“The man who says it can’t be done should get out of the way of the woman who’s doing it. We focus all the time on politicians and what they’re going to do. Meanwhile, we’re becoming more energy efficient every day. We’re using fewer resources every day. We’re finding a way to do more with less, quietly, every day. But [the free market is] where the solutions are coming from.”
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.
Christophe Jospe: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Christophe Jospe, here with my co-host Ross Kenyon and producer Paul Gamble. We are back in the Nori office. If you’re a longtime listener, you will have known we’ve been all around the country. We’re in New York and D. C. Now we’re back. It’s good to be back. Well, I’ve got your ear. Let me put a couple plugs. If you’re not subscribed to the podcast already, please subscribe, give it a good rating, share it with your friends who might like it. And also...
There are only a few days left where you, if you like what Nori is doing, can actually invest in our platform. You can go to republic.co slash Nori and find out all the details there. Ross, how about you introduce our guest?
Ross Kenyon: Sure. We have today Todd Myers, who is the Environmental Director at the Washington Policy Center. We connected a few weeks ago and went down there and spoke a little bit about 1631, which was the carbon fee here in Washington. And we’ve just been trying to connect with people who are working on policy issues, coming at climate change from multiple different perspectives. I don’t want to put words in your mouth and your story and exactly what the Washington Policy Center is. Why don’t you... Tell us how you got to this position here now, Todd, and what is it y’all do down there?
Todd Myers: How I got to this position is a long story. So I’m the environmental director of the Washington Policy Center. We’re a state-based public policy think tank that looks for free market solutions to a variety of environmental issues. So I started in the environmental work about 20 years ago. Working at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources on issues relating to old growth, spotted owl, those sorts of things. We were doing some climate work back then talking about carbon sequestration and how we could harvest trees to maximize carbon sequestration. And so that’s how I got into it.
And I now sit on the Puget Sound Salmon Recovery Council. So I do salmon work as well. And obviously warm streams are a concern for salmon. Salmon like cold water. They don’t like warm water. But I’ve worked on energy policy for about 13, 14 years now.
Ross Kenyon: And you laid such delicious bait right at the head of that where free market environmentalism, this is a contradiction in terms, right?
Todd Myers: Well, no, to the contrary. So economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources and environmentalism is concerned about scarce resources. So they actually go together quite well. Some people don’t I don’t like to admit And that the market is their best friend in promoting better use of resources, come up with very good solutions. And people like the Nobel Prize winning economist Eleanor Ostrom, who’s the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics. That was what her work was on, is finding how local solutions, either whether they’re property rights or market solutions, do a lot better than government solutions.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve read a fair amount of her work and not as much as her husband’s. Sadly, they’re both departed not too long ago. But Beyond Markets and States was a big influence on me about how it isn’t as simple as just privatizing or leaving something in the public sphere. The details matter quite a lot. And you can design free market policies that are disastrous for the environment or ones that work quite well. And the same goes for any sort of policy. It isn’t as simple as just public versus private.
Todd Myers: Right. And what she especially said was that the local people, people who have the incentives, people who have the knowledge are the ones who should make those decisions about the structures. And you’re right. It doesn’t just mean, you know, setting up a market and walking away. What What it means is doing what is best for people who have an interest and incentive. My favorite was in one of her books called Governing the Commons, which I think is one of her most famous in terms of managing the environment. She talks about forestry.
And in Japan, they were trying to protect this forest and make sure that people weren’t illegally harvesting. And so they got a group of people together and they hired people to go out and make sure that they caught anybody who was illegally harvesting. And in Japan, because it was very – because they didn’t want to be exposed. So when they caught somebody, they had to pay a fine and then pay a bottle of sake to the ranger who caught them.
Ross Kenyon: So I kind of liked that. I think that’s a good system. That’s fun. When we do meet people who care about markets and they also care about the environment, the thing that always strikes me is that they do care about these issues. It isn’t as sometimes the left claims that this is a smokescreen or some sort of fig leaf for corporate interests. But I think What they care about is that whatever happens actually works. It doesn’t just sound good on a bumper sticker. It doesn’t just make people feel good, but this actually gets results.
And also that it isn’t mixed in with a bunch of other policy issues. So if climate change is the consuming issue of our times, you don’t mix in a bunch of stuff that might muddle it or doesn’t work very well either. You just focus on exactly what we’re trying to fix, which is climate change. You think that’s a fair summation of the sphere? Yeah.
Todd Myers: Yeah. And I think that the fault is both on the left and the right. Look at a map, right, of the United States. Look at where the congressional map and look where the red parts are, where the conservatives are, and look where the blue parts are, where people on the left are. The blue parts tend to be where we have paved over nature with concrete and steel and asphalt. And those are the people who call themselves environmentalists. The red parts are all where the nature is, and that’s where the conservatives tend to live, and they’re the ones who get accused of not being environmentalists.
