Today, Peter joins Ross, Christophe and Paul to share his goal to reduce carbon in the atmosphere to 300 parts per million by 2050. Peter discusses his favorite methods of CO2 removal, permanent sequestration in limestone and ocean fertilization. He also shares the cutting-edge techniques for restoring the Arctic and the relative cost of those tactics. Listen in to understand the moral imperative around reversing climate change and get Peter’s take on overcoming the partisan divide around the issue.
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 with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gambill. We are in San Francisco right now for the Global Climate Action Summit. It is a week right now, and it is September 11th. It is a full week of events related to climate and the environment, what we’re doing, how we should think about it. We had a lot of items on the wish list for events to go to, but we had to be quite selective because there’s so many things happening this week. We’re going to do something special here and then kick it over to Paul. Which—
Paul Gambill: This is my special request I made. I made Ross start over the recording so I can say this.
Ross Kenyon: Which I love.
Paul Gambill: If you listen to our podcast episode last week, you’ll know that we are now running a live crowdfunding campaign at republic.co/nori, so you can invest in Nori and go check it out there. I’m not allowed to say much more than that, but everything that you need to know is available at the Republic page, so please go, republic.co/nori.
Christophe Jospe: And I would just add, the Global Climate Action Summit — keyword, action. That would be a wonderful action to take, because, you know, we’re giving you that agency. And it’s the world’s first cryptocurrency to pay for reversing climate change.
Ross Kenyon: We’re sitting across the table from a fellow traveler who cares about the same things as us, who has some of the same goals. I’d like to think we’re all on the same team. We’re doing this together, and there’s an imperative to do it as quickly and responsibly as possible.
Christophe Jospe: And I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Fiekowsky. It is one of those phone calls, you know, where you know exactly where you were at that phone call. I was sort of pacing around Brooklyn, and I can still picture it was sort of raining. And I was very excited talking to Peter about direct—
Ross Kenyon: Do you pace while you’re on the phone?
Christophe Jospe: Yes, I’ve noticed that too, actually, yeah. I find that if I am pacing, I have more effective conversation. I can think better. Anyway, so I remembered where I was. We were talking about all sorts of things. He was talking about how the Healthy Climate Alliance, of which he is the founder — and a really great organization that sort of builds a large umbrella of citizens and scientists and experts who care deeply about restoring the climate and sort of translating the science and the opportunities around that. And I was like, yeah, cool, I’m in. Like, tell me how I can help. And I’ve now joined the Google group, and there’s wonderful discussion. And Peter is probably — he’s blushing a little bit.
Ross Kenyon: We like to be able to brag about our guests.
Paul Gambill: Building you up pretty good. Are you going to be able to live up to this hype?
Christophe Jospe: He’s like, go for it. He’s like this shepherd of a flock that helps, like, direct people in some really audacious goals. So without any further ado, Peter, we like to start with people’s stories — sort of, who are they, where they got to, where they are today now. So how did you get interested in reversing climate change? Where did it all begin?
Peter Fiekowsky: I’ve only been in the climate area for about six years, so I’m probably the newest one in the room, probably the newest one in San Francisco at this climate summit. And I got in through poverty work. So I’m a physicist. I’ve got a software business in Silicon Valley doing image analysis for semiconductor manufacturing. I’ve been volunteering for 30-some years in poverty reduction, going to Congress, getting money allocated for immunizing kids around the world, for reversing the AIDS epidemic, for getting microfinance going around the world.
After about 25 years of that, people in my organization, which is called results.org, decided that we actually have to deal with the climate. And so I supported them in starting the Citizens Climate Lobby, which some of your listeners are familiar with. I was advising the Citizens Climate Lobby, and I said, OK, good. As a Silicon Valley guy, I’m going to ask you: what do you want to achieve? What’s the end result? Let’s figure out the end goal, and then we’ll figure out how to get there from here. And there was silence. Just like now, waiting to know what is it. The executive director said, Peter, you’re in charge of that now, rather than embarrassing himself.
And I created the 100 Year Plan group for Citizens Climate Lobby and talked to Dr. Jim Hansen, talked to just all the climate scientists I could find. And there was no goal. My first response to that was, well, I’m a Silicon Valley guy, I don’t play losing games. Clearly you’re going to lose because there’s no meaningful goal. I’m not going to play. Then my daughter came home from college for spring break, and I realized I couldn’t not play in the climate game.
So I took on creating the goal, and it took another couple years of talking to experts. And what really changed things for me was in Marrakech, at COP 22 in Marrakech, a bishop took me to dinner, and after about two glasses of wine, he kept insisting that climate is a moral issue. It’s not a scientific issue. And that was hard for me, because I’m a physicist, and you can probably tell just looking at me, I love understanding things and getting the equations, understanding it soup to nuts. And I finally got that it’s a moral issue and it’s only about humans. The science is going to be fine, the planet’s going to be fine. We say, oh, we’d save the planet. The planet’s fine, but the planet might be happier after we’re gone.
Ross Kenyon: You can do the George Carlin. Yeah, that’s my favorite George Carlin bit. He ends up trying to make the point that, like, maybe the whole point of human life is to make plastic. Maybe the Earth wanted plastic. But yeah, he says the same thing. The Earth is going to be fine. It’s the systems for us that we’re trying to save.
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah. And once you do that, the whole game comes into focus, because once you say it’s for us, you say, oh, good, what do we need? Well, we need the same climate that we evolved with, that our species evolved for, our civilization evolved for. And then you say, oh, OK, good. So somewhere between 250 and 300 parts per million of CO2. Done. You don’t have to debate that anymore. Anything more than that is risky for our grandchildren. Anything below that’s going to be risky of being too cold. And then you say, OK, by when? And you say, I just picked 2050 because it’s a round number. And also after that it’s too late for my kids, and it gets me off the hook.
