When presented with solutions to a problem that conflict with our ideology, it is human nature to deny the existence of the problem. Thus, climate change solutions that involve regulation or ‘big government’ result in climate denial from right-leaning groups. How can we create solutions that provide conservatives with an economic win? How can we change the psyche of red districts by rewarding them for behavior that reverses climate change?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospin.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gamble making sure those levels are very nice. We are in the Nori office in Ballard, Seattle right now and we have a guest with us and we are happy to share his knowledge with you.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, hopefully he will also be happy to share his knowledge with us. We will extract it for you. We are going to yank it out of him. But sitting across from us, we’ve got Greg Rock. Greg is a sustainable energy engineer and lobbyist and board member for Carbon Washington. So I’m sure we’ll get to learn more about what Carbon Washington is about, what their priorities are. Sort of how Greg thinks about all of these challenges as an energy engineer, what it even means to be sustainable. How the heck are we going to go about solving climate change?
You’re on the Reversing Climate Change podcast, if you didn’t know, Greg. So welcome. But we do like to start with people’s story and sort of how they got involved to be doing what they’re doing. So Greg, how did it all get going? When did you start caring about climate change?
Greg Rock: I actually probably first got involved in environmental concerns around peak oil issues, actually, way back 2000. Studying that in my undergraduate degree, learned a little bit about the challenges associated with ever increasing demand for And then, of course, when you’re burning ever-increasing supplies of oil, that has the unintended consequence of CO2 in the atmosphere that accumulates over time. So had kind of a passion for that, started the green car company. We sold biodiesels, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, early-stage electric cars, transitioned to that into infill development. And then eventually decided I want to get more involved in the policy world.
So I went to Sweden and actually got a master’s degree in sustainable energy engineering and came back, worked for the state for a couple of years before leaving that to work on the first carbon tax initiative in the US, I-732 with Carbon Washington. That all worked out, right?
Christophe Jospe: We have one.
Greg Rock: Did not work out. It is a difficult thing and being first is always challenging. I think a lot of the things I’ve been involved with have been pretty cutting edge and often the pioneers get the arrows in the back. You’re able to get some movement going. You know, when we were doing the green car company, we brought the first smart cars into the U. S. and imported the first hundred. And sold a few hundred before we finally convinced Diamond Chrysler that they should start selling a smart car here, which they eventually did.
And started convincing people that smaller cars make sense. With 732, I think we raised a lot of awareness around how carbon pricing can be a real positive impact. We’ve seen a lot of discussions going on at the national stage. A group of Republicans came out and are advocating for a carbon price. We’ve got another carbon initiative that’ll be on the ballot here in November. The ball keeps rolling forward, but it is hard to get things moving on their first pass, of course.
Ross Kenyon: My basic understanding of the policy you guys tried to get past was that it was revenue neutral and this was a way of replacing taxes that you thought were less beneficial for the economy or for other reasons and it was also more palatable to those right of center. They weren’t getting a bunch of new programs or a giant tax increase. It was effectively the same. But also they could minimize their tax incidents by limiting the amount of carbon they would emit, something like that.
Christophe Jospe: And effectively what you’re saying to polluters is there’s a price on this thing that you’re putting out there. There’s a real externality. And once you start seeing that price, the motivation is for you to put less of that pollution out there.
Greg Rock: I think we all recognize that carbon pollution causes damages. And so no one’s paying the cost of those damages. So we get this giant tragedy of the common situation where the big polluters make more money and the people who are choosing to pollute less actually end up kind of a competitive And so by putting a proper price on carbon, that’s actually the most economically efficient way to cause reductions. There’s market transparency. There’s no technology specifications, technology agnostic. So the market can really figure out the best way to do it. The other approaches like subsidy programs, government-run programs, those can work, but they’re typically a little bit less economically efficient.
So 732 was focused on saying, well, let’s just do the most economically efficient part of this. Let’s put a price on carbon. But we don’t actually have to raise money for anything. So we can take all that money and use it to lower existing taxes. So rather than taxing the goods and services that we wanted, like sales of goods or property, income, the other things that we tend to generate our revenue off of, let’s reduce those types of taxes while creating a tax on the bads, the carbon pollution that people are creating.
Ross Kenyon: Where did it go sideways or what happened with it?
Greg Rock: The biggest challenge was, frankly, the ballot title. You end up... With a tax reform policy. And it read like it. The first line was, this initiative concerns taxes. It’s very sexy. And so, you have the general disconnect, I think, between this not being a tax increase versus most people thinking that it was. And so, a lot of the voter outtakes, most people thought that it was a tax increase when it actually And we didn’t have a ton of funding to really get that message out. There was some opposition from a lot of actually kind of progressive groups that felt like you should have government programs.
