In order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, we can’t just reduce emissions. We have no choice but to add carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to the mix to keep global temperature rise under 2°C. So, what CO2 removal processes are in development? And what are governments and nonprofits doing to advocate for and fund carbon removal?
Dr. Jan Mazurek serves as Senior Director at the ClimateWorks Foundation, where she leads the Carbon Dioxide Removal Fund. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Dr. Mazurek joins Ross to discuss what the Biden administration is doing to make ‘historic strides on climate’ and explain what carbon removal measures are left out of the Biden-Harris climate agenda.
Dr. Mazurek explores why it’s politically beneficial to lead with rural resilience and job opportunities as opposed to carbon removal, describing how ClimateWorks grantees partner with unions to garner support for DAC. Listen in for Dr. Mazurek’s insight on the challenges associated with carbon pricing and find out why it’s crucial to engage front line communities in the discussion around carbon removal.
Connect with Ross
Subscribe to the show on Substack @ rosskenyon.com/subscribe.
I also write Carbon Removal Memes and curate Climate Workers Anonymous.
Resources
The CDR Program at ClimateWorks
Noah Deich & Giana Amador on RCC EP017
Dr. Julio Friedmann on RCC EP016
Giana Amador’s Blog on the Biden Budget
National Academy of Sciences Workshop on Ocean CDR
ClimateWorks’ Video on Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement
Rhodium Group’s Study on Job Opportunities in DAC
Tracy Johns at the Climate and Land Use Alliance
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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 going.
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Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Dr. Jan Mazurik, a senior director at Climate Works Foundation. Jan, you lead the Carbon Doxid Removal Fund there. Thanks so much for being here.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Oh, it’s a pleasure, Ross. Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: I’m happy to have you. It’s been a long time coming. I am happy that you have such an illustrious career in climate and also in carbon removal. Sometimes people think of Nori as being involved in carbon removal for a long time, but it’s only been a few years and maybe just carbon removal has grown so much the last couple. But I think you’ve been there basically since it really began. Is that a correct understanding?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: I think we’re temporally pretty well synced up. Right around the time of the Paris COP, I think everyone saw that in order to stay within sustainable temperature bounds, we needed to start thinking seriously about carbon removal. And I must also tip my hat to Noah Deitch and Gianna Amador, as well as Julio Friedman. They have been our trusted advisors and partners from the start.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, well, fair enough. And they’ve all been on the podcast as well, doesn’t it, right?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: It’s about time you had me on the show.
Ross Kenyon: Getting the gang together. Yeah. Well, how did you find your way into carbon removal? What has your career been like?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Well, I started a very long time ago. Next year marks my 30th year in the climate and energy space, mostly in nonprofits in D. C. I like to refer to myself as a has-been. But I’m one of those people who spent the early part of my career working on carbon pricing systems, both in Congress, as well as here in California, where former CARB Chair Nichols brought me into the Air Resources Board to help implement AB 32, which is not just carbon pricing, but a whole suite of other measures. Although there are any number of states, as well as national level, as well as multi-nation trading system regimes, They’ve been a little bit late in coming and haven’t been sufficiently ambitious.
And so in addition to taking emissions to zero with pricing mechanisms and standards and other regimes, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of having to remove carbon from the atmosphere as well as eliminating emissions.
Ross Kenyon: So you’re saying it’s your fault that we have carbon removal? It is.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: It is entirely my fault. I... I worked on systems that, for whatever reasons, resulted in big collective action problems and free ridership problems. So yes, it’s my fault. And so it’s entirely appropriate now that I’m working on the removal piece.
Ross Kenyon: I’d love to hear more about that. What kind of collective action problems and free ridership problems did you encounter? And how might someone working in this space now try to avoid that? And I realized that is an entire show on its own, really. Yeah.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: It’s a great question. And somebody actually very, very smart in the UK during a webinar earlier this morning sort of posed the same question. It’s like if we can’t get all nations to agree to join in a global carbon pricing system where we impose a price on fossil laden fuels and reward fossil free fuels, Endeavors, what makes us think that we can somehow create a commensurate system for removal, which because although there’s excess CO2 in the atmosphere, it’s much more diffuse and takes a lot more energy to try to pull it back down to Earth than just capturing it at the sort of end of pipe flue gas stream.
What makes us think that we’re going to be more successful at that? And- My short answer is that I tend to be a bit of an optimist. And I look at what people said 30 and 40 years ago about solar and what they said about EVs. And now Musk oscillates as being one of the wealthiest people in the world because he’s designed something fabulous that people want to drive. And it has the added benefit of not releasing any tailpipe emissions. And I’m not going to say that society should innovate its way out of problems because sometimes when we innovate, we create new problems for ourselves, right?