Ross Kenyon: Love it.
Christophe Jospe: So just to kind of unpack some of the things you said: we’re talking about carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. And the reason for that is because there’s something called the greenhouse effect. So the more heat-trapping gases exist in the atmosphere, the warmer it gets. And so pre-industrial times were around 250 to 280. And so what you’re saying is, let’s go back to those pre-industrial times, because that’s when the Earth was happy and healthy.
Ross Kenyon: I always like to think that I want to go back to the Pleistocene. And I want it to be like — what was it then? Like 180-something?
Paul Gambill: Yeah, get a little cold, man. A little too cold, too cold. What are we now? We’re like 410, 412, something like that.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, it’s like plus or minus 8. So what ends up happening is you have more trees in the Global North than the Global South, because seasons happen, obviously, around the world.
Ross Kenyon: When there’s leaves, it’s pulling more out.
Christophe Jospe: Exactly. And then the leaves fall and decompose, but it’s trending up. We’re adding around 2 to 3 parts per million each year, and it just accumulates there, warming the planet. And so the goal is, we need to balance the carbon in the atmosphere. So, Peter, how do we do it?
Peter Fiekowsky: The goal actually is not to balance it. The goal is to get it back to that level at which we can be assured that our kids and future generations have a livable planet, the climate that we evolved for. And that means we have to get a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a very, very big number. Are people intimidated by this, or do they get energized? At the end of this podcast, hopefully our listeners will be energized. I was hoping that we could do like Dr. Evil and just have evil laughs — like, one trillion tonnes.
Paul Gambill: Well, here’s the thing: I think we’re all engineers here.
Ross Kenyon: Oh no.
Peter Fiekowsky: No, I am. OK, you are. You know, in engineering and in management, you know that if you want to produce a result, you’ve got to say what the result is and by when.
Christophe Jospe: Yes, and work backwards.
Peter Fiekowsky: And work backwards. And so once you say we want to get back to below 300 parts per million, which is our goal for the Healthy Climate Alliance — and I think pretty universally — and do it by 2050, then you get: oh, we have to remove 50 billion tonnes a year of CO2. And then once we came up with that, about a year and a half, two years ago, I went to the scientists who do carbon dioxide removal — Klaus Lackner, for example — said, what methods do we have that can remove 50 billion tonnes a year? Well, we came up with eight different methods that could do that. Every one of those scientists said, well, this is remarkable. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. How come no one ever asked me if I could save the planet? I could actually save the planet. That’s pretty cool. Now the question is, can we get the funding to do it? But the first thing is to realize that we actually have the technologies, and that’s not the issue. The issue is creating the demand.
And so what I’ve taken on here is creating the public demand, the buyers for a healthy climate for our children. And so the Healthy Climate Alliance has been working on promoting the idea that we actually do want to give our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren a climate that’s healthy. And if people want that, then they’ll pay the money for it. If they don’t, if it doesn’t occur to them as something they want, they’re not going to pay the money for it. Advertising Coke was like that, before people knew what Coca-Cola was. They wouldn’t imagine spending all the money that we spend on Coca-Cola. Once they discovered how great — well, never mind. Tastes good. That’s fine.
Ross Kenyon: The approach that you described is very similar to how I’ve heard Paul talk about this the entire time as an engineer. Like, mitigation sometimes isn’t as thrilling because it isn’t solving the problem. It seems to kind of push it off a little further. You wedge it a little bit and it’s safer, it buys us some time, but we’re really interested in solving it. Would you say that those are fair words to stick into your mouth?
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah, you were saying exactly the same thing that we’ve been doing.
Paul Gambill: That’s the Nori philosophy.
Christophe Jospe: Just a quibble on the word balance. What I mean by balance is, if you emit a tonne of CO2, you should pull another tonne of CO2 back. And we’ve emitted over a trillion tonnes of CO2 that we already need to pull back. So what I’m basically trying to say — and I think we’re arguing for the same thing — is we need to pay for our old debts, which is the way to balance it. And moving forward, we need to balance the books. And so you’re saying, OK, you’ve got eight technologies or methods that you looked at far and wide that have great opportunities. And then you’re saying, well, to balance the books, or to remove and give our children a healthy climate, that needs to be around 50 billion tonnes per year.
Ross Kenyon: So, not to pick favorites, Peter, but what are some of your favorite methods?
Peter Fiekowsky: I’ve got two favorites. My metric is: is it doable? And so the first one is the one we’ll be talking about at the summit this week, and that is using aggregate. Blue Planet has a process which takes CO2 and calcium and turns it into limestone, and limestone is the main rock that you use in concrete and road beds and so on. Limestone by weight is half CO2, and globally we use 50 billion tonnes a year of aggregate for building roads and buildings. And so we actually have a market — that is concrete and aggregate — which uses roughly the right amount of CO2. And so now all we need to do is provide that CO2, not from quarries, but from a process which pulls it out of the air. And we have that process.
Blue Planet has been providing the limestone aggregate for the San Francisco Airport extension. They put some in the Salesforce building. They’ve been approved by Caltrans for California highways. We have a market. People want to buy that CO2. They want to buy the CO2 in the form of rock, limestone, and we have the technology to do it. So now it’s a matter of getting the funding. But that’s the first one — I call it in general mineralization. Because on land, if you sequester carbon in trees, trees often burn, as here in California we have these big forest fires and so on. So it’s a risky way to sequester carbon. And roots are good, but again, it’s unclear how long the carbon is sequestered in the roots. But if you sequester carbon in minerals, it’s permanent, and especially if those minerals are built into your infrastructure. So that’s the first thought.
