Many indigenous communities see the climate crisis as another form of colonialism. First World countries have colonized the atmosphere with their greenhouse gas emissions. And there is a risk that carbon removal infrastructure reinforces business-as-usual. So, what is the best approach to decolonizing the atmosphere? How can we tackle climate change in a way that fits with broader progressive goals around equity and social justice?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck is a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Institute on the Environment and Sustainability and the author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. Dr. Buck joins Ross to discuss her recent article in Progressive International, ‘How to Decolonize the Atmosphere.’ She describes how the ideas in The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth informed her thinking and introduces us to the concept of settler colonialism as it relates to climate change.
Dr. Buck walks us through her three progressive goals for carbon removal: 1) link carbon with the managed decline of fossil fuels, 2) ensure public ownership and return on investment, and 3) advocate for a global framework for carbon removal. Listen in for Dr. Buck’s insight on the interconnectedness of the climate crisis with the other major issues we face and find out why she is concerned about the way social media may be influencing scientific research.
Resources
The Red Deal Part 1: End the Occupation
Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure by Winona LaDuke, Deborah Cowen
After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration by Holly Jean Buck
Global CCS Institute Report on Climate Change
Rhodium Report on Jobs & Direct Air Capture
Rhodium Report on Policies for the US to Advance Direct Air Capture
Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism by Geert Lovink
‘Climate Change is a Waste Management Problem’ in Issues in Science and Technology
All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change by Michael T. Klare
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, welcome to season 2 of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcasting thing now, and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com/noripodcast. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what Norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a Nori book club? Get special access to Nori events? Go take a look at patreon.com/noripodcast for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean and that sort of way that, you know, we like to do this, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback.
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Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, lead strategist at the Nori carbon removal marketplace. Today, we have an alumna back, Dr. Holly Jean Buck, research fellow at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Holly, you wrote “How to Decolonize the Atmosphere” in Progressive International, which gave me the chance I needed to invite you back on to do a bonus episode. So, thanks so much for being here.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: What led to your writing this article? And I don’t know that we’ve actually covered this before, which is potentially even negligent on my part. But what does it mean to decolonize the atmosphere? And what does it mean to be colonized generally?
Holly Jean Buck: So I was inspired by a lot of recent writing, including the Red Nation, that put out The Red Deal. So these different series of — explaining what that is, the third part, about indigenous action to save the Earth, is about healing the atmosphere, right? And they say that first world nations have colonized the atmosphere with their greenhouse gas emissions, and that reducing and absorbing emissions to decolonize that atmosphere is what we urgently need to be doing. And I thought that was a really good starting point for thinking about what carbon removal means.
If you think about all those emissions, the weight of them taking up the space, it’s the first world emissions, U.S. emissions. What does it mean to remove that? Can that be a decolonial practice? And I just say that — it might seem very far-fetched, because a lot of the conventional ways of thinking about carbon removal would actually just further entrench settler colonial infrastructure. So this is a very radical departure from how a lot of people are thinking about it today, but I think it’s an interesting and important provocation.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Okay. Those are — that’s the first time that those terms have come up on the show, I’m pretty sure. So when I think of settler colonialism, I usually think of it as contrasted against indigeneity, [unclear]. Would you mind sketching a little bit of what these terms mean for someone who may be encountering them for the first time?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. And I — but I mean, I will caveat it that I’m not an expert in it, so I’m really drawing from thinkers like Nick Estes, Winona LaDuke, Kyle Whyte, other people who have, you know, explained this to me, that I’m trying to learn from, right? But as Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen say in a recent article about “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure,” they say infrastructures are the how of settler colonialism — settler colonialism being this form of colonialism where people come and settle on the land, outsiders, usually a very violent extractive process intertwined with capitalism in many cases. And so, carbon removal infrastructure — would that also be, you know, another extension of settler colonialism? Or can we imagine an infrastructure for removing carbon that’s, in their words, alimentary, something that’s life-giving in its design, its finance, its effects?
Ross Kenyon: That’s a huge question that I want to explore with people, especially people that are better thinkers than me, frankly, about these things. And we should have some of them on and do greater justice to this topic, because it’s certainly interesting and of interest to our audience, and we have not covered it nearly as much as we should. So that’s enough — we will be doing that in the future. But I guess, how exactly might one pursue a project like a decolonial carbon removal regime? Because as your work has documented — and we’ve had you on for your book, After Geoengineering, and this has come up other places — how do you make sure carbon removal doesn’t become a business-as-usual kind of strategy?
What needs to change in order to make carbon removal liberatory? Or your work specifically seems to be: how does the left use carbon removal in a way that fits in with their broader goals and worldview, as opposed to being something that reinforces the structures that they do not care for that currently exist? Is that a fair summation of your work?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. And I think that one way to approach this is through the Green New Deal framework, since that centers equality and environmental justice kind of by definition. And so that’s what I’ve been thinking about for a while, and what a lot of this article in Progressive International is about. And it’s interesting to kind of think about that at the same time as looking at the Democratic climate crisis action plan that came out recently — I guess a week ago now, maybe two weeks ago, from the House committee, right? Because it talks about carbon removal in ways that would kind of synergize with the Green New Deal framework, but are not quite as progressive as what I’m describing in this article.
