In a world where ideology informs decision-making and policy-makers have little understanding of what is plausible when it comes to negative emissions technology, challenging doesn’t even begin to describe the task of reversing climate change. In this top-down approach, a small number of academics, activists and politicians are making the decisions for 7.5 billion people—and spending a lot of time arguing hypotheticals rather than taking action.
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, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast hosted by Nori. We’re a blockchain-based carbon removal marketplace. Now this is our fifth episode. We’re here in Phoenix, actually in Tempe, Arizona. It’s the alma mater of all of us, actually, weirdly enough. I didn’t really expect to come back to Arizona too often as a professional. I live in Los Angeles now. But I feel like I keep getting brought back here because Phoenix seems to have a lot of cool stuff happening. So I’m here with Christophe and some guests here on the ASU main campus.
And Christophe, why don’t you introduce them?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, right when I got out, they pulled me back in. Small technicality. I was a Sun Devil. I was on the Sun Devil payroll, but I never technically went here. Had the pleasure of working at the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, which is part of the Sustainability School, which is a large umbrella. And I know it’s an umbrella that also encompasses the School for Future Innovation in Society. Hopefully I got that right. It’s great to be back in Phoenix. Seattle’s gray. Yeah. Arizona’s not great. Yeah, Seattle, I understand why snowbirds come here.
You get it now? Yeah, I got it because we were walking on the pathway and I just stopped to take in some sun and that’s something I can’t do in Seattle.
Ross Kenyon: That’s like our version of small chat here in Arizona where you can just be like, ah, snowbirds. I was behind a snowbird for like 20 minutes today and everyone’s like, yeah, I understand. I feel you. Or we also say it’s a dry heat. That’s the other thing that people say just to make small talk. It’s just a dry heat. It’s just a dry heat and there’s snowbirds and that’s most of your day of chatter.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Yeah. I like it. Well, today is a very special episode because it’s the first time we have brought on two guests. And without further ado, let’s throw them into the gauntlet here. So to my left, we’ve got Jane Flagle, like bagel. You’re going to practice that like 10 times, man. I wanted to make sure that I got it right. Flagle. Anxious delivery. Yeah. So as I contacted some of my other ASU colleagues before I came on, they said, oh, you know, geoengineering Jane is speaking on Tuesday. Are you the geoengineering Jane?
Jane Flegal: No. Actually, there are two of us. There are a large number of Jane in the geoengineering world. I go by Jane Jr. , Jane 2. There’s Jane Long. Who’s a senior scientist. And then there’s me, Jane Jr.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, so she’s geoengineering.
Jane Flegal: I will submit that she is geoengineering.
Ross Kenyon: And how many sulfates do you want to emit into the atmosphere?
Jane Flegal: A small amount. Bathtubs worth, initially. Scaling up rapidly.
Ross Kenyon: It’s sulfates, right?
Jane Flegal: Depends. We’re not going there. I’m on the right track, though. I’ve been learning about this, but it’s new. It’s like a volcano.
Christophe Jospe: We could go there. I really like definitions, so I’d like to define it. Andrew Maynard, welcome.
Andrew Maynard: Thank you.
Christophe Jospe: And we’re sitting in your office.
Andrew Maynard: You are.
Christophe Jospe: So maybe we could start giving both of you the chance to introduce yourself. What do you do? What do you think about? Why are you on the Reversing Climate Change podcast anyway?
Unknown speaker: I have no idea.
Christophe Jospe: Jane, how can you?
Jane Flegal: I can start. Yeah, that’s true. So I’m a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, actually, in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management. But I’m visiting this semester. And before I started my PhD, I worked for a few years in Washington, D. C. at a think tank called the Bipartisan Policy Center, where I worked mostly on... Energy issues kind of widely, but most of my work focused on energy innovation. And some small, very small chunk of that portfolio was devoted to looking at geoengineering, which we can define in a moment.
But in the context of my work at the Bipartisan Policy Center... That term encompassed both research into ideas to increase the reflectivity of the planet through a range of techniques and also attempts to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the kind of negative emissions technologies.
Christophe Jospe: So that thing’s carbon removal, right?
Jane Flegal: That thing is many things. Carbon removal, carbon dioxide removal, negative emissions technologies...
Christophe Jospe: And the first thing you said is SRM?
Jane Flegal: Well, you know, there’s a lot of politics around that as well. It’s the National Academies which put out reports on both sets of techniques termed the whole category not geoengineering but climate intervention. Because they didn’t like the way that engineering implied a sense of controllability that might be unrealistic. And then that report called the solar radiation management or solar geoengineering techniques, which are about increasing reflectivity, albedo modification.
Ross Kenyon: Albedo.
Jane Flegal: Albedo.
Ross Kenyon: Is this like a Freudian term? Close.
Jane Flegal: What’s an albedo? Albedo. How would you define albedo?
Andrew Maynard: You’re putting me on the spot.