Christophe Jospe: Can I ask a clarifying question? So, we are nerds, so that means we care about life cycles, and caring about the life cycle means you need to track from the beginning, to where you might extract something, and look at all the associated emissions that come with that. So one of my concerns with Blue Planet and other companies which are saying we’re doing carbon removal is that maybe that’s their end goal, but they’re not starting there. And so it’s a really big number when you think about all the emissions that go into producing concrete and cement today — it’s upwards of 5%. Half of that is coming from when you split the lime from the limestone to produce the clinker that you need to mix into all this. And so what you’re telling me is that Blue Planet has come up with a way to not even deal with that splitting that would emit CO2 in the process. And are you able to say on the air that indeed, like, if I’m to draw a pure life cycle assessment of all the associated emissions that might go into this process, that it’s truly negative?
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah. I’m a physicist, so — physicists like to divide problems into parts that you can deal with. And so concrete is rock, is aggregate, sand and cement. And so you’re referring to, the cement produces a lot of CO2 when you produce cement.
Christophe Jospe: Now, before that, right? So when you get the lime from the limestone, which emits the CO2, to separate and crush and grind those materials. So I just would want to know, are you producing a new form of aggregate that’s completely different from the entire cement industry through the Blue Planet process?
Peter Fiekowsky: Well, now the cement industry is separate; we’ll come back to that. When it comes to aggregate, normally the limestone comes out of a quarry. In this case, the calcium can come from basalt, it can come from used concrete — which currently is the best source, because there’s unbelievably huge amounts of used concrete which is basically wasted, but there’s a lot of free calcium they can get out of that. Then you have the calcium, you add carbon dioxide and you get the calcium carbonate. The new limestone they create is pulling CO2. Currently their process takes the CO2 out of the exhaust stream from the power plant. And then we’re displaying tonight, in fact, a very simple direct air capture unit modeled exactly after Klaus Lackner’s patents and so on.
Christophe Jospe: Like the moisture swing?
Peter Fiekowsky: That one, moisture swing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can also provide the CO2 from the atmosphere, using that to concentrate it. That process is definitely carbon negative. And then a lot of people ask about the cement, which normally produces quite a bit of CO2. You’ve got to get the CO2 out of the limestone, as you were saying. And in that case, what they can do is, they can, in a cement plant, capture the CO2 the cement plant creates and create more limestone out of that. That goes into the aggregate. That gives you now a very carbon negative concrete.
Ross Kenyon: In general, we very much like these industrial approaches. We’re starting with more ecological methods, but we think in the long run, of scale, you’re going to have to see quite a lot of carbon dioxide embedded in products and industrial infrastructure, and I think that’s a huge get. I think the permanence is a really important point that you’re bringing up. Attractive, yeah. We get a little freaked out sometimes with forestry projects for the reasons you specify, among others too. That said, trees produce all sorts of great ecological benefits that are really important, and even though they may burn down, well, we should replant them, and we should be sure that our forests continue to provide the important service.
Paul Gambill: Shill for the tree lobby over here.
Ross Kenyon: Which is why we stay agnostic. Right? Yes, yeah. And just trade-offs in all things, too.
Peter Fiekowsky: The criteria that we use is: is it restoration scale? So does it easily scale above 10 billion tonnes a year? And so the mineralization area definitely scales above that, because there’s really no limit how much minerals you can create. A lot of us are familiar with the Carbfix process up in Iceland, where they take CO2 from the atmosphere, pump it into the basalt field and it mineralizes underground. That’s great, except you can’t sell it. And so what Blue Planet is doing is essentially the same thing, but doing it above ground so they can sell it. And the thing to remember when you’re looking at markets is that the next product that humans buy at scale is plastic, and that’s about 150 times smaller market.
Christophe Jospe: Than concrete, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, wow. OK.
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah, it’s nice, but it’s not going to restore the climate. The only product that we buy is aggregate — it’s so heavily, so much at scale. But the other thing we can do is in the ocean, because in the ocean you want to do photosynthesis. The ocean holds about 90 times more carbon than the atmosphere does. And so if you restore the photosynthesis in the ocean, you get a lot of fish, you get a lot of seaweed out of that as a byproduct. But a lot of the biocarbon is going to fall to the middle of the ocean, and some of it will settle to the bottom of the ocean. But you can sequester it for 1,000 or 2,000 years at least in the ocean. And then you have a byproduct of the fish and the seaweed that gets produced, because you now have a healthy ocean. Because about — I think the number is about three quarters of the ocean now is what they call ocean desert, where there’s just not the right nutrients to grow. And so the sun shines on a blue ocean because there’s no green growing.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. That’s why it’s cloudy, right? Because there’s plankton and other—
Peter Fiekowsky: Types of that, yeah, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So how does that work?
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah. You know, people get scared about ocean fertilization. Everyone I know, when they first hear about it, they say, oh God, that’s really scary. There’s a misunderstanding, and that is that you don’t do the same process over the whole ocean, just like farmers don’t take a whole continent and use one way of farming for the whole continent. Farmers take a field and they pick the right process for that field. In ocean fertilization, they make pastures. They pick an area maybe 100 miles in diameter, or maybe more, where it’s uniform, and then add whatever’s needed. Most of the time, a lot of cases, it’s iron, very finely powdered. Iron is the limiting nutrient in a lot of parts of the ocean. When you provide that, you get the plankton growing.
