Nathanael Johnson is a Senior Writer at Grist and the author of All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps Us Healthier and Happier and Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Nathanael joins Ross and Christophe to discuss how his writing challenges the status quo, asking the questions that inspire real results
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Christophe Jospe: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. My name is Christophe Jospe. Ross, I missed you. I get to do this one with you. It’s been a minute. Sitting here with Ross Kenyon. You’ve just been doing it in Denver the whole time and I’m not there that often, so I miss them all. I know. I took a trip to Kansas. You know, here we are. It’s kicking off a really exciting week for us in Oakland or Berkeley or the Bay or I don’t know, losing track of everything. We’re in Berkeley right now.
That’s what happens when you come here, right? Yeah. But yeah, Ross, how about you introduce our guest?
Ross Kenyon: Sure. We are very excited to have with us today Nathanael Johnson, Senior Writer at Grist. Nathanael, we have followed your work for a long time. You’ve been on our list of people. It’s like next time we’re in the Bay, we got to do a show.
Nathanael Johnson: I’m glad you sought me out.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Thanks for joining us. Well, Kristoff wanted to ask you about Nevada City. He was talking my ear off about, all I know is Joanna Newsom’s from there, right?
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah. So yeah. How do you know of Nevada City and what do you think of when you think of it?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Take this, Kristoff.
Christophe Jospe: How much should I expose about my personal life and the sorts of events I go to? I don’t know. Like there’s a subculture. There are people who are free thinkers. You have on the back of your book that you were raised by hippies. Yeah. So that probably It probably has something to do with it, but how did Nevada City shape you as a human being?
Nathanael Johnson: I was born here in Berkeley at home, as all good hippies are. That’s how we’re hatched. Then when I was about four, my parents decided that this was just too dense and too big of a city. I was starting to fall down. I had a little brother as well and skin our knees on the concrete. And that was this intrusion of technology upon all that was good and natural, injuring children. And so my parents needed to move somewhere softer. So we went up, got back to the garden and moved up to Nevada City, which...
Ross Kenyon: Full Joni Mitcheld, huh?
Nathanael Johnson: Exactly. Yeah. Which is a place that, you know, some people have heard of and it essentially evolved because Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder bought some land up there and all of these beats and hippies and sort of bohemian free thinkers started, who were similar to my parents before their time, started to move up there and buy land. And so... As is the case in many rural places around big cities, you have this mix of the rednecks and the hippies coming together and clashing and getting married and their ideas commingling and weird things happening.
But yeah, it’s this wonderful place to grow up. It’s beautiful. Yeah. So how did it shape the way that I thought? I mean, it has a huge influence on me. My first book, All Natural, is really sort of about that because there is this sense that we’re in this place where these refugees of this modern world gone crazy. We kind of know better than other people that the world is messed up and we’re out. But there’s this frustration that comes with that as well because it’s sort of like, You’re waiting for everybody.
You’re sort of disempowered, right? Because you’re waiting for everybody else to realize that, too, and get out as well. And you can’t really influence them because you’re in this You’re just sitting there complaining, meanwhile driving around in your petroleum powered car and all the rest. There’s this weird tension between this feeling that the rest of the world is running blindly into madness and its own destruction and an inability to influence it. Essentially, the first book was about, you know, here’s this idea that we’ve missed something about progress, that we’re blind to all the ways in which our progress is hurting us.
And what we really need to do is get back to the garden to be more natural, that what’s natural is healthy and good, and we need to embrace that. And so the first book is really just about Trying to figure out, you know, is that true? Taking this thing that I love and feel deeply to my core and being sympathetic, but also scientifically rigorous with it. And I guess, you know, when you ask how that influences me, it’s like, that is really my entire career then. You know, it’s sort of like, yes, we need to save the world.
Yes, we’re destroying the planet. Let’s figure out how to do it in such a way that We can actually change things and let’s be skeptical and rigorous in our approach.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a very good introduction because, and let me know if this is an unfair appendage to apply on to you, but I see you’re sort of a progressive contrarian where you’re on the team, but you’re also willing to check them when they support things that you might not think is very wise. Or maybe it sounds really good, but you’re like, I did rigorous investigative journalism and I’ve decided that actually this is a terrible strategy. Please do not do this progressives. And so that’s what you’re trying to do. Your sympathies are there, but you also try to steer it in the right kind of way.
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think of myself as a contrarian just because I think of that word being like someone who’s going out and looking for a fight. Like I imagine someone in a bow tie who’s just like, ah, ha, ha, I got you, you know?
Unknown speaker: I know those guys.
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah, exactly. We’ve all been to those dinner parties, but really doing this from a place of love and concern and also just a sense of wanting to be interesting, wanting to ask the questions, That will get real results. When I was a teenager in Nevada City and starting to figure out, okay, what am I going to do with my life? What’s the big thing that I can work on? And I started going to these various groups and it was basically a bunch of hippies getting together and telling each other the same thing over and over again.
I just started to get bored with, you know, it’s like, yes, we know we’ve all read from this Bible. We know this spiel. Isn’t it more interesting to go out and ask if perhaps some of those core beliefs are wrong? Where is the evidence that is going to allow us to push forward and take the next steps rather than sort of just hammering home the dogma over and over again?