Jane Flegal: I’m putting you on the spot.
Andrew Maynard: So albinio is effectively the propensity of something to reflect light. To reflect light, yeah. Yes. It’s a little bit like light. What is it?
Ross Kenyon: Is it a Greek word? No.
Jane Flegal: And I just failed my qualifying.
Christophe Jospe: Well, think about painting roofs white. Yes. And so if you paint a roof white, then if it used to be black, if it were black, it would absorb a lot of the heat and require you to spend a lot more on your cooling bill.
Ross Kenyon: You’re saying it’s like Santorini and it is Greek. Is that what you’re saying?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, right. It is Greek, exactly. So the albino modification was developed in Santorini, where everything is white.
Unknown speaker: Fake news, man. Fake news. Fake news.
Jane Flegal: But there are also ideas that are perceived to be a little more large scale than white roofs. So things like mimicking the effects of a volcano. So after large volcanic eruptions, which put aerosols into the stratosphere, those aerosols basically act as kind of a shield around the Earth and block some of the incoming sunlight. So you do see global cooling. In response to volcanic eruptions and that’s sort of where the aerosol injection the sulfates that you mentioned earlier comes from.
Ross Kenyon: I know this is quite controversial because some people like they don’t like the term geoengineering because it sounds like we’ve already ruined this planet like you think you can like control this and then the same thing gets ported over to terraforming Mars or other things they’re just like you guys are like this is all hubristic exercise is it not is this part of the criticism of geoengineering?
Jane Flegal: I think so. I’m sure. But you asked about this scary technology of geoengineering. I’m actually not that convinced that people are scared about it. Yeah.
Andrew Maynard: Jane, I don’t know whether there’s been any recent public polling on attitudes, but my sense is that this is a little bit like inside baseball. So people that are really invested in either geoengineering or being anti-geoengineering have this assumption that everybody else is also equally invested in it. Most people either don’t know about it or don’t care about it.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. So like you already agree on like 80 or 90 or even more of the percent, but then like the fights become so intense because it’s just like the name is really important for some reason.
Andrew Maynard: So actually, I think within the community, there are some big fights here, ideological fights about what you do. Do you start tinkering even more with the planet or do you try and stop tinkering? But it really is a small group of experts. And if you go out onto the streets of Tempe and ask people, what do you think of engineering? They’ll look at you as if you’re from Mars or something.
Unknown speaker: Is that the name of like a shot or a beer bomb?
Ross Kenyon: Right, yeah.
Jane Flegal: Most of the empirical social science, the public opinion polling on geoengineering finds insanely low levels of familiarity with the term geoengineering in the order of less than 10% closer to single digit percentages of public awareness. And they find that If you’re trying to get, you know, elicit a response from the public to something they know nothing about, surprise, surprise, it’s all in how you frame it, right? Oh, sure.
Ross Kenyon: Is it fair to say, like, this might be totally unfair, but I have friends who went to the sustainability college and they tend to be like a little more on the hippie side and the idea of like... Interfering more is just like a total non-starter. Like they would just be like, no. Oh yeah. I’m like a techno-optimist too. Like I think humans solve problems. We’re good at it. We’re going to solve more in the future.
Andrew Maynard: So I have to be a little careful because a lot of this is anecdotal, but certainly people come Right, right.
Jane Flegal: But there’s all these concerns about the level of sort of what does the general public think about these ideas? And then there’s the question of how are these sets of ideas being addressed at the level of policymaking? And we can have an interesting conversation, I think, about. The role and politics of negative emissions in particular in the context of international and domestic climate policy. In the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sets of reports that tried to model what kinds of mixes of technologies might be able to achieve the temperature targets that were agreed to under the Paris Agreement.
So keeping global average temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius. From pre-industrial levels.
Unknown speaker: Did you say a lack of awareness with policymakers? This is such a weird thing. I mean, I thought these people were gone.
Christophe Jospe: So Jane, you open the door. Let’s walk through it. Oh, great. Are you saying that people agreed to commitments and they have no idea how to solve these things they agreed to? Sounds pretty risky, doesn’t it? It does sound risky. Yeah.
Jane Flegal: Well, I mean, I think that there are different ways to interpret the kind of political process that happens at the UN agreements on climate change, right? And so an expression of an aspiration to achieve a two degree temperature target can be read as just an aspirational goal and not a very specific prescription about technological pathways. And so some people will make that argument. But I do think that there’s a real problem here. In that if we are going to assume at the high levels of international climate policy that these targets are achievable using technologies that are essentially imaginary at this point, then that suggests to me that policymakers either need to be quite seriously investing in modes of inquiry into those technologies or take them out of the scenarios altogether.
Andrew Maynard: So I would add to that. So this is not unusual, setting policies that force technology. You say, this is where we’d like to be. We don’t know how we’re going to get there. But by setting the levels or whatever, we’re going to encourage people to come up with the technological fixes. What is plausible at this point?
