Dr. Jane Zelikova is the Chief Scientist at Carbon180, a carbon removal think tank on a mission to fundamentally rethink carbon, and cofounder of 500 Women Scientists, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming the leadership, diversity, and public engagement in science. On this episode of the Reversing Climate Change, Jane joins Ross and Christophe to discuss the challenges of measuring the carbon content of soil and the projections around how much CO2 we can sequester with improved management practices.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Before we start this episode of Reversing Climate Change, I’m going to do a small promo read for another podcast called No Place Like Home. These are wild and scary times and I want to tell you about a podcast that might help you navigate all of the craziness. It’s called No Place Like Home. Host Marianne and Anna Jane tackle the climate crisis with heart, depth, vulnerability, and grace. Listening to them feels like sitting with two best friends on a big breezy porch. And doesn’t that sound lovely right about now? And I can confirm tonally that is how I experienced the show.
This season, called Bring the Light, they’re exploring how spirituality helps us find courage and strength to fight climate change. They chat with a Buddhist climate scientist, an evangelical pastor from Puerto Rico, a witch, an indigenous spiritual teacher, a Muslim activist, a rabbi, and more. Wow, a lot of diversity in there and also dovetails very nicely with what we’re doing at Reversing Climate Change and trying to program more episodes on religious and theological themes. No Place Like Home gives us tangible advice on how to fight the crisis, which is definitely important.
But most importantly, as they see it, it helps us deal with it on an emotional, psychological, and spiritual level. I think these shows pair nicely together because we don’t do as much with the emotional, psychological, and spiritual levels. We’ll be trying to balance that out a bit more in our new season. But it just isn’t something that we do nearly as much. And No Place Like Home is known for this. So if you would like to add another climate podcast to your repertoire, I think you should definitely check out No Place Like Home.
Check it out wherever you listen to your podcast now currently. And I hope you’re staying safe with the pandemic. I hope our friends at No Place Like Home are as well. And thanks so much. And thank you also for reading your version of what I’m doing right now for Reversing Climate Change on No Place Like Home. Thanks. Love to see these climate podcasts working together. And I wish you all the best. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Season 2 of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon.
You can find it at patreon.com slash noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what Norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a Nori book club? Get special access to Nori events? Go take a look at patreon.com slash noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori.com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter which you can find at nori.com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m here with Christophe Jospe, who is my colleague at Nori. Hey, Christophe.
Christophe Jospe: Hello.
Ross Kenyon: Hello. Today we have with us Dr. Jane Zelikova, chief scientist at Carbon 180. Jane, we’ve been trying for so long to get you on the show and we finally did it. So welcome.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Thank you. I’m so excited.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed, you’ve been one of our longtime interlocutors about soil science and trying to make sure that what we’re doing at NORI makes sense and is in accordance with the best of what science has to say about soil. You’ve oftentimes nudged us a little bit if you think we’re going the wrong direction and we’re always so grateful to have your insights here.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, thanks for letting me do the nudging. Some people don’t appreciate it as much as you guys.
Ross Kenyon: We want it to work. You have to have nudgers or it’s not going to work.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Right. Yeah. I mean, I say a lot when I talk about Nori and being very upfront that I’m on the science advisory team for Nori now, but that I’ve seen you guys take a lot of what we bring up as concerns on the science side very seriously and really dive into solving problems rather than just checking off the box that you consulted a scientist. And moving forward without doing anything about it.
Ross Kenyon: I’m really happy to hear that. And we’re going to dive into a lot about soil today. It’s been a while since we’ve done one focused on soil and agriculture. So I’m happy to do this, but maybe we should start closer to the beginning here. Jane, you work at Carbon 180. You clearly care a lot about carbon removal. How did you find yourself at this intersection between soil, climate, carbon removal? How did you get here?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, it’s a really good question. And as with many things in the world, it was almost entirely by accident. So for my PhD work, I studied climate change and impacts of climate change on seed dispersal and ants and plants. And so that’s a pretty giant leap from ants to carbon removal and carbon 180. But I think in working on climate change, I kind of Realized that I couldn’t really understand the problem without understanding in a lot more detail the carbon emissions part of that. And so I applied for the IIAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship.
IIAS stands for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And I was accepted. And for my fellowship, I worked at the Department of Energy in the Office of Fossil Energy, specifically in the office that works on carbon capture and storage. And part of the reason I really sought out that particular assignment is because I wanted to understand the major factor here, which is fossil fuel emissions, in order to understand how to solve the problem or how to start addressing and removing carbon. So I had worked as a researcher on carbon sequestration, but I also really wanted to understand the emissions part.
And that together led me to carbon 180.
Christophe Jospe: So as an ecologist, you obviously get the big picture and you understand how all these different pieces fit together. And you left a lot of juicy bait around ants. And I absolutely want to get into that. But let’s leave the ants aside for a second. And let’s really zoom in on you wanted to. So you do focus on emissions as chief scientist at the, sorry, Carbon 180, almost called it the Center for Carbon Removal. And maybe actually my misspeak there is a key part of your commentary, which is that you got to focus at the whole picture, right?
