One of my biggest podcasting regrets is not having been able to interview the anthropologist Dr. James C. Scott before he died in 2024. We had corresponded by email, but he'll forever be one of the ones who got away... Rest in peace, James. Your scholarship is still making people think.
Today's show serves as an introduction to anthropology, and to some key Scottian concepts like "legibility" that Grant Faber and I apply to the carbon removal and carbon offsetting spaces.
Why do states prefer straight lines? Why do more organic shapes take place seemingly everywhere else? How can creating legibility be simultaneously great for transparency and order but perilous for justice and truth? When complexity is often so much more accurate, what is it within us that yearns to abandon it? What is in us that desires to make everything legible to our gaze even if it creates a wasteland and calls it peace?
If that's a soupy theoretical mess for you, you'll probably enjoy this episode. It's a doozy!
“A language is a dialect with an army and navy."
— Max Weinreich, attributed
"[The Romans] create a desert and call it peace."
— Tacitus
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Resources
Grant Faber's Carbon-Based Commentary on Substack
James C. Scott's Wikipedia page
James C. Scott's posthumous In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings
Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance by James C. Scott
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by Jame C. Scott
"Not 'gay' as in 'happy' but 'queer' as in "f**k you'." is a line I've heard that is maybe informative here.
"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" by Friedrich Nietzsche
Hauntologies of carbon removal—w/ Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University of Buffalo: RCC S3 bonus
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher
Michael Oakeshott, though I wonder if I have potentially overstated his position...
"A primer on additionality and carbon removal" by Grant Faber
350: Robert Höglund Presents: The Many Perils of Being Catalytic in a Carbon Accounting World
David Graeber's Wikipedia page
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.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, out there. Thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change. My name is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of the podcast. I’m a carbon removal entrepreneur, climate tech entrepreneur.
I have a fun one for you today. It’s a little bit of a reach. It’s one of those shows where, I care about climate change, I like anthropology. I’ve learned a lot from the anthropologists I’ve read. And every once in a while I will meet someone who comes into anthropology, and they often come in through James C. Scott. His work has been very influential for me. It’s given me a number of conceptual frameworks that I use all the time for trying to make sense of social order, why things are so bizarre.
He’s great. I think I’ve read almost all of his works. I think I’ve read all of his books, and I reread all of them recently in preparation for this show. And I’m gonna tell you all about why you should listen and why you should care about it. And then Grant Faber, the legendary carbon removal, let’s call him a man of mystery. I don’t think, I don’t think I would call Grant a man of mystery. He is a man whose job is to make things less mysterious, typically, is on to discuss his work.
Before I do though, if you could please subscribe to the show if you haven’t already. If you love the show, a great rating and review in your podcast app of choice is very impactful as well. If you could become a paid subscriber through Spotify, the link is in the show notes. It’s $5 a month, and it’s a really powerful signal to me that, you know, I’m delivering content that you want, that you keep coming back to. And in exchange, Spotify won’t put in ads for you. If you’re a paid subscriber, there’s bonus content that’s only available to paid subscribers. The link is in the show notes if you would choose to do that. But also, hey, you’re here now. You endured the commercial part of this, and now we’re back into the fun intellectualizing that presumably you’re here for. So I’ll just get back to that now.
James C. Scott died not very long ago. He was a Yale anthropologist. He worked primarily in Malaysia during his life. That’s where he cut his teeth and where a lot of his original social observations came from.
His work became about the relationship between state and non-state peoples, both historically and contemporaneously, because we’ve been enculturated into a world that is dominated by states that feel very powerful, and they spend a lot of time ordering our world, especially if you’re in places that have high degrees of state capacity, like much of the global North would qualify as this. It seems inevitable in some ways, or natural. But actually this wasn’t true for much of human history, and it’s one of those questions that gets really weird when you try to understand it.
What does it mean even to be a state in the first place? People typically start with Max Weber’s famous understanding of it, that a state is an organization with a monopoly on violence within a certain area. So the only person that may legitimately use violence within a certain territory, that’s typically considered to be the state.
And we can all name things that come along with statecraft, things such as writing, records, bureaucracy, taxes, in many cases conscription historically, things like corvée labor where every so often you would have to give a certain number of days per year for building roads or dikes or some sort of project that you could not refuse.
But the thing about talking about states and what they are is that it also implies that there is quite a lot of social organization that does not qualify as a state in this way. It is something else, and maybe the best way to understand exactly what it means to be a state is to understand the relationship between people, between the origins of states, how they would rise and fall, and the people that were on the periphery.
But it’s really hard studying the periphery. Writing is one of those things that is associated with states. And perhaps one definition I can offer here that is heavily influenced by James C. Scott’s work is, states are legibility producing machines. His work documents in so many different ways legibility versus complexity. Perhaps if I was only going to leave you with one core concept to think about with James C. Scott, it would be legibility.
States are concerned with what’s called the view from the center. Essentially, if you’re the king, it’s not a fun job typically. It’s a hard job, especially historically, because everyone’s lying to you and manipulating you. And they know if they tell you things that you don’t want to hear, they could potentially be putting themselves at great personal risk.
And so you have your kingdom that you need to be collecting taxes from, you need to be conscripting people into the military. You need to be doing that for reasons of conquest, for defense. And in order to do that successfully, you need accurate records of, you know, how many people live where, what kind of harvest did they have last year, the last 10 years, how much did you know how to tax them so that they still feel encouraged enough to keep farming. But, you know, not so little that they’re able to grow rich or develop their own power center that could rival yours.