Ross Kenyon: I get really into like direct air capture is really cool to me, but I know it’s like kind of nascent and like pretty early days, right?
Christophe Jospe: Right. And just for our listeners who may not even know what direct air capture is.
Ross Kenyon: This is very responsible over here. Look at this guy.
Christophe Jospe: Right. I’m coming from the academic who’s trying to use big words, but I want to keep this for the people, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Please do it. Hox populi seeds the floor.
Christophe Jospe: Direct air capture. You can think of it like an artificial tree that is directly extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, upgrading that stream, and then using that stream to permanently sequester it. It’s all theoretical. You have some demonstration plants. There’s an interesting demonstration plant that we actually talked about with our last episode up in Iceland.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, the mineralization? Yeah. Yeah, that’s very cool. Putting it into rocks, it stores it there permanently or you hope permanently.
Christophe Jospe: But let’s also not throw trees under the bus. Isn’t large-scale tree planting a form of geoengineering?
Jane Flegal: Well, you hit on something really interesting that relates to the discussion we just had about How the way that you frame these imaginary technologies affects how people perceive them, because in a lot of the social science research on negative emissions technologies, people have found that if you frame technologies as like a tree or as something natural, people tend to be more willing to accept it than if you describe it as something that’s more artificial, which is a really interesting finding, I think, perhaps not surprising. On the afforestation question on this idea of plant I don’t know, Andrew, do you have any?
Ross Kenyon: Isn’t it like if we were to even like cut emissions to nothing or even start reversing it like all the arable land of earth would have to be trees or something crazy like that?
Jane Flegal: I mean, I think for a lot of these approaches, there’s a tendency for people to want to describe certain techniques for doing negative emissions as softer than others. So the stuff that feels more natural, like Planting a lot of trees or bioenergy with carbon capture feels more natural. But I think for a lot of this stuff, the question is really scale. So exactly what you’re getting at, you know, if you were to do these things that feel okay in a particular place at a particular time to have a meaningful impact on climate in the way that we might expect or hope they could have quite significant, not just technical challenges, but social, political, cultural challenges as well.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was scolded kind of moderately severely by producer Paul over here the other day. Sometimes I forget, I think the average person doesn’t really know that even if we did cut emissions entirely, we’re still way over the amount of carbon in the atmosphere to even deal with this. The modeling shows that there is some like lagging. We haven’t seen the full rate of rise, right? Right. Okay. But it’s coming at some point, but it just hasn’t taken place. But we have to like start pulling it out now. So it isn’t just like we can’t just do what we’ve always done.
It’s we need technology to solve this problem or it’s coming. Is that correct?
Jane Flegal: It sounds right now like you’re proselytizing about solar geoengineering because this is actually one of the reasons some of the scientists.
Ross Kenyon: Don’t put words in my mouth.
Christophe Jospe: Ross, you’re going to get scolded after this episode. By the way, you sound like this.
Jane Flegal: True. This sort of, again, like not to suggest that all policymakers are ignorant, but there is, I think, across even like a lot of the experts in the climate space, a lack of understanding of the kind of inertia in the climate system that you’re describing, right? That even if you stopped emissions today, we would still be committed to some degree of warming and therefore some climate risk. And that’s part of the reason why things like negative emissions and perhaps solar geoengineering might be things that we want to keep on the table.
Ross Kenyon: What is solar geoengineering? This isn’t like you put up like a satellite that blocks the sun. Is this Snowpiercer? Is that what we’re doing? I think where’s like Albedo coming again.
Jane Flegal: Yeah, yeah. It’s just the idea that you could enhance the reflectivity of the planet essentially to cool the planet rapidly. And there’s a bunch of ideas. The one that’s treated as sometimes the most promising is the idea of basically mimicking a volcano, like putting some aerosols in the stratosphere. But there’s all sorts of things. Yeah, like space mirrors and white roofs and all kinds of things like that. But One of the points, I think, is that while some people who work on negative emissions technologies really don’t want to be included in the geoengineering conversation, as soon as you frame it as about solving the climate problem, you start to recognize that none of these things really make sense without So I think the challenge is, when you look at the problem, the problem has got three dimensions.
Andrew Maynard: We’ve got lots of sun coming in, we’ve got lots of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that help capture that sunlight, and we’ve got people coming in. So if you’re going to address the problem, you’ve got to either reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth, you’ve got to reduce the number of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or you’ve got to change people’s behaviors. And certainly from somebody like me, who looks at how you think of risk on a systemic level, you’ve got to look at all three parts of the problem to work out how to get forward.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, if you just reflected the sunlight isn’t like ocean acidity isn’t going down at that point, right?
Jane Flegal: Oh boy, now you’re really getting into it. I learned myself.
Christophe Jospe: Ross did his homework. He tries to come across like he didn’t do his homework.
Ross Kenyon: I do best, but I do homework.