Christophe Jospe: So what sort of experiences did you have that shook your core beliefs to the core that made you reassess things that maybe you learned in your experience in Nevada City, but then had some experience that made you see the world a little bit differently?
Nathanael Johnson: There’s lots of little ones, right? So as a storyteller, I really like the model. You know, there’s this one big road on to Damascus moment, right? That changes everything. But in real life, real life doesn’t work well with narrative. But I can think of, I can think of tonnes of little ones. Like one is that combination of the rednecks and hippies, you know, hanging out with friends before... Nevada City was a, now it’s sort of a cultural and marijuana town. But before that, it was a gold mining town and then a lumber town.
And so some of the parents of my friends had worked in the lumber industry before that died off. And, you know, spending time with those people in the woods and just talking with them, these lovely people who are like, okay, fine, you know, it’s over, you know, we lost everything. You’re against logging, I get that, but you seem to really like wood. If you look around, we’re sitting here in my dining room and there’s old growth redwood all around us.
Unknown speaker: There sure is.
Nathanael Johnson: This is the big leaf maple on the dining table here, which is a native tree from around here. People like me tend to really love this stuff. This redwood has been here since 1914. It’s locking up this carbon for all this time. It’s this really cool material, but in order to get it, you have to cut down trees. And so that was something like, how would we do this sustainably? How would we start to think of logging as something that we could actually support? As environmentalists in certain situations. That’s one of these examples where instead of just being like, oh yeah, logging is bad.
How do we work with this the right way? Another example is my first job after I graduated from college. I got a newspaper job in a small town in southern Idaho surrounded by giant industrial farms run by conservative Mormon farmers. This wasn’t one specific thing, but just Seeing the way that they worked, seeing the efficiencies that they got out of the land, seeing the way that they could produce so much food in so little space was interesting. And seeing that they were people who I respected. They weren’t crazy people out to just rake in clouds of money.
They were really trying to Be as responsible as possible while they were producing food for the rest of the world. So, yeah, I guess there’s lots of little things like that.
Ross Kenyon: Your articles on topics like this have generated a fair amount of criticism. I had to walk by a bodyguard on the way in here. That didn’t happen. But I know a lot of your work has written about the nuances of nuclear energy and in which cases that may or may not be justified. I was wondering if maybe that’s the first controversial topic we can get. What’s the latest on nuclear energy?
Nathanael Johnson: Well, nuclear energy is something that’s... It’s not like there’s... It moves slowly. It’s not like there’s a ton of new stuff out there. There are these new models of the next generation of nuclear reactors that they’re trying to bring online. But even those are things that they’re really resurrecting from... The 60s and 70s. They’re things that they initially tried and then basically they went to these water reactors which were really chosen because they were good reactors to put in nuclear submarines where you’re surrounded by water all the time.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve always heard this too about the choices in nuclear have gone the direction that they have because of their synergy with weapons manufacturing and nuclear weapons. Is that true or is that just like a myth someone has told me at a party?
Nathanael Johnson: I think it’s certainly true insofar as... Yeah. Nuclear aircraft carriers. And that was the initial client. It’s interesting if you go back to the early history of nuclear energy, there are all these people out running around looking for use cases. Like, we’ve got these things. What the heck do we do with them? And so at one point they were trying to blow up nuclear bombs in these tiny island towns in Alaska to create harbors. And there’s this great story about that where the native people really were much more savvy than the Washington bureaucrats gave them credit for and recorded all these conversations and did this big expose and stopped it from happening.
Yes, there’s not necessarily so much with nuclear bombs. It’s sort of a different path. I mean, the same ancestor, but it branches off fairly early. But certainly with the military industrial complex, I think there’s a strong relationship there.
Christophe Jospe: So Nathanael, can you lay it out for us, the debate around nuclear today? What are people who are pro or against nuclear even talking about?
Nathanael Johnson: Well, they’re talking about many different things and they’re often not talking in ways that connect to each other, you know, as these debates often do. You know, one person is talking north-south, another person is talking east-west. I guess the easiest way to lay this out is to just look at what we’re facing in terms of climate change. The IPCC says that if we want to have any chance of sticking to the 1. 5 degree warming region, We need to keep the nuclear energy that we have going basically for as long as possible.
And many of the scenarios that they use involve building quite a bit more nuclear energy. So, I mean, it’s one of these things that it’s like when you look at the raw numbers, it’s just it’s the biggest. The biggest form of non-carbon energy that we have in many countries. And so to get rid of it is a problem. So I think of like Leah Stokes, who’s a professor at UC Santa Barbara, who’s been analyzing all these Democrats, different climate policies. And so she found this and she’s like, oh crap, I have to break this to my lefty friends that if we can’t just get rid of nuclear, it makes the problem a lot harder.
So she did this at this Green New Deal conference where they were bringing people in to figure out what to do. And now she’s like, what the heck happened? Now I’m like the nuclear person because I’m... There’s this thing that happens that when you’re willing to go into these things and just look at the data and not just go with the conventional wisdom, because you’ve done that, then you kind of become the nuclear person. She, like me, is just one of these people that kind of wants to deal with this problem and sees the fact that if you eschew this technology entirely, it’s going to be a near impossible challenge.