There’s a lot of questions like this. So writing is often correlated with state formation as a way of keeping track of, managing the relationships, both property and corporally about bodies that are under the control of that power center, and that could be a king or a chieftain, or however we want, we wanna say it, the holder of that power.
And states have historically only arisen in certain kinds of places. There’s some exceptions to this, but in general, essentially floodplains, places where you can do row cropping, places where you can do rice. Places where the crops that grow are ripen all at the same time, so that, you know, if you are a representative of the ruler, you can come by and make sure that people aren’t hiding things from you, that there’s not some secret granary, and that you’re only taxing some small portion of what they produce this year.
So there are only certain kinds of crops and certain kinds of geographies that even allow this simplified view from the center, legible approach. Now that is not easy to do in hills and mountains and swamps. And so James C. Scott’s work is not only about where states have formed, but it’s also about the people who live on the periphery of states. People who are oftentimes in trade relationships with states, who often have maybe not a super simple relationship with them, because those who are not ruled and do not live in geographies where they’re easily monitored have a very strong incentive to not be counted, to not be forced into corvée labor, to not be conscripted into the King’s army, to not be taxed.
And the way that we’re often taught about the long arc of human history is that when states formed, they were such an immediate draw because outside of states, life was, in the words of Hobbes, nasty, brutish and short. I actually, I could go my whole life and not hear that phrase again. I think it’d be okay, but I have to use it here, ’cause that is what the assumption is. Is that outside of places with state protection where there’s a monopoly on violence, there’s a lot of chaos. There’s uncertainty about who makes the rules and who’s the final arbiter of justice, and that people were oftentimes clamoring to fall under the protection of rulers once the technology civically existed to even make it possible to do so.
But actually there’s a fair amount of research that shows people would oftentimes flee the rule of the ruler. They would rather go back into a state of secondary primitivism. They would return to barbarism, so that they did not face those punitive labor regimes or tax regimes, and can do their own thing. And that people who lived in these more difficult geographies did things like practice polyculture, where they would have plants that would ripen at different times of year, and nomadism, they would move between lots of different geographies seasonally to make sure they could take advantage of the harvest of various things.
They didn’t have last names in many cases. Last names are a relatively recent phenomenon that was introduced so populations could be better tracked over time. Even their spiritual beliefs and mythologies, because they’re primarily an oral tradition and not written down, was a way of flexibly dealing with cultural changes that a written culture has a much harder time adapting.
And so you have these people that are often on the periphery of these legibility producing machines that want to receive some benefits. I mean, some of the goods that are produced from within states are still valuable to those who are living on the periphery as non-state peoples, and in many cases states are dependent upon goods or services from the non-state peoples as well. Like they kind of need each other. Like they’re contrasted, but they oftentimes provide things that the others don’t, for either geographical reasons or cultural reasons.
I mean, one of the most famous examples here is the tsars enlisting the Cossacks of Ukraine to be an effective screening force, because they’re very effective horseback warriors that, in exchange for offering their services to the tsarist regime, also received some guarantees and some privileges that made it worth it for them to take those deals. It changes over time depending on technology and social dimensions, the political economy. It isn’t always that way.
And one thing I’m careful to delineate here, and so is James C. Scott, is that legibility isn’t always a bad thing either. For instance, think about what it’s like that we have pretty clear rules for how property rights work. You pay property taxes on the property that you own, and typically a will will specify how the property will be transferred upon the death of the owner. And even if it’s complex, there are strong rules governing probate when a property holder dies without a will, of courts determining who should get what and how.
This way of working, where people permanently own fixed plots of land, is a relatively recent invention as well. And in many communities of peasants and non-state peoples, it would often be the case that they would rotate who would have access to which bits of property within a patchwork of different property statuses, based upon familial needs, the needs of the community. It might be the case that one family had, you know, a kid in the last year, and therefore have access to more grazing land. But that will not be the case for someone whose family may be contracted in size during that same time.
And the way that this works is frankly just confusing, illegible to outsiders. Inside the system that you’ve grown up in, you might know the likely outcomes of, okay, this is gonna shift to this person. This will shift over here, this family, you know, in three years it’ll go back over here and whatever. And that might make really intuitive sense to you. But if you’re a ruler or a representative of a ruler from the state capital who’s out in the countryside trying to figure out who you can tax, it’s not legible at all. It just looks intentionally inscrutable, and in some cases it probably is. I’m sure in some cases it’s done as a way to protect the insularity of their community against outsiders who might be seeking to take advantage of their productivity, their bodies, something else.
Once you start seeing legibility, you can kind of see it everywhere. One of the examples of this that is culturally very important right now is gender, and how gender makes people feel really uncertain. There’s a really strong meme that’s, there’s men and then there’s women.
Think about how it works with gender, and specifically with sexual attraction and gender identity, where for a long time there was presumed to just be categories of heterosexual, which in fact is not even true. People oftentimes point to the Oscar Wilde case and how we didn’t even have a word for homosexual till pretty late in human history, and much activity passed without even a name for it, which in some cases made it less legible and less governable in a way. And as time has gone on, we’ve created pathways to identity through stable concepts.