If you’re going to raise a carbon tax, you shouldn’t give the money back to lowering taxes. That should be used for programs that reduce carbon emissions or other related programs. So that also made it challenging to kind of face the fire from both sides. Although we did get a number of Republicans that actually endorsed the policy sitting legislators. It created an interesting dialogue, but did face kind of attacks from both extremes.
Paul Gambill: One of the things that really disappointed me with the outcome of that was that it was great that Washington is a fairly left-leaning state. It’s not impossible to think that we might, if not this year, eventually pass some sort of far-reaching carbon taxation plan that also generates a lot of revenue to pay for programs like that. But you’re not going to see that happening in rural right-leaning states in the center of the country. And I-732 seemed to me like a really great example, like a template that other states could follow, especially if they weren’t already more lefty.
Greg Rock: That’s really what drew me to the initiative, why I quit my job and started volunteering for it, is I saw it as a potential way to break down the logjam between the right versus the left. If we can come up with a policy that centrists can agree to and can draw support from both sides, that’s something that can really... Catalyze and spread because what we do here in Washington isn’t going to change the world for climate change unless we’re setting an example that other states can follow. So, you know, Initiative 1631 is going to be on the ballot this November.
I’m going to be voting for it. I encourage other people to. We absolutely should put a price on carbon, which that policy does. And it’s a good first step. But it is a left-leaning policy. It’s the type of thing that’ll play here, builds a lot of government programs. It’s got a good ballot title, so that should help. What is it? You’ll have to look at it on the ballot. I don’t have it memorized. But it doesn’t start with this concerns taxes. I think they went the fee route. Yeah, they’re actually calling it a fee, which they’re allowed to do because they’re spending all of the revenue on problems associated with what the fee was raised.
So while 732 was spending it on lowering other taxes, it couldn’t be called a fee. And so that’s a policy that hopefully will pass. It will create a lot of good here in Washington in terms of carbon reductions, some programs that will benefit a lot of other aspects of Washington state, but it probably isn’t going to be something that’s going to pass in Iowa and some the more red-leaning states.
Christophe Jospe: You’re a lobbyist, but a special kind of lobbyist because you’re actually an engineer too. So you can talk about really complex things in simple terms. And then as a lobbyist, I guess you have to think about who are you sitting across from and what are the sort of messages you can tell them that will really resonate. And hopefully it’s not just preaching to the choir, but sometimes with people that disagree with you. But I would be curious, for someone who’s advocating for putting a price on carbon, what kind of messages do you find resonate the most?
And what are the messages that you might not expect that are really resonating? And what doesn’t resonate?
Greg Rock: Well, I guess I’m special in two ways. I’m an engineer and I’m also a volunteer lobbyist. So a lot of other lobbyists are getting paid, which gives me a little more flexibility to be kind of true to my passion and mission. It all depends who you’re talking to. I think on the left side of the aisle, you find a lot of people that are on board with the message. We want to act on climate. But in many cases, it’s not their actually highest priority. They’re supportive of it, but they’re not...
I think there is some lip service that gets paid often. Where on paper, they’re supportive of it, but maybe not going the extra mile. And so finding discussions and topics that can really bring it home to their district, everything is very district related in local legislative policies is important. And then on the right side of the aisle, I think I’ve been a little surprised that some legislators are very supportive of programmatic increases. If the money is getting spent in their district, they would maybe prefer that than revenue neutral approach, which surprised me a little bit.
But working with... with them on how to do this in an economically efficient way that’s minimizing the drag of government and a non-regulatory approach. There typically is a resistance to regulation amongst people on the right side of the aisle.
Christophe Jospe: A lot of what we hope to resonate here in the state of Washington of what Nori is doing actually, I think will perhaps resonate more with the right side of the aisle than the left for a number of reasons. One, we’re talking about supporting farmers to put carbon in their soils. And when you think about where all the agriculture activity is occurring in Washington, it’s in the eastern side, which is traditionally a red leading side of the state. And so I’d be curious to kind of talk about carbon sequestration as some Yeah, I think that’s a really important aspect of this kind of ever-changing discussion around how we act on climate change and how policies get developed.
Greg Rock: You know, sequestration is something that has intrigued me from a technical standpoint, being an engineer and just the different aspects that go into it. But it also has a lot of political possibilities. If you start thinking about sequestration credits, paying people for absorbing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then storing it on the planet. Most of the spaces where that type of activity can occur are rural districts, typically districts that aren’t very supportive of climate policies. And so if you’re developing climate policies or voluntary marketplaces like Nori is doing, the It is bringing money into those communities as a result of doing something positive to combat climate change.