But the thing I always tell conservatives is, you don’t sound like environmentalists. You have chosen to build your life around nature. You live near nature. You work in and near nature. Stop sounding like you don’t care. Because when too many conservatives, when they are confronted with environmental problems, they’re worried that it is a Trojan horse for big government and for values that they don’t agree with. And so rather than say, you know what, I care about the environment, but I don’t like that solution. What they say is, ah, this is a lot of BS because they think that’s the easiest way to stop bad ideas that they fear are coming down the road.
So the fault lies not just I think they’re drawing wrong conclusions, but they are drawing conclusions based on the words that they’re hearing. You know, people on the left who criticize what I say often don’t hear me in front of conservative groups telling them, look, you’ve got to change how you talk about these and how you think about these as well.
Ross Kenyon: I’m sure many of the people that you are speaking to that are right of center, it summed up pretty well on Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, right? Where the left sees this as an opportunity, climate change is an opportunity to create social democracy or democratic socialism or some variant of that set of policies here in this country. And so people on the right just say, like, no, and I’m going to deny all the way back at the start. I knew it. I knew that’s what you were up to. And then there’s plenty of people on the right who I’ve spent time in hunting and various things.
And sportsmen’s leagues tend to care quite a bit about preserving natural resource. They have to have a spiritual connection. If you listen to country music ever, they like being at a meadow at dusk. They like sitting in their truck bed with their girl and all that. There is a connection there that people in the city, it’s a vacation, but for them, it’s a lifestyle. And how do you talk about that in a way that doesn’t turn their stomachs and say, oh God, this is leading to taxes or regulation or destroying my way of life.
So you’re pointed both directions. To the left, you’re saying, hey, this actually needs to work. This can’t just sound good. And to the right, like... Don’t just deny everything. That’s a losing strategy.
Todd Myers: Absolutely. And the thing is, is that what’s interesting is that I spoke to a tea party group one time, which of course raises the hair on the back of the neck of a lot of people on the left and about the environment. And afterwards, several people came up to me and talked to me and said, you know, I’ve been thinking about different environmental issues. And there was one case where somebody said, you know, I’ve been thinking about fisheries. And what we need to do is we need to set aside part of the ocean or part of inland waters as a sanctuary where fish can reproduce, where they don’t have to worry about fishing and other things like that.
And the funniest thing was is that literally two weeks prior to this, I’d been talking to an environmental activist on the left who was talking about the exact same idea. So here is a tea party person saying something that an environmental activist was saying just two weeks earlier. So there can be a lot of overlap, but the key thing is what you said, does it work? Is it, am I just driving my Prius so that I can have a bumper sticker that shows that I care about the planet? Or am I spending my money and my time in a way that will actually yield benefit to the environment?
And that I think is where the left really falls down. So much of what we see in Washington state is about what people call virtue signaling, about sending a message, about feeling good about the work that they’re doing. And then they never go back to say, okay, did it actually work? And then years later, we find out when it didn’t, they say, well, okay, let’s try, let’s spend some more money and see what happens. And if you truly care about the environment, if you care about something, you follow it, you track it, you make sure it’s working.
You don’t just sort of, you know, spend the money and walk away.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Right. How it all works. So I actually think Washington State dodged a bullet by not passing that. Hopefully I didn’t out myself too much there. But I would be very interested in your feedback on what was it about 1631 that you thought failed? Where could it maybe have been successful? And what, from a policy perspective, do you think it will ultimately take?
Ross Kenyon: Let me just interject real quick, too. This wasn’t a nori decision. People were pretty split in the team which way they voted. That isn’t like an official anti-1631. I’m not scared. I’m not scared of you people. I just want you to know that we have intellectual diversity on the team.
Todd Myers: So what’s interesting about the argument about, well, big oil opposed it, so therefore it must be good. Well, big oil opposed the revenue neutral carbon tax that was two years ago, and the environmental community also opposed that one. So that argument didn’t apply two years ago in the way that it did apply this year. And the reason is, the policy. And quite frankly, the policy was bad. It raised a huge ton of money and then put control of that money in the hands of 15 people, 14 of whom were appointed by the governor and not elected, not accountable.
And that’s a problem because in the initiative itself, there were no metrics of success. They didn’t say, look, you have to make sure that the grants that you’re giving yield CO2 reductions that we pay only $20 per metric ton. You could do that, right? We want to get the maximum environmental benefit for every dollar that we spent. And you could put that in the initiative. They didn’t. They actually said, if you want to spend it on pilot projects, if you want to spend it on tests, you can spend it on whatever you want.
Yeah. Well, and then again, that’s that goes back to the revenue neutrality. So that I think, caused people right, they didn’t want to raise their taxes in the first place. But when they when they hear, okay, Who’s controlling this and how are they accountable and how’s the money going to be spent? Then people start to say, maybe, you know, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. And what’s interesting, of course, is, is that as we rejected 1631 by 13 percentage point, people in Washington state also increased the Democrats majority in Olympia.