In any case, though, we’re at a point now where I think most people can pretty much understand what it means to be gay, and you’re a man who likes having romantic and or sexual relationships with other men. That’s a really well understood, stable category of being gay. But think about how confusing it is and threatening it is to introduce queerness into that, where it isn’t even clear what exactly queerness denotes to an outsider. In some cases it might just mean that everyone is a gender unto themselves. Everyone is truly unique. Everyone is their own person, and this can mean different things to different people. That as a concept is likely the closest definition to the truth of what it means to have gender at all.
But it doesn’t give most people a really easy foothold onto how to treat people, how to understand people, how to make sense of the social order, of where these people are, what they’re doing, who they’re relating to, and why. And you might just say, well, that’s none of their damn business. And I think if that is your reaction, that’s really important, because that would show you the importance of complexity and remaining illegible to people who might otherwise like to understand and thus to govern or exert influence over you.
If you heard what I just said and it made you feel tense, or like, I wish these people would just choose something stable so I knew what to do with them and how to understand them, then you very much understand the desire for legibility. Because there is something that’s very comforting about stable identities, even though in many cases they are simplifications, by which I mean they’re lies. They’re useful.
One of my most commonly recommended essays that I point people to is Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense,” where he talks about how categories are essentially all lies that take all that is unique in the world and compresses them into a format that makes it easier for our minds to make sense of complexity. But it’s just not actually true. The degree to which categories can or cannot be useful in different circumstances is a really fascinating, endless question that you can pick at. You can pick at it till it becomes super annoying.
There, there’s points at which you can undermine every category until you’re at a point of, I mean, conservatives love to complain about William of Ockham and about nominalism, and about how if we don’t have words that mean anything, we’re just in postmodern soup and that’s bad for everyone. But I think in a case like this, at least as pertains to categories and concepts and legibility, I think that is true. I think that is actually the default status of what categories are.
I think when we get too invested in defending stable categories, something else is happening psychologically within us, that we have to understand, what is it about the undermining of this category that is so threatening to my intellect, why is this so painful to me? And that’s something that only people can address for yourself. And I suspect, by the way, I’m not trying to guilt anyone either. I think there are examples that we can think of that you would prefer illegibility. And there are examples you can think of where you would love us to just move on to something else, so we can say, okay, we don’t have to think about this anymore because it’s already been decided. Like this is part of the categorical framework that we all accept.
That’s one of the reasons why, if you read especially people like Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, people that are often punching bags for certain political orientations, this like constant undermining of categories is such a key thing to do. A lot of these things have just been enculturated into them, and it becomes really hard to see them once you’re within them and see, like, what would it be like if I didn’t have that idea? What would it be like if I wasn’t ensnared in this conceptual framework?
And that’s another thing that I love about James C. Scott’s work, and this is also true of other anthropologists like David Graeber. I mean, these are famous leftist anthropologists. They’re very, very well situated on the academic left. But I think anthropology, just in general, even if you took the politics out of it as much as you could, which they would hate that I even probably tried to say a sentence like that. But anthropology is a really fascinating discipline, because it also teaches you to not take for granted how much of the world is actually socially constructed, how much variability there is between ways humans have lived human lives on earth. There’s so much variability. There are certain things that we come back to as recognizable patterns that may be more likely as proclivities than other things. But it is really useful to understand, just to appreciate how much variability there is in human life.
There’s another very famous essay. I did a show with Holly Jean Buck on it back in the day. I’ll put a link into it. Weirdly enough, it became one of the more popular shows. I’m not even sure why. It’s about Mark Fisher’s ideas about hauntology. But he has a book that’s very famous, another big lefty book called Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? And it’s a book that laments just how underpowered our imaginations have become, where it’s hard for us even to imagine somewhat superficial changes to our world order. And granted, he might wanna take that in a political direction you don’t like, and that’s totally fine. But the insight is still important.
I actually, a lot of my intellectual influence comes from the Scottish Enlightenment. And that’s people like David Hume and Adam Smith, and quite a lot of the Scottish Enlightenment’s thinking is just agog at the world working at all. One of the core questions of the Scottish Enlightenment is, like, what works. Things that exist have emerged for a reason. They have a logic to them, and it would be irresponsible to think that we can rewrite the rules of social order without regard for tradition, because what has emerged to work has a stability to it.
And so that core question of what works is really important. You know, obviously the rejoinder that you’re probably thinking is, works for whom, because in many cases it does not work equally for everyone. In fact, that’s probably a good default assumption, that the benefits of any social order are not equally distributed.
Even if you skip all the legibility bits, even if you don’t really care about the deep history of human life on earth, if you don’t care about state versus non-state peoples, about legibility producing machines, you don’t have to necessarily care about that. You don’t have to do anything really. But one thing I would encourage you to take away from this discussion, and also just anthropology in general, is a reclamation of imagination.
We can dream up new ways of organizing ourselves. We don’t have to feel so hidebound that we can never change the way that we relate, the way that our systems work. Things are malleable, and humans are able to adapt to changes and to come up with new ideas.
The counterpoint to this is best situated within the classic debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine about the French Revolution, where Edmund Burke, you know, very critical of the French Revolution. And guess what? There’s lots of reasons to be critical of the French Revolution. It didn’t exactly go great. You know, there’s some parts of it, depending on your politics. There are some parts of it that were great. There are some parts of it that were not so great. There was ultimately a Bourbon restoration where the monarchy came back, and then there’s Louis Philippe, and it’s like kind of good, but like not really. And then there’s 1848, and French history in the 19th century, in the late 18th century, it’s like, did they ever really figure it out? Like how great was the revolution ultimately?