Fossil eliminated horse manure on the streets created climate change in the process. But that being said, when I look at people such as Noah Deitch and Gianna Amador and their patron, Matt Rogers, who invented the Nest thermostat, I am eternally optimistic. And I think one of the great things about carbon removal that we don’t talk about very often is that we can create carbon to value. And I know that’s a topic that’s very popular among your listeners and many are engaged in that. But it’s a narrative that I find creates a lot of hope for people that we can bring CO2 back down to Earth.
And either lock it up permanently or that we can turn it into really cool things. That’s not carbon negative. It’s sort of carbon circular. But it makes people feel much more in control of a problem that otherwise seems almost hopeless to solve.
Ross Kenyon: Is a way of perhaps generalizing out from that entrepreneurship and technological development is a potential solution to the collective action problems based on policy?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Yes, it is. It’s one of many, but yes, it is. And another is a very rich innovation environment. And of course, I’ve lamented for years the fact that the US spends more on potato chips than it does on RD&D. And there is that big valley of death. But I’m cautiously optimistic now that this new incoming administration, particularly looking at the new Biden-Harris budget numbers, and I will flag an excellent blog that Gianna published today on it, recognizes the importance of Supporting early stage technologies such as direct air capture to bring them down the cost curve.
But I think, you know, government, RD&D, as well as entrepreneurship are two pathways that have incubated any number of great breakthroughs. And I’m cautiously optimistic that we can do the same here.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve had so many pessimists on lately, Jan. So thanks for sticking your neck out.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: I’m usually a Debbie Downer. I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’ve been wanting to do an episode about what is happening with the Biden administration and carbon removal. This might be a good chance for us to open that topic up some. What are you seeing?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Well, I’m absolutely delighted that so many of our top former grantees and thought partners and others have been appointed to really important posts in the Biden administration today. And I won’t say that has anything to do with their affiliation as former grantees of Climate Works. I think it’s just that they were standouts in the field to begin with. But it’s delightful to see them sprinkle throughout the Biden-Harris administration and creating a whole of government approach to thinking about removal.
Ross Kenyon: Let’s talk about the American Jobs Plan and what we’re seeing in there, what you’re looking forward to. I saw some good things about 45Q in there.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Yes. You know, we’re very optimistic about 45Qs. And, you know, so we can talk about sort of executive branch action. We can talk about developments on the Hill. I think in sort of looking at the Biden-Harris climate agenda as a whole, First, you have to look at the executive orders that came out in January, the most recent stimulus that was passed, the December stimulus, which contained all kinds of fabulous provisions for director capture, even though it was still the Biden-Harris transition at the time, the American Jobs Plan, and then most recently the Biden budget.
And when you look at those things, those measures as a whole, they are poised to make historic strides on climate writ large, particularly climate mitigation, but also elevating justice and labor as part and parcel of climate progress in a way that I’ve never seen before. So that’s historic. But I also think that it’s, you know, it’s very remarkable putting the executive orders aside To look at the degree of ambition coming out of DOE, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. They have their first female deputy in the Office of Fossil Energy, Dr.
Jen Wilcox, who’s magnificent. And we’ve seen announcements already out of DOE for $100 million for deep decarbonization and advanced technologies. As well as $24 million for direct or capture applications that use less energy. And as Gianna notes in her most recent blog, the Biden budget has also proposes additional funding for the Office of Fossil Energy, as well as a name change to the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management and funding specifically for DAC. So that’s very exciting. But, you know, the technological side of removal is just one part of the equation.
We’re Very excited to see Robert Bonney back at the U. S. Department of Agriculture. He’s a thought leader in the space of carbon removal on the land side, but he comes at it with a jobs lens primarily. So we’re super excited to see $161 million there. For potential funding to make sure that the carbon that we’re both mitigating and or avoiding as well as removing from soil is more accurately measured, reported and verified. That’s very, very important and also demonstrates how The US can model leadership in going into the international discussions on the NDC side.
We have really good confidence about how much we can do on the energy side to meet our Paris commitments, but the natural side of the equation is always beset by greater scientific uncertainties about how much you’re storing and removing. I’ll just pause there for now, but we’re also very excited about the appointments at the Department of Interior. We see our partners on tribal lands as vital to carbon removal, as well as attendant co-benefits in the form of greater forest health and greater soil health.