So it wasn’t that this was a bunch of Republicans in Washington State, which is, you know, an oxymoron. It was Democrats. People who voted Democrat at the rest of the ticket were voting against 1631 at the top.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. And it goes to a point that came up on our last podcast when why do governments like carbon taxes? Well, if you’re going to tax every emission, you can make a lot of money. But I feel like that’s actually trying to answer the question in the wrong. No, we’re not trying to create some revenue generating source. We’re trying to get carbon out of the supply chain. And to address climate change, right, there are two ways to do that. We’re over a budget, so we can stop emitting, and so we can keep the carbon in the reservoirs where it exists.
And so given that framework, I kind of want to put it back to you, Todd. What do you think would be an efficient mechanism, free market approach that could be the most efficient way to address the carbon challenge?
Todd Myers: So when Initiative 732 in Washington State came out two years ago, which was a revenue neutral carbon tax, we were generally, we thought that had a lot of merit. Because I think that given the choice of who has power, who’s going to find the clever ways to either reduce carbon emissions or as you talk about pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and go in the other direction, it’s technology. It’s creative people who are going to find the ways to do that. And the way you do that is you give a simple price.
Now, I think that you have to reduce regulation and I think you have to keep it revenue neutral. But what we have to do is incentivize the technology. And that is the way that you’re going to have the most success. Politicians are really, really bad at figuring out the next technology. They’re very bad at figuring out effective ways of reducing CO2. We’ve seen that again and again. But I can tell you, if you raise the price of something, people are going to use less of it. And if you give a price incentive, they’re going to find ways around it.
And that’s what we want to do. The way that we do that today with technology is going to be different than the way it is five years and 10 years from now. One last thing I’ll say is people need to remember 10 years ago, there was no such thing as an iPhone. That’s how rapidly things are changing. And we need to provide an incentive for people to continue that rapid pace of change in technology that is not dependent on politics.
Paul Gambill: One thing that I think can help when discussing price signal around carbon is the way that we think about it and the direction of it. When I hear policymakers and economists and environmental activists talking about wanting to put a price on carbon, what they’re saying is that they want to make it cost more to emit carbon right now. It’s a thing that’s unpriced and they want it to cost something. So it’s an expense. And what Nori is doing is the exact opposite of that. We’re saying it should be valued higher to remove CO2.
So you should get paid a growing amount for removing CO2. And that’s a totally different approach than what people are currently thinking about. And I mean, I think it can be more effective. That’s why we’re doing it.
Ross Kenyon: It’s not waste. It’s an economic input that we’ve now realized isn’t economic input and can be.
Christophe Jospe: Right. Just to the technology point, we’re not picking winners here. One carbon removal certificate, a ton is a ton is a ton. Any way that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere, we’ll use our market platform to be able to monetize it. We’re actually starting with one of the oldest technologies in the book, which was practiced in biblical times, which is planting cover crops, keeping your fields covered all the time, which has happened a lot less. And when you do that, you’re improving the health of the soil and it might The reason that there needs to be an incentive market is because it does cost money to make that switch.
So that’s why we want to monetize that.
Ross Kenyon: And cover crops are good for bees.
Christophe Jospe: What do we know? And you’re a beekeeper. Oh, we’re getting there.
Ross Kenyon: Just to wait, we’re coming back to that. I want to talk about this focus on technology because we’ll link it in the show notes, but you have a TEDx talk on smartphones and how your work as an apiarist or an apist or a beekeeper, whatever the correct terminology is, beekeepers are coming after us on this show. They’re going to come write us angry letters. There’s technology that is making it very easy to track how much you’re emitting, certain types of behaviors. You list a number of apps that have ecological benefits that even if you had a similar amount of money go to policymakers, the results that they would give would be much diminished and it would probably be less visually appealing and nice to use as an app.
Because we’re big, big believers in technology. We believe quite strongly in it. What’s the potential for technology? Is it going to save us all? You know, you sort of say that facetiously, but I sort of think it is, right?
Todd Myers: I mean- So do I, for the most part, yeah. I think the touchstone is, is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we thought population and pollution were going to destroy the planet. We thought there was no way that we could have enough food. And yet what changed was technology. It was believed that, you know, India, that there were going to be massive famines and people starving.
Unknown speaker: Paul Ehrlich.
Todd Myers: Paul Ehrlich, right. And yet today the population of India is far higher than it was in the 1970s. And they’re also wealthier. And what you see actually in the Northern Hemisphere is that we are doing a better job of using scarce resources because of technology. Forest land in the Northern Hemisphere is actually increasing. It’s not because we use less wood or because we’re not building things. It is because we use wood better. And what you find is that where you see deforestation is in the impoverished countries, people who are using wood to cook their food and heat their houses.