I mean, the famous Zhou Enlai line is, when asked about the French Revolution and its impact on history, he said that it’s too soon to tell. And that’s pretty close to my own take too. When I look at French history, especially modern history, I’m like the meme of the guy blinking and shaking his head. That’s a little bit how I feel, despite, you know, being really interested in the topic.
But Edmund Burke was concerned that you would have these Robespierrean cult of reason, we’re gonna be able to redesign society, to create a just society, ex nihilo, and just boom, new rules. This is what we do now. We’re changing the names of all the months. It’s different now. And ultimately there are some limits to what you can do, on which scales that make sense for us. That type of change was really traumatic in lots of ways, and the repercussions were felt for a very long time, and I’m sure still are being felt.
And some conservatives even like to make the case that the amount of violence and uncertainty and Napoleon and everything that came after it was not even necessarily worth getting rid of the Bourbons, having a republic, then an empire. It was not actually worth what you paid for it.
And I think these are really important questions to keep in mind. I never want the imagination to become so large that people are imagining that there truly is a sort of infinite human perfectability, which is an idea that’s often associated with the Enlightenment, that we are this malleable, we can create new types of social order and it can be good. And the sort of caveat that Edmund Burke put out is that social change works best when it happens at this smaller scale. He called this idea a little platoons. You have smaller groups of people trying out new ways of organizing.
In other words, it’s really hard for me to make a non-qualified recommendation towards your reclamation of your own imagination, if that doesn’t rhyme too much. Because I also like history enough to know, like, there are many cases when imagination has led us to very deadly, very unideal places too.
That being the case though, there are some conservatives who take this so far, like Michael Oakeshott is one, where it almost seems like society should be fixed in amber to some extent, and that change is so inherently threatening that deviation in any case has a sort of precautionary principle against it. Like evolution carries such enormous risk that we actually should be much more content with keeping things the way that they are. And if you’re an American, this idea is so far removed from our national culture that it probably sounds super strange. It’s a type of conservatism that is not super common, but it’s out there. It’s an interesting one.
So that’s all to say, reclaim your imagination. Don’t go too crazy with it. Let anthropology show you how much variability there is in the human experience and in ways of relating to one another.
And now you have the sublime pleasure of listening to Grant Faber and I applying some of these lessons to our weird little carbon removal industry. So I really hope you enjoy it. Who is the show for? If you’re out there, I wanna know you. I think we probably get along, because there’s not that many of us. This is a very special kind of show. Thanks for listening. I’ll let you just dive in. Now, here’s Grant Faber. I love you guys a lot. Thanks for listening.
Ross Kenyon: One of the themes that we wanted to connect to carbon removal is that of legibility, and also just complexity. If you’re trying to understand communities that you may not be a part of, it’s useful to have language that is accessible to you.
Where does legibility play a role within carbon removal? Is this a useful concept for us to understand, especially when we’re dealing with a complex, both human and ecological system that we are trying to manage in a way that we would like to be legible, but also is perhaps the most complex thing that we come into contact with ever? What are we meant to do with this information, where the benefits from legibility are great, but so are the threats?
Grant Faber: So my one word answer to all of that is
Ross Kenyon: yes. And I don’t even know. That was a mouthful. I’m very sorry.
Grant Faber: Yeah, it’s good. And yeah, I think this is one of the most exciting areas where Scott’s work kind of overlaps with how we think about carbon removal. And partially where this shows up for me is in this journey that we’re all on to try to make carbon removal credits into a commodity, into a tonne is a tonne is a tonne. We have well-functioning spot markets, you know what you’re getting. It can all just be exchanged on one or two central exchanges, or through just a small number of registries with its set number of rules, and we can all understand for any given project, like, okay, it’s taken into account all of its emissions. It represents one net tonne of carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere that we can use to compensate for emissions from any sector, and that it is almost a complete commodity.
And the same tension that Scott talks about, between like the states and the center trying to impose this foresight or impose these rules and legibility on everyone else, shows up, because in reality every carbon removal project is unique. There’s a unique set of people, of value chain actors, of environmental conditions, of social impacts that exist within every specific process. Some requirements may not even make sense for a given process. There’s different ways that any particular project might impact the climate. Maybe if you think about a biochar project, if it’s using forestry thinnings versus crops that grow on a few year cycle versus, you know, very short rotation crop residues versus something else. And all of that versus cropland enhanced rock weathering versus direct air capture and all of these things.
How they interact with their local environments and with the global climate, like there is so much complexity due to just how interdisciplinary the field is, how many different sectors it spans. And so how do we capture all of that detail and boil it down to, okay, this is one net tonne of carbon dioxide removal that costs $200 per tonne, that’s tradable in this global, like, Article 6.4 approved market, and is tracked via this, you know, one central registry? That’s a process. That’s a tension that I think many folks in the industry fight, or live within, every day.
Ross Kenyon: I think Scott would say that there are also some serious benefits to centralizing these processes, to having them be legible. Because if you could create a truly fungible carbon removal asset that could be easily understood by anyone, you don’t have to know all the particularities of a project.
I mean, I remember looking through, I think it was Gold Standard’s page of projects early on in Nori, and being overwhelmed by the amount of information and just heterogeneity amongst projects, being like, do I care about this happening in Malawi or Rwanda? I can’t even, well, why should I care about one over the other? And, oh, there are several other material differences all at the same time I need to keep track of. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was just all in the same currency, all in the same language, that you could just compare against one single number?
