost cobalt free. I think we’ll see a divergence in battery tech. We’ll have sort of lithium batteries. And why do batteries matter when it comes to climate change? Solar and wind are intermittent, and so they mostly are complementary. Sun during the day, more wind, usually at night. Sun more in the summer, winter more in the winter. But still, there’s times that there’s not enough sun and not enough wind.
It’s usually wintertime.
Christophe Jospe: Any other favorite sustainable innovations?
Ramez Naam: Well, I think EVs, but I think not just EVs, I think there’s this transport revolution happening with a combination of electric plus autonomous plus ride-sharing services like Lyft. When you put them all together, the cost per mile of being transported in like a shared electric autonomous vehicle should drop to like 25 cents or 15 cents a mile. It should be cheaper than the bus. And then people in cities, at least, are going to vote with their pockets and go for that much more sustainable way to travel.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I was floored. A year ago, I test drove a Tesla. And I mean, they still had this sort of driverless software getting worked out. But my hands were above the steering wheel, not on it. And it was just driving itself. It was following the map like that technology is coming.
Ramez Naam: It’s pretty freaking amazing. And basically, like. Uber costs half per mile what a taxi does as part of why it’s successful. If you make an autonomous Uber or Lyft or Waymo, Google’s company or Tesla, it should drop that cost in half again. If you make it shared like an Uber pool or Lyft line sort of thing, it should drop that cost in half again. If you make it electric, you can drop that cost in half again. It’s talking about one-eighth. Yeah, and I think the use switch is also interesting because we have cars that are sort of sitting there not getting used.
But when you start sharing it and you can get greater use, it actually results in fewer vehicles.
Ross Kenyon: And less parking spots taking up real estate.
Ramez Naam: Yeah, 40% of LA’s footprint by land is used by cars.
Ross Kenyon: Oh man, I just moved out of there and when we didn’t have a parking spot, finding street parking was sometimes 45 minutes in the evening.
Ramez Naam: Which is also carbon emissions, like it’s just terrible.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, pretty harmful to the quality of life. I think I was much less happy then.
Ramez Naam: Oh my god, I’m so excited for half of our streets to get turned into like pedestrian thoroughfares lined with trees.
Ross Kenyon: We were in Amsterdam not long ago. We’re amazed at the bike culture there and just that people were doing that. I found it very pleasant.
Ramez Naam: And even Stone. They’re managing the bikes just fine. Is that my outside voice?
Christophe Jospe: You can cut that if you want to. Oh, no, that’s more fun way to bike. Just make sure you wear a helmet and try to stay on the bike lane.
Ross Kenyon: It’s legal there. We’re not breaking the law. What should we be looking out for at Nori? Do you think we’re in a good position to make as big of an impact Reversing Climate Change?
Ramez Naam: We haven’t done much, but the price is coming down so much, we’ll decarbonize 80% of that. Transport, another quarter. More than half of that is cars. We’re going to decarbonize cars, decarbonize a lot of trucks. We still don’t know about ships and planes, but ships and planes overall each are like 3% of global emissions. Manufacturing and heating of buildings, another quarter. That’s harder. We can do it technically, but the incentives have to be there. Just on pure economics, it’s probably not going to happen. Not the way that transport and electricity are.
And the last quarter is agriculture. Actually, it’s livestock and land use changes. And that’s the hardest. We’re making some progress on deforestation from a policy perspective, but the world’s going to keep eating more meat. So even with all the tech happening in solar, wind, electric cars, we really don’t know how we’re going to decarbonize at least a quarter and maybe more of the world’s carbon emissions. So people are going to have to do something. And so some sequestration from air, I think, is just simply necessary. The flip side to that, which I think is really interesting, is you guys are building a voluntary decarbonization market or voluntary sequestration market.
And I used to think that, hey, it was going to only happen through policy. But we talk about this non-zero world and greater coordination. Consumers are doing better at coordinating their behavior. And consumers have shown preference for clean energy. And so you saw Lyft like a month ago announcing that they’re going to offset 100% of the emissions from rides that passengers take. Not the emissions for making the car, not the emissions for when the driver is driving around with nobody in it, but 100% of the emissions from when people are in the car.