Jane Flegal: Painting ignorance. Actually, this question of the potential impact of solar geoengineering on the carbon cycle is not totally clear. Some scientists have recently argued that, you know, it certainly wouldn’t address ocean acidification in a direct way, but that there might be kind of feedback effects associated with solar geoengineering that could...
Andrew Maynard: But that’s a long cycle, isn’t it? If you look at the dissolution of carbon dioxide in the oceans, it takes a long time for it to get there. It takes a long time for it to come out as well. So we’ve got a real challenge there.
Unknown speaker: But it’s there long enough to kill the coral reefs.
Andrew Maynard: That’s right. It’s very good at that. Yes. Which seemed to be important.
Unknown speaker: So can we geoengineer our oceans as well?
Andrew Maynard: People are talking about it. Yes. But that also raises the question. So you’ve got oceans. We could start using aquaculture and growing seaweed and, dare I say, nori.
Unknown speaker: What if we had floating cities in the ocean?
Christophe Jospe: That’s always a good idea. Definitely.
Jane Flegal: Well, this is also interesting to me because, you know, there’s been a lot of talk in the climate debate about taboos around particular kinds of strategies. So initially adaptation was really perceived as being taboo, like something.
Unknown speaker: What’s that?
Jane Flegal: The notion that because of what we just described and because of the fact that we’re committed to some climate changes, no matter what we do at the moment, significant investment should go into adapting to the changes that are likely to come. So this includes things like planning for potential future sea level rise in some cities or investing in smart ways to do agriculture in the context of future climate change. But for a long time, especially in the sort of mainstream policy debate around climate change, adaptation was like, I feel like you would want that insurance policy on the table, though, wouldn’t you?
Well, but for a lot of people, it was perceived as a resignation. Like, ugh, that’s an admission that we can’t really address climate in a way that feels good because we’re intervening.
Andrew Maynard: And again, you get back to the ideologies. There’s something that really worries me here, and that is who decides which is the right ideology. And effectively, what we’ve got is we’ve got a really small number of people who are deciding what is right for seven and a half billion people around the planet.
Unknown speaker: Is this IPCC?
Andrew Maynard: I not know. When you’re talking about the ideology of what we do and don’t do or what we do talk about and what we don’t talk about, I don’t think it’s people or groups like the IPCC. It’s academics and activists in this area who have decided that this is how we should be going forward because of This is the right ideology.
Christophe Jospe: Can we refer to them as the geoengineering Illuminati?
Ross Kenyon: So like people don’t like carbon negative processes because it feels like, oh, people are just going to burn fossil fuels because they can buy absolution, you know, they can buy an indulgence.
Andrew Maynard: So this is the argument. And again, I think it’s something of an intellectual argument. Yes, it goes along the lines of as soon as you give somebody the And we see this sort of economics happen elsewhere. The more opportunities you give people to sort of offset what they do, the more of the So let me give you an analogy. It’s a medical analogy. I mean, if you’re trying to do things like address heart The last thing you do is say we’re not going to allow anybody to have any heart bypass surgery because as soon as we offer that, people are going to have bad lifestyle habits.
It’s not an option.
Unknown speaker: Yeah, the argument for moral hazard there seems kind of stupid.
Andrew Maynard: Right, right. But we’re tending to do the same thing, I think, when it comes to conversations around how we manage the climate.
Ross Kenyon: I would rather do that personally, though. Like, I want to live the same lifestyle I’m living now. Just what do I have to pay to do it? Like, I’m willing to just, it’s my waste product. I’ll pay for it. Can I just do that?
Unknown speaker: And there you become part of the problem. This is why people don’t have these conversations.
Ross Kenyon: How’s that part of the problem though? I feel like I’m like at least neutral.
Jane Flegal: Well, this is one of the things about negative emissions that I don’t think we have yet talked about. And perhaps because it’s there’s so little actually R&D happening in a serious way on some of this stuff. But the question of who’s going to pay for it, who will pay for... I mean, I don’t know. That’s dirty. And, you know, these kinds of questions. And I think it’ll be interesting to look at how the negative emissions debate intersects with that sort of ongoing political conversation.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like you can’t just tell China and India. You can’t just be like, nope, you got to stay where you’re at or just like put in solar panels and you’re doing tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people to poverty that way. That doesn’t seem totally fair either. Is that what you’re talking about? It might even be in the three commas club. Trace commas. Yeah. Is that what the problem is there?
Jane Flegal: I mean, I think that there are a lot of problems here. And there are people, like we should be fair, that there are a lot of people would argue that this question of energy access in the developing world can be addressed without negative emissions technologies. Like there are people who will make those claims that we can just destroy. So let me ask you this.
Andrew Maynard: And again, as somebody that sort of is a bit of a dilettante and wanders around this area, but isn’t deeply embedded in it, who are these people who think that they have the right to tell others what they should be doing?
Unknown speaker: You’re getting spicy.