I think it’s a very natural human desire. It can be a really powerful thing when that type of simplicity and legibility can work in the favor of something good. But I think we can all think of examples where the quest for the one magic number have led us astray and have been deceptive. I gave you some examples. I could run us through some of those too, but if you have any up your sleeve, I’d be curious to know what you think.
Grant Faber: Yeah. Well, to back up a moment, I wanna touch on, maybe harshly, what could drive this tension is like this sort of voluntary to compliance shift over time. And what I mean by that is, maybe the carbon dioxide removal market today, and especially in the past, to the extent that it’s had a more philanthropic flavor to it, maybe there’s more concern about the particulars of any given project.
Like if you are investing $400 per tonne, and it’s like a pre-purchase, three years, starting three years in the future would be when the credits are delivered. It’s very early. Like, maybe you want to know more about, well, who are the people involved with this? You know, what was the very particular social engagement strategy? How am I gonna ensure this isn’t gonna backfire on me? Which sustainable development goals does this project meet and satisfy or support?
And that market for those kinds of credits will look very different from maybe like a compliance market 15 years from now, where there’s hundreds of millions of carbon removal tonnes being transacted, and massive corporations just need to buy X number so they can check a box to say, okay, we were compliant, and not have to pay a fee.
And the evolution of that market over time, I think it kind of goes hand in hand with standardization. Like, standardization will enable that large scale transaction paradigm. But to get to that paradigm also will cause more standardization. So there’s like a feedback between these two things. Like, as we just try to do larger and larger deals, it’s just gonna be the case that maybe certain things drop off. There can’t be such bespoke analysis that goes into every last single tonne that gets removed.
Or I guess in some sense we could use maybe advanced MRV technology and things to like try to track almost every tonne as best we can, in a sort of like low cost customization type strategy or approach, like a mass customization approach, where we could have a market where we are trading billions of tonnes but each tonne is kind of tracked. And you could get information about that particular tonne. But yeah, how do we strike the right trade off there? And this is kind of where the evolution of new protocols, new MRV technologies, will determine the answer to that question a little bit.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. Do you think complexity in carbon credit design is a good thing? Is it good that maybe projects are just heterogeneous and are likely to remain so? Or should we keep trying to simplify them down to, price per tonne is the most important piece of information about them?
Grant Faber: So I think it might be the case that complexity’s good today, while there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what the, quote unquote, best pathways are, what pathways we’ll be able to achieve lowest cost, which ones are kind of socially optimal or fit for purpose in different geographies or for different industries, or different MRV technologies we have available.
And so it might be the case that today it’s really good to have a complex, diverse ecosystem of these credits, so we can experiment with a lot of different approaches and technologies. But to achieve true scale, it’s probably not the case that we can maintain that kind of bespoke nature for every single deal and every single project. So there will need to be a winnowing, or like a narrowing or convergence over time, of technologies, of standards, so that we can drive large scale deployment.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. One of the other themes that we were talking about comes from, well, several of his books, but notably Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. I think that’s the subtitle. And also it’s in The Art of Not Being Governed. It’s in a lot of his books about the class relationships between these various entities and how they are attempting to get the other group to do what they want.
Essentially, we’re wondering if there are class relationships within the carbon removal community that are meaningful. With Weapons of the Weak, Scott makes an effort to talk about how subaltern or people without power approach power in indirect ways. They’re not trying to only have a rebellion and storm the Bastille. They’re oftentimes pretty aware that John Brown did not survive. You know, it’s common knowledge that it’s really hard to do these things. So they’re oftentimes trying to subvert the process in ways that allow them to survive and persist.
And that’s one of the reasons why Scott makes a great point of why the Br’er Rabbit stories within American enslaved person folklore is so popular, ’cause they’re trickster figures who essentially lie to power, manipulate and get their way without necessarily the person in charge being any wiser. And that’s a really common narrative structure that is prominent in hill people, barbarian people, raw people, as various people have seen them. They oftentimes revere the trickster, that is a character that they love.
We’re wondering, does this apply to carbon removal? Are project developers, do they feel put upon by the various people who are competing to have new standards, registries that are in an arms race to be the most credible and legible of all? Do project developers ever feel pushback? Do you ever notice anything like that?
Grant Faber: So I definitely think that this general principle, or this dynamic of there being, say, standards imposed or expectations or something, and then folks try to like get around them or drag their feet, as in Weapons of the Weak. I think some of the resistance techniques were like a feigned ignorance, or like almost a feigned idiocy, pretending to not really understand, gossiping, foot dragging, just like muddying things, just mucking up the works. But not actually like just doing an open revolt and saying like, yeah, we’re just going to kill you.
And so I do think that dynamic exists to some extent, some intentionally, some unintentionally, between say project developers and registries and other standard setters. And I say intentionally and unintentionally because I think it’s partially just a function of there being a lack of knowledge and time and understanding. And sometimes there really is this disconnect, where maybe the MRV protocols out there are being written by folks with PhDs using very particular language, and then you might have folks from project developers who do not have advanced degrees, who did not, you know, study this stuff for multiple years, who they read something like financial additionality, the subject of our past discussion, and they’re just like, I don’t get it. Like, why do I have to do that? Then they might just do the bare minimum that’s required to check the box for the protocol, just to move it through the process, without like wanting to comply, I don’t wanna say in good faith, but like sort of fully with that.