I know there’s all kinds of grays in there. Do you keep what we have open for as long as possible, but look for ways to wind it down while you’re scaling up new technologies, figuring out fusion, figuring out geothermal, these other kinds of technologies that can fit the same niche. But the fundamental issue is that you have these renewables that go up and down that we don’t control. We don’t flip the switch on. And as we get to deep penetration of those renewables, we’re going to need something else that we can flip the switch on.
It could be storage, but that’s also something that we haven’t figured out. We need more technology on. So one thing that we do have is nuclear power. That could possibly be the answer. But the real problem is it’s hugely unpopular. People hate it. So I see the next generation of nuclear power as being Several Democratic candidates have embraced this idea, but it’s more of like a PR thing. Here’s this thing that’s, this could be a different version. All that animosity you feel toward nuclear power, that’s this old stuff over here.
We’re going to do something different with this new stuff and it’ll be great. I don’t think that’ll actually work, but it’ll be interesting to see.
Ross Kenyon: Old nuclear and new nuclear TM.
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Why do you think nuclear has such a bad rap? I don’t know nearly enough about it to like, don’t quote me listener and say Ross Kenyon said it was a great idea because I’m not. Really that smart on this stuff. But it seems like the numbers I’ve seen for deaths caused like per kilowatt hour, however they measure it, nuclear is super low. The impact is really, really quite high. We should probably be building more of these. There’s Next generation technology that’s sort of locked up. And my understanding too is, and multi-nested question here, Nathanael, you can take in any direction you want, is that sometimes people say nuclear is just too expensive relative to other types of renewables.
And I never know to what degree that’s, I’ve heard it’s basically impossible to ensure new nuclear and that the DOE, Department of Energy, makes it rather difficult.
Nathanael Johnson: They have requirements that you have to get insurance, one specific type of insurance that they have to pay a lot of money for. But it’s interesting because the nuclear industry has to pay for this insurance, but it’s also seen as a subsidy because if there ever was... So if there was a nuclear disaster, it would overwhelm this insurance and then there would be a bailout. So it’s this weird thing where, yes, it’s a subsidy because we’re requiring them to buy into this insurance and the people are going to bail them out if there ever is a disaster, which there hasn’t been in the United States.
On the other hand, it’s a subsidy where the nuclear industry has paid millions and millions of dollars.
Ross Kenyon: And that answers some of the questions I was going to ask on that, which is how much of nuclear is non-prominence relative to other types of renewables right now as a result of market forces versus various policy livers that have been pulled against it or maybe just not for it?
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah, it’s hard to separate those two. I went back, I read several books. There’s a great book called Collapse of an Industry by the sociologist looking at the nuclear industry and what happened. And he does this wonderful nuanced job, but it looks like the biggest, there are many interlocking factors, right? But the biggest thing has to do with Local opposition to that land use. You want to put a nuclear plant right here across the street, people are going to oppose it. And then that starts to interact with the regulatory apparatus, which is...
Let’s be super careful about this. So then it takes years and years. It gets more and more expensive. And then that starts to interact with the market and the manufacturing forces. So because it got so hard to build nuclear power plants, the whole engine ground to a halt. And so now they’re They said, let’s build a couple more. They tried to build one in Georgia. It probably will get completed. There’s another one in South Carolina that will not get completed. And what they found when they did that was that the entire pipeline had collapsed.
So nobody knew how to do it. There were these crazy delays. You know, they were putting things, these major elements in upside down and had to, you know, spend, you know, just a cool billion dollars to pull that out and flip it over and, you know, just these horrific things where they didn’t have the expertise they had to, like, you know, You’re just saying because there’s no industry to support this anymore.
Ross Kenyon: There’s no industry.
Nathanael Johnson: Exactly. Okay. There’s no industry to support it. There’s no expertise to figure out how to do it. There’s, you know, there is the regulatory intensity so that people have to be super careful and everything has to slow down and which I think is good. You know, let’s... Get this right. It’s also an incredibly, I mean, let’s not be one-sided. It’s incredibly complex technology. Technologies that are simple tend to get cheaper. And this is something where you have to have backups upon backups upon backups, you know, especially because we’re designing these things that are made to be underwater.
And so because they’re not in submarines, you have to pump water up to always, and this water is going to evaporate if you lose power. So you have to have these backup systems on top of, you know, To get the water there. So it’s, you know, and you have to keep people out so there’s not these terrorist threats to come in and steal the radioactive materials. Very complicated. It takes a lot of layers of safety to deal with. And that just makes every new reactor go $10 billion over budget. Except in, and you can talk more to Ted Nordhaus about this because they’ve done some interesting stuff in South Korea where there has been...
More constant industry and the prices have actually gone down.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Is what you’re describing part of the older gigantic infrastructure nuclear reactors? Because I know there’s much that are very small though. I keep hearing about them, but I don’t know.
Nathanael Johnson: So the next generation of nuclear reactors, there’s these small modular reactors that are moving through the regulatory pipeline. And people are very excited about them or worried about them as the case may be. And they will come out, but they’re sort of this thing that’s been promised for a million years and have not happened. But I think they’re going to. The question is, will those be any more cost effective? And I think the argument is because they’re small, because they’re modular, you could solve some of these complexity problems. You could You could solve some of the on-site artisan engineering problems.