And if instead, ironically, they use natural gas, small natural gas stoves or solar, deforestation would go down and their standard of living would go up. Technology made those things happen. And so even if something as serious as deforestation we’ve been worried about, we’ve been able to turn that around in the wealthy countries because we have access to technology. The same thing can be true with carbon and energy, that you can find ways to do more with less. And one of the things that people who are nervous about carbon tax is because they’re worried, I think rightly, that politicians will say that it’s revenue neutral today, but will change their mind tomorrow.
And so don’t trust that system. I think that what we need to do now is to make those price signals work better using technology. So that rather than having to increase the cost of energy, that we use existing price signals and make them work better. So Nest, I have a Nest in my home thermostat. It uses artificial intelligence to figure out how to reduce my energy use. And now Nest is working with utilities to do a thing called rush hour rewards, where during peak demand, They can send a signal to your nest.
And if you say voluntarily, yes, I’ll sign up. They reduce the temperature in your house by a couple of degrees. You probably won’t even notice it, but yet at the end of the month, you’ll get a rebate. You’ll save energy. The utility won’t have to build new power plants. That’s artificial intelligence. That is making more of existing price signals. You don’t even have to raise the price. You’re just making more of existing price signals. So that I think is what we need to do first. The opportunity is there. And so technologies, blockchain, make sure that I know that when I buy something, I’m getting what I said I was purchasing in a way that was never really possible before.
There was always sort of a leap of faith with a lot of these sorts of things. And now what you guys are doing with blockchain is saying, look, I can show you that what you paid for, you are getting. And that increases consumer confidence in doing those sorts of things. I mean, these are really exciting opportunities that make it easier for consumers to get engaged.
Christophe Jospe: Well, I was just going to say, there’s a lot that you said there that I tend to agree with. I like the... It’s carrot, not stick. Why wouldn’t you do it? You don’t really need a government price signal to come in and tell you that you want to save money. You’re just kind of stupid not to. I want to push back. So you’re an old growth forest guy and you say, oh, it’s... You know, yes, okay, people are burning wood, but let’s look at one of the major drivers of deforestation.
It is the cutting down the trees rapidly to graze beef because 20% of the population now eats meat that didn’t before. Right. Really systemic issues that we need to think about. And the value of old growth forest is much higher than new forest. So there’s a need to protect those things. But from your kind of free market perspective, let’s use Brazil as an example. Sure. Whose foreign minister recently said that climate change is some socialist propaganda. It isn’t. It’s real.
Paul Gambill: Newsflash.
Christophe Jospe: News flash. But give us a free market solution for stopping deforestation in the rainforest.
Todd Myers: There’s a variety, right? In the United States, the amount – one reason that forest land is increasing in the United States is because the amount of land that we need for agriculture is decreasing because yields are increasing. So technology is improving our ability to do more with less land. And so if you are grazing in a traditional way, then yeah, you’re going to have deforestation. There’s no doubt. There’s a variety of things that you can do. And it’s not just the grazing. It is the feed. That is the land that you have to clear for the feed and other things like that.
So everything you can do to improve that is going to be better and reduce the stress on – and you’re absolutely right. You can’t – it’s hard to replace rainforest that’s been cut down. Even if you allow it to come back, it takes a long time. But – The biggest problems in deforestation, Brazil, I think people get that problem. And that’s where they focus because rainforest is very valuable. But there’s more deforestation going on in Africa than there is in Brazil. And in Africa, it is a situation where people are in poverty.
So I think, you know, get the low-hanging fruit where you can. Brazil is gonna be a tougher situation simply because what you’re talking about. And the reason that the foreign minister of Brazil says things like that is because he looks out at his people and sees impoverished people and sees climate change policies as a threat to bringing people out of poverty. And as long as your message about climate change is, well, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to sacrifice for the environment Then that is a really bad trade-off. And you’re gonna be frustrated, right?
If you care about climate policy, if you care about the environment, you’re gonna be frustrated. And so that’s why you have to have market solutions, not only allow people to be prosperous, but to do more with less. And there’s a reason that the richest countries in the world have better environmental records than poor countries. So it’s gonna be the deforestation in Brazil is reducing. It’s not zero, but it has declined and we need to continue to work on that. But if what you’re doing is you’re putting your hope in politics to say, we’re gonna stop clearing, what you end up getting is the current government in Brazil who says, screw that.
We see what this has caused and now we’re going to full tilt. That’s the problem with relying on politics.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a tough sell whenever you get into that limits of growth or degrowth mentality because then unless you are ideologically bought into that idea, it’s a hard sell. No one votes themselves a pay cut as the old adage goes. And if the tradeoff is between economic growth and the environment, the environment is a little bit more abstract for most people if you neglect it. It might not come back to bite you immediately. Yet if your salary drops or in real terms, it drops because everything is more expensive by 25% or something.