And just like a farmer, you put in as little as you possibly can. You see what happens, and you lay it fallow for the next year or two, and that way the animals and plants from adjacent pastures can come back in. That’s the way nature does it. When a volcano erupts, a lot of nutrients fall into the ocean, you get a lot of stuff growing. You can see fishing picks way up downwind of a volcano for this reason: that the volcano provides nutrients, which provides plankton, which provide fish. And then the next year there’s no volcano and everything restores back to the way it was.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, I never knew volcanoes had an impact like that. It’s quite interesting.
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah. Mount Pinatubo, when it blew up in ’91, the CO2 level stopped going up for a year and a half after that, because there was so much nutrients put into the ocean around it. There are other theories for it, but this is by far the best explanation: that a lot of nutrients fell into the ocean and you got a lot of photosynthesis happening, and a lot of the stuff fell down to the middle of the ocean.
Christophe Jospe: Even accounting for all of the extra CO2 and other emissions that go into the atmosphere from the explosion itself, that’s—
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I did not know that. That’s amazing.
Christophe Jospe: It also had a global dimming effect. And so this is the basis for a lot of research coming from solar radiation management that says, hey, well, Mount Pinatubo did it, like, we humans could do it. And that gets into an area that oftentimes people say, Nori, don’t even go there, don’t talk about SRM. But that’s not the same thing as saying that the CO2 levels went down, which is the interesting, I think.
Peter Fiekowsky: But they’re both interesting. Now that we’re talking about Mount Pinatubo and these things, what’s really wonderful about climate restoration — and so we have this target of 50 billion tonnes a year getting us back below 300 parts per million in our lifetime; I’ll be 95, so I don’t know about myself — but once you see that, then if you want to do solar radiation management, you’d only do it for 10 or 15 years, which is a whole different emotional feeling than doing it forever. I don’t talk about that publicly, so we may delete that from the podcast, because it only makes sense when you actually picture getting back to 300 in 2050.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we always hear that. The real risk — we talked about this on the Shawn Hernandez episode — there’s a tendency to become addicted to this. So you might get locked into this cycle where, oh, that was such a nice easy fix, and we’ll just do it another couple of years, and then another couple of years, we’re not quite ready yet, and it’s hard to break out of that a little.
Christophe Jospe: Yes, in a funny way, it’s sort of, as Shawn brought up, presents an existential business threat to Nori, because we’re in the business of generating carbon removal certificates and making it as easy as possible to draw down carbon from the atmosphere. And if someone were to say, oh, well, I can just cool the Earth in this way, like let me shoot up some things into space — first of all, that’s extremely scary. And I think from my perspective, I would like that to be not a scare tactic, but I can’t think of a better word, to actually say: let’s get our acts together and stop emitting carbon and draw it down as quickly as possible, so that we can have a level of CO2 in the atmosphere that we’re all happy to live in. But at the same time, the Arctic is melting, like really, really rapidly. There are ice sheets which are disappearing, and pretty soon you can go on a nice summer cruise line straight through the Arctic.
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah, you don’t have to do it in the summer. The Russians now ship freighters across the North Pole in February. Think about that. In February, they’re now shipping across the North Pole.
Christophe Jospe: The Healthy Climate Alliance has a sort of two-pronged objectives, from my understanding. So one is this incredibly audacious goal — say, 350 parts per million by—
Peter Fiekowsky: 300.
Christophe Jospe: Thank you. 300, excuse me, thank you for correcting me. 300 parts per million by the year 2050. I was thinking 50, and that’s why — anyway. 300, we love it. Like, that’s so amazing. And then the other part is, let’s also restore the Arctic in a way that it doesn’t need to melt. So to me, that’s a lot more palatable solar radiation management, because when you have more ice, that increases the albedo effect, which reflects the sunlight back into the Earth. So the sun and the heat doesn’t stay on Earth, it goes back into space. Yes. So how are we going to do that, Peter?
Peter Fiekowsky: Well, there are a number of methods. One of them is being developed actively, and that’s ice911.org, and they’re doing floating sand. They take very fine sand, melt it into hollow glass beads that float, and then you can spray that on the ice, so that in the winter — or in the summer, when the sun is warming the ice, you’re getting melt ponds — that white snow, white sand is reflecting the sun just as if it were still ice. They’ve done studies to show that that should be enough to maintain the Arctic ice and restore the Arctic ice in some number of decades.
Ross Kenyon: That’s cool. Yeah, I heard that idea. And do they have any sort of back-of-the-envelope costs on it?
Peter Fiekowsky: It is definitely less than fighting a war like, you know, in Afghanistan. The way I like describing it is, it’s probably less than the cost of the US Navy patrolling an open Arctic Ocean.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a good deal. I’ve seen some of the geopolitical predictions, if I get into full Tom Clancy mode, about the coming fights over Arctic mineral and gas resource conflict. Are you up to speed on some of that stuff?
Peter Fiekowsky: A little bit, yeah. It’s going to be interesting. We have been working on some of the politics there, because we do have to deal with that. The Russians may want to keep their trade routes open there.
Ross Kenyon: And those dirty Canadians, always up to no good up there too. I’m sure they’d like the Northwest Passage open.
Peter Fiekowsky: There’s another very easy to visualize way to restore the Arctic ice: in the winter, when it’s 50 below zero, you can pump seawater on top of the ice that forms, and then it’ll freeze in an hour or two. And then once you’ve built up a meter of ice, that’s enough to last the whole summer. And that idea of ice thickening, the oil companies have been using for 50 years to build islands, ice islands, to do their oil infrastructure. So we know how to do it. We would use windmills rather than diesel engines.
Ross Kenyon: You know, all the good weird sci-fi things happening is currently occurring.
Christophe Jospe: I heard that example actually. Someone gave a presentation about that exact concept at ASU. So I’d like to just give a shout out to Arizona State University for also kind of promoting all the good weird moon shot ideas.