But that all depends on there being enough of a pipeline, enough of a demand for them, enough local acceptance that they start getting built and put into places. And that’s a problem that no one’s tackled.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like that and cold fusion. I’ve seen this attributed to Charles de Gaulle about Brazil is the country of the future and always will be. Right. And that’s how I feel sometimes with some of this nuclear tech. I’ve been hearing about this since I think high school or middle school and still not here. So 20 years later, you learned about it on the Simpsons, right? I think that was like basically everyone’s first contact with nuclear, probably.
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: What’s what do you think is the OK, so we’ve laid out some of the positive things about nuclear energy. You can either speak from what actually bothers you or you can invent it if you think it’s actually nonsense. But what do you think is the best case against pursuing a nuclear future?
Nathanael Johnson: Well, I think the strongest argument is sort of a social science argument that there’s There’s a lot of these things in the world or in the heads of very bright, rational engineers that make perfect sense in black and white. You can look at the deaths per kilowatt hour and say like, yes, this has the lowest deaths per kilowatt hour, but that has no bearing on the way that normal people’s brains works.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a very nerdy, abstract way to think.
Nathanael Johnson: Exactly. We don’t Think about the number of deaths per mile per gallon of gasoline that we get from our cars. You know, these are these horrific death machines that put just about everything else in our lives to shame. Cars? Yeah, cars. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That we’re, you know, we sacrifice our children to.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like 40,000 people a year in the United States die from auto accidents.
Christophe Jospe: Let alone like the local health hazards of just smog and pollution from congestion. And not mentioning the climate effects.
Nathanael Johnson: Oh, right.
Christophe Jospe: That’s sort of inconvenient.
Nathanael Johnson: Carbon dioxide. Pesky little molecule there. But people don’t register that as so much of a risk. For a couple of reasons, because it’s under our control, because we see immediate benefits to ourselves, and because it’s something that we can kind of see and understand. So there’s this transparency, there’s this control, and there’s personal benefit. When you look at the risk science, the things that people fear the most are the things that are the opposite of all of those things. Things that are out of your control, that are controlled by some giant corporation or government that you have no ability to influence.
Things that you don’t understand. Things that may bring some benefit to you, but do it in this circular way. That don’t bring immediate benefit that you get to make a choice about the trade-offs on. And nuclear power ticks every one of those boxes. Here’s this strange thing that’s hard to comprehend that some corporation with a crazy name like Drax or Exelon is under control.
Ross Kenyon: It sounds ominous.
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah. And that you don’t get to weigh the costs and benefits yourself, that this is being done at a societal level or in some, I guess it wouldn’t be a smoke filled room now, but like a vape filled room.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think in those upper echelons of board meetings, they’re all...
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah, when they’re just poking. ... Pumping on their jewels.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s not like vape cigars yet for that. Good image, though. Very comedic.
Nathanael Johnson: So, I think that’s a real thing that... The political economy for some of these things just might not work. And because of that, the economics, the economy economy might not work. Maybe for enough time that some other cleaner, better, less politically problematic solution will come into play. This is Dan Common’s argument. He said, Scientists at UC Berkeley just up the road.
Ross Kenyon: Is it thinking fast and slow? Dan Kahneman?
Nathanael Johnson: No, not Dan Kahneman. Dan Common.
Ross Kenyon: Oh.
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah, no, you got to. It’s too close. Yeah, your K scientists are tricky.
Ross Kenyon: I still sound smart though, right?
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah. Okay. I’m with you. So he’s like a real solar enthusiast who’s not into nuclear power for this reason. He just sees by the time that we figure out these political questions, by the time we’re able to make it cheap, we’re going to have We’re going to have space mirrors. We’re going to have solar panels floating in space with nanowires coming back to Earth to provide us with power. We’re going to have these other, we’re going to have fusion. So he’s sort of like, I’m interested and I think we should keep on researching it because we’re going to Need some power sources for our deep space missions.
So that’s kind of a fun use case. But yeah, it may well be that the only places that nuclear is going to work for new builds in the modern world will be places like China, where you have much more authoritarian governments who just kind of ram it through, which is what’s happening.
Ross Kenyon: It’s hard to be a NIMBY when you have someone like that you’re going up against.
Nathanael Johnson: Hard to be a NIMBY in China right now, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Tough going. Yeah, when I think of nuclear in the sort of like atomic age and Eisenhower years in the 50s, I see it as sort of like the ultimate progressive vision is this clean, abundant energy replacing like the dirtiness of the cities. And it’s strange to me that it just never came to fruition. I think most of it, I think you are right. I think most of it has been a PR failure with like Three Mile Island. And it’s much later, of course, and Chernobyl didn’t help. But I think the nails were already in the coffin by that point.
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah. I mean, I think of it less as, it’s not like people did something wrong with PR. It’s just these, there’s these inherent issues that squid onto our brainstem in a way that make us react with dread and horror to this technology.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: And that makes responsible for Godzilla. Yeah. At least we got that out of it.