People feel that. And that’s what gets politicians voted out. And I think they will generally default in favor of economic growth unless you offer them an option. Like hopefully what we’re trying to do is make it so that you can have both. Right.
Todd Myers: But trust is a part of that because the very same people who are driving pre-I and Tesla.
Ross Kenyon: Is that the neologism for it?
Todd Myers: Yeah. And Teslas, right? And feel in their heart that they care about the environment are the same ones who are voting against 1631. Because they don’t trust that 1631 and politicians who are spending that money are going to spend it wisely. But they do trust themselves. And if you can provide them a way to say, this works and I can show it to you on the blockchain or another way, right? Or on your own end of the month utility bill, that works for them. And it doesn’t matter whether the president is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
If my nest is going to save me money, I don’t have to be a Republican or a Democrat or a libertarian or a socialist. That works. And so those are the options that I think can really make the difference. And one of the things that I say in a lot of my speeches is that the man who says it can’t be done should get out of the way of the woman who is doing it. And we focus all the time on politicians and what they’re going to do. Meanwhile, we’re becoming more energy efficient every day.
We’re using fewer resources every day. We’re finding a way to do more with less quietly every day. But that’s where the solutions are coming from.
Christophe Jospe: It’s hard to argue with that. There’s a term, I think we haven’t yet brought it up, but it was a term I learned in grad school around energy efficiency called the Jevons Paradox, which sometimes says when you get so efficient, you end up using more energy. And part of that can sort of look to lumens, right? And how much light you get and you get- Or joules or anything else. Right. And so- Is that true? What’s your stance on the Jevons paradox as it sort of plays out? And what is it?
Yeah, it’s called rebound.
Todd Myers: So basically what it is, is if I pay less for electricity because I’m more efficient, or if I buy a Prius, And so I don’t actually make any improvement in environmental benefit. To some extent that is true, but what we see overall is that it’s not, is that the improvements in energy efficiency overwhelm that sort of rebound. And that the reason that you, in the United States, even though you see overall population going up and GDP going way up, you see our CO2 emissions going down and energy use basically flat.
So people are finding ways to use some of that money to become more prosperous and do things that they previously wouldn’t do. But some of it is simply going into energy efficiency and we are better off. People will point to the aggregate data in the United States and say, see, it’s not working. But we’re basically flat at the same time that our GDP and population are going up.
Ross Kenyon: For the importance of prices, I wanted to ask you about, we’ve been talking about this internally lately, given the fires in California and the ever-looming possibility of a devastating earthquake here in Cascadia that would destroy the entire region. What happens when, because insurance companies, their actuaries are quite good at estimating the risk of certain types of behaviors. And so if you live in the foothills of California, the odds are that you will be hit with a fire within the next 10 years or so. I’m just making that up, but it seems plausible.
But when sometimes government involves themselves and flood insurance is an example where this happens a lot, where they’ll subsidize it so people can live on the coast for cheaper than it actually might be. And therefore, they’re encouraging people to take a riskier behavior than they otherwise would. Why does this happen and how do you how do you break out of that so people can be incentivized by prices to make correct decisions?
Paul Gambill: Can I add it’s also not it’s not always just subsidizing. But in the case of California, there were requirements around that the insurance companies have to offer the insurance to people living in certain areas or they they’re not allowed to raise their rate. So it’s not exactly the same thing as a subsidy, but sometimes effectively the same.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Yeah.
Todd Myers: Good. Good addendum. Yeah. I mean, price distortions cause bad decisions. People will take advantage of the prices that they see. And in the case of either flood insurance or I’m not familiar with the insurance rules in California. But yeah, people are going to not take precautions that they otherwise should take either by not moving there or by creating what’s called defensible space around your house so that fires can’t get, you know, forest fires can’t get into your property. When I worked at the departmental, Department of Natural Resources, we did all the time, was tell people, look, if you’re going to live out here, that’s fine, but you have to use defensible space around your house because we may not be able to get to it in time to stop it.
But if you tell people, oh, look, we’re going to pay out and don’t worry, we’ll be here. People are not going to do things that they should otherwise do. But again, those are all Decisions that are made based on politics. One of the ones that frustrates me along those lines is a subsidy is a subsidy that we give for electric vehicles, right? There’s a federal subsidy in Washington state. We used to waive the sales tax.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a nice little deal.
Todd Myers: Yeah. Sales tax is very, it’s, we don’t have an income tax. So we have very high sales taxes in Washington state. So we used to waive sales taxes. And so I went and looked, you can get the records of the zip codes of where people have purchased electric vehicles in Washington state. And I overlapped those with the IRS data on income, average income or zip code. And it will shock you or not shock you to find out that the vast majority of sales tax breaks went to people in the top 25% of income.