Ross Kenyon: I did notice this, and oftentimes there’s a split pose between these two camps of industrial, carbon removal, and ecological. But it seems like the Biden administration is very all of the above, which makes me wonder if that is actually true and what actually is not included in all of the above within their carbon removal plans.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: They just made a very, very important appointment on oceans, but our newest area at Climate Works of Exploration... And again, we’re not necessarily proponents, but we want to make sure that when and where removal happens, it’s very thoughtful and that the opportunities outweigh the challenges. And so as many of your listeners probably know, and you must also know, Ross, as we become more successful in removing carbon with technology and with trees and soils, unfortunately, the ocean has been storing up a surplus of CO2, and it’s going to give some of that back.
And it’s also suffering greatly from that additional CO2 in the form of acidification, which harms shellfish and other marine life and inevitably will also alter human livelihoods.
Ross Kenyon: Well, Jane, I thought you were supposed to be the optimist here.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: But I’m waiting and hopeful that the Biden administration, I think, has a very deep bench of talent, both on the technological side and the natural side in the administration. We’re also hoping to see equal levels of ambition on the ocean side, hopefully also around ocean removal. Climate Works has been funding the National Academy of Sciences to complete a workshop on ocean CDRs. And we’re very much looking forward to that publication as a way of calling attention to that important topic as well.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I can’t wait to read that. That’s fascinating. I think for listeners, they probably know about the basics of blue carbon. We did an episode on whale carbon once upon a time. We’ve also done mangroves. I think people know about kelp farming and marine permaculture. But I think there are also some new industrial technologies for ocean capture that are coming down the pike. Is that right?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Well, I like to think of them as natural because, you know, the way that the earth and the oceans have managed the ocean’s pH. And I like to think of it as, you know, the ocean is kind of analogous to, you know, human blood pH because that’s where ultimately life all kind of came from. But as rocks that are highly basic erode from rainfall, they, I’m oversimplifying, but, you know, they wash out to sea. And there’s a very complex mixing process that takes place, but that material buffers the oceans in the same way that taking a Tums helps to reduce a tummy ache when one has ingested too much lemonade or something.
And there are, at least theoretically, approaches to accelerate that process. But in order to think about whether or not those approaches are going to be safe, It’s important that academics, in particular, start to undertake any number of studies to see what happens when you accelerate that buffering process. That being said, I will say that many oyster hatcheries along the Pacific Coast already buffer the water because otherwise the oyster shells will dissolve and we’re already seeing those effects of acidification in the dungeness crop populations along the West Coast of California. So the ocean is becoming increasingly acidic owing to increasing CO2 levels.
There are natural processes that can address that. There are already some commercial processes, as I mentioned, in oyster hatcheries that need to be done to apply to that. So one can set up experiments using oyster hatcheries, for example, as a way of seeing whether there are any unexpected challenges to marine life. That occur from these processes. But as many listeners and Ross, you also know, there are some companies that are going out and looking to olivine approaches. And that is something that we’re still several steps behind and funding basic academic research to look what happens to the marine aquatic life when you accelerate this natural process.
Ross Kenyon: Fantastic. I know there’s a lot of work to be done just on the basic research side on so many things within carbon removal. Is there not an analogous process happening in the oceans with direct air capture? Is there anyone working on large machines that separate carbon dioxide from, I guess, ambient water? What even is the term for that?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: It doesn’t make sense in a non- I’ve often wondered about that. Is that direct air capture if it’s from the sea? And I know under the Sea Fuels Act, the Navy in particular had been exploring that as an approach, I believe, in a way that’s kind of analogous for the long haul aviation industry and thinking about extracting that CO2 and converting it into a fuel. And so there’s the Sea Fuels Act. I am not directly aware of other approaches to directly remove CO2 from seawater, but I’m certain that there are.
Any number and listeners are probably aware of those. But that is an area that we haven’t yet moved into in our ocean CDR strategy, just because it’s hard enough to get our arms and minds around ocean alkalinity enhancement. There’s a nice little We’re also looking at the phenomena of growing additional seaweed and the question there being, does it really sink down to the bottom of the sea and store the carbon as it needs to, or does it dissipate and not achieve that effect? So we’re looking at seaweed and ocean alkalinity enhancement first and foremost, and then we’ll look to the other ocean approaches as time and resources permit.
Ross Kenyon: Is the jury still out for you about sinking kelp to the seafloor?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: You know, we have a very deep bench of experts who are, as one might expect, divided on that question. And some say, yes, it does sink and permanently stay down there. And others are still wondering about the economics of how one does that cost effectively.
Ross Kenyon: But the science isn’t in question so much as the economics of it making sense.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: I think there are still very open questions around both and more funding research to get greater clarity into both.