Jane Flegal: I mean, it happens in a lot of domains and it’s happened in the energy and climate space for a long time. I mean, I think there are a number of environmental NGOs and foundations and academics that Yeah. That would suggest that in light of the risks that we face, you should invest in a wide range of approaches.
Christophe Jospe: Right, because practically it takes time. If I am building a coal-fired power plant without any kind of carbon capture affixed to it, I intend for that coal-fired power plant to be there for 50 years. And it would be foolish for me to turn it off before it’s run its life and I don’t get my money back. And so I just don’t think that we’ll be able to decarbonize as quickly as people think we will. And without the ability to pull carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere, we cannot get there.
Yet these carbon removers don’t seem to be invited to the party. I am a used carbon salesman. They’re not going to let me show up. I’m going to be a sleazy guy.
Jane Flegal: What party do you really want to be at?
Christophe Jospe: Well... We’re making our own party from a Nori perspective. We’re trying to say if you feel so inclined to pay to negate your carbon emissions and find this a useful instrument and would like to ensure that all of the money you’re paying is actually going to... The entity that’s removing carbon, let me give a very real example. Farmers actually can remove a lot of carbon in their soils. Sometimes they get as little as 20% of that actual project. It goes through so many middlemen. You mean like the auditors take it and the salespeople, wow.
The lawyers too.
Ross Kenyon: 80% goes to those people?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, right. We’re going to change that. Okay. And so we’re going to create a new voluntary mechanism for people who feel so inclined to at least get it going.
Andrew Maynard: So let me ask you a question. We’ve talked a lot about a top-down approach. You’ve got the Illuminati, you’ve got the international bodies... People get the context. So you’ve got this sort of small body of experts deciding what is right and debating amongst themselves.
Unknown speaker: And getting it wrong, by the way.
Andrew Maynard: Okay, right. And some people think getting it wrong. But your approach seems to be, okay, let them have their discussions. We’re actually going to do something rather than talk about it. What are the hurdles from your perspective? Surely you can just do this. If you’ve got a market there, why not just do it?
Christophe Jospe: There are a lot of hurdles. But as crazy young people, we see challenges as just opportunities to jump over. One of the first hurdles is trust. Do we know what we’re talking about? And do we have a way to verify that these things that we say are removing carbon are actually happening? We think we know what we’re talking about. And we certainly look forward to learning more so we can talk about it. Part of what we’re doing on this podcast. Can we be sure that it’s removing carbon? Yes, we think so.
We’re working with some very smart people who have some fancy ways of measuring that. And then when we make this party, are people going to come up and play and show up to our party?
Andrew Maynard: Right.
Christophe Jospe: And that is a big question.
Andrew Maynard: But then so your value proposition, is it simply the value proposition of people having an opportunity to do what they think is the right thing? Or is there actually money on the table here?
Ross Kenyon: Well, yeah, there is money on the table. You could always buy these tokens very early in the process. I don’t know what the going rate of removing carbon is right now. It’s probably three digits, right? Hmm. Is it high three digits? I think Climeworks is like $600 or something like the last time I checked.
Christophe Jospe: Well, also just to kind of pull you out of the rabbit hole you’re going down because you should know how much it costs. No, I’m just kidding. It all depends, right? Planting a tree is pretty inexpensive. And we’re by no means excluding tree planting within what we’re setting up. So there’s a range of costs. And then there’s also a cost curve on new technologies that someone needs to subsidize. And indeed, Climeworks, which you mentioned, is quite expensive today. And as they continue to learn by doing, they’ll come down in the future, hopefully below the social cost of carbon.
And we defined that already, I think. Last time. But let’s define it again. Social cost of carbon is essentially the dollars per ton that an additional ton of carbon dioxide will cause and damage based on certain modeling. Anyway, just to get back to your question, I think we have to start with the cheap and doable stuff. Yeah, cool. So, say publicly, our approach is to work with the natural engineered solutions. And doing so actually creates a new perception of risk where you can create a number of co-benefits that come along well.
So let’s pick on our soil friends. By sequestering carbon in soil, you retain way more water. You don’t require fertilizer, which leads to no runoff. And by retaining more water, you’re more drought resistant. So in sunny places like Arizona, So you’ve got added value there. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: And ruthlessly competing amongst each other to bring the cost down.
Andrew Maynard: Right, right, right. But if a different technology comes along that looks viable, looks trustworthy, you’re just as likely to support that as you are looking at the agricultural.
Christophe Jospe: Exactly. We play no favorites. And we are going to succeed in bringing the geoengineers with the farmers together and convince the farmers that they are doing a form of carbon geoengineering.
Andrew Maynard: So what is going to stop you doing this? This is fascinating to me returning it back to you because this is what I do thinking about risk. What are the really big hurdles in your mind that you need to work out how to get over?
Ross Kenyon: Okay, yeah, I think we’re probably gonna end up focusing a lot more on hardware and like catching the IoT side of things up, the Internet of Things.