So I think there’s basically three things we need to do to be more radical with this. One of them is linking carbon removal with the managed decline of fossil fuels, and thinking about these as the same project, basically — looking at supply side policies that integrate carbon removal with [unclear] the production of fossil fuels. So that could be something like a carbon take-back requirement, meaning that companies are required to take back carbon that they emit or produce; just transition programs to support workers to transition from fossil fuel extraction jobs to carbon management, carbon services, carbon cleanup jobs; and then minimizing the remaining emissions. So really making residual emissions a political matter, not just kind of a calculation of what’s left over, but really politicizing that in line with science and biophysical reality, of course.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. I’m trying to decide if I want you to lay out the outline of all three, or we just dive in, because every one of those you laid out — in the first pillar, I know, what does it mean to politicize residual emissions? Like, what exactly do you have in mind when you say that?
Holly Jean Buck: Okay, so as I say, most of your listeners know that net zero targets by 2050 or whatever assume some amount of residual emissions, and that there’s going to be negative emissions capacity to balance those. And usually the residual emissions defined by different entities, whether that be a nation state or a US state, or a city, or a company, often work out to be between 10 and 20 percent of current emissions. Goldman Sachs in their Carbonomics report has a figure of 25 percent. I mean, generally there’s some significant portion that is difficult to decarbonise, mostly for biophysical reasons, but not necessarily, right? So I think that this needs to be both a technical and political conversation about how many residual emissions we can cope with and should cope with.
Ross Kenyon: There’s one other one you mentioned in there too. You just quickly named the other ones that you have mentioned.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, in terms of integrating carbon removal with the managed decline of fossil fuels, thinking about just transition and thinking about supply side policies — I mean, I think that needs to be a much bigger focus of the whole climate policy writ large.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. By the way, are you going to allow this, “supply side”? Because it makes you sound like a Reaganite. I don’t think you’re allowed to do that, step one. And then, so what is that? And then also just transition policy, I think is very interesting too. Could you outline a bit what these mean?
Holly Jean Buck: So, I mean, supply-side, I just feel like a lot of climate policy is focused on curbing demand, and we need to think more about curbing production as well, in a much more planned, regulated way. It’s like industrial policy rather than changing your light bulbs, something like that. So that could mean production quotas for fossil fuels; it could be linking production with certificates of obligation for carbon removal. All just a much more planned, heavy-handed approach than just letting the market decide about that.
Ross Kenyon: And then just transition, as I understand it, has been more about: what do you do with people who have invested a lifetime in learning the skills necessary to be roughnecks in the oil patch or something like that? And now what do they do? How do you get buy-in from working class people who are sort of — they’re like, God, this is, this is the worst type of economy, [unclear], but they’re stranded assets themselves, right? It’s like, what do you do with human stranded assets? That’s the worst, most neoliberal thing I’ve ever said on the show. You can cast me into the far left outer darkness for that statement.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, this is something I’m really concerned about. You know, I was in the Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas, in the Permian Basin, where there’s a lot of enhanced oil recovery. And in this museum there’s this exhibit about, you know, what’s going to happen to workers if oil runs out? And this Q&A, and the answer is, we’re not going to run out, because enhanced oil recovery will keep jobs coming for the foreseeable future. I mean, it was really pitched at the oil workers that are worried about, should they even get into this industry? What’s the future going to be?
And so you can see that, you know, enhanced oil recovery perhaps coupled with carbon removal policy could be a way forward for people who already have skills in that industry. And it’s been interesting to see even the Global CCS Institute has a recent report where they use the language of the just transition. There’s a new report out from Rhodium about jobs and direct air capture. I think that this is increasingly of interest to people on both sides of the aisle.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we use this rhetoric too, and I’ve also seen it in other places lately, but they’re trained to pull hydrocarbons and carbon molecules out of the ground — can we just reverse the process? Do those skills transplant effectively into the new carbon capture industry? I hope so. Do you think that’s actually going to happen in the way that people are hopeful for?
Holly Jean Buck: Maybe. I am also starting to have a few concerns about it, because it doesn’t necessarily change the mode of production, which is what I’m more interested in. And I also think that if you go to a place like Denver City, Texas, which is where there is really big CO2 flood infrastructure — I mean, the gender dynamics in this town are just like the craziest you’ve seen. And you can see this in the census data too, about earnings between men and women. It’s like the men have these high paying jobs, and the women, if they have a job, will be in these gas station, restaurant, service industry jobs. And is a just transition, switching this to carbon removal, going to just replicate those gender dynamics? I don’t know. I just wanted to throw that in there.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, those are difficult sociological knots to untie, you know, what you do in cases like that. But okay, let’s keep going to your second pillar here, Holly.
Holly Jean Buck: So the second one is ensure the public has ownership and return on investment.
Ross Kenyon: So what did you have in mind for this pillar?
Holly Jean Buck: I guess this is kind of my offhand comment a minute ago about the mode of production. So, carbon removal — is it just going to replicate the same kind of social relations between big energy companies and workers as we have now, or is there a chance to change it, so that the public has ownership stakes, collective decision-making, and gets something from this new infrastructure we’re thinking of building out?