Ross Kenyon: And making the ocean more basic as opposed to pulling CO2 out, are you adding some basic materials into the ocean?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: That’s right. That’s right. So, you know, I mean, you know, Stripe is funding Project Vesta to look at the Olivine Beach approach. And there, we’re just funding basic science using one of the green sand beaches in Hawaii, as well as natural upwelling in the Santa Barbara Channel. So we’re not creating an experimental intervention. We’re just kind of using nature and looking to see whether enhancing alkalinity has any effects on mesocosms in the sea.
Ross Kenyon: And you’re saying in the Biden administration’s plans overall, oceans haven’t yet featured prominently, at least compared to terrestrial or industrial.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: That’s right. And that’s not surprising. It’s a very novel approach. We started off this session by talking about how four years feels like an eternity in carbon removal. But I would say that with respect to oceans and the need to think about removal there, for most of us, that’s been probably a one and a half year endeavor that we’ve had to stand up very quickly. But, you know, the administration has appointed distinguished Oregon State University professor and former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Jane Lubashenko, to a prominent position.
So I think that’s a very helpful start.
Ross Kenyon: My layperson understanding of this, this very well might be not true. And perhaps you can tell me if it is or not. But the ocean is a more dynamic environment than a terrestrial one and is thus potentially harder to measure and quantify. Also, though, I’m coming from a place of working on soil for the last couple of years, also not easy.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: No, no, no, it’s not. Yeah, I completely agree with you. The ocean is so incredibly dynamic. You know, one could spend hundreds of millions of dollars on academic research and still not settle all of the questions that need to be settled. And that is beyond climate philanthropies, resource capabilities and something that we hope, you know, Congress and coming appropriation cycles will think about supporting.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. There’s a chance that alienates potentially more conservative, otherwise supporters of something like this, or it gets enough buy-in from everyone because jobs and dealing with longstanding issues could potentially be popular. How do you think this will play out?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: I think if we’re very thoughtful about the political economy, of carbon removal, that it creates a win-win for everyone. And so on the natural side, we’ve been very cautious in our grant making to lead with rural resilience as opposed to climate or carbon removal, because that’s the frame that landowners, land stewards, tribal communities care about. They care about jobs and they care about food security. And they care about viable uses of potentially uneconomic trees for mass timber. And on the technological side, our grantees have done, I think, a masterful job of working in close partnership with the steelworkers and other unionized groups to think about the potential job benefits of scaling a director capture industry, for example.
So again, I think if it’s approached in a thoughtful way, it could be very powerful. You know, one of the things that we like to talk about in California is, yes, you know, let’s keep fossil in the ground, but let’s put those fossil workers to work taking carbon out of the air and putting it back in the ground where it belongs.
Ross Kenyon: You think that the focus on jobs and jobs seems like the top level keyword that I’m picking up in a lot of this Biden administration chatter. That is maybe a unifying approach to many of these things.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: That’s how I see it. To me, if it I spent I kind of cut my teeth in Washington for many, many years working for someone who now is back in the Biden White House, who coined the popular Clinton era phrase, it’s the economy, stupid. And, you know, I still...
Ross Kenyon: You rage in Cajun by chance?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: If people can’t meet basic needs and have secure, well-compensated employment, it’s very, very hard to get their attention around any other top and pressing priorities, including climate.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. Insofar as you can say, have the experiences that you’ve had with unions been supportive of a transition like this?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: You know, on the direct air capture side, absolutely. I think our grantees have done masterful work in creating partnerships with various union groups. And I think that is unique because one of the challenges that we encountered eight years ago with That round of stimulus is that historically, at least, the wind and solar jobs, solar in particular, have been less unionized. Whereas if one were to build out a direct or capture ecosystem, one would imagine that steelworkers and pipefitters and other traditionally unionized industries would potentially stand to benefit. And there’s a very nice rhodium study That quantifies job creation potential.
There was a really super panel that took place yesterday, I think by the Energy Futures Initiative with former Energy Secretary Moniz and a deep, deep bench of union and other representatives on the innovation agenda. And so I’m hopeful.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think are some of the lessons from, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, Jan, but I think since Kyoto or Inconvenient Truth or some of those earlier, at least for my generation, climate moments, what went wrong during those times or wasn’t successful enough such that we’re here now? And what should we learn from that time period and moving forward?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: That’s a great question. It’s one that keeps me up at night, having lived through those times as well, as well as being at the epicenter of trying to create an economy-wide price on carbon and watching it ultimately that moment evaporate.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, sorry, I didn’t ask you an easy one.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: No, no.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t want someone asking me this in 20 years.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Clearly, at the end of the day, it comes down to who pays and who benefits. I think carbon removal may be one of those opportunities where the global north probably will need to bear the cost of creating the tools and rules to pull carbon back down out of the atmosphere and then deploy at much lower costs since it bought these approaches down the cost curve, whether they’re MRV for soil or the price of direct air capture so that they’re available to the whole world. But also I can envision a system where, you know, those who emitted most mitigate the most and also bear the share of removal.