Those are people who don’t need sales tax breaks, right? I mean, those are people who are going to buy a Tesla because it’s a cool car and it is a cool car. But, you know, me giving a sales tax break is not incentivizing them to move from a gas powered car to an electric car. I can tell you a thousand ways to spend that money better and get more CO2 reduction than subsidizing cool electric vehicles. But again, that gets back to the discussion we had earlier about politicians choose things that look cool and associate themselves with cool things like electric vehicles rather than things that are effective.
And that’s what drives conservatives crazy.
Paul Gambill: It’s also that these issues are just really complex and nuanced and these politicians are trying to fit into soundbite length segments and just say, you know, don’t you want to help out these families?
Unknown speaker: Think of the children, Paul.
Paul Gambill: It’s literally that. Vote green. Yeah, we’re like constantly getting screwed by that and we’re seeing the results of that in terms of how the bad policy has played out and resulting in serious disasters.
Todd Myers: And that’s right. I don’t begrudge anybody for having a difficult time sorting out the best ways to help the environment, whether it’s reducing CO2 or anything else. It is complicated. And what you find is that what you think helps the environment, like corn-based ethanol, ends up harming the environment. What I begrudge is that when that is made clear, that politicians say, I didn’t make a mistake. You don’t care about the environment because politicians, the incentives for them are not to admit that they’re wrong because then they lose the street cred that they had for being green.
Once you put an issue in the political realm, the incentives go the wrong direction. They go away. They go more toward image for politicians and not toward results, which is why we continue to do the wrong things again and again. And that’s why I think if everybody had a little more humility, And admit, you know what? That didn’t work. Let’s try this. The environment would be better off. But humility sometimes doesn’t play, right? We’re seeing this in the White House today. Humility does not get you elected all the time. And that, I think, is a real challenge in making political solutions work.
Paul Gambill: You published an op-ed in Crosscut, I think it was back in January of this year, kind of taking Governor Inslee to task for not following up on some commitments that he’d made around carbon reductions. Can you talk about that?
Todd Myers: Yeah. So in a number of states and in government, there’s a called lean system, lean management, which is designed to make sure that you meet a particular target. It doesn’t have to be environment. It can be in anywhere, right? You can improve customer service is one of them. You can... Improve healthcare access, things like that. But however you meet the targets, it’s a process to make sure that you’re meeting them. So the governor set a number of targets on climate policy as well as some other environmental areas. And as I pointed out, we are not on track to meet any of those targets.
And yet you don’t hear about it. You don’t hear the government taking his staff to task. You don’t hear him setting more restrictive targets and holding them accountable. He just kind of ignores them. And in fact, he has semi-regular meetings with members of the government on different issues. He had never had a meeting with any of the people involved with the climate target. In other words, it was about sending out a press release. It wasn’t actually about meeting the goals. I mean, that is the barest example. That is not simply we tried something and it didn’t work.
That is we put out a press release saying that we care and then we never followed up. There’s another example of that in a number of cities in Washington state and across the country, more than a thousand cities signed up to meet the Kyoto targets when George Bush was president in 2005. And so in 2012, when the Kyoto targets were up, I called all of those cities in Washington state and said, okay, you’ve signed up for this promise that you were going to meet the Kyoto targets. How are you doing?
And two thirds of them said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I would show them their press release and their name on this list and say, well, here you have this. And they said, well, we’ve never done anything. Again, the value was in the press release, not in the results.
Christophe Jospe: That’s not shocking at all. And was, I think, one perhaps naive hope that Nori has is that we can hold these cities, governors, companies even to task to say, hey, you made a commitment. You have no idea how you’re going to get there. The only way you’re going to get there is to pay for your past emissions and buy carbon removal certificates. And here’s a way. Yeah.
Todd Myers: And look, if you can... If you can show them, here’s a way to do it cost effectively, you don’t give them an excuse, right? Or you make it hard for them to say, well, we’re going to try this instead, or we’ve got a plan. We’ve got this vague plan. Trust us, right? The more you make it cost effective and you can show the results, the less wiggle room you give politicians to come up with nonsense arguments that are more about publicity than results.
Christophe Jospe: I’d like to continue to believe that actually politicians do represent the people. If the people want to hold politicians accountable and say, here’s how you can be accountable in the most cost-effective way, wouldn’t that be great?
Todd Myers: It’s true, but remember, when you vote for somebody, most people are not single-issue voters. Most people care about a variety of things. They care about their schools. They care about transportation. They care about the environment. They care about healthcare. They care about social issues and a variety of things. So it’s very hard to say, I voted for this person. Why aren’t they doing what I want? Well, they may be doing what you want on two-thirds of the things, but on a third of the things, they may be screwing up. And that’s why the more that you can take personal control of and the more that technology can put environmental sustainability and results in the palm of our hands, the more likely you are to see results.