And so there definitely is a dynamic, but I think it’s also a dynamic that I would imagine that the registries and auditors are aware of. They’re aware that there needs to be, or maybe there needs to be, an upskilling in the space. And as years go on, folks will get more experience. They’ll learn why there are different requirements in place, and then maybe over time there will be a give and take, and some of the protocols will get a little bit simpler in certain respects, as they see, okay, folks are just not understanding this particular provision. But of course the registries are also incentivized to have a well-functioning carbon market for their own revenue.
So yeah, there might be a dynamic, but I definitely think that the kind of foot dragging can be a way for, say, project developers to influence protocols and registries over time. But that doesn’t necessarily touch on the class dynamics of these things. I think that they certainly could be there, certainly are there in some ways, but I think that the class dynamics maybe show up more in cases where the carbon removal industry as a whole tends to be like a little wider, a little wealthier, a little more in the global North. And then there’s maybe disputes between the carbon removal industry and then society more broadly, when, especially for things like CO2 pipelines and other kinds of infrastructure that will be required for large scale carbon removal deployment. And then there’s definitely ways that communities could use some of these kinds of weapons of the weak to resist carbon removal deployment. So I think in my mind, that’s where that class dynamic shows up a little bit more. But what do you think?
Ross Kenyon: No, I think you’re right. Although I think we’re using the term class in different ways too. Or maybe it’s more appropriate that I say something like faction, where it’s maybe more a class in the way of a class action lawsuit, where a class is being certified as a group that is equally harmed in some kind of way. Although you are right, the class effects within carbon removal are very much as you describe, and there’s a lot to say about that.
I think the way that I’m using class is recognizing that one’s positionality. This is like the most postmodern lingo dense podcast I’ve done in a while. The positionality here determines how you view various incentives and structures.
So if you are a project developer, if your registry is saying that they’re going to update their protocols and methodologies every couple months, and that might require, you know, operational changes to your business, you might perceive that as a threat to continuity, to your own legibility. Something that could make planning really difficult. A change would come along that could render maybe a sensor obsolete that you would have to replace, that could be very obnoxious to you in the right case.
But the registry is a two-sided marketplace, or a two-sided business, I suppose you could say. They’re also trying to please buyers. And I bet buyers as a class want as much legibility as possible. I don’t think they wanna look at a dashboard essentially and know exactly what’s happening, and feel very, they want all the warm and fuzzies that it’s happening exactly as it’s being displayed, and be able to trust that even if it makes life hell for project developers. But they still want it.
And so you just have these people who are at loggerheads, and there’s this negotiative process here where I imagine registries are in a tricky spot. Or maybe you’ve even seen some of this too, where maybe the thing that’s best to do for data visibility and legibility adds so much burden to project developers that you decide like, is this actually worth it, because we’re gonna result in fewer carbon removals produced at all, or this supplier is just going to go over to a rival registry and do something else because this is too much. And there’s just like a balancing process here where there’s active class tension between these two classes. And I recognize that this might be a stretch of the term, but if we allow it, how would you react to that?
Grant Faber: I totally agree. There are these tensions, and many folks talk about the conflicts of interest born out of these. You hinted at the race to the bottom dynamic of each registry perhaps having somewhat of an incentive to dilute their standards to get more suppliers locked into their pipelines. And there certainly will be a degree of customer lock-in and reduced buyer power, if you view the buyers in this case as suppliers selecting which registry to go with. And that’s kinda the fear, is, oh, will there be this race to the bottom?
And the only counterbalance, or one of the only counterbalances, I would say there’s multiple, one is maybe like a regulatory or government floor that’s set. So, I mean, we were trying to do that a little bit at DOE with the carbon removal purchase prize. A big part of that was not necessarily the absolute amount of funding that was being spent, but it was the signaling. And the value from that was gonna be saying like, okay, this is what DOE and the US government therefore views as like quality carbon removal. This is kind of like the floor.
And then in the EU you have the CRCF, which is hopefully helping set some of that. And then as we see other compliance markets emerge, and eventually the methodologies from the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism, those will help set kind of a floor for standards. And then there’s the ICVCM and VCMI that also help do this.
So there is somewhat of a floor. But what about the race to the bottom to that floor? And the only real counterbalance to that is buyer expectations, and they’re saying, hey, we’re paying hundreds of dollars per tonne for these supposedly high quality, durable credits, and so we want some assurances. We want risk reduction here, ’cause we don’t wanna pay for what could essentially be a liability.
And so given that, yeah, there are all these different actors with all sorts of different incentives here, and how do we manage those? And it’s so funny, because if you talk to an individual person who works at any one of these entities or classes, they might be a nice person and want the best for the carbon removal industry, and say, oh well, I’m incentivized to do the right thing just because the industry needs it, trust is the foundation of carbon removal, all this kind of stuff. But then the conflict of interest can still rear its ugly head in the marketplace, in terms of which registries or other entities can even survive. Because maybe if you try to have higher standards or something, if that’s not what the market wants to see, then maybe you just die as a business, and then you just aren’t there anymore to exercise your high quality approach.
So hopefully we can all try to avoid this and use like smart institutional design, and smart design of the different decision points along the entire life cycle of carbon removal crediting, so that we can avoid these kinds of unfortunate outcomes. And yeah, I don’t think it’s easy, particularly given some slightly hostile political environment in the United States.
Ross Kenyon: All this was cracking me up, because I was imagining what it would look like if carbon removal were a factory a hundred years ago, and the people running the shop, they want Fordism, right? They want the assembly line, they want labor discipline. They want to know that they’re always getting the same tonne over and over again.