Ross Kenyon: Those desert dwellers really care about ice.
Peter Fiekowsky: And it’s more than that. Steven Desch at ASU wrote that paper a year and a half ago, and it’s a phenomenal paper, well researched, and it’s inspired a lot of people, and we’re currently raising money to get it implemented.
Christophe Jospe: That’s awesome. I think one of my biggest concerns is, aren’t you going to spend a lot of money, like pumping the water up? And if you really have to scale that out, doesn’t that start to hurt you cost-wise, or there’s got to be a way around that?
Peter Fiekowsky: Well, you don’t have to pump it very far, right? You pump it maybe three, four feet. That’s all you have to pump. And so it doesn’t take a lot of energy. And if it’s wind power, there’s a lot of wind in the wintertime. And so someone proposed that you can drop the windmills from a plane and have them embed themselves in the ice, because that kind of technology has been developed by the military.
Christophe Jospe: Were you looking to— [unclear] Producer’s prerogative, it looks like you want to say something. On behalf of you, Ross, I wanted to put out a call to our listeners that—
Paul Gambill: Is Ross nervous right now?
Christophe Jospe: Ross has brought up to me countless times that he very much wants to read a Tom Clancy style novel about the geopolitics of climate change, and we haven’t found it yet. So if you know of a novel like that, please send it to us at hello@nori.com. Or if you’re an author, please write it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I want to know, because there’s relative winners and losers out of climate change, right? Like, there are people who will at least have, like, local maximums, even if globally we’re not at the maximum. Russia might win, Canada might do better off. There’s more area to farm, there’s more availability for shipping — you don’t go to the Panama Canal anymore. But there are also some serious costs, and the people who are paying it will probably not be the people far in the north.
Peter Fiekowsky: Right. The big issue is creating the demand for restoring the climate. You have to remember, we don’t do it for ourselves. It’s like planting a tree that you’re never going to sit under. As long as we’re looking at what’s good for me, we’re going to keep doing the status quo as we’ve been doing. If we look at it as, I am humanity, I’m part of humanity — looking from that perspective, it makes a lot of sense to invest the money to provide a planet that our grandchildren can live on.
Christophe Jospe: I’m excited about the prospect of, how do we sell that to the Russians?
Peter Fiekowsky: One of my colleagues said, well, when we restore the Arctic ice, we can maintain canals through it for shipping, and then we can have the Russians own the canals. So they own the rights. They can only earn money charging tolls for the canals if they keep it frozen.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, wow. So it’s like the Suez Canal or Panama?
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah, they’re charging tolls, but they also have to maintain the ice for the whole planet.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s a fascinating little proposal.
Peter Fiekowsky: I like smart people who come up with ideas about that. That wasn’t mine.
Ross Kenyon: Some of the stuff in the space, it often feels like you’re just trying to, like, conquer each other, or like force them to do what you want, which can work in some cases, but it’s way better if you can give someone a nice upside. They’re saying, like, oh, this isn’t just a cost on me. This is actually a way we can all win. And it helps that Russians already are inclined to like the cold.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And then there’s stuff like — we always get excited, and we every chance we get to reference Pleistocene Park. You know those folks? Are you familiar?
Peter Fiekowsky: I’m not.
Ross Kenyon: Oh man, they’re trying to restore the Arctic.
Peter Fiekowsky: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Christophe Jospe: And reintroducing woolly mammoths, and that whole wild bioengineering project. Yeah, that’s super fascinating too. So I think, like, there are ways where you can monetize the restoration or the maintenance of tundra, and so you don’t have permafrost melting. You give Russia an incentive to make sure, like, they’re winning off of keeping things the way that they are, or even restoring further than that.
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah. Yeah, the big deal is to get people really wanting to restore the climate, because, like, I think for Nori to succeed, you need to have people who want to buy the carbon credits. And so we’ve taken on the job of creating that demand. Sort of like someone at Coca-Cola 100 years ago said, you know what, I need to teach people to like brown fizzy sugar water.
Ross Kenyon: And to sing, right? You have to teach the world how to sing, right?
Peter Fiekowsky: Well, that’s part of what they figured out worked.
Ross Kenyon: Was that Don Draper who did that? It may have been, may have been before there. I think there’s an episode about that anyways.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, to your point, right, we need to create the demand. And what I think is unique about your approach, Peter, is you’re bringing this moral imperative to it. You say, actually, we must do this for not only our own children — which I would say is self-motivated; like, I plan on having kids one day, I want them to live in a healthy climate — but actually, I want all the children to be able to live in a healthy climate. And so we take our ego out of it, and I think that’s really important. And do it for the children. We have to do it for the children.
Ross Kenyon: Won’t someone think of the children? Is that what you’re trying to say?
Christophe Jospe: Nope. Where I wanted to go with the line of questioning, actually — was it not a couple of months ago you were at the Vatican and were articulating some of this value proposition, if you will, to the Vatican? And so I’d just be curious, what happens when we bring religion into this global movement?
Peter Fiekowsky: What’s been useful for us is using the Vatican to frame the argument. I came into it as a physicist, and I came into it late, because as a physicist I knew it’s just physics. You’ve got X tonnes of CO2, we know how to get the CO2 out, they don’t need me to solve it. And I realized that that was not happening. And using the Vatican as a frame to say, this is about humanity, it’s not about the science. The science is going to be fine no matter what we do. And that’s why our scientific goal is 2 degrees warming. The likelihood of humanity surviving living with two degrees warming is pretty low, I’d assess.
Ross Kenyon: You think the chance of humanity surviving at 2 degrees warmer globally is low?