And I tell friends that and friends like, oh, that’s just one more reason to switch from Uber to Lyft. So I see that. I see consumers and employees and corporate boards having a preference for clean. And so I think the time is ripe for making it trivially easy, an API call to offset your carbon. I think that makes a heck of a lot of sense today. And I think you’re just on the right path. It’s pretty good.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. Where do you go from there? Cool. Satisfied? Yeah.
Paul Gambill: Well, you know, okay. So you talked about those four different quarters of sources of emissions. And one of the cool things that we don’t even really talk about very much, we have talked about on here that we’re focusing on different methodologies, methods of removing carbon dioxide and how we measure and verify that. And the first one that we’re working on is soil sequestration. And so there’s this tangible benefit of farmers getting paid for sequestering carbon dioxide in their soil. But what we’re not even really talking about is all the saved, avoided emissions because they’re using less fertilizer, so they don’t have to be as produced as much.
And not only by not tilling are they end up pulling CO2 down, but they’re not stirring up what’s already there. So we’re getting rid of some of that land use change emissions and then putting more down in the ground. So it’s an extra benefit.
Ramez Naam: I think that’s amazing. Going from something that is one of the carbon sources that is the hardest to deal with right now to making it a carbon sink is just frigging amazing. And as we talk about other ways, I don’t know how much you want me to say, but if we get into afforestation down the road, these are also So cheap in terms of ways for carbon removal. When we talk about the new David Keith, God bless him, scientist with technology to suck carbon out of the air. I’m a huge supporter.
I love it. Let’s keep doing it. But we’re talking about more than $100 a ton to sequester carbon via industrial processes like that. When you’re talking about a handful of dollars a ton... To sequester carbon through better soil management, that’s such a bargain. And so I think focusing on things like that is just incredibly smart.
Ross Kenyon: It’s an easy sale, too. Many of these people were considering going to regenerative practices, and then were like, hey, we’re going to pay you for doing this thing that you were considering.
Paul Gambill: Or make it easier for them to get paid. Or make it easier. We’re not doing the windspan.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a very easy sale. And direct air capture, too, in my understanding, most of it is carbon capture in use right now. They’re not storing it. It’s not cost competitive for that yet. They’re mostly using it for beverage carbonation or other purposes, right, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: Right. Well, you mentioned David Keith, his company up in Squamish, Canada, British Columbia, that’s Carbon Engineering. They are certainly eyeing the California low carbon fuel standards opportunity because what they’re doing initially will be making fuels with CO2 from air. So it’s not even that it’s sequestration, but it’s a potential replacement fuel for those internal combustion engines, which just don’t go away overnight. We don’t like to pick favorites. For us, a carbon removal certificate, a ton is a ton is a ton. And there are so many co-benefits. Like when you plant a tree, did you know that trees make you happier?
Ramez Naam: Aw, mine do. I’ve been watering my plants this summer. It’s probably bad behavior, but I love plants.
Christophe Jospe: It’s like, oh, great. Animals come back. I hear more birds obviously need to be mindful about.
Ramez Naam: It’s all hands on deck. I’m down for any single way that we can figure out to reduce carbon, but I think go Going after this underappreciated and underutilized mechanisms that are really cheap, that are probably even cheaper than we’re figuring out because of what you were saying, Paul, and that generate other positive co-benefits for the environment is just an amazing place to start.
Ross Kenyon: How much time do you think we have or what’s the infinite resource approach to something like some of the estimates we’ve heard about coral reefs dying off in the next couple of years or decade? Brian von Hertzen was here talking about cooling, specifically cooling key coral reefs through deeper water being pumped into it. Is there some sort of infinite resource way to deal with these problems?
Ramez Naam: Well, so I’m heading to XPRIZE on Friday to take part in a hackathon they have. And I’m really doing the sort of off-grid solo. I’m going to have to hear the ideas they have for a saving coral reefs XPRIZE. And I’m not a scuba diver. I’m passionate about that. This might be hard to hear, but I’m more of an optimist on human ability to adapt than most people. So right now we’re not on a path for two degrees C, but frankly, I think at 2. 5 degrees C or three degrees C, it gets worse.
It’s non-linearly worse, but human civilization will survive. I think we will be called upon this century to be shepherds of the earth and to actively manage coral reefs and forests and rethink what we think of as an invasive species and move by our human volition. So I think we can do more of that than we believe. And two degrees C is not everything. Is hunky-dory at 1. 9, and at 2. 1, we all die. It’s this grade, and I think at 3 degrees C, there’s a lot of pain in the developing world, a lot of pain in least developed countries that are in the equatorial band, and there’s scars in the ecosystem that lasts for millennia, or millions of years, really, but we survive.