Jane Flegal: Excuse me, IoT? I’m here to represent the people.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we love Elon Musk’s like little note about how acronyms ruin the workplace. So we always like calling those out. Yeah, Internet of Things. So basically like smart devices that can give you very dynamic feedback very quickly. So you can tell how much carbon is soil actually storing, how much carbon is being pulled out of a flue of a smokestack, stuff like that. But for a lot of what we’re doing, I think the hardware is not quite there yet. But we’re talking to people who are working on that problem, and I suspect we’ll probably end up deeper involved in that.
So I think we’re kind of like a financial services kind of because we’re building this marketplace, but I think we’re going to end up in hardware too.
Andrew Maynard: So how about public perception? We’ve talked a bit about it. Is that something that really keeps you awake at night?
Unknown speaker: No. I thought that sounds awesome. I think it’s going to be great on that.
Jane Flegal: I mean, if you can look at, especially if you’re talking about things like afforestation or soil carbon or whatever, you can look at historical cases where attempts have been made to establish carbon markets or incentivize biofuels, for example, that on the face look like a bunch of really quite technical decisions about how you account for this and that. But have been extremely controversial, especially in the developing world and around things like indirect land use change and how and whether to quantify that. And so that strikes me as a place where there might actually be a lot of controversy.
How are you actually verifying this? Who stands to benefit actually where these projects are occurring and who stands to benefit or lose in those places? Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: We should talk about Alden too and like her experience working with carbon markets because conventional carbon markets have had a rough go of things, haven’t they? Like many of them have collapsed over the years. Yeah. And so we have like, why don’t you introduce her and what she’s up to? Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Well, this is a special treat for our listeners because we’ll bring her on later.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, are we going to actually interview her? We should. Absolutely. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Absolutely. Needless to say, okay, so Alden Donnelly is one of our team members. We’re actually going to publish a profile of her, which should be done before this podcast is up. So we can put that in the show notes. She is one of the people who was sitting at the table in Kyoto. And so she helped devise some of the carbon markets back in 1997, and then went on to broker some major transactions and has done some work. With soil and understand some of the nuances much better than everyone else on our team.
Was that what you wanted me to say?
Ross Kenyon: Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, those are all reasonable concerns, too. And we want to make sure that like Nori is a triangle basically of like buyers, sellers and verifiers on here. And I think is it fair to say that the verifiers is probably the weakest part of the tripod so far? Producer Paul’s leaning in. He’s got something to say. Take the mic.
Paul Gambill: The verifiers are the difficult part. That’s the technical challenge that we’re facing here. And figuring out how to actually incentivize the verifiers to do what they’re doing, how to pay them without introducing possibilities of collusion with the people who are doing the carbon removal. We’re working on different ways of management and it’s more of like an economics problem for us to solve.
Jane Flegal: But in other domains where you’ve had like non-certification schemes for fisheries or whatever, you end up with these sort of like certifiers of the certifiers who are doing the certification. Right. We came across one paper recently that suggested that one possible way to do this sort of thing is you have... Two potential rounds of verification. So you have one verifier who comes in and that’s always going to happen. And then there’s a known probability that there will be a second verifier coming in, say 70% chance, but it’s just a random number.
We don’t know if the second verifier And so that’s enough of a disincentive against collusion that if the second verifier comes in and they find some evidence of collusion with the carbon remover, then we reward the second verifier and the second verifier. And so we’re trying to design the game theory of that into our model so that it doesn’t have to become this never-ending cycle of verifiers, which really adds up the cost significantly. So we need to find a way to bring that cost down so that they’re getting paid fairly, but not...
Mm-hmm.
Christophe Jospe: The other thing I’ll say, we may not have it right at our first stab at this, but we sure as hell want to get it right, and we will do our damnedest to get the science right. And we will build the system in such a way that it can improve with the data that it gets. That unlike the very cumbersome Methodologies today will create something that can be consensus-based and crowdsourced and engage academics in a really meaningful way.
Paul Gambill: Can I have one more thing, which is that we’re building out this software platform so that we can take in the data from the carbon remover? So one thing that’s important to us is that when we launch this marketplace, we’re going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting to get the first sorts of different methodologies online so that we’re getting this data in. So Chris often, Ross have talked about soil carbon and afforestation and so on, but we want to make that open in a way so that if someone else wants to come and propose a new sort of methodology, that could be something that we could consider and approve.
So it’s not just us picking favorites, it’s the marketplace.
Andrew Maynard: So I’ve got to put my cards on the table here and say one of the things that fascinates me about this is that you’re using the entrepreneurial mindset using lean type approaches, which do not work with large scale customers. So this is actually what excites me. And I’m actually going to sort of say I’m actually quite excited with what I’m hearing here. Because if you have a top-down bureaucratic institution, they totally lack agility when it comes to governance. And I’m thinking about governance largely in terms of... How do you do things that are going to protect what’s important to us?