Peter Fiekowsky: I think so. Most of humanity may die, or face extreme hardship, or — who knows what will happen. But we can already see a lot of civil society coming apart. Yeah, we see it in our country, we see it in other countries, that may not get better. We’ve got almost 8 billion people. One or 2 billion of them live in the areas that are going to disappear because of sea level rise. We’ve already had Europe almost collapse under 1 or 2 million immigrants. Imagine when that’s 100 million immigrants.
Ross Kenyon: I can’t.
Peter Fiekowsky: And that’s why I say I don’t think that civilization will survive. Some people will survive, but it won’t look anything like what we like.
Ross Kenyon: That’s one thing that we definitely try to focus on. Some of the rhetoric in the climate space focuses quite heavily on — it’s just like, sea level rise means you won’t get to live in New York or whatever, or Miami’s going to go underwater, which is important, I would prefer to preserve those places. But I’m thinking about changes in agricultural patterns and people having droughts and people not being able to feed their family. And when people are desperate, things get scary. That isn’t adequately discussed.
Christophe Jospe: Not to mention feedback loops, right? So the climate gets warmer, that causes more methane to be released up by the Arctic, that causes more forest fires, forces the pine beetles to move north, which devastates the forest, which then basically become kindling for the forest fires. So all of these feedback loops sort of compound each other. So when I see 2 degrees — which by the way, I think is a fake number anyway, fake news, because we want 0 degrees, and 2 degrees is not a stopping point. If we say we’re happy to live at 2 degrees, no, we’re going to get all these feedback loops and it’s going to keep going up. So that’s why we have to get back.
Ross Kenyon: Back to where we were, back to the home.
Christophe Jospe: The analogy they use at [unclear] is, we’re on a car that’s like speeding towards a cliff, and trying to stop us at 2 degrees is just like saying let’s try to slow down the car. Whereas what we’re talking about here at this table is like, let’s turn this car around. And it was great, I wrote that article.
Ross Kenyon: Are you sure that was [unclear]?
Christophe Jospe: Anyway. Were they? They were. Maybe they might have been quoting me. I didn’t see that before I gave my— I’m sorry.
Ross Kenyon: Our listeners know we like to destroy metaphors, so that’s definitely what a—
Christophe Jospe: Fragile ego over here.
Peter Fiekowsky: But the good news is that we actually can do it. It’s possible, it’s achievable, and it’s getting started now. What I’ve pointed out is that between the aggregate and the fishery restoration, we can get all the excess carbon out essentially for free, by getting profits from selling the aggregate and profits from selling the fish and seaweed. And then on the Arctic, we could probably enroll the Navy with a suitable advertising campaign, political campaign, saying, listen, it’s going to be cheaper for you to keep the Arctic frozen than it is for you to patrol it. Why don’t you just do it? It’ll be cheaper. And the point is that we actually have everything we need other than the vision. So we have the technology, we have the money; we need the vision of restoring the climate. That’s what I’m working on.
Christophe Jospe: Have you started talking to Congress about that issue? Because the Department of Defense is pretty interested in climate mitigation.
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah, and adaptation.
Ross Kenyon: Have you ever read Jeff Goodell’s The Water Will Come?
Peter Fiekowsky: I’ve read parts of that.
Ross Kenyon: The whole book’s great, but the section on the military having to talk about how they’re adapting and planning new bases and expansions to — and then, but also having to frame it in a way that is not alienating to Congress, where they’re like, why are you building this dock extra high? Oh, just thought it’d be a good idea. Just, just, just in case. They’re like, for what? For the climate. No, no, it just would be — it’d be nicer if it was higher, just in case.
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah. So, so tomorrow we actually are having a bill introduced. It’s a resolution in Congress, and it simply says that it’s the sense of Congress that the US is committed to giving a healthy climate to our kids and grandkids.
Christophe Jospe: Who’s introducing that?
Peter Fiekowsky: Jamie Raskin in Maryland. The point of it is to actually start the conversation in Congress, in Washington, that we know unconsciously that we have an obligation to our children. But to say it aloud, publicly, is a different thing. And so this is getting people to say aloud what we know in our hearts. It’s a very conservative concept — of course, you know, preserving the planet for our children is conservative. But first you have to say that we’re committed to it. It goes against the science, as we were just saying a minute ago; the science is saying, oh, 2 degrees warming. In our heart, we know that at 1 degree of warming we have these massive forest fires, massive floods, hurricanes destroying islands, and so on and so on. And so, get the idea that we’ve given up on our kids. And so we’re reviving our commitment to our kids by saying, no, we are committed to it. If you want to get married to someone, you can’t think I love you. You can’t think will you marry me. You’ve got to say I love you aloud, and you’ve got to say will you marry me aloud, because it just, nothing happens if you don’t.
Ross Kenyon: You have to feel it innately. Some people argue sometimes that if you say it, you start feeling it.
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah. But the main thing is, if you don’t say it, it’s not going to happen. We have an obligation to our children. We all know it, but you’ve got to say it before it happens. And so that’s the purpose of this resolution in Congress. And once people feel comfortable saying it, then it’ll be easier to get the Navy to get engaged in it. I’m an MIT alum in physics, and went back there last year to promote climate restoration, this goal of 300 parts per million by the year 2050. And in private, everyone said, that’s great, we love it, we can’t improve it for you. And in public, they said, you know, I can’t get my name associated with it because it goes outside the bailiwick of current science. It’s just too embarrassing to say we want to restore the climate in public, because it implies that maybe we haven’t been doing the right things in the past. And so we’ve got to break through that in order to give social permission for people to restore the climate.