And I imagine project developers are, you know, sometimes they’re cooperative with that. If it’s easy for them to comply but it’s not easy for their rivals to comply, then they’re very supportive of it. If there’s someone for whom additionality just really messes their business up, they’re going to be opposed to additionality. They’re probably not gonna be wildcat strikers. Maybe there’s a little bit of unionization grumblings in the break room sometimes, in the back of the warehouse.
I hear a lot of project developers complain about various portions of it. Most commonly, financial additionality is the most common thing. But I’m sure there’s plenty of grumbles. Do you hear grumbles? Is it the same as me? Is it mostly additionality related? Do you hear lots of other types of grumbles?
Grant Faber: So definitely there are financial additionality grumbles, and not necessarily due to a fear of lack of compliance with it, but just due to what a lot of people perceive as, they perceive it as just being kind of nonsensical. I heard one person say, like, I described the concept of financial additionality to them, and they were like, that’s communist.
Ross Kenyon: And.
Grant Faber: I got such a kick outta that, because in their mind it was like they, this person viewed communism as the same as like rewarding less efficient, less economically efficient processes. And so they just viewed it like, oh, that’s what financial additionality results in, is actually giving more money to things that aren’t as, you know, profitable. Which I get a kick out of.
Ross Kenyon: Oof. That’s so funny. It’s something that I’m just gonna bet generationally they were alive during the Cold War. Am I right?
Grant Faber: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Knew it. Oh, it’s funny how much history can impact one’s paradigm and how one sees the world. That does not seem like something someone under about 35 or 40 would’ve said.
Grant Faber: Definitely. So yeah, so there was that. And if only there was a, you know, podcast episode talking about financial additionality and all of its pros and cons that people could listen to.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah. That I’ve heard a lot of good feedback on, on that show. I think people liked it. It made people think, at the very least it had them ask questions, which I think is the most important thing. I don’t even care about anything else besides like, huh, I never thought about that. I need to let that marinate for a while.
Grant Faber: Totally. And that whole conversation has definitely been pushing my thinking further and further from financial additionality. I’m just not, I think as long as you have other forms of additionality, the financial piece is just not as important for carbon removal. I think for any kind of avoidance or reduction offset there’s a much stronger case. But if something truly would’ve happened, if people would’ve put LED lights in anyway and that kind of stuff. But for carbon removal, if it’s happening above and beyond baseline, it probably should not matter, or at least the standards should be loosened pretty significantly. But we don’t need to get fully into that again.
Ross Kenyon: You can just drop that and not. I was gonna ask you, what about common practice additionality or regulatory additionality? Are those ones that you think follow the same logic, or are you also willing to relax on that too?
Grant Faber: No, I think regulatory additionality certainly needs to be maintained. Like, truly, if something is being required by law and it is going to happen regardless, it’s like, okay, we should really reserve the funds for use elsewhere.
But financial additionality I think is different, because you can incentivize more deployment from processes that are inherently profitable. So like the argument you were making before, if they can get super profits, then maybe it’ll attract more investors, there will be even more deployment, even more carbon removal. It’s not necessarily going to detract.
And that is also just the basic nature of supply and demand curves. Like, you have a supply demand curve, of course there’s equilibrium, and in a well-functioning market most folks are gonna charge that, or try to charge around that equilibrium price. But there are suppliers on the supply curve who would be willing to sell it for less, but they just sell it at the market price.
So I think as long as the overall market, as long as there are actions taken to make sure that it can sustainably provision financially additional credits as well, I don’t think it’s a huge problem. Assuming that we think that non-financially additional credits cannot meet our total overall removal goals. Like, if they could, then so be it. Like if we could get 10 gigatonnes of high quality durable CDR per year that were all like non-financially additional, that you could just charge $1 per tonne for and it would just happen, I mean that would be like amazing. That would be like the ideal case, right?
I don’t really believe that is the case, and so you wanna make sure that the market can support financially additional processes as well. And so you wanna be a little bit careful in terms of ensuring those processes can be allowed to get on their feet, which I guess is where the communism rolls in, and because then you’re, oh, you’re picking winners and losers. But in my mind it’s not communism, it’s actually just intelligent market design for, like, thinking about that market actually functioning at scale.
Ross Kenyon: “It’s not communism, it’s just intelligent market design” is a great quote that should forever be attributed to you. It’s very funny. You should come out and write something about additionality. I’d be curious to see how this has progressed since we last had you on this show, and I just wanna know where your head’s at. I’m sure other people would pay attention to this too. I don’t know that everyone else has taken this as seriously as you have.
Grant Faber: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it, like maybe a short article, like an update to thinking about financial additionality or something like that. So just thinking about it.
But to your question that kicked off this whole thing, you know, what have folks grumbled about the most, or what do project developers grumble about? I mean, I think part of it is just the sheer number of requirements that are necessary for the initial certification, ongoing MRV process. I mean, it’s just like a lot of requirements overall, and they all kind of make sense. Like, you want to ensure the LCA is in place. You wanna ensure a good monitoring plan is in place. You wanna ensure all the environmental and social safeguards are met, or that they’re present. And depending on the particular CDR pathway you’re looking at, there’s a number of like pathway specific things you wanna guarantee around feedstocks and end uses and proper CO2 storage.
And it’s one of those cases where every individual requirement makes sense on its merit, at least for the most part. But then when you combine them all, it’s like, this is just quite a lift. It’s just quite a lot of things to submit, to track, to audit, to describe.