Ross Kenyon: I’m curious about this too. It just came up on Leah Stokes’s episode a bit as well, which is that some types of public ownership, particularly for utilities, have not been as progressive as people had maybe hoped. So do you think there are things that we’re maybe missing about how utilities should be transformed moving forward?
Holly Jean Buck: Probably. Yeah, [unclear] person to comment on that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, fair enough. It’s a hard one. I’m not totally sure either, but I think people do tend to think that public ownership itself changes the dynamic enough, that — it’s not a panacea that once it’s put in place just solves everything. There are some of those same incentives still existing independent of that ownership structure. So I guess, what do you do to have a truly progressive utility or something like that?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I guess when I was thinking about that point, I was thinking about both municipal operations in waste management, and I was also thinking about agricultural co-ops, because I was out in the field talking to people who cooperatively owned dairies with, you know, 100 owners, or were using these kind of new arrangements to make agriculture work economically for them. And so I think that, I mean, utilities is the obvious thing to look at, but we could even go further afield to look for other models of how that might work.
Ross Kenyon: And this return on investment, what exactly is meant by this? Where might that money be flowing into? What might these industries be funding beyond themselves?
Holly Jean Buck: I think this really depends on the form of carbon removal, because obviously there are some forms, like bioenergy with CCS, where you have a usable good at the end. And then I see direct air capture as more of a waste disposal service. So I mean, the economics of those I think are pretty different.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, certainly. But I guess, so the concern then is, as policy is being created, how is it being done so that giant companies that the average person has very little control over — that that doesn’t just become the future for direct air capture or some of these other carbon capture methods? There’s an element of wanting to change the structures of these such that they are more democratic or under public control or something like that. That’s the vision.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I guess part of the reason I was thinking about this is because I have a paper I wrote coming out soon in Interface Focus, which is a scientific journal, that looks at the history of waste management, both in liquid waste and solid waste, over the past couple of centuries, and how there’s this kind of tension and going back and forth between, you know, should these be viewed as private industries and opportunities for private industry? Or should they be civically held, maintained infrastructure? And the history is kind of going back and forth a bit. And I think that for carbon removal at scale, a public works model just makes a lot more sense.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, because Nori is a for-profit private company trying to create a marketplace for carbon removal. Obviously, what you just said baited me a little bit, Holly. You must have known that from four years ago. But why do you think the incentives or the structure of something like what we’re trying to do is potentially inferior to something that is more inside the public domain, I guess you could say?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I think this thing here is scale, and I think that what you’re trying to do probably works really well at a million-tonne type scale. But then when you get to this gigatonne scale — I mean, maybe it sounds radical when I say it, but I’m thinking back on the Rhodium report from May of 2019, Capturing Leadership, where they suggest that maybe the government could undertake the task of CDR itself. And, you know, should we have what they call a Federal Carbon Removal Administration that’s chartered by Congress to kind of help manage this? At the million-tonne scale, I can see a pretty obvious role for a marketplace connecting particular projects, and at that gigatonne scale, it’s harder to imagine.
Ross Kenyon: Well, maybe for you and, you know, a couple of other wonky report writers. No, no, I think there’s a fair point there too, and people can legitimately take that. It’s also easier to imagine that scale coming from — if the government created an administration to deal with this at scale, that would clearly have a gigantic effect. And seemingly, because those bureaus can be created just with a pen stroke from a president, right, that could seemingly happen very, very quickly, whereas scaling up a voluntary marketplace, there’s different dynamics at play. Is that sort of what you’re getting at?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. There’s also an interesting proposition, thinking about the US as a territory having these geological storage assets that could be rented to other countries that have less geological capacity for carbon storage. I mean, you could apply this principle about the public having ownership and return on investment there too. So, you know, if the US was to sequester carbon, would the flows from the funds go back to the public? Would they be used — I mean, how would they be used? Like, thinking about this throughout all the different scales. You know, it’s just a very broad principle and I didn’t develop it in this article, it’s like one paragraph, right? But I’m hoping that people from all different fields will continue to think about this public ownership question.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, absolutely. I’m sure there will be more discussions about this in the future. And then, so you’re hinting at this third pillar then, which is advocate for a global framework for carbon removal. So what might that look like for the world at large?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. So we’re going to hear a lot of discussion about this in the next couple of years, and I think that people in the NGO community and in policy who have been seeing what happened with REDD+, seeing what happened with the biofuel boom-and-bust, really want to avoid some kind of mechanism which just has the Global South generating carbon removal capacity for continued emissions in the Global North. So I think people are reasonably aware of that danger and figuring out how to avoid that, right? Because what we need is really quite an opposite thing. We need the Global North to develop and pay for carbon removal to clean up our legacy emissions.
And in doing so, in ways that — it’s tricky, because if carbon removal is an opportunity, you don’t want other countries to lose out on that opportunity. But if carbon removal is a burden, then I think it’s arguable that the US and other heavily industrialized nations with large consumption should be taking up [unclear]. And then in terms of what a global mechanism looks like — I mean, I think that, you know, there’s talk around mechanisms. I think maybe Article 6 in the Paris Agreement to hash some of this out. It’s hard to imagine that not being a part of the, you know, international negotiations in the next five years.