So this now gives us another layer of opportunity to do interesting things. And what really fascinates me here is one of the things I’m working on at the moment is this concept of agile governance. How do you actually respond to emerging issues and challenges very fast, Improve your mistakes fast and move forward fast. And increasingly, we’re discovering that you’ve got to have these partnerships from people working at the very bottom all the way up through the hierarchies. So you actually have a very responsive portfolio of how we can do things in novel and innovative ways.
Ross Kenyon: I think we’re blushing after that. That was the best praise I think we’ve got on this thing.
Unknown speaker: But you still have plenty of challenges in front of you.
Ross Kenyon: No, no, don’t talk about that. We should always bring on more guests who can just continually play.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, we didn’t even put those words in his mouth. We paid him a very small amount of money.
Jane Flegal: Who’s verifying these claims?
Christophe Jospe: We’re going to put some IoT on you later. So agile governance, I love it. Can you give us a real example of what that is?
Andrew Maynard: Sure, yeah. In fact, actually, so a couple of weeks ago, I was in Dubai with the World Economic Forum, where we were really sort of working on some of these concepts ahead of their big Davos meeting in January. And the idea there is very simply, if you look across the border, technology innovation, you’ve got a disconnect between what we can do with emerging technologies and how we can ensure that we don’t make a complete mess of things and we actually see the benefits. And that is particularly relevant when it comes to climate change, because a lot of what we’re seeing is driven by how we use technologies and how that intersects with what we as humans with all our weird ideas do with it.
So, in the climate change context, but also more broadly than that, we’ve got to find ways of actually responding fast to emerging challenges. And we’ve got to find ways of actually learning from what we do, because we’re never going to do things right to start with. So, the agility comes in being able to spot where the problems are emerging, put solutions in place, which are not necessarily the perfect solution, but solutions. That we can learn from and adapt and pivot and come up with better solutions very rapidly as we go forwards.
Jane Flegal: There’s also like a lot of academic writing lately and Jack Stilgo actually has written about this in the context of governance of geoengineering experiments like actual outdoors. Absolutely. So there are actually a couple of really important parts of this. One is that experimental idea or sandboxing, having the freedom to try new things out.
Andrew Maynard: But the other is this idea of inclusivity. Because as soon as you’re trying to come up with solutions which supposedly benefit society, you’ve got to work out who all the actors are that are going to be impacted by that. And they’ve got to have some part in the process. You can’t leave it to an elite few to make decisions. A, because it doesn’t work within a democratic society. And B, because if you do that, you’re really going to annoy some people who are going to stop you doing what you’re trying to do.
So you’ve got to somehow engage with people who are going to be affected.
Unknown speaker: Sounds like the best way to do that is with radical transparency.
Andrew Maynard: Oh, yeah, I’m not sure I would go quite that far. But you’ve got to be smart about it. And you’ve got to be able to work out how to give people the information they need to make smart decisions. And you’ve got to listen to them and be able to actually respond to what they’re thinking and what they’re saying. Radical transparency, I personally, I think is going way too far. And it’s a very much abused idea. But certainly, you’ve got to be able to talk to people and listen to them and respond to them.
Ross Kenyon: You just got verbally spanked, I think.
Andrew Maynard: I did, or at least scolded.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a lot of scolding. You scolded me earlier. It’s all coming around.
Jane Flegal: Well, I want to suggest that this notion of inclusivity might actually be important for things like setting up the verification protocol. Yes. So not just transparency, but developing the sort of criteria for what you’re actually verifying and the process for I think that this has been shown in... Again, certification schemes in forestry, for example, that the kind of early on sort of upstream engagement with stakeholders around even a sort of technical standard setting process can enhance the legitimacy of the certification scheme itself.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I 100% agree with that. And one of the things from another industry that we’re trying to bring into this is the way that open source software is developed is done in a very similar fashion. So we’re envisioning publishing the rule sets around these methodologies and how they’re So Andrew, you’re a physicist.
Andrew Maynard: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Which means you must think about a lot of things.
Andrew Maynard: In a weird way, yes.
Christophe Jospe: What else do you think about in the large physicist sort of umbrella that’s relevant to the conversation we’re having here?
Andrew Maynard: Goodness me. So I’ve got to qualify that. So yes, I used to be a bench physicist, but for many years now, I’ve expanded out into sort of being a pseudo sociologist. I’m a social scientist and thinking about society and people and governance and how people’s brains work and things. From that context, the sorts of things I think about are part of my brain thinks, wow, cool, really interesting stuff. It’s tech, it’s different. It’s a really cool way of solving a really complex problem. But then other parts of my brain kick in and say, this is a problem which is so complex, there are going to be no easy solutions.
In fact, there are going to be no solutions. There are just going to be pathways which are slightly better going forwards. Muddling through, yes. But then I begin to think about the broader complexity of this. So without a doubt, when you’re looking at the confluence of the climate of people, humanity, of technology, you’ve got a highly complex system. That means... Substack means nonlinearities, which basically means that we can’t predict what’s going to happen in the future from what happened in the past. We’ve got the possibility of catastrophic failure, and we really don’t know what the trigger points there are going to be.