Ross Kenyon: Totally. There’s a revolution afoot. We’re all part of it. We’re all on the same team, and we need to have fun while doing it and make it as inclusive as possible and as wide as possible, because at the end of the day, everyone wants the same thing.
Peter Fiekowsky: Everyone wants the same thing. That’s the funny thing. When I tell people that I’m working on restoring the climate, they say, oh my God, do you know what our president is doing? I said, you know what, that’s OK. You know, we all want to restore the climate. He’s doing his thing, probably has no argument against it. It’s just, you know, he’s doing his thing.
Ross Kenyon: He probably doesn’t care at all, or think about it. It’s probably not anywhere in his frame of reference. Seems like he’s got his hands full.
Peter Fiekowsky: I think so. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, yeah. So it’s not a partisan issue. You know, it becomes a partisan issue when it’s hopeless, sort of like when a ship is sinking, people will say, oh, it’s your fault, it’s your fault, it’s your fault. But once someone says, oh, wait a minute, we can save the ship, everyone stops arguing about whose fault it is. They actually save the ship.
Ross Kenyon: Start working together. Yeah, yeah. We don’t actually think this is a very partisan issue. One of the philosophical reasons for Nori — which, you’re a long time listener and fan, and which I deeply appreciate — but yeah, when you can make sure that people can get paid and environmentalism isn’t purely punitive, but can also be economically rewarding, hopefully a lot of the right chills out on it and it says, hey, this is actually an opportunity where I can win. I’m not just being taxed more heavily, or you’re not shutting my industry down. This is a way where you can actually get people on board to really make things happen.
Peter Fiekowsky: We want that to happen too. We want to see this not just be a partisan issue.
Christophe Jospe: Right now the issue is sort of owned by the left, and a lot of it kind of turns people off from it. But it doesn’t have to, right?
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah, yeah, it belongs to everybody. And one of the biggest jobs I’m finding with the Healthy Climate Alliance is overcoming the partisan feeling about climate, because we act like climate is partisan now. I’ve lobbied in Congress for the Citizens Climate Lobby, carbon fee and dividend. And when I walk into a Republican office, I just act like a Republican, because I grew up in Washington, I know how to do that. And the Republicans will share with me. They totally get what’s going on. And they say, no, I — yeah, I like what you’re doing. If I were you, I would do exactly what you’re doing. What can I tell my constituents? That’s a public relations matter.
Christophe Jospe: Jobs.
Peter Fiekowsky: Well. Economic security.
Ross Kenyon: Well, this is probably the ten thousandth time we’ve brought up—
Christophe Jospe: Do it again.
Ross Kenyon: All right, let’s go. One of my favorite books from, I think, 2014 was The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Are you familiar with that?
Peter Fiekowsky: Oh yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Quickly summarize it.
Ross Kenyon: Haidt is a moral psychology researcher and has used empirical evidence to show that there are six broad categories of values that humans across all different cultures tend to care about to some degree. There’s a continuum: caring, fairness, liberty, authority, sanctity and loyalty.
Christophe Jospe: I don’t think you’ve ever gotten all six of them.
Ross Kenyon: That’s it. But the main point of the book is talking about how politics is dividing good people. Like, the idea of, like, good and evil people is such a fallacy. It’s just that people value different things. And so, like you’re saying, when you’re in a Republican’s office, you act like a Republican. You appeal to the values that they tend to care about, which happens to be, in Haidt’s matrix, conservatives tend to care about all six of those roughly equally with each other. They all hold the same weight, whereas liberals or Democrats tend to care about just caring and fairness, and the other four are a lot lower. They’re not zero, they’re not zero for anyone, but they’re a lot lower. And so making these appeals to people that reflect their values is really the best way to go about talking about this.
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah, meet people where they are, right?
Ross Kenyon: Exactly.
Peter Fiekowsky: One of the things I discovered in our work this last few months is I’ve been trying to convince people that we have an obligation to our children and grandchildren. And I realized that when I was convincing them, I was cornering them in the opposite opinion. And so I now frame it as, of course we all want to restore the climate. And everyone agrees. The point is, these divisions mostly are artificial when you live in a zero sum game. So imagine we’re off in the savanna in Africa and, you know, the population is up to what the land can hold. If another clan comes into our neighborhood, we’re going to push them out, because if they come in, you know, we lose, because it’s a zero sum game at that point. If there’s plenty of resources, we’ll welcome them in and say, hey, let’s go build a temple or something together. And the trick is to turn this from the zero sum game, that if I win you lose, to everyone wins game, that we’re all in it together game.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, we love that. At some point hopefully we have enough fans, or if someone will make a Reversing Climate Change bingo card. I think, like, one of the boxes would be like, someone brings up game theory, Christophe starts a comment with so. That one would be easily checked off.
Christophe Jospe: Oh man, I’m going to get so self-conscious now. So — no. I totally agree with you, Peter. We’re talking about living in a spirit of abundance. One of our advisors, Ramez Naam, talks about knowledge is the infinite resource. We have the knowledge that the solutions are out there. We just need to share this widely and sort of spread hope and point to the opportunity.
Peter Fiekowsky: One of the key things there is, we are going to have to have a lower population on our planet. We need to have what we call a sustainable population. There’s a population above which our planet’s not going to hold, and we’re way above that. The experts tend to agree on that. We don’t like to talk about that, but we do need to talk about it. And the good news is that the way you reduce the population, you have small families for a while.
Christophe Jospe: It’s pretty clear that as countries or societies become wealthier, the birth rate goes down. So really the solution there is to create more wealth and value. As people do that, then—
Peter Fiekowsky: It goes both ways, that is.
Christophe Jospe: Educate women and girls.