Christophe Jospe: I mean, I certainly appreciate this about you as a journalist who’s kind of fearless to ask the right questions, going to some topics that are certainly not black and white. Another topic you’ve written about are genetically modified organisms or GMOs. Watch out.
Ross Kenyon: This is going to get real spicy for you. This is a spicy one, listeners.
Christophe Jospe: And it’s, you know, it’s one of those things where people know what they think they know and hold these beliefs really, really steadfast. But what is a GMO? What’s the deal with GMOs, Nathanael? How much time do we have?
Nathanael Johnson: I mean, so it’s tricky because even the definition is squishy. Like, I wrote an entire piece, which was entitled, It’s Practically Impossible to Define GMO. Because technically, a tomato is a genetically modified organism. It depends on where you’re going to draw the Is the line that things have changed, that their genes have modified? Well, of course, everything’s doing that. We’re evolving all the time. Is it that they’ve been changed by human influence, those devious mad scientists? Well, of course, we’ve been doing that since the beginning of agriculture in selecting crops.
Well, okay, but it’s not that. Is it about introducing other genes from other species into another species? If you define it that way, you have to take into account that this is happening naturally in the world all the time where you have this horizontal gene flow from viruses and you have insects sucking on one thing and putting a rice gene into a barley plant. It’s sort of, if you approach it with an air of curiosity rather than morality, it’s kind of boggling and wonderful to see how messy the things that we think of as separate species are throughout history.
It’s just this wild stuff where We’ve just been smushing DNA back and forth across the tree of life for the last 2 billion years. So what it really comes down to, I think, in people’s minds is it’s sort of like the same risk analysis that happens with nuclear. What it is, is it’s a GMO is something that someone I don’t really trust in, probably in a lab coat, did in a high-tech looking room that And was motivated purely by profit to do so. So what it really is about is it’s a marker.
You know, I talk about GMOs as a metaphor. It’s like anything that feels like it’s out of my control in this world of corporate food that I can’t really trust. That’s almost a better way to think about it. I mean, the actual definition, if you get into like the U. S. government, has to do with transgenesis, which means taking humans, taking one Gene from one species and putting it into another species. Again, there’s even problems with that because when you scramble DNA by exposing seeds to radiation or bathing them in toxic chemicals, that’s something that people tend to avoid.
But that’s something that we use for seeds that are used in organic agriculture as well. So it’s very complicated.
Ross Kenyon: You’re like the physical embodiment of the actually meme guy.
Nathanael Johnson: My worst nightmare. If that’s true, I’ll take it.
Ross Kenyon: No, the details of these things matter quite a lot. And I do think it’s more of a political marker than it is merely someone who dug in and they don’t trust Monsanto or they don’t trust some of these big companies that have their best interests in mind. And then this sort of, we talked about this a little bit before, but in Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, one of the main pillars of it is sanctity. And sort of both nuclear and the way that it causes mutations and radiation, I think that fits into this too.
And then GMOs is deliberately changing the natural processes of these genes. I think there’s something about it that just rubs people. And it isn’t a conservative or a left-wing thing. It just seems like we all have this as one of our intuitions that we either have to serve or fight against. Yeah. Even if this was perfectly safe, you even have very smart people like Nassim Taleb, not into GMOs.
Nathanael Johnson: Oh man, is he not?
Ross Kenyon: Not into GMOs one bit. And a lot of this is for precautionary principles, which I know you’ve written about and like to argue against. So why don’t you lay it out for us? Can you start with defining what is the precautionary principle?
Nathanael Johnson: Well, I wish I knew.
Ross Kenyon: Don’t do anything for any reason to anyone. This is the Michael Scott answer.
Nathanael Johnson: Right. Exactly. Yeah. That’s, I mean, that’s, that’s sort of the danger of the, often when the precautionary principle is wheeled out, it’s, it’s really by people that just want to shut something down.
Ross Kenyon: Rhetorically, it’s very useful.
Nathanael Johnson: Right. Exactly. It’s a, well, if in its most extreme, it’s saying if something might have some negative effect, you have to prove that negative effect won’t occur before you introduce it into the world. Well, that’s impossible. You do that and you stop all growth and all innovation. You stop all... You know, learning. If you apply that to culture, gosh, you know, stop reading books, you know. That definition is very problematic and there’s, you know, there’s various regulatory bodies like the various UN. There’s huge tracks that are really boring that you can read about this where they say, well, it’s not quite that.
We want to look at these things and, you know, make some good choices. You know, if you define it that way, I have no problem with it. The thing that I like to think of is we need to be precautionary in our choices about introducing new things into the world, but we also need to be precautionary about the status quo. The status quo right now is really not good.
Ross Kenyon: Dude, that’s the reverse Uno card right there. You just got played.
Nathanael Johnson: In a lot of ways. And so if you’re saying, let’s just stick with what we have until we can prove that anything new isn’t going to hurt us, then we’re stuck in this status quo that’s heading at 400 miles per hour towards six degrees of global warming, which I’m not willing to accept. There’s a real need for not blindly rushing into things, but we have to weigh that against the need to make some real changes.
Ross Kenyon: What’s that got to do with GMOs? What are some good reasons to support it? What can they do with climate change? What are the genuine risks too? Give us the best case for it. I want to make you the people who you fight with. I want you to represent them. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Or just like at least convince me why when I’m in the supermarket, I should or shouldn’t buy GMO free. Like why should I or should not care?