Just because now that nations have these net zero targets and thinking about and drawing up detailed plans, looking at their expected residual emissions, looking at what they have within their borders to secure that negative emissions capacity, I think a lot of them will be looking beyond their borders. And so that’s when the global framework discussions will come in.
Ross Kenyon: I’m very curious how that plays out, just because there’s something that’s so fundamentally unpopular politically — it probably also just personally — about taking responsibility for your actions. I have a hard time imagining a president saying, hey, we’re responsible for the bulk of the world’s emissions, so we need to tax everyone here to pay for this. Like, that person’s gonna get voted out of office very quickly. I think even if that’s the just thing to do and the right thing to do, we should do it and take responsibility for our levels of consumption and emissions. But it seems just so challenging to admit that you’ve done this so long. I don’t know. Do you think it’s a little too pessimistic?
Holly Jean Buck: I think, since this has been the heart of climate debates for many years now, this question about historical responsibility, and then, you know, we have frameworks like contraction and convergence that have emerged to talk about it. I agree with you that it seems far-fetched from this standpoint, but I also think as activists it’s our role to push the window, you know, get it a little bit closer, right? Even if it doesn’t seem like the most likely thing for politicians to do in the near term.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, fair enough. Okay, I’m going to be difficult a little bit. You can tell me if this is right or wrong in your view, but I think the like average American is probably — I was reading the other day that the average person is left of where politics are now when it comes to economics and class issues, and right of the median when it comes to cultural issues. How do you think — this probably falls more into a cultural issue, like admitting responsibility for this, or taking responsibility for our climate emissions. And the average person in the country, Republican or Democrat, probably doesn’t want to pay more or cut consumption or admit that there’s really anything wrong with it, that they have to pay the personal price for it.
I don’t know. I have such a hard time seeing that transforming. I don’t know, that idea of guilt. This is sloppy, Holly. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say here. Can you make what I said intelligible?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, so there’s definitely a reckoning. I think that people have an easier time reckoning with waste than they do with something like colonialism. I mean, I think we need to reckon with all of it, obviously, but I think that in terms of cleaning up your own waste, that’s something that people can generally get on board with, because they have experience of what happens if you don’t, right? And so that’s why I find this waste management framing — and Klaus Lackner and Christophe Jospe had a great article in Issues in Science and Technology about this, which everybody should read, in which they simply say that, you know, it’s a waste management problem. We put the carbon there, we need to clean it up.
That’s something people can get on board with, because it takes away the guilt and kind of, you know, makes it simpler in a sense. And so I do think there’s a bipartisan, cross-cultural thing there, which is also pragmatic. On the other hand, if you believe that we actually need to get to the deeper — we think about our whole history, basically, in this country, and re-narrate what happened over the past, you know, four centuries, which is the point that I hope through my teaching and work that we can get to. I think that [unclear] still talks about that quite a lot. And the waste management framing is definitely less controversial.
Ross Kenyon: No one likes a litterbug, I don’t think, from the most conservative to the most progressive. I can’t imagine anyone is out there being like, yeah, you should litter, littering is a great thing to do. I think everyone’s at least a little bit ashamed of it, if they do it at all. But that being said, in this apartment building that I was living in, it was surprising how many people would like leave boxes in the trash room and like not take them down, or just like leave stuff in there that I could have opened the chute and thrown out. So part of me is less trustworthy that that will happen.
But I think when people hear justice talk, they do start to hold onto their wallets, or like, oh God, how much is this going to cost, or how much pain is it going to cause me, and having to think about these sort of intractable issues that are sort of baked into the country and the world at large? I think things are getting really worried — I think you are right that waste management does diffuse some of that. But then, is the point to defuse conflict, because shouldn’t we also be having conversations that make us uncomfortable too? Is it not just to ignore that entirely? Is that kind of what you’re after?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, and I don’t think we should not talk about it because we’re afraid that the conversation will take us down a road that’s really uncomfortable. Like, the idea of returning land to indigenous people may be really uncomfortable for some people, right? And so, if — I think there might be a tendency, if the conversation looks like it’s going that way, that some people might want to veer into a safer direction. I think we should go, you know, everywhere.
And I think about this because I wrote this paper some years ago in a scientific journal that mentioned the word colonialism in it once, and the reviewer said, you know, that’s not appropriate to mention in a scientific journal, and I took it out because I was an earlier career scholar and I thought, you know, it wouldn’t get published. And I’ve always felt bad about not pushing back, but I think we need to take these little steps first. Pick it — okay, to say the word colonialism in a scientific article, whatever those next steps are. Let’s do it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s a good question. Like, a lot of the discourse around climate change — Nori, our communications style tries to be closer to meet people where they are. For instance, I just read a really great book called — it’s called All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, by Michael Klare. Have you read that book?
Holly Jean Buck: I haven’t read that one. I’ve read a few of his earlier works.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that was the first of his I read. I thought that was the single best book to show to conservatives, especially if they’re somewhat hawkish in their perspective on foreign policy, because it basically shows like military preparedness is really under siege by climate change. It’s going to cost a fortune to keep bases open and to patrol the Arctic and all of the various things that are being stressed, and the military having a humanitarian function for disasters, all of that happening at a much greater level than now. So this is a great book to share with someone.