It has eternally sort of split over that question of who emitted the most and who is most responsible for both eliminating and mitigating emissions, but now also removing them.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s a hard question. It seems like the common sense justice concern is that if you make a mess, you should be the one to clean it up.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Right. Exactly. Exactly. And we’ve done okay on bringing dramatically down the cost of wind and solar in part because our partners in China did a very, very good job of driving down the cost of solar panels. But here in the United States and in Germany, we adopted feed-in tariffs and renewable portfolio standards. And I’m very optimistic that we could do the same thing with carbon removal. And once we drive down the costs of those rules and tools, it makes it much more palatable for the public sector to then implement programs and policies to bear the cost of that.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. My admittedly basic understanding of the solar cost curve is that Germany’s various types of subsidies really helped that go in addition to basic research from the U. S. and elsewhere. Is that broadly what happened? And do you think something similar might happen for developing carbon removal technologies in the U. S.?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: I hope so. You hope so? Okay.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And then with research like this being done, funded by the government, does it typically come out as non-proprietary? Anyone can use it and build a business around it? Or is that understanding wrong?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: I think that understanding is correct.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, okay.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: You know, I mean, the interesting thing, and I don’t want to oversimplify this, and Julio Freeman and Jen Wilcox and others, you know, can do a much better job of this. But I think, you know, one of the beauties of carbon removal is that it’s fairly low tech, right? I mean, you know, a direct air capture can be dry sorbent, can be wet sorbent. There are advances that we can make on, you know, the sorbent materials and chemistries. We can certainly figure out much better ways to make them use less energy.
Energetically, it takes a lot of power to pull something that’s very diffuse in the atmosphere into a filter where it’s trapped. But this isn’t a fusion reactor, right? And trees are very basic technology. The soil issue is tough just because soil, the heterogeneity issues of soil bearing from one meter to the next. But these are all sort of surmountable. They’re not wickedly hard problems. And so the point of that is that I’m not convinced that there are that many breakthroughs that we need. I think we mostly, on the land side, there are going to be some very thorny governance questions associated with the amount of trees we need to reforest and aforest and how that collides with other land uses, such as farming or indigenous dwellings.
On the technological side, there are going to be governance issues as well, to be sure. But as I said, these are lower tech relative to some other types of applications. And so I think that we can drive the cost down primarily by scaling and learning by doing.
Ross Kenyon: You’re making me feel so good right now with not being a wicked problem or a set of wicked problems, not that many breakthroughs required. We have had so many door shows lately, Jan. This is feeling like a breath of fresh air. Thank you.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Sure.
Ross Kenyon: Given that you’ve worked so much on carbon pricing, the hope of a carbon tax or a fee and dividend was that this would be use the best of the market and prices to get action on climate. It would be appealing to people who are more right of center. It would also have climate Impacts, which would be conventionally left of center. But some people worry that it wouldn’t have enough buy-in. There’s not this focus on jobs and equity that I think the Biden administration is really trying to get enough emotional attachment, almost.
Carbon pricing seems really thin and almost something that an economist would like, but maybe the average person finds alienating.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: You’ve been talking to people inside the... But yeah, that’s right.
Ross Kenyon: That’s alienating wildly. But what do you think about that? Is that right?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: I think that carbon pricing is not in vogue in the United States, to be sure. And I also believe that because justice groups were not brought to the table early on in some places around discussions pertaining to offsets, that was a dreadful process. Dreadful missed opportunity and it has cast a shadow over carbon pricing efforts. I think there’s also a sense that a carbon price is inadequate to drive deep decarbonization. And I think what that means is that if you have a carbon price, you have to set it very, very high.
To incent the types of things that we need. I mean, if you took away 45Q and the low carbon fuel standard, you’d have to set a price of $600 a ton to do DAC, right? Carbon pricing has this Goldilocks problem. No one wants the price to go too high. No one wants the price to go too low. So you have to bring in all these other quote unquote complementary measures as we do in California. We have a low carbon fuel standard. We have a price on carbon. We have Any number of other approaches designed to incent deployment of technologies such as EVs, wind and solar.