Nathanael Johnson: So I started out, you know, I started out caring a lot. Before I started researching this, they didn’t really have the GMO-free label. But now I really don’t choose based on that at all. The more research I do on agriculture, the kind of less I’m concerned with these consumer-facing labels. And it’s been wonderfully freeing to not have to worry about them. But again, trying to skate over the surface without diving into too many details, as I’ve already done to our peril today a couple of times.
Unknown speaker: Don’t worry, we’ve trained our listeners. They like it.
Nathanael Johnson: But just one way to kind of get at the big picture is to think about what would agriculture look like without GMOs? And it wouldn’t look that different. It’s not a foundational technology of industrial agriculture. I think part of the opposition is just this idea that like, get rid of this thing and we’ll have these beautiful, aesthetically pleasing small farms where I can... You know, do a 50-mile bike ride up to and have this wonderful meal and that will be the world. And that just, that won’t happen. There’s plenty of technologies.
There’s farmers that use GMO and non-GMO crops side by side, not for ideological reasons, just because, you know, one happens to be the right price at the right year. It wouldn’t change things that much. You know, you’d have people spring less glyphosate because glyphosate is Roundup. Roundup resistant crops, but then they’d be spraying a lot more of other herbicides and other more toxic herbicides. Farmers would be using less BT crops. So the main two GMOs are Roundup resistant and BT. BT is a bacteria that’s used in organic farming a lot to kill certain insects.
You can spread it on your broccoli and these worms will eat it and then they’ll die. Bt crops have this little crystal that the bacteria produce engineered into them so that when these worms eat them, you know, it’s toxic to the worms. It’s not toxic to humans. They die. So you get rid of those and farmers. So you wouldn’t have GMO. Insecticides, but you’d have farmers using more actual insecticides. So not a huge change. The problem about sort of defending GMOs and being like, what could they do, is that there’s not great examples.
Because there’s enough regulatory hurdles. It’s so hard to produce one of these things, get it through all of the testing and get it on the market that only the Monsantos can do it. So there were a lot of these little startups that had great ideas way back when, and they sort The only things that are produced are the things that are going to appeal to giant farmers, that they can be sold across the board. There are lots of cool things out there. You could engineer crops that produce more per acre, which would take pressure off surrounding forests.
There’s some really interesting work being done on engineering. Soil bacteria to produce fertilizer for crops. So you’re not putting synthetic fertilizer on and it’s just producing a little spurt right when the plant needs it rather than putting a lot on all at once that gets washed downstream. I think if you had the innovators sort of freed up to experiment with this, there would be a lot of use cases that would be kind of cool. But as it is, it’s sort of this like, yeah, it helps make industrial farming a little bit more efficient, which is kind of like, you know...
Yay. Like golf clap. Yeah. I mean, it is important. I mean, it’s not useful from PR perspective because people don’t understand how important industrial farming is to the overall footprint of humanity on the world. And if you can make it a little bit more efficient, it has these huge environmental savings. And there are things that are used by, you have small Very poor farmers in Bangladesh right now that now have access to BT eggplant who have gone from being out there with bare arms and legs spraying horrendously toxic pesticides two or three times a week.
You really have to spray eggplant a lot to really not having to spray at all.
Ross Kenyon: Buy organic eggplant is what you’re saying.
Nathanael Johnson: Well, this is a GMO eggplant. Well, yeah, yeah. Organic or GMO eggplant. But it’s less about the consumer. By the time it gets to the consumer, The pesticides are much less of an issue. It’s really about the farm workers where this is hurting. So the point is there are these use cases out there that I’m more interested in, but they’re kind of these small marginal cases. Eggplant in Bangladesh, papaya in Hawaii, these things that are less foundational to our food system.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a good point. One of those questions with regard to GMOs that one should be asking is what would they be doing were it not for this technology? And if it’s worse, that’s a good reason to evaluate it.
Christophe Jospe: Right. I’m really enjoying this conversation.
Ross Kenyon: There’s too much here, though. I should have just let you just do GMOs or just do nuclear.
Christophe Jospe: There’s too much to split. Yeah, we just have to come and hang out with you off air. I know that’s basically the answer.
Nathanael Johnson: Anytime, man.
Christophe Jospe: You’ve talked a lot. I mean, clearly you have a perspective. You’ve worked in Southern Idaho, you’ve worked directly, you’ve reported on farming, you’ve reported on industrial agriculture, you’ve got this book here, All Natural. I see that Rodale published it. So, you sort of in like the all camps, which is really cool. Like that’s... That’s how you can really understand the levers of change and systemic change. Now, so Nori, I mean, we’re a carbon removal marketplace. We’ve developed a methodology that helps farmers monetize incremental gains in soil organic carbon. Soil carbon is sexy right now.
Got to credit Jeremy Kaufman on our earlier podcast for SEQ, sequestration, C. I forgot about that. Soil carbon is sexy.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: You wrote an article that threw a bit of shade at it. You said it’s a little bit overhyped right now. Where’s that coming from? Yeah, how dare you?
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah, I’m here to throw sand into the wheels of Nori, really.