But is there something that is problematic about meeting someone where they might be? Because does it matter why someone cares about climate change, so long as they end up in a similar place? Or do we really need to all accept all of the same premises about why climate change is important in order for us to address it in an appropriate way?
Holly Jean Buck: I think it’s really great to start by meeting people where they are, and I definitely don’t, you know, approach interviewing people in Kansas or Iowa by talking about land return first. But I also think that the danger, if we don’t move it past that, is then we get forms of carbon removal that reproduce inequalities. So if we don’t eventually move the conversation to that and design alternative forms and alternative infrastructures, we will be entrenching all these structural inequalities. So then there’s a question of, okay, well, how do you move people along? How quick does that happen? I don’t know.
I mean, I think that the Democrats at the House committee did a good job in their plan, talking about this, because they have tonnes of interesting things about how the military can play a role in scaling up CDR, right? I can see that as being a great thing to leave with. I don’t know if you’ve read this, but it’s pretty cool: military procurement of fuels made from captured carbon, building on the SEA FUEL Act to have RD&D projects with direct air capture, etc. I mean, that’s the starting point, I can see that.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, yeah. And then you say, oh well, we have energy independence, we’re less dependent upon OPEC, or we don’t have to deal as much with like Persian Gulf states that we have various types of relationships with. We could just do this internally, there’s a buy-domestic angle to it. This would be done inside the country. It helps the military be more independent, can maybe stay at sea longer if they’re able to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of reasons, if you care about that a lot and that’s the thing that you care about, there’s cool reasons to think about it.
But that isn’t the only reason. These are — the question is, if we could solve climate change without addressing all of the other problems that the country and the world has, would it be worth doing it? It sounds like we should do this all at once. You just bought a house, Holly, so it’s like, if you’re already taking the cabinets out of the kitchen, should you put in a new range while you’re at it, and bring gas from the street? You’re already in there, why not just do it all at once? Is that totally infantilizing and stupid, [unclear]?
Holly Jean Buck: I think that, I mean, this is a question that’s come up a lot on your show. I think my way of looking at it is that, you know, climate change is a crisis. We need to start on what we can, how we can, with the tools we have. But at the end of that process, we could be living in a world that still sucks, even though it confronted climate change. Maybe there’s like creepy carbon surveillance apps that fixed it, but now we’re being monitored all the time. Or like, maybe we’re dealing with, you know, other types of environmental challenges. It’s not like climate’s the only thing going on.
Ross Kenyon: No, it feels like the country is tearing at the seams, and we have — how many crises can you even name at one time that are all on top of each other at this moment? Is it fewer than 10? [unclear] It’s probably more. We got a problem, like, turn off before we finished the list. I thought at some point, like, I thought it’d be fun to live in the 60s and be in the civil rights era, but now you’re like in the civil rights era and the Spanish flu and 1939, with like maybe World War 3 on the horizon, just like naming all of these things. It does, it does feel cataclysmic.
I try to be, I try to be optimistic, as, you know, you listen to the show enough to know, but some of that stuff has really freaked me out, and I would like us to live in a society that we could be unalloyedly proud of. I would like to be able to be proud of America without having to give a single caveat about anything. Do you know what I mean?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. I think the thing is that a lot of analysts see them all as like one — it’s one crisis, right? It’s just this mega crisis that we haven’t evolved the right language for, whether you call it, you know, world ecological crisis, or biodiversity crisis. I mean, there’s all these different words, but it’s all one thing. Colonialism, you could call it that.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, so yeah, I’m interested in this too. So we had Eric Holthaus on, and he at least partly attributes this root cause to that idea of ownership. And it’s an interesting idea of trying to diagnose what are the cascading effects of fundamental ideas that cause these sort of internal contradictions in the systems that come up around them. So that’s sort of like a Marxian way of saying it, right there. Like, once you have competition and private property, is there sort of a process that is almost like coded into history that unfolds as time goes on? So I don’t know if you do buy that case. Like, do you think that is a root cause, or is that too reductionist?
Holly Jean Buck: I feel like if you keep going back and back and back, then you get to just really kindergarten stuff about like being mean or not sharing, like these really fundamental things. You know, somebody with a PhD, we’re taught to complicate things, and that’s like a verb we use in our writing. But I think it’s really kind of a moral, spiritual crisis, something really deep in the root, particularly of people from settler colonial ancestry like me, right? I think that you can locate it there, with coming to a different place and killing people.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, being mean. I think it comes down to being mean, and I think your thought about the game theory of it is terrible. I can imagine people that we don’t have words for, because they just haven’t survived. This was tens of thousands of years ago. I’m sure there were peaceful hunter-gatherer societies that lived near warlike neighbors who were just exterminated. And then the only way that other groups could survive was to also become warrior societies and have this sort of balance of power against others. And then what do you do when the whole world is essentially that? How do you live peacefully in a world of warriors?
I don’t even know. But the incentives of defecting from that like baseline are [unclear], and your entire society and family and everyone you know is murdered and enslaved, etcetera. What do you do with that? I don’t know, I don’t know. Are we getting too elliptical here? Is this too weird?