Ross Kenyon: I want to put you on the spot a little bit here, Todd, in the spirit of humility. We try to do the same too. We have strong opinions if you listen, but we’re weird heterodoxes too. We read all sorts of things from different perspectives and we try to challenge ourselves and hope that you do the same. We’ve never done this to a guest before, but Todd, who is the smartest person that disagrees with you? Or what is the best example of a book or someone that is totally opposite of you, but you think this person knows something smart, is just a good advocate for their ideas?
Todd Myers: That’s a good question. So here in Seattle, there is a group called the Sightline Institute, which is definitely a left-wing organization. And sometimes I think they’re totally crazy and wrong. And other times I think that they have interesting challenges to me. A few years ago, I was worried that I was getting in a bubble, right? Everybody was patting me on the back, telling me what a genius I was. And I had all these doubts in my mind about, I was like, well, I know I’m worried about what I’m saying. So I called them up, met with one of their researchers who I liked and said, you know, if I sent you a paper on something, would you...
Review it for me and tell me how I’m wrong. And just as long as you don’t release it to the public before I do, I’d really appreciate that. And they did it. And it was great. And they gave me very nice feedback, very direct, and it helped make my piece better. So that’s one example. I read a lot of different things from people who disagree with me. I will say that I have become more and more frustrated with climate policy because I think it is hardened into two camps. And so I don’t very often read things that surprise me.
The Breakthrough Institute is another group of folks who are on the center left at Nordhaus and Schellenberger wrote a book. And I remember putting that book down and saying, if I was on the center left, this is the book I would write. I disagree. They have more faith in government spending than I do, but I think they’re really interesting and they’ve challenged me to think about things and they’ve changed themselves, right? They are very pro-nuclear, which they didn’t used to be. So I think that’s another source. So those are two examples.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that was good. We get pretty bored, I think. We all have our sources that we go back to that give us spiritual strength when the world is too crazy. But I think we’d all get pretty bored if you just read people who agreed with you all the time. We’d be happy to have any of those people on the show as well. And if they want to tear into us for any of our comments that we didn’t quite think through before they left our mouths on this one. I’ll be happy to have you on the show as well.
Todd Myers: I even get a chance to ignore the other side, right? I think if I lived in Texas or something, then I think it would be a bigger problem. But living in Seattle, I am constantly being challenged for my ideas. And it does, I mean, it, frankly, it does make you a lot better. I hear people on the left in Seattle make some really, really dumb arguments because I don’t think anybody has ever challenged them because they’re surrounded by people who agree with them. So I do try to find people who disagree with me, but generally they find me first.
Right.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a great, great policy too. We try to do that in the office too. We definitely lean certain ways on some issues, but we’re much richer when we have people challenging us and not agreeing with everything we say. If you don’t like something that we’ve said or you disagree with us, you’re welcome to email us at hello at nori.com or reach out. Maybe we’ll have you on the show. Yeah, just it’s bad for your own intellect to be unchallenged or in an echo chamber. And we try to be as open as possible.
Todd Myers: I actually on my Facebook page, I have when I get tweets and emails and things like that, I take a screenshot of it and I post it. And I have actually an entire photo album on my Facebook page called Love Letters to Todd. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Oh no, I missed this in my pre-podcast research. There’s some doozies in there, I’m sure.
Todd Myers: I’ve gotten all sorts of things. And so I generally think they’re amusing, but it’s, yes, there are people who don’t agree with me.
Ross Kenyon: Probably from the right too, who just don’t like that you’re working on environmental issues. Do you have some people who are just like, this is a hoax, you’re a fraud?
Todd Myers: There, no doubt. Actually, there’s a group called, there’s a listserv that I used to be part of called Global Warming Realists. And they came after me one time and called me a sellout and a fraud and all sorts of other things like that.
Ross Kenyon: Did you used to be less believing in climate science at one point? You changed it or were you affiliated with these people or what exactly happened? Have you changed over time?
Todd Myers: I think- You know that when I was first studying this and trying to figure out what’s real, right? What do we know and what don’t we know? In climate change, it’s really hard to figure that out because climate scientists themselves disagree about what we know and what we don’t know. What is a likely scenario and what is an unlikely scenario? And you see a lot of stuff that is simply nonsense. And so I still listen to a lot of folks on both sides about climate science. And I don’t pretend to be a climate scientist.
Talk to me about economics and they say something crazy about economics, I can pick it up pretty quickly because that’s what I’m used to and that’s what I talk about. If somebody says something stupid about climate science, I don’t always catch on as to the game that they’re playing. And people can play some pretty clever games when they know what they’re doing on both sides. So I try to listen to both sides, but it’s ultimately at the end of the day, what I tell people and I tell conservative audiences is because I get asked all the time, is this real?
And what I say is that what we know is that the sun heats the earth and a certain amount of that goes back out into space as infrared radiation. And that what CO2 does is it blocks a certain amount of that infrared radiation and keeps it in the system and over time tends to heat up the earth. So therefore, I mean, so we know that, right? We can measure that. We can in a lab, we can see that CO2 blocks infrared radiation. So the question is, so what? How big a problem is it?