All of a sudden, it starts changing people’s kind of psyche around this. Well, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to act on climate change because this is strengthening my community. It’s enhancing rural economic development. And I think that can really be another way to kind of, as I said, break down that logjam of this right versus left. The right feels like they’re going to get penalized. A carbon price, maybe I’ve got a bigger car and I drive further. It’s all the people in cities that have public transit that are going to benefit and afford the electric cars.
They’re the ones that are going to be the winners and I’m going to be the loser. When you start building a policy or a market mechanism like Nori is developing that’s looking at rewarding for sequestration activities, all of a sudden those rural participants can become winners under the policy and that’s going to change behavior in terms of their opinion of it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, one of the images that keeps me going is I imagine there probably is a farmer out there who does not believe in climate change, but they’re going to adopt practices and be a part of the Nori marketplace and be like, some dumbass big city liberal is going to buy this thing and whatever. But yeah, if there’s a carbon market for it, I’ll play. Yeah, like they’re going to, and commerce brings us together and it gets the goods in that kind of way. And that’s something that’s really exciting to me.
You don’t have to persuade someone in a political way. You’re offering them something of value and you’re making the trade.
Greg Rock: Well, and what’s really intriguing is there’s a lot of psychological studies now going on and they’re looking at this concept called solution aversion. The theory is actually that, and there’s a lot of pretty strong evidence that this appears to be the case, that the way human mind works is that if I present you with a problem and I tell you that the solution is something that conflicts with your core ideology. So there’s climate change and the solution is bigger government, raising taxes, regulation. You don’t argue with that’s not the right solution.
You immediately, through cognitive dissonance, decide that climate change isn’t real. So in many respects, it’s the solutions that have been presented for the last decade to this problem that is causing kind of climate denial amongst conservatives that just don’t agree with those solutions. So if you start developing solution packages that work for them or work within their core ideology or turn them into economic winners, all of a sudden, not only will they say, oh, this is okay, they actually may start believing in something they didn’t believe in before.
Ross Kenyon: That’s beautiful. I’m going to use that verbatim. I have a friend who does that so, so badly. Actually, I recommended The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Colbert. Have you read that book by chance?
Greg Rock: I haven’t, no.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a really, really nice book. But it’s basically a history of geology and stratigraphy and how the fights over geology evolved and how mass extinctions have worked in the past and how we might be experiencing one now. There’s very little politics in it. It’s not like she says, and that’s why we all need cap and trade globally or something like that. It’s very strongly journalistic. And my friend was complaining about it, though. He’s like, it sounds like another one of these left-leaning, horrible books. I was like, it’s really not, man.
You’re just seeing things where they don’t exist because you’re very scared that it might lead you to some spooky place that is big government. Doesn’t have to. Solution aversion, though. Solution aversion. That’s the term I’m going to start using.
Greg Rock: I think the next wave of climate action is probably going to be more focused around the psychology of how we get people to buy into acting. There’s been this past decade of... Is it real? What’s going on? How do we address it? But we basically kind of know it’s happening. There isn’t that much disagreement that it’s occurring. We also have a pretty good set of policy options that we could adopt. And we know there’s a lot of different ones and they would all work in different ways and could achieve the goal.
We’ve got the technology out there to make it happen. Some of it’s a little more costly, but with the proper market incentives, it wouldn’t break the economy in any shape or form. Probably would enhance it long term because you’re talking about cheap renewable energy being a large portion of that. And so the barrier right now is how do we get people to decide to do it, that first step? And I think things like the voluntary market that Nori is developing is really a great way to try to enhance that first step in a really difficult field.
You’re focusing on agriculture right now. How do we get farmers to take that first step? So they’re learning how to do regenerative agriculture. So They’re learning how to do practices that are not only going to get carbon in the ground, but it’s going to enhance their soil productivity over the long term. And then they’re going to say, well, this was great for a lot of reasons. I’m glad I ended up doing that. And so getting people to take that first step can really start changing people’s psyche around what it means to act.
Ross Kenyon: Do we want to get into this time or like the ton year thing we were talking about prior?
Unknown speaker: Sure, you brought it up. So let’s go there, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know if it’s a criticism, perhaps, but an observation of Nori and the way that the monetary system would work with the tokens. But Greg, you were suggesting that rather than focusing the monetary unit of a Nori token on one ton, one metric ton of carbon dioxide or equivalent removed, we should also specify a year inside of that per token.
Greg Rock: Yeah, so when you talk about sequestration, from a technical perspective, there’s two activities going on. The absorption of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and that’s a quantitative thing that can be measured as one ton. It’s been absorbed. But the other very important element to The value of sequestration is the storage. And storage is a time function. If you store something for one year that has a lower value from a climate change avoidance perspective than if it gets stored for a thousand years by converting into biochar or Or putting it through a mineralization process or weathering.