Holly Jean Buck: I think that there’s a problem, because the vocabulary we use in the academy and, you know, professional sectors, and the way we’ve fragmented our knowledge with all these disciplines, keeps us from talking about these like more elemental — I don’t think it’s wrong or dumb, but I think we don’t have a lot of practice with it, right?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, no, it does. It ends up sounding like kind of a little hippie-ish if you say it in the wrong kind of way, and people like scoff, and even I’m guilty of doing that sometimes. But these are the only two solutions I’ve really heard for this sort of game theoretic environment. Well, okay, I’ll preface a little bit. Do you know Daniel Schmachtenberger’s work?
Holly Jean Buck: No.
Ross Kenyon: He’s interesting, sort of like a complexity and risk theorist, but basically posits that within a competitive game theoretic environment, as technology advances, we get closer and closer to like the doomsday machine going off. And like, we need to transform this dynamic before there’s weaponized AI and like drones that like run themselves, basically, because then you end up with Skynet and bad things will happen, or there’s an accidental nuke launch that sets off the whole thing. So we need to like dig down and figure out what is wrong with the incentives, and I thought that was a great thought experiment to wrap your head around.
I’ve heard two potential ways out of this. One is Ramez Naam, who’s a Nori advisor and futurist and science fiction author. His book called Nexus, which is: what if people could take this compound and it erases the boundaries between people? It sort of heightens the psychic [unclear] of people so that they no longer see themselves as individuals, but as sort of, you know, social beings. So like almost like how maybe ants or bees see themselves, like identify with the hive more than as an individual. Like, that’s one thing.
Or you have sort of like a really strong Christian social ethic, like Tolstoy, and you’re just like fundamentally like turn the other cheek, resist not evil, and you’re just willing to like really model that and go the whole way, even at great personal cost, and just like live that Christian dynamic. Those are the only two, like a spiritual revolution, or some sort of like tech biochemical Ramez Naam thing that allows us to get beyond just individuality. That’s the only ways I’ve seen to break that game theoretical cycle. Sorry, I didn’t mean to just go on a lecture, but I’ve been thinking about that one for like two years now. I don’t know what to do beyond what I just said. What do you think about that?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I’ve often thought that maybe psychedelics could obviate the need for geoengineering. Like, instead of this earth-moving techno-fix, we could just have a biochemical techno-fix, because it seems like we’re farther along with drug development than we are with geoengineering, but nobody ever takes me seriously when I suggest that. I think that there’s something though, to — I mean, you mentioned about religion. I think there’s something to social norms and the way they’re enforced in this current moment that could actually be used for good.
I mean, right now we see kind of manifestations of that power, like with fat shaming, or mask shaming with regards to COVID, like these kind of wars on the internet, right? And then all the discussion about cancel culture or whatever. But there’s a force there of people promoting norms, wanting to have those norms, wanting to be on the right side of things. We just had this crazy moment where people sacrificed tremendous amounts to protect vulnerable people, and I feel like that’s totally been lost in all the, you know, culture of warfare around these lockdowns, but it’s really kind of amazing what happened. And so, can we figure out how that’s all working and apply it to climate change? Maybe we have a shot at steering ourselves in a more moral, spiritually whole direction. I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s a good example. Humans are both better than we expected and worse at various moments. Yeah, I don’t know what you do about that. I hope that capacity is there to break that cycle. It just seems like the people who do break it first, like, pay the cost, and then you have a free rider problem, which is, it only works if everyone basically does it, but there’s great incentives for you personally not to, in some cases. I don’t know. Unless there’s some sort of like external ethos that you ascribe to that keeps you honest in that way. I don’t know how we get there, or you just — it’s like a psychedelic thing or a tech thing that allows us to break sort of individual identification in some interesting, new kind of way. So I don’t know.
Is religion just the analog version of that, and the tech psychedelic version is the digital? Is that, is that what it is? [unclear]
Holly Jean Buck: You know, I mean, there’s all this writing, like in the 90s and early 2000s, about like how the internet was going to connect us all, right, and would be kind of one. And I actually wonder now, watching the response to COVID, if that’s actually happening. Like, all around the world, you know, people are sensing what’s going on, they’re wanting to act.
Ross Kenyon: I guess. Okay. Maybe this might just be the way social media is monetized and promoted, but I mostly just see people who are like — the angriest, most pithy tweets are the ones that get retweeted the most, I think. Do you think that is building something important, or does it seem like it’s just cutting us more into different groups who like to argue with each other?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, right now, it definitely is, but it’s because the infrastructure is, you know, built in this capitalist way, right? So, coming back to this infrastructure issue, we now have the potential to connect everybody, to build social norms in a positive way. We’re limited by the infrastructure we have, which is via these few private tech companies, right? But we could do it differently.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. We’re talking about before the show, I think there are things about capitalism that are worth preserving. I like various aspects of private property, markets, prices. I think they’re valuable and should not be thrown out or spoken of too cavalierly. That being said, I think one of the best cases against capitalism is almost certainly the way that social media is monetized, where the longer you stay on Facebook, the more ads get served to you. The best way to keep people on Facebook is to have them be angry and commenting and yelling at each other. So all the incentives are there for that.