And yeah, I’m not sure there’s that great of solutions to it. I think it’s just an area where hopefully we’ll see some level of convergence across different registries, where everybody will kind of arrive at a place to say, okay, this is more or less the minimum set of things that we need to see to ensure that high quality, sustainable, like, just carbon removal is happening. And then it’s gonna be kind of roughly the same across different jurisdictions, different registries. And there will be like an upskilling, hopefully, of all the different project developers, where they’ll understand all of these requirements in isolation, or they’ll learn more about them over time, and then we’ll just get to like a more mature market.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. I’m trying to think about how to apply this to carbon removal. Everyone always complains that there’s multiple standards. That could be a good thing for complexity. It’s too early for us to lock everything down.
There are also a number of big fights active. I talked with Robert Höglund recently and we were discussing the wide approach of Absolute Climate, and it’s like, how much should be in scope for understanding carbon removal? And then some of CarbonPlan’s work on whether or not what is carbon removal is the right question, and is wastewater treatment with CDR, is that actually removal or not? And I don’t even know which way is up anymore.
I think it’s good that these debates are happening and we’re not rushing to just have a standard and have all the questions done, because it seems like there’s still a lot to figure out. But it would be nice if we just had one final answer for everything.
But do you think we’re maybe jumping the gun if we push our way past complexity too quickly, even though it would result in clarity? How do we determine what’s better at a given moment? Is it more important to have legibility and clarity, or is it more important to have complexity, intellectual fervor, things like that?
Grant Faber: It’s a balance. I definitely think, as we’ve been maybe ourselves converging on those conversations, it is a change over time, and it’s a question of like, how rapid is that rate of change from our current very bespoke, particular, complex, diverse ecosystem of market? And it’s this like question of, what’s the rate of change from that state to the kind of completely commoditized, standardized or legible market?
And I feel like, at least for me, a lot of this thinking is flavored by, like, how do we not become like the forestry carbon credit market? How can we avoid having this like seemingly absurd sense of certainty in what we’re doing, only to find out 5, 10, 15 years later that it was all hogwash?
And maybe it’s just a personal thing. Maybe it’s just because I feel it’s the best for the long term health of the carbon removal ecosystem. But I think it’s very prudent to move conservatively there. And why I say it’s personal is ’cause maybe I have a fear of regret, of it being 10 years from now and I look back at, you know, the work I did over the past 15, 20 years working in carbon, and be like, oh my God, it was all bullshit. Like, I’m so terrified then I’ll have to jump off an overpass, and I don’t wanna do that.
And so it’s like, yeah, I think it’s prudent to go slowly, to explore all these different things to make sure we’re getting it right. But then kind of when we do, we would have to work as an ecosystem to set, like, okay, at what point do we feel like we have enough scientific certainty to lock in certain answers, at least for the medium term? But then once we get to that point and we all feel pretty comfortable with it, that’s like the hyper scaling phase. And so, yeah, when is that going to happen? What are the criteria for when we feel comfortable enough for that kind of mass standardization, commoditization? Or is it all just kind of a spectrum?
Ross Kenyon: I think we’re gonna see such powerful class interests there too, in the sense that I was using it, where whatever rules get decided, it’s going to favor some technology and disfavor others. Some of them are gonna be dependent upon co-products, and that will be fine or not fine, and depending on your business you will be either very happy or very, very upset.
I’m just really curious how that’s gonna play out. I’m looking at SBTi and I would not wanna be in their shoes. Whatever they do is gonna make some people very angry. Not news, just watching it.
Grant Faber: Yeah, they’re
Ross Kenyon: gonna make the REDD+ people happy or they’re gonna make the carbon removal people happy, but not both, most likely. And I wonder if carbon removal, once it comes down to a standard like that, it’s probably gonna have a similar moment.
Grant Faber: Could be painful. Definitely. And that’s what’s scary. I think the ideal would be operating from a just completely objective framework. And this actually I think goes back very much so to our financial additionality conversation, in terms of trying to put our personal or organizational biases aside and saying, well, what are the high level goals? What’s our high level like vision for society? And then engaging in rational debate for, okay, what are the steps for how we get from where we are today to that vision that we hopefully agree on, in the most efficient and rational manner possible? And that’s kind of like the ideal. And then of course the power interests and the biases and all the junk then infects that discourse.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah. Once there’s investments made and reputations made, I think it’s pretty hard to knock people outta that and be like, this is actually in the best interest of the planet, the climate, or the industry. Like, but my company, you’ve just ruined my company, Grant.
Grant Faber: Yeah, that’s a challenge. But if we can align these things, if we can align the economic interests and the good of the client, then we can just pursue rapid aggressive scalability with, you know, with no reservations.
Ross Kenyon: Or we could just say that we’re going to buy out the losing tech that regulations disfavor. We’ll pay back the investment from the winners, and you will now close shop and not be super upset about it.
Grant Faber: But that’s communism, Ross. It’s communism, because then we’re gonna incentivize people that have failing tech ’cause they’re gonna get a juicy payout.
Ross Kenyon: It’s not communism, it’s just clever market design. Okay. That’s enough for now. Thanks for being here, Grant.
Grant Faber: Yeah, thank you so much, Ross, for having me back on, and for getting a little out there with the conversation. But I think it was really interesting. I think there are more connections than one might think at first glance.
Ross Kenyon: I agree.