Christophe Jospe: No, I think I mean, we’ll turn that into pearls.
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah, there you go. I think it’s caught the imagination of a bunch of policymakers. You have all these Democratic presidential nominees or not. What are they? Candidates talking about how we’re going to just sequester tonnes and tonnes of people. So I went and I talked to a bunch of soil scientists and I was like, so what’s real and what’s not here? And basically what they said is... We know how to do this. These basic techniques of cover cropping, of minimizing tillage, of incorporating organic material back into the ground as much as possible do sequester carbon.
It works. The question is how much can we get and how long can we maintain those gains and does it tail off at any point? Do you start to fill up the bathtub at some point where you’ve got these degraded soils that For the last century, we’ve been hauling carbon out of it in the form of grain and selling it across the world. You fill that up again, where does that get you? And I think those questions aren’t fully answered. There’s some interesting estimates. I wish they would show up. I don’t know where they are.
But I do get a little concerned when I hear people like the Democratic candidates or like Alan Savory saying, we can just solve this problem. We can keep flying around and polluting. We can just get regenerative grazing going and we’re good. I think that’s the danger.
Ross Kenyon: It’s fair to say that some of the claims that we see are What’s weird though is that people who are really into soil stuff tend to think it’s the only thing necessary or they’ve so isolated it from all the other solutions in the solution set that it just seems unrealistic to me.
Christophe Jospe: And anyone who’s working on one solution is going to be like, forestry, trees are the best way to draw down carbon. That’s a fair point. Yeah. No, marine permaculture. No, but you should really look at aggregate.
Nathanael Johnson: Well, that’s sort of the question that I had. And it sort of echoes. A lot of the things that we were talking about because I’ve noticed in, you know, I live here in the Silicon Valley area and with startups, there’s this interesting tension. And I’m curious how you handle this yourselves between being, we’re young. We know that we’re ignorant. We’re going to fail early and fail often and learn from failures. We’re going to pivot. We’re going to listen. And then also having to do the marketing and having to say, we have got this world changing idea.
We are a unicorn. We’ve got it. It seems like those things are in conflict. I wonder if you like, how do you navigate that yourself? Do you find yourself having to put on different hats in different situations?
Ross Kenyon: I’d say sometimes, but I mean, the podcast that you’re on right now, this started as a way to educate people about what we’re trying to do. And we also, we say goofy stuff on here sometimes that doesn’t always portray ourselves in our smartest light when we’re learning and we try to be transparent. We’re also trying to innovate on multiple different frontiers simultaneously that all need it. And we’ve brought people along for the ride. So that’s at least a major reason why we’ve done the podcast. And we try to be pretty, we make some big claims or we have big ideas, but I think we also try to be humble about how we present it too.
Maybe we don’t always succeed at it, but that’s sort of how I think about it.
Christophe Jospe: Not to bore our listeners, but I’ll give a hot take update on our business strategy because I think it’s part of it. It’s like, yes, we’re in tech stars right now. And one of the mottos in tech stars is do more faster. And we have certainly been looking at like, what are the micro experiments that we can learn from and then adopt a I mean, there’s no question that Nori’s business model is valid. The world is going to need an atmospheric cleanup service. And that’s where we’re positioning ourselves. We’re a carbon removal marketplace.
We want to make it as easy as possible for people on one side to pay for that activity and on the other side to... Basically generate a claim which is valid. People can trust it and then they can monetize it. So the question comes down to how can we most efficiently do that and learn along the way. And so like any two-sided marketplace, you’ve got the chicken and the egg. What came first? How do you build? We’ll actually create this one-time opportunity to monetize historic carbon removals and then sign a 10-year contract where you’ll continue to do this.
We’ve learned a bit from that strategy, but generally it sticks to the same and it’s then how do you get the data in the most efficient way. And there are other podcasts where we’ve brought on someone like Emma Fuller, who works for farm management information software at Granular, that basically we’re building an application programming interface between our platform and the farm platform so we can just get the farmer data and make it work. Then on the selling side, we’re just figuring it out constantly. What’s the easiest way to sell this to people who want it?
And how do we learn from them and do that along the way? And I think the broader point as a newcomer into the carbon market space, We realize that we’re not the only game in town. We realize there are other places where people can buy carbon offsets or pay for some environmental activity. So what can we do that’s like a step level change, better, more efficient? And for us, that comes down to... So we, from very early on, have been working very closely with The team at Colorado State University, which has been funded by the USDA, called Comet Farm.
This is basically a USDA-approved carbon estimation tool based on the farm management practices that people are changing. So it’s not Nori who’s designing our own system. Actually, we’re aligning with a third party. And yeah, it’s totally learning by doing. I mean, that’s part of why we do this podcast. Like Ross said, we invite the listeners to join us on this journey, be a collective author in this broader story where... If it’s a voluntary carbon market where we’re cutting our teeth initially, over time, we’re talking to California too. California could adopt part of our framework and we would be like, great, more shots on goal.
There’s too much carbon. All that’s to say is move quickly. I think it was a strategic decision to start with projects here in the United States as opposed to overseas. It was a strategic decision to say start with agriculture because carbon markets to date have been inhospitable to farmers. If we can just use software in an efficient way, that’ll make it easier. I don’t know. Were you also asking about...