And you see a similar dynamic that’s perhaps a little less sophisticated with cable news, right? So like, whether you watch MSNBC or CNN or Fox, they’re all sort of pandering to their base and pointing out how the other team is really stupid. And that’s not to say that the other team isn’t often ridiculous in their own ways, but I think it’s really damaging that that’s the way that we consume news slash entertainment, which is just baiting, I think. I think that we’re like seeking out reasons to be angry by consuming the type of media that we are consuming. And I don’t know that like Facebook making money off of that really is in the long-term interest of us as individual people, or as a polis.
I think this is — I don’t know what to do about it, Holly. It sounds like maybe you, maybe there should be like a public option for social media, or we should just have NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, that should be like the main show everyone watches. What do you, what do you suppose instead?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I think there should be a public infrastructure, and I think that it would be great for climate change. I mean, maybe it’s the best thing we could do for climate change. You know, we’re focused very much on building out physical infrastructure, which is also important, but at the same time it could be a huge multiplier to have, you know, reform this science-media-policy interface.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we should talk about that, and perhaps we should have you back on, but maybe I can link to it in the show notes. Will you tease us with a little outline of that other paper you’ve mentioned?
Holly Jean Buck: I’m now trying to remember, I’m working on like four of them.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, you’re saying that like the way that like scientists publish now is with an eye towards posting on social media, and this has sort of changed the directionality of science and how science and knowledge work is produced, or some such.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, well, that’s a theory. It’s something I’m concerned about. It’s something I haven’t collected empirical data on, which I think it is an empirical question. But I’m concerned that, you know, the incentives in science, which has been underfunded under neoliberalism — had to use that word once in this podcast.
Ross Kenyon: You got it. Nice.
Holly Jean Buck: You know, people are driven by the need to get large grants, to have high-profile publications, increasingly to have tweeted publications or publications covered in journalistic outlets, right? And so how much of that is a driver of research on different ideas? Big question, would love to find out.
Ross Kenyon: Well yeah, we talked about this on a previous episode with J. Maarten Troost. So he’s a travel writer, but nowadays it’s no longer good enough to write fiction or memoirs that are just really good. You also have to have a baked-in media reach, be like, oh, on Twitter I have half a million followers. And then publishers say, oh, I don’t care what kind of drivel you write, so long as you can pitch it to the people who follow you. And God, is the same thing happening for science too? Is that — please tell me, please tell me that’s not the case.
Holly Jean Buck: I’m worried, because if you see some of these things that have happened with regards to COVID, like the retractions in The Lancet and different things — I mean, you can say, are these bad apples, you know, obviously egregious fraud, or are they part of a structural problem that has developed around this science-media-policy interface? And if so, what does that mean for a topic like geoengineering to be introduced into that media ecosystem? It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but COVID really rang the alarm bells for me there.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Well Holly, all that hurts to even think about. Yeah, I am not really on Twitter like at all. In fact, someone tweeted at Nori today, was like, and where’s Ross, is he not on Twitter? Like, what’s the deal? I’ve sort of made a choice. I don’t feel like it, okay? I would pat myself on the back a tiny bit, Holly, and like, the point of the podcast is like, we try to have people from many different schools of thought who probably don’t all agree with each other, but we try to have respectful and interesting conversations with everyone. I don’t feel like that happens in social media like at all.
Like, every time I log on to Twitter or Facebook, it’s just people assuming the worst of the people that they’re talking about or talking to, and I don’t really want to play in that ecosystem. So I’ve made kind of a choice not to. That being said, because I defected from the baseline, I am punished, because the podcast would be more popular, probably, if I were hanging out on Twitter and BS-ing with everyone all the time. I don’t know, I don’t like to do it. I don’t know that we need that, but that means the show probably gets less [unclear] than it should, then. So was this even the right choice? I don’t know. But God, that’s a depressing thing that you just told me. And I only see part of that in my own life.
Holly Jean Buck: You could read Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism, so, Geert Lovink, because he talks about this. You know what, we really need a public alternative for the health of our society, right? But maybe Twitter and these things, Facebook, are just kind of growing pains on our way to a better internet and a better form of connectivity. We can hope.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve heard this before, I hope that’s true. I hope that everything makes it that long. So, whatever comes next, it doesn’t seem like TikTok is healing the country, but I’ve seen some that have been hilarious, so that’s okay. But yeah, whatever comes next, I don’t know. Is there some way to incentivize us to be the calmest discussants with one another? Like, I know — Holly, you seem like pretty even-keeled, but surely you must get riled up and feel the pleasure of righteous indignation, right, occasionally?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. Yeah. But I think for a lot of people that’s like, they’re like living off of that. I think that’s like the main thing that they’ve got in some of these cases. Well, I feel like my gender has conditioned me to reflexively curb it. I mean, for worse, frankly, but there might be some of that going on. You don’t want to be like the loud angry woman [unclear]. I mean, if you think of a contrarian, think about the people that come to mind — are there any women that come to mind when you think contrarian?