And that’s where the fighting begins, right? Is it going to be one degree Celsius? Is it going to be four degrees Celsius? Because those are two very different results in terms of the impacts and what we should do and whether we should mitigate And whether we should avoid and all those sorts of things. And that’s where the real mud wrestling begins. And that’s harder for me to discern. So I tend to avoid those fights and say, look, it’s real. It’s worth doing something about. But let’s do it in a way that works with prosperity and worth personal freedom rather than against it.
And what I advocate is a no regrets policy, which is if we find out 30 years from now that climate change isn’t that big a deal, but we’ve done things that have made us more energy efficient and reduced costs and made us more prosperous, great. So that’s kind of where I ended up. And I mean, you asked me sort of, you know, why I, how I’ve changed. How I’ve changed is that I worry less about the particulars of how many degrees Celsius and more about the things that we can do that are effective and make life better.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, that’s a beautiful place to end it unless there’s any objections. No objections. Todd, we’ve had enough of you.
Christophe Jospe: It’s time for you to leave. I’d like to add an addendum, actually. I was very eager to hear about your experience as a beekeeper.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We forgot to even get into that. Yeah.
Todd Myers: So yeah, my sister worked on a flower farm in Michigan because any good brother has a sibling rivalry with his sister. I got tired of hearing how cool bees were. And so I started doing it myself. And now I’m, you know, vice president of my beekeeping society. So I’m, you know, a geek in that way. They’re really fascinating. They’re amazing creatures. They’re super complex. They can do calculus, right?
Unknown speaker: Wait. Explain, please.
Todd Myers: Yeah. So bees determine where nectar is or water or pollen or other things like that by doing a little dance that you’ve heard about based on the sun. And the sun moves across the sky more rapidly in the morning and evening in terms of the arc that it covers than in the middle of the day. And the bees can adjust for that. So when the bees do the dance, they can predict where the sun will be, no matter what time of day it is, and they will adjust their dance. So they’re essentially doing calculus.
Paul Gambill: I remember doing problems like that in high school.
Todd Myers: Yeah, exactly. The other thing that’s amazing is that because evolutionary, in an evolutionary sense, an immune system costs energy, they don’t have an immune system. So that’s not entirely true, but they do things to supplement their immune system. So they have a hive immune system and they take basically the sap from poplar trees around here and they coat the hive with it. It’s very sticky, but it has an antibacterial quality, I think, that basically makes it so that they don’t get sick. And so they have hive immunity because it costs less energy to do it that way.
So, I mean, once you, I mean, people think, oh, you like honey? It’s like, well, I got five gallons of honey in my garage. I don’t like honey that much. I mean, mostly I like the bees.
Unknown speaker: You didn’t bring us any time.
Todd Myers: That’s right. I should. Believe me. And I just, and I just made some very nice cherry meat as well. So, you know, anytime anybody has, you know, gallons of fermentables lying around, they’re going to find a way to make alcohol out of it.
Ross Kenyon: So have you read, uh, the economics of non-human societies by Gordon Tullock? You read that?
Todd Myers: I have not.
Ross Kenyon: I have a coffee. I’ll show it to you on your way out.
Todd Myers: Yeah. So anyway, so I love bees. The one thing I will say is that everybody thinks all the bees are dying. That’s not true. Actually, the bee populations in the United States are going up and they’re about the highest that they have been in 20 years. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem. A higher percentage of hives die every year than they used to. But beekeepers, because they have an economic incentive to make sure that they have hives for pollination, are replacing lost hives faster than they are dying. So in my TED talk, I actually talk about the technology that I use to make sure that my bees live through the winter and to make sure that’s the case.
And beekeepers are doing more and more of that and they’re finding a way to overcome colony collapse.
Paul Gambill: I think I remember seeing a cover story at Reason Magazine a few years ago about that. So maybe we’ll find that and put that in the show notes.
Todd Myers: Yeah, that’s a great piece. It’s by a guy who works at Perk, which is a great free market think tank in Montana. I’ve been to a couple of their colloquia before. Yep. Sean, who wrote that, he and I know each other very well, and we’ve talked about that. That’s a very good piece. It’s, yeah, what he says in there is exactly right. I really like that piece.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. Great. Okay. Well, thanks for being here. This is a Nori XL episode, I think. What are we running at?
Unknown speaker: Pretty close. We’re doing good.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff to cover. It’s action packed.
Unknown speaker: It is action packed.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thank you. Thanks for being here, Todd. If you like the show, please share it and give it a good rating. Promote Nori. Let people know what we’re doing over here. If you feel compelled to invest by what you’ve heard, go to republic.co slash Nori. And thanks for joining us.
Todd Myers: Thank you.