So carbon pricing is not having a moment in the United States, but the EU ETS has just entered its second phase, incorporating lessons learned from initial design challenges. China is doubling down on carbon pricing. And so I’m not Advocating for carbon pricing, but I think a challenge is that in the absence of a price, I see the debate in the climate community as devolving into Madisonian factions. And so we have these groups that champion one form of technology or one form of removal approach over others. And it’s just a waste of time and energy.
As far as I’m concerned, we need everything. And we have to stop fighting each other over whether natural is better than technological, whether certain types of natural removal approaches are superior to others. It’s just such a waste. And it’s a distraction from actually making progress on the climate challenge. The clock is ticking.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Did you just complain about the fights over industrial versus ecological carbon removal and bring up the Federalist Papers in a single comment? Are you just pandering to me slash our audience now? Sorry.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Sorry. So I think that’s what you lose when you have a price on carbon, because the price sort of makes, it’s technology agnostic. And if you take that away, then you get into these endless spats on Twitter and elsewhere.
Ross Kenyon: We try to rise above it. We’ve started with soil for our first methodology with U. S. croplands, but we ultimately want to support carbon removal so long as it’s ethical and credible. And we want to support methodologies from many, many, many different places. I don’t know. How should we be thinking about that? It sounds like you’re validating our instincts a little bit to stay out of some of these fights because they do get quite nasty and I’m not always sure how productive they are.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Exactly. I mean, I just think we need everything and the kitchen sink at this point. I just really do think it is a waste of time and everyone’s energy to argue about it. And I think sometimes it may be masked as a time and resource question. I think people worry that if too much attention is paid to removal, then mitigation will suffer. If too much attention is paid to renewables, then preserving the existing nuclear fleet will suffer. And again, we need all of it. And I feel fairly optimistic that if we put our minds to something, such as a vaccine for COVID, we can get it done in a fairly short timeframe.
We just demonstrated that. And I feel the same. That should be the one great takeaway for the climate challenge.
Ross Kenyon: You say that, but I saw a meme the other day that had a West Side Story photo and said, when the Moderna gang sees the Pfizer boys or something. There is something about that, though. I think I usually attribute this more to humanity than to the actual arena in which is...
Dr. Jan Mazurek: It’s not the technology. It’s us. We’re very, very clever. And I always like to think back to 2001 and The Bone. It can be a tool. It can also be a weapon, but we figured out how to pick up and use it so that we could eat, but then we also learned how to whack each other over the head with it. And I’m not a technological optimist. I’m a humanist.
Ross Kenyon: Interesting. What do you think is going to happen in the next couple of years? Any wild, irresponsible predictions you’d like to make? Well...
Dr. Jan Mazurek: In the next couple of years, I feel as though we could go into international conversations with Renewed ambition around the urgency of these problems. I’ve been in this environmental space, as I said, almost 30 years. And so when I started, I focused mostly on traditional pollution problems and things addressed by the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, Toxics, and the Endangered Species Act. And so I will just say that when I was a child growing up in California owing to DDT, I didn’t know what a pelican looked like.
And because of whaling, I never saw gray whales. And we put rules, very stringent rules and tools in place to bring back those endangered populations and pelicans are ubiquitous now. And we’re doing a pretty good job with the condor and tribal communities here in California are reintroducing them to their lands. And so, you know, I do feel like when we when we have a challenge, We typically know how to face it, but the problem with climate is that it’s largely invisible. An indicator species is a lot more visceral for people.
The polar bear hasn’t quite worked as well as sort of the climate species. But we are now seeing directly, I think globally, the impacts that climate’s having. And even among sort of staunch conservative communities, they may not call it climate, but they know something’s happening to their soil. They know the nights are getting warmer. Buds aren’t setting when they’re supposed to. Their lands are flooding. And so when we start to feel the problem viscerally, we typically do act.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s right. I hope you are right that time is coming. Where do you think Climate Works fits into this mix?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: The beauty of Climate Works is that, you know, we try to catalyze endowed philanthropies to, you know, free more resources to tackle the climate crisis. And we do that in a variety of different ways, some of which focus on really thorny decarbonization challenges around transportation. We’ve made great strides on EVs, but what do we do about freight? What do we do about long haul aviation? What do we do about shipping? So those are areas where my talented colleagues help to create awareness, develop technology, Strategies to excite philanthropies to put more resources into the space.