Ross Kenyon: Like your original question that prompted this, which by the way, Christophe, I just got to cut that in there as just like a standalone, like insert Christophe here and I’ll just send that to people if you want. What’s the latest on Nori? That was quick. But you’re asking like, we’re doing exciting things. And we want to be conservative and accurate, but there’s also a tension with marketing and talking about how great we are.
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah, and approaching funders. I wonder if you feel that... So if I’m to summarize the history of offsets, it’s sort of a dumpster fire. I support it. I think it’s like our dumpster fire. It’s better than any of the other... I mean, I think, you know, there’s huge problems with red. I don’t even know what that stands for. Reforestation, avoided deforestation. Yeah. But it’s also better than not trying to do anything at all. And I think there’s some real important success stories with indigenous people and the Amazon, etc. But do you ever feel like you have to sort of be like...
We’re confident. We know the right way to do this. We’re stepping up the game. We’re not going to make a mistake and you can give us a check for a billion dollars versus, gosh, let’s try this and see if it works and we’ll keep iterating. I mean, it depends on the hour.
Christophe Jospe: But I think we have to be humble about it. And I do think the word collective authorship is what it comes down to. It’s let’s write this story. If there’s a better way to estimate and quantify carbon dioxide removal, let’s be public about it. Let’s, you know, poke holes in it.
Ross Kenyon: I think bravado is pretty transparent too. And I think... Showing thoughtfulness about how we’re approaching it and what we’re learning is oftentimes being humble. It’s sort of like the ultimate confidence in a way like I know what I don’t know. And I would hope that anyone wanting to work with us would respect that rather than just being like, I got it, man. I know everything there is to know about soil carbon. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. People are like that. And I don’t know. I’m sure you run into people like that all the time.
And you’re like, yeah, this guy’s terrible.
Nathanael Johnson: Well, I mean, the thing that is impressive for me is when there’s, you know, everybody can say words. When there’s evidence that something’s working, then that’s exciting. So I really, that’s what I’m, this sort of new wave of people who are trying to do what Nori is doing. I’m really excited for the, when that starts, you get enough time to have like a solid sample set and be like, we can really show a trend line here. That’s going to be cool to see.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. I wanted to ask you one, a final question, and it could be a quick one if you’d like, but who do you think is your best critic? One of the questions we like to ask, or we’re trying to ask more often is, who’s the smartest person who disagrees with you?
Christophe Jospe: Spoiler alert, listener. That’s coming next week.
Nathanael Johnson: You can keep that in there or cut it out as you like. But his organization puts on these breakthrough dialogues, these conferences, and I’ve gone to a few of them. They’re full of people who are thinking in very critical ways about these questions. So I bump into those people there. And if I’m being a little bit overconfident or those people will call me back. Sometimes bump into on Twitter is Tamar Haspel, who’s a columnist at the Washington Post, and she is excellent, really thoughtful. We don’t tend to disagree about that much, but sometimes we do, and it’s super interesting to see.
The critiques that hurt are the ones that are not the ones that like you’re an idiot, everything you say is wrong, but the ones that are like, I think you’re 75% right, but there’s this one thing. It’s like, oh, you really read that closely. And so I’ll get that often from, you know, there’s these farmer scientists that are on Twitter who...
Christophe Jospe: But as a journalist, you want that, right?
Nathanael Johnson: Exactly. Exactly. You don’t learn and you don’t make progress unless you have checks on yourself. There’s like this guy, Terry Daynard, who’s a farmer... Yeah. And will critique me when I’m saying something like, gosh, this Impossible Burger is pretty cool and they want to get rid of all meat production by 2030. She’s saying, you really want to completely wipe out this way of life that we’ve been treasuring for decades? Hundreds of years. Yeah. So there’s, there’s some, there are these people in there often, you know, it’s not, it’s often reminding me of the science, the science and like, you might be rationally wrong about this, but it’s often these more cultural heart related, you know, critiques that force me to think about things in emotional terms as well as, as rational ones.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a very good answer. And that question is also extremely difficult. I think we’ve stumped a couple of people with it or just came out of left field and they’re like, I don’t know. So well done. Let’s do another one of these at some point. This was fun. There’s more to talk about. Thanks so much for being here. If someone wanted to buy your books or you also have a great Twitter handle or follow you and keep up, how should they do it?
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah, so I’m at Sabertooth, like Sabertooth Tiger, except Saber with a V, Sabertooth. At Sabertooth on Twitter, I have a website where you can find that in my books, which is just NathanielJohnson.org. If you Google my name, I have a weird spelling of my name, but if you Google Nathanael Johnson Grist, you’ll probably figure out the right spelling. And it’s N-A-T-H-A-N-A-E-L. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for years and years.
Ross Kenyon: I had to study it and make sure I got it right.
Christophe Jospe: What are the parents doing to kids in Berkeley?
Nathanael Johnson: Yeah, that’s torture right there, you know. But it does make me Google, you know, with a last name like Johnson, you know, you do need something a little bit unusual for your first name. So that’s maybe a blessing in disguise.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, thank you again, Nathanael, for being here. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes or Apple Podcasts or Stitcher as well if you use that. And thank you so much for listening.
