Some decisions we don't expect to have big consequences. And yet, sometimes you wake up thirty years later in a world deeply altered by that little moment. Today's show is about when that happens in science.
Dr. Tyler Kukla is a Research Scientist at CarbonPlan, one of carbon removal's preeminent watchdog nonprofits. He returns to the show to explore how a conservative estimation of how much carbon returns to the atmosphere after agliming with carbonate rock (all of it) in the 1996 IPCC report has led us into a commercial carbon removal future that focuses almost entirely on silicate rock.
This isn't a story about whether silicates or carbonates are better for enhanced weathering (it really depends upon a number of geographic factors and design decisions around system boundaries and additionality), but about how some good faith placeholders can reify to such an extent that they do so much more than they were ever expected to.
Resources
Revised 1996 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories
"Scaling enhanced weathering in limed fields" by Tyler Kukla
"Evidence for carbon sequestration by agricultural liming" by Dr. Stephen K. Hamilton, et al
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
🎧 Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
Paid subscribers get this episode ad-free. The ads in the free feed are inserted by Spotify when you press play. They are not in the file I make.