Peter Fiekowsky: Yes, absolutely.
Ross Kenyon: That’s it. Let’s do it.
Peter Fiekowsky: That’s the doing side of it. But you still have the marketing side. It’s sort of like here in San Francisco: if we wanted to get to Hawaii, we would go west. But if we go west, we’re not going to end up in Hawaii. If you want to get to Hawaii, you’ve got to say, I want to get to Hawaii. And so it’s good to educate girls and provide family planning, give a lot of choice. But unless you say we actually want a sustainable population, we’re not going to get it. It’s just standard management. You’ve got to do both. You’ve got to actually say we actually do want a sustainable population.
Christophe Jospe: Well, that’s where, to quote myself from last week’s episode, I often advocate for tokenizing everything, creating markets around all sorts of things, ecosystem services and natural resources, things that are often unpriced right now. Creating price signals for those will help allocate those resources in a more efficient way, in a more sustainable way, so that we actually do achieve that goal.
Peter Fiekowsky: We see it here in Silicon Valley. My son and daughter are moving back from where they went to college and so on, and it’s expensive here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Like, you cannot have a lot of kids here anymore.
Christophe Jospe: So the market is communicating.
Ross Kenyon: Well, yeah. And like, people don’t necessarily need to. The reasons in the past why people might have large families are for reasons of sharing the workload of the family.
Christophe Jospe: It’s insurance for when you grow older.
Ross Kenyon: A lot more people that have my last name. Well, I mean, prior to modern medicine, like, God forbid something happens to one of them, you still have more.
Peter Fiekowsky: So as people become wealthier, the need for having so many children goes down, and the desire for that goes down as well. You’ve got to create the social norm. I call it a norm of one. For the rest of the century, we probably want to have the social norm, most people have one child or two, you know, some have none, some have three, but the norm is one or two. You know, when I grew up, the norm was two or three, you know, for a family. It doesn’t really make that much difference, because, as you said, we’re not dependent on our kids for our life insurance policies anymore. What South Korea did in reducing their birth rate tremendously, it’s now half the replacement rate in South Korea, because they had a campaign in the 70s that said two is enough, and they had a campaign in the 80s that said two is too many, and which resulted in a far lower birth rate than in China, for example.
Christophe Jospe: This is interesting. I don’t know if I agree with you on population control. Yeah, I think that market forces will take care of it in a way that people don’t have to be told how many children is good or bad. I think that we can find ways that just allocate those resources efficiently. And like with all resources, every single time we’ve reached some sort of scare about peak whatever that resource might be, we always find ways to innovate and use different resources, or extract more in other different ways, or move beyond that. So I think I’m less concerned about that.
I think what concerns me, in having lived abroad in some of the third world countries and sort of families that have many, many kids, is it’s not the well educated families that are in the upper echelons of society, who can take care of their kids, who are having a lot of kids. It’s basically the poorest sectors of humanity. And so you’re birthing people into a life that is going to see very little upward mobility. Hopefully in this, market forces can take care of all of this. I think it goes back to what we started with, which is what you care very deeply about, which is poverty alleviation. And it’s sort of very interesting to look at all of this systemically and see how a warming climate is an existential risk to everyone, but particularly the people who are the poorest.
Peter Fiekowsky: That’s right. If we look at it like we’re all in it together, I like saying I am humanity. When I say that, I get really happy, because I don’t have to worry about my own particular circumstances. And then you’d want to take care of everybody, because certainly if there’s poor people like in El Salvador now, a lot of the people crossing the border into the US, they can’t survive in El Salvador. A lot of it is the heat, and the climate has changed. They can’t raise the crops they used to. But also the population has gone up. But that’s given a lot of stress in our country. If you read the news, those immigrants have stressed our country.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, even if it’s not them directly, it’s stressed in the perceived crisis too. So it’s almost independently of any empirical effect, good or bad. It’s just, the perception is everyone freaks out.
Peter Fiekowsky: Yeah, that’s what people worry about, for right or wrong. I don’t want to go there, as we provide the resources for them to educate their girls and provide voluntary family planning and say, listen, it’s OK to have a small family, and provide the resources that the sustainable development goals are working for, for universal education and health. But you’ve got to tell them it’s OK to have a small family. This is a change. The main reason that Mexico is now at replacement level and Brazil is well below replacement, and they used to be very high birth rates, is there’s a group called the Population Media Center. They designed long running radio dramas, telenovelas, that teach people about what happens if you have a large family and stuff like that. So whatever is the social issue for that country in that area. But they promoted having smaller families, and people said, oh good, if the people on the drama have a small family, I’ll do the same thing. And it worked phenomenally well.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, when’s the Reversing Climate Change telenovela going to take place? We’ve got to make some creative media here, get the word out about carbon removal.
Paul Gambill: Sure.
Ross Kenyon: The ringing endorsement from the CEO. I have the best idea, as always.
Christophe Jospe: Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much, Peter. Thank you for all the work you’re doing. We really look forward to remaining on the same team and, like, scaling up this movement in several orders of magnitude.
Peter Fiekowsky: Good. I’m looking forward to it. Yeah, we have a few orders of magnitude to scale up and it’s happening. So yeah, if you have a chance, come by one of our events this week.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, definitely.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks for being here. That was a lot of fun and we’ll see you again soon.
Peter Fiekowsky: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you guys for the work that you do, especially the popularization of it. That’s so important.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, we got mass appeal here. It’s, right. So if you’re listening to this podcast for the first time and you like it, please share it. Leave us a review, tell someone about it. Subscribe, subscribe. Email us at hello@nori.com. If we are in a city near you, maybe we’ll even bring you on as a guest. OK. Thank you.