And so I think that we will continue doing what we do. I feel uniquely privileged that our funder partners decided to enable ClimateWorks to create a carbon dioxide removal strategy and build the field. I think that was incredibly visionary and courageous. And I feel so honored to lead the work on the behalf of our partner philanthropies. It’s scary for some traditional climate funders to look at the space because particularly in Europe, there’s so much concern about moral hazard. But for the newer funders that are coming into this space, new high net worth individuals, They really want to go to carbon removal because they see it as an under-resourced area.
And, you know, we help to marshal data and other statistics to help them understand just how terribly under-resourced it is and grow new funders into the space. So that’s what we do. And that’s how we look to kickstart progress.
Ross Kenyon: Carbon removal in the United States, certainly since the IPCC 1. 5 degrees Celsius report, pretty mainstream at this point, it feels like here. But the people I know in Europe that I speak with, they have an entirely different experience. Do you have any idea why that might be?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: That’s a great question. And I think it’s multifaceted. On the one hand... They are not as technologically optimistic as we are in the US perhaps. I think that’s one piece of it. I also think that our colleagues in Europe are very, very passionate about the role that natural solutions can play in carbon removal, but they worry that corporations and fossil producers in particular We’ll use carbon removal to avoid phasing out fossil extraction. And they’re deeply, deeply concerned about that.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think those concerns are well-placed or overstated?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Because I lack the unique vantage point of sitting in Europe and observing industry behavior, it’s harder for me to say I do know that, and my partners who operate any number of DAX startups, this is no secret to them, but I would prefer to think about aviation and other sectors scaling direct air capture. I would rather see, you know, grow houses scale direct air capture than direct air capture be used for enhanced oil recovery. I know that narrative was very popular with the previous administration, but it did a lot of damage, I think, to the perception of DAC with the base.
And I think that the Europeans were looking at that very carefully and felt skeptical about that as well.
Ross Kenyon: Who exactly was that supposed to appeal to? I guess the oil and gas companies, people, roughnecks, I guess they probably liked the EOR carbon removal angle. I tried to be optimistic about that one. Just thinking that them making money off of this is not the greatest place to end, but it might be an okay place to start. But then other people like David Roberts was on the show and thought that you might extend the lifespan of these industries in this pursuit for an extra decade or something.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Yeah. And I think that’s the primary concern of our colleagues across the pond.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like people don’t really like oil companies in the United States very much either though. No.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: And, you know, I think if one were clever, you know, one could construct a kind of a quid pro quo regulation. You know, that’s what the Toxic Substances Control Act banned substances that were harmful to humans and, you know, driving diminished populations of animal species. And sometimes it really does take a cara and a stick. And so... I don’t think it has to be moral hazard. I think that there could conceivably be ways where you incent DAC by putting a binding requirement on fossil extraction numbers and you don’t need to retrain an oil worker who’s been taking oil out of the ground too much, I don’t think.
Maybe I’m getting way out of my depth here to harness the same infrastructure to take CO2 and stick it back in the ground. Just not use the CO2 to force EOR backup.
Ross Kenyon: Got it. So are you favorably disposed towards something like a carbon take-back obligation? Well, it’s relatively new to me, but it could be as simple as if you mobilize a ton of carbon dioxide, you must demobilize a ton of carbon dioxide. If you’re going to use it at all, you need to remove it.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: You just like it. You say, yes, let’s do it.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Well, I think about something a little bit more draconian where you don’t have license to continue to pollute, but it’s more the atonement of past emissions, right?
Ross Kenyon: So it would be a carbon take-back obligation, but for your historic emissions as well.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I mean, Microsoft’s heading that direction.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: That’s right.
Ross Kenyon: I imagine others will be too. God, some of those companies that are highly omitted, that sounds onerous. If that was on your balance sheet, it might just crush your company though, I think.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Well, not if you could set up a system that would compensate you for doing it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s true. People also complain about that too. And that’s not that the complaints are ill-founded, but that they’re going to make money off of cleaning up their past mistakes. Jan, I thought you cared about justice. How could you support that?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Well, I don’t... I don’t think, necessarily, if the jobs go to frontline communities and that activity is done in such a way where it doesn’t pose disproportionate risks to the workers in that sector, that it would necessarily be unjust. If we took the entire petrochemicals industry In Texas and Louisiana and over time converted it from an extractive production industry into one that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere, turns it into products and where appropriate locks it away in geologic formations. I don’t necessarily see that as being a bad thing.