Probably. What worries me the most, what keeps me up the most is these tail risks of runaway feedback loops. Is the Arctic getting darker as ice melts and absorbing more sunlight? If the Arctic was ice-free in June, which we’re nowhere near, but if it was, we’re closer to it in September, but we’re not close to that in June, that would be as much additional heating of the planet as all carbon emissions to date. Oh, forests. Yeah. I mean, that’s like a century away on current path. Forests burning down forests in the tropics that are carbon sinks becoming carbon sources, the Arctic tundra, greening, you know, going from white to green and brown.
Buried methane being released in those areas. So honestly, I look at each of those and I can walk you through each of those and why it’s probably not going to happen. You know, I can tell you like, oh, you know, the Arctic methane clathrates at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean survived an ice-free period that was at least hundreds of years long at the start of the Holocene 12, 14,000 years ago. There’s good reason to believe they’ll survive a couple centuries now until we get this stuff under control. Yeah, good.
Let’s say each of those is a 1% risk. It’s not pretty. So that’s what actually worries me. And while I think we can survive 2. 5 degrees, there’s a chance. There’s a paper out yesterday. There’s a chance that actually hitting 2. 5 degrees might rapidly turn into 5 degrees. And that’s not pretty at all. So the faster we go, the better. And no matter any intervention you look at, and certainly what Nori’s talking about, at a few dollars a ton, the benefits to humanity are 10x, Or 20x what the cost is.
Let’s just do it.
Ross Kenyon: The motto for us should just be Nori, you don’t want to turn into Venus.
Ramez Naam: I prefer like Nori, just do it. Like you steal from Nike. Hopefully they won’t mind.
Paul Gambill: That’s great. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I’ve been reading a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson lately.
Ramez Naam: God, I love Stan.
Paul Gambill: New York 2140. Have you read that one?
Ramez Naam: I haven’t, but you know, I’ve read his depictions of New York in 2312 and so on.
Paul Gambill: Oh, okay. I haven’t read that one yet, but it takes place in 2140, large-scale climate change has occurred. There have been two big, rapid ice melts that have raised water levels around 50 feet or so, and he’s telling the story of how people are surviving and adapting and so on. One of the scenarios in there is this woman who... helps transport polar bears from the Arctic down to the Antarctic, helping them survive as a species. So it sounded very similar to what you were just describing. Yeah.
Ramez Naam: And just to be totally clear, like Stan there is talking about tail risks, like the central estimates, IPCC is sort of conservative, but you raise What they’ve estimated to say to the other papers, we’re talking about two to three meters, six to 10 feet in 2140 of a sea level rise. So it’s not quite like that. But for Bangkok, half of Bangkok is less than one meter up. For Miami, that’s the First road in Miami, gone. So that’s a serious amount. But I do love Stan’s spirit. I don’t know if he does this in 2140.
In 2312, he has this sort of throwaway line of how New York City has been flooded. And like the bottom first story is basically gone. And people get around by boats like they do in Venice. And that the New Yorkers have thought about making a big seawall and draining all the water out. But they kind of like it better this way anyway.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, it’s the same in this one.
Ramez Naam: I love that. That sense of human adaptation, I think, is really good.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. I think it’s inevitable. But we’re optimists. You’re an optimist. It’s all go be techno-optimistic and try to at least build a market mechanism that makes it so we can envision a world with no degree sea warming and live happily ever after. Sounds good to me.
Ross Kenyon: We’re kind of headed towards ending it on a dead-end note there. So thanks, Christophe, for bringing it back. If you like the podcast, please share us. Give us a nice rating in the app that you use. Share this on social media if you would. Mez, thanks so much for being on. Please read his books, Infinite Resource and the Nexus Trilogy. Is that the correct name for it?
Ramez Naam: Yeah, that’s right. Nexus Trilogy.
Ross Kenyon: Really good stuff. Thanks for being here.
Ramez Naam: You guys, it is such an honor and so much fun. And I can’t wait to launch Nori and get it out there in the world and like speed up our pace of decarbonization.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. We’re so excited to have you with us as well.