Ross Kenyon: Nope. The first person I thought of was sort of like a guy who brews his own beer and listens to — I mean, Richard Dawkins. That was the first person I thought of, maybe unfair to those people. Sorry, New Atheists, that’s who I thought of, but it was not someone like you and it was not a woman. No.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, because if you have a contrarian opinion, then you’re just like crazy or ignorable if you’re a woman. But if you’re a dude, it’s like, oh, you’re so edgy. Yeah, I might have been a miniature rant, but I think that, you know, I mean, these platforms reward different personalities, right? And you have to like have a certain personality to succeed at them.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think about that sometimes too, where people who do get really angry online, even if it’s justified, sometimes I get a little turned off by it because it’s done in the wrong sort of spirit, and I end up in these weird epicycles of second-guessing myself.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, I just basically try to avoid it. But in terms of your question about like what platform would incentivize better things, you mentioned Reddit, I think, before the show, and I mean, that has a mechanism at least for like people saying what’s good, right?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, somewhat of an improvement.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, so much of it is inherent in the design, like the code, right?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think maybe it’s the length, Twitter being capped, you have to read like unfurling threads if it gets really detailed. But I remember reading Reddit, [unclear] personally, but reading Reddit and seeing someone wrote a very fair critique of something, often in great detail, I would say like, cool, you can have an upvote, that’s really cool. But then there’s also various parts of Reddit that are subject to extreme groupthink.
And I’ve seen some posts, I have gotten like some posts, you look at, you can sort by the top voted or you can sort by controversial, and some posts, the comments that are controversial have like a mix of up and down votes. Those are like the ones closest to the truth, but because they didn’t conform to the ideological standards of the subreddit, just got downvoted into oblivion. So yes, the design matters. But it isn’t, right? It’s not some sort of paradise. There’s as much of this jerky behavior as anywhere else.
How much of that is design versus how much of it is that humans like splitting into groups and fighting, which I think is something that, like I said this on the show like 10 times at least, but like, that’s one of our favorite things to do as a species. We like splitting into groups and yelling at each other and fighting each other. So I think we might just find ways to do that almost no matter what.
Holly Jean Buck: I hope not, that’s depressing. But yeah, yeah, but wait, maybe we can use it productively. You know, I was thinking about the groupthink and researching different climate change approaches, right? I mean, you could have a research program that, what’s called the red team, blue team approach, where each team really goes for poking holes in the other side of the science and the design and so forth. And then that’s like a safeguard, right? So I think it’s, it’s a human tendency, but it can be used productively if we realize we have that tendency and like work with it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, I hope so. I thought there’s some new platform, but I didn’t really read about it, it was called something, called Persuasion. Did you see that?
Holly Jean Buck: No, I didn’t.
Ross Kenyon: I saw some big people were on their board of advisors, but I didn’t really look into it, but I wonder, I hope someone figures out how to get us to talk to one another. Sometimes I think people, they look back at the eras when there was like three channels and people all consuming the same thing, you know, everyone watched Walter Cronkite or Edward Murrow or whatnot, and we all certainly agreed on the fundamentals of society. And how much of that is whitewashing of history?
Like, did the people actually agree with each other more in the 50s? Like, we had a Red Scare. There’s the Eisenhower era, which at least had that veneer of stability and suburban comfort, Leave It to Beaver, but I think that’s sort of an imagining. I don’t know that that’s actually how that era really was. So did we actually agree with each other more back then? Do you have any idea?
Holly Jean Buck: You know, I think there’s, you know, empirical studies of this that I haven’t read. I think that we should probably be looking forwards, not back, because all the problems of that system have been documented too, that era of mass media.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Allegedly a bonus episode turned into quite a long one, and we ended up talking about all sorts of fun things. Okay, how about I wrap [unclear]. That’s me, something I want to listen back to and try to wrap my head around, but a lot of fun to have you here. Holly, thanks for being on.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: And then also, if you’re listening, you should read Holly’s book After Geoengineering, because it is a great read. We’ve also done a previous episode with Holly that dug into all those details, which is a really, really cool show. Actually, is there anything else you’re going to plug? I guess you’re on Twitter, your Twitter handle is in the show notes too. Is there anything else you’d like to point people to?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, I want to point people to the Red Nation’s Red Deal, especially Part 3, Heal Our Planet. I think that that’s a good starting point, some of the things we kicked off this episode with.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, right. I need to just read that in its entirety, and also just do more shows of that ilk, because yeah, we really should. And apologies if you’re listening and saying, how come you never cover this? That’s my fault, and I would like to, let me do that. So stay tuned. If you have any good show ideas or topics that we haven’t covered, you can always reach out to podcast, singular, P-O-D-C-A-S-T at nori.com, and let me know. Let me know what you’d like to hear that you haven’t gotten so far from the show. Yeah. Holly, I’m putting a pin in it. This is the end. [unclear] Thank you.
Holly Jean Buck: Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: If you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and thank you so much for listening.
Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and/or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is [unclear], interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up with Nori at nori.com, where there is a newsletter, that’s nori.com/subscribe. There’s podcasts, there’s a whole bunch else, or you can send us an email at podcast@nori.com. We are also now on Patreon at patreon.com/noripodcast, if you’d like more content, engagement and community. And thank you so much for your support.