Ross Kenyon: I also keep seeing discussion of carbon removal and frontline communities, especially from carbon 180. They should probably come back on for an update too. It’s been a while. Could you maybe sum up what exactly people mean by that and what the relation between these two things are?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Our experience with the cabin trade system and with offsets, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, led us to understand that the more groups that are at the table At the early stage of a conversation about a climate intervention, I think the greater likelihood that the intervention will actually translate into action. And so Carbon 180 has been working with any number of frontline communities to start to build those bridges and provide resources and multiple languages so that we can hopefully Create more voices in the carbon removal conversation and also build greater understanding of the perceived opportunities and challenges associated with removal.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think I asked you that many easy questions today, Jan.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: No, you haven’t. That was a softball.
Ross Kenyon: That was a softball. Yeah.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Yeah, we’re very proud of Carbon 180’s work in that space because it started in 2019 and wasn’t just... The work was well underway before the events of last year.
Ross Kenyon: Certainly was. No, Carbon 180 has had a lot of leadership in the kinds of conversations that happen within carbon removal. And I think they’re a great place for people to go and catch up on that too. Because I think linking environmental justice and carbon removal... I’m trying to remember before Carbon 180 started dealing with it. I don’t know. I guess Holly Jean Buck’s been on that for a long time, I suppose.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: She has. And our partner at Climate Works, who’s with the Climate and Land Use Alliance, Tracy Johns, has been making, I think, very important grants to Youth Voices, we’re planning a workshop with representatives from indigenous communities and has been, you know, funding other groups worldwide. And with the point of, you know, bringing other voices into this dialogue, which is really important. So I would say that it’s imperative on the land conversation, particularly as well as on the technological side.
Ross Kenyon: Beyond the basic, pretty obvious concerns that carbon removal, if not done correctly, could actively harm people. So set that one aside for a second. I think there’s also a really big risk if carbon removal isn’t done properly. That, for instance, I think it’s safe to say that red plus and avoided deforestation does not have a sterling reputation. And at least part of it is because of some of the land use issues in the global south and the interactions between indigenous peoples and those policies. And we don’t want to, and that could discredit for a very long time, quite a lot within carbon removal in that same kind of way.
Is that a correct way of understanding this too?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: Yes. When we first created this carbon removal portfolio, we brought together any number of representatives from our global network. And I remember hearing a very vivid presentation from one of our colleagues in Brazil. And he said, look, we don’t want to be your representative. And that stuck with me ever since because I realized the enormity of the challenge. And I think people who have been working for years and years just on the avoided deforestation piece With all of the complexities around communities that rely on the forests and the lands for their livelihood, it’s a very tough challenge, particularly sitting in the global north to go to the global south and tell people how their land can and can’t be used.
It’s a very thorny and vexing challenge. And so one of the ways in which philanthropy addresses it is by a very decentralized global network of grantmaking to get a better understanding of needs on the ground. But that’s still highly imperfect. And even if we take it out of that context, look at what’s happening in Wales, where farmers are being told that they need to give up some of their agricultural land for reforestation. It’s not being well received.
Ross Kenyon: If those stakeholders were brought in earlier, as you’ve alluded to a few times, do you think we would have done things with them differently? Or will we have chosen approaches that wouldn’t have included them at all?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: If they were brought in earlier, we probably would have not chosen approaches that they would find. It would have taken a lot longer to get to the solution because there would have been a lot more discussion. But I don’t think that any of these solutions can be imposed by Sort of fiat or eminent domain, right? There will be a terrible backlash. Just look at the protests, the Yellow Vest protests in France, for instance. Yeah, that did not seemingly go very well.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think so. That validates, as far as I can tell, the Biden administration’s thesis of focusing on jobs, getting buy-in, having these conversations, having an eminent place for justice discussions in all of this. So it seems like some of these lessons have been learned.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: It seems like it. There’s always so much more room for learning, for growth, and for improvement as the events of last year. And ongoing events are demonstrating. I think it takes 250 times of repeating something for the average human brain to learn something. So progress is slow and sometimes we slip backwards. But I think broadly in looking at any number of advancements that we’ve made around public health, eliminating or driving down steeply certain forms of disease, nutrition, The overall trajectory is upward.
Ross Kenyon: Well, that’s a good place to start wrapping up. Jan, if someone wants to follow your work and that of ClimateWorks, how should they do so?
Dr. Jan Mazurek: They can go to our website. We have a landing page on the carbon dioxide removal program where we post blogs, grantee reports. And, you know, other pithy items. And on occasion, we also host webinars and other outreach activities.
Ross Kenyon: Very nice. Well, thanks so much for being here with me. I’m so happy that we have your brain working on carbon.
Dr. Jan Mazurek: I’m so happy that we have yours. Thank you for the very thoughtful questions. I really appreciate it. I’ve very much enjoyed our conversation.
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