So all of that tells me that we can’t stand still because it If we stand still, bad things are going to happen. We’ve got to be really careful moving forward because we don’t know what the consequences of our actions are going to be. And at the end of the day, thinking about everything from the technology to society to policy to decision making to a whole raft of things, we’ve got to work out how to spot small signals from early warnings so we can work out when things are going in a bad direction and we can change course very fast.
So that’s what my sort of strange physicist stroke policy stroke sort of social science brain tends to think about with things like this. No, no, no. So the only way physics comes in is when you’ve done physics for a couple of decades or so, it completely rewires your brain. So you can’t actually see things like a normal person.
Ross Kenyon: You’re a Vulcan, is what you’re saying?
Andrew Maynard: Well, I hope not, but I’m something weird.
Ross Kenyon: I guess that’s good enough.
Andrew Maynard: That’s why you’re at ASU.
Ross Kenyon: Fit right in. That is the only place that would take me.
Andrew Maynard: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Geoengineering Jane Jr. Yeah, correct. Any final thoughts around some moral issues that we might be walking into here?
Jane Flegal: No, I mean, I think it’s great that you guys are having these kinds of explicit conversations so early on. The way that I have been trained to think about the governance issues around innovation is to see the social and political dimensions of Quite technical decision-making. And actually that grew out of my policy experience in DC, where I was working on really technical questions and realized, oh, wow, you know, you’re trained to think of the science policy interface, if there even is one, as being about speaking truth to power. Like you do the right science, you tell the policymakers and it drives decisions.
And I’ve perhaps, that was a naive assumption I had, but I very quickly learned that was not in fact how things worked. And so in that experience, I sort of learned like, oh, wow, A lot of the kind of technical decision-making that happens is itself quite political, has a lot of political implications. A lot of the decisions are driven by ideology. And trying to think about innovation, policy, in light of some of those findings is part of what I think is so great about a place like SFIS. Yeah, what is that?
You guys mentioned it, but I don’t think we got into it. The School for the Future of Innovation in Society. Is that here? That’s here.
Ross Kenyon: You told me? I’ve been doing it the whole time? Yeah, that’s cool.
Jane Flegal: But for those of us who have an interest in science and technology policy from a kind of different perspective than the way that you’re often trained to be a science and technology policy person outside of ASU, I think it’s really wonderfully weird place in that regard. It really like I think that the training here and the way that people approach problems here is actually much more empirically correct in terms of how the world works. So for that reason, and a bunch of others, I think it’s fascinating. So it’s great that you guys are here and able to talk about some of this stuff.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Personally, I want to say when people sort of bemoan that carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management doesn’t sit at the same table, we’re sitting at the same table. Yeah. It’s a small table. Yeah.
Jane Flegal: We almost sat on the floor, actually.
Christophe Jospe: We came close. So, Andrew, I’m going to put a crystal ball in your hands, and you’re going to look into it and tell me something that you see in five and then ten years.
Andrew Maynard: Goodness me. Five years, I think we’ll all be sitting around a similar table still, unfortunately, having arguments about hypotheticals rather than doing anything. You had the opportunity to change that, though.
Unknown speaker: This isn’t a Norrie skyscraper, right, in Washington?
Andrew Maynard: Well, no, that would be good. Yeah. Yeah, 10 years, I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know. And I don’t know because there is so much ideology driving conversations here, which is inevitable at the end of the day. What I would hope is we see a lot more thought to how do we move fast? How are we more fleet-footed in seeing a whole raft of opportunities, whether it’s actually removing carbon dioxide, whether it’s solar radiation management, whether it’s changing behaviors, whatever. You guys are really focused on the carbon dioxide removal, but I actually genuinely think that we’ve got to have a portfolio of ways forward.
But what I would love to see is far more pragmatism, far less posturing, far less hair pulling over hypotheticals, far more getting on the ground and doing things, trying things, learning early and fast from what works and what doesn’t and moving forwards. That’s my dream for 10 years time. Where do you find these people?
Ross Kenyon: I feel like I mostly know a lot of goop balls in the environmental circles. Everyone we talk to is just like very practical and sensible.
Christophe Jospe: Where do you dig these people up? It seems like they’re action oriented, which are the type of people that we like to associate ourselves with.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s pretty good. I think, I mean, I have more questions. Maybe we can take this off air and deprive our beautiful listeners of that. But is it fair to wrap this up?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I think it’s about time. I, you know, landed two hours ago and here we are. I feel like Phoenix has been very welcoming. So thanks for being the first stop on the tour. Thank you.
Jane Flegal: It’s the dry heat.
Christophe Jospe: Did you get stuck behind Snowbirds when you came?
Ross Kenyon: I think so. You think so? Yeah. All right. Thanks, everyone. JSP.