As you start looking at different products within the marketplace, whether it’s a no-till process that’s going to store carbon in the soil for 10 years, or it’s cross-laminated timber that’s going to store carbon in a building for maybe 100 years. There is a different value associated with those. So I think there are ways to look at it from a really scientific perspective and look at the radiative forcing benefits of one versus the other, which gets very complex. But there’s also a lot of value to just avoiding carbon for a period of time.
If we can store something in the ground and not having the atmosphere and causing global warming for the next 20, 50 years, that gives us more time to develop new technology and new solution sets. And so there’s kind of a balance between those two arguments. But I think There’s a growing kind of consensus around, you know, 100 years being a very good thing. If we can store carbon in the ground, set the atmosphere for 100 years, that is really beneficial. And so... As you start looking at products that maybe people don’t want a long-term contract to behave in an activity for 100 years, there may be an opportunity to look at multiplying by the quantity times the year.
So I’m storing it for 10 years. I’m going to absorb 10 times as much as I emitted and store it for 10 years to kind of get to that 100-year multiplier.
Ross Kenyon: This would add one more complicating dimension into the FIFO marketplace of it, wouldn’t you think? FIFO, that’s first in, first out. Yeah, it’s like how the market queue works. It seems like an extra wrinkle in it that might make it more complex.
Paul Gambill: I think it’s an interesting idea. One interesting effect that it might have, though, is that... It puts a lot of arbitrary value on the methodology development that we’re doing. So for soil for this first cropland soil sequestration methodology, our working number is 10 years, which is just a contractual obligation that Let the grower continue those practices for 10 years to keep that carbon in the ground and they have to enter data into the model each year and get audited periodically and so on. It’s a contractual obligation for 10 years, but we’re not assuming that at the end of 10 years that every single farmer is all of a sudden going to plow up their land and release all that carbon back into the air.
Ross Kenyon: There’s all those co-benefits that come along with that.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, they have their own internal incentive mechanisms that are trying to keep that process going longer. So it’s certainly not the case that it’s just 10 years and then no more storage. Some of it will, some of it won’t. But then if we start talking about things in the future, like say we have a direct air capture with mineralization methodology, how many ton years do you award for that? We sort of generally You know, these numbers are so far out there, it’s not like we can wait around to test these.
It makes whatever Nori would decide from a methodology perspective to award to that supplier a far more arbitrary number than it currently is.
Christophe Jospe: One of the values to not try to throw our baby out with the bathwater, a ton is a ton is a ton and really commoditizing carbon. I mean, if we think about what is causing climate change, it’s the greenhouse effect. And if we want to sort of extrapolate more, we’ve got... We’ve got a lot of excess CO2 in the surface oceans, which is causing acidification and all sorts of challenges. And so carbon is not necessarily the problem. Carbon is in the wrong places, the wrong reservoirs. And so by building a voluntary market mechanism that says we want to learn to get this right.
We want the volunteers who are willing to participate in this understand what it is that they’re participating in. And ultimately, they’re building a mechanism to help us reverse the effects of climate change by putting the carbon in the places where it needs to be and taking it out of places where it shouldn’t be. And it wouldn’t be an issue until at the earliest 2029 for us. We could begin to look at all sorts of interesting ways that sort of course correct to say, hey, we’re wrong about this one methodology. We need to make certain changes.
But to Paul’s point, having that sort of commoditized carbon removal certificate and Nori token, which immediately matches up to that, makes it Some of these different solutions to understand what it is that they’re going to get for doing a certain activity.
Greg Rock: Yeah, and I think, you know, while you’re focusing on one segment, you know, agricultural practices with a 10-year contract, you’ve got a very, you know, a CRC that means something specific. We’re redefining it as not a ton is a ton is a ton, but a ton year is a ton year is a ton year so that you have a time element in there. Probably makes it a little more transferable as you start looking into other marketplaces. And so as you say, well, we’re not just doing agricultural practices. We’re also going to be doing forestry practices.
We’re also going to be doing direct injection, mineralization. As you start looking at things that have different time factors, that may be more transferable. And there may be a cap on the time factor. Maybe 100 years is as long as you go in terms of a multiplier. Because once you get beyond 100 years, we’re just in a totally different I don’t think even if we really mess up, humanity is going to be dead. But there’s going to be a lot of people suffering around the world. And the real risk factor that bothers me the most about climate change is it’s not And so we really have an obligation to utilize our technology advantages, the educations that we’ve all been able to be afforded to really try to tackle this problem and take responsibility for a lot of the emissions we create.
Ross Kenyon: Will you come back again and be on the show another time?
Greg Rock: I think I could do that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I really like that we had that challenge on the time year. I’m definitely going to play with that thought experiment some. Thanks for walking us through Washington State’s legislative history. I feel like I learned a lot there. Let’s hang out and do this again in the future. Thanks for being here with us, Greg.
Greg Rock: Yeah, thanks for having me.