Need to reduce our emissions. We also need to remove the excess of emissions. But I’m curious, your path as an ecologist, sort of how you see this whole space playing out and where you see carbon removal fitting within the broader deep decarbonization that the world needs to be doing.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, thank you for noting that because I sometimes discount my ecological training, but I think it’s really important and critical for how I think about these problems because ecology is inherently a study of relationships and climate change is inherently the consequences of some relationships that aren’t working the way that they should. So when I think about why carbon removal is necessary, I really think about the climate map. As an ecologist, I think the systems focus and framing is really important. It helps me kind of understand and work from a broader climate math perspective.
And so in the broader climate math perspective, we have a system where carbon emissions or the carbon that’s emitted into the atmosphere is in a balanced system offset by carbon uptake. That carbon uptake could be photosynthesis or ocean uptake. And in a situation where our human activity is causing additional emissions to go into the atmosphere, those emissions cannot be taken up by natural carbon sinks or pathways to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And so as we’re sort of solving a math problem where we’re trying to get carbon emissions and carbon uptake to essentially offset each other, We can’t get there without, one, stopping all the additional emissions that are going up into the atmosphere over and above the natural carbon cycle.
And two, we have to remove the emissions that have already been emitted. And so that’s why the carbon removal piece is really important. From a system’s perspective, that’s just how it has to work. The math doesn’t work without it.
Christophe Jospe: Can I further complicate your math equation?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: You can absolutely. That was a very simplified carbon cycle equation.
Christophe Jospe: Right, because we’re talking about we need to remove one ton of carbon dioxide for every ton that we’ve emitted. But if we emit a ton in, I don’t know, let’s just say 2020, and it takes us 10 years to remove that But the result of that ton resulted in all sorts of weird feedback loops or forest fires that are devastating and releasing a lot of carbon or methane releases. Like, don’t we actually need to remove more than one ton for every ton of CO2?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, it’s not a one to one. And it also ignores the inertia that I think you’re talking about and some of the system thresholds that we pass as we have a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. So, I mean, essentially, even if we solve the math in a one-to-one for every ton emitted, we remove a ton 20 years from now, the impacts of that ton having been in the atmosphere for 20 years, we’re not going to be able to reverse the impacts. And there’s inertia in our very complicated socioeconomic system.
The inertias are something we have to consider. So we actually end up having to remove more carbon than we emit. And we’re also not just thinking about 2010 as the benchmark, even though different countries and different companies set different benchmarks. We really have to think about the carbon that’s been emitted since the Industrial Revolution. So we have a really large carbon deficit we have to pay back.
Christophe Jospe: So I want to zero in on one carbon removal technology. I’m going to call it a technology, even though it’s totally not. It’s just a way of storing or releasing carbon, which is in the soil. And it’s so fascinating. There’s so many dynamics that we can go into in soil science. But let’s just ask a really uninformed question. What’s hot in soil carbon?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah. What is hot in soil carbon? Well, I think one thing that’s hot is that a lot of people are talking about it, which was absolutely not the case two or three years ago. All of a sudden, soil carbon is kind of like the thing that people are interested in. Agricultural systems are all of a sudden really important, which I’m really happy about. The other thing that I think is really hot in soil carbon is Trying to figure out ways to pay people for the carbon they sequester. So this idea of bringing like the market perspective into this space.
The third thing that I’m personally really excited about is understanding or continuing to unlock the microbial sort of black box because microbes really are the drivers of biogeochemical dynamics in soil. Biogeochemical being the biological system that essentially transforms Transforms carbon and other nutrients in soil into things that plants can use or other organisms can use or can lock it away for tens to hundreds to thousands of years. And so microbes are really at the center of what happens to carbon when it gets to soil. I think it’s a really important and hot topic.
In climate change research and in soil carbon research to understand the role that microbes play and potentially try to harness what they’re already doing and improve upon it or optimize it in a way that can help us sequester more carbon.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know who, I don’t think I was responsible for this, but the exact form of that question, what’s hot in soil carbon? Thanks for being a good sport about that, Jane. It’s very silly, right?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: It is silly. I could have taken it in some other directions, but I try to see what you’re trying to get at here. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. I mean, I was on a farm a couple of days ago and actually the soil was quite cool because it was happily sequestering carbon and it was a very living and happy soil. So maybe we totally took that in the wrong direction. We don’t want hot soils drying up. That means carbon is being released. Yeah.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: What’s cool in soil carbon? It would be like you get the same answer. It’s cool that people are talking about it. It’s cool that we’re trying to measure it and pay people for the services they provide. And it’s also really cool that we’re kind of like realizing the microbes are really important and trying to figure out who the microbes are and what they’re doing so we can harness their incredible power.
Ross Kenyon: I want to do the Bill Hader’s Stefan from Saturday Night Live. The carbon removal’s hottest methodology is soil carbon. I don’t know if that means anything to you. Do you even know what I’m talking about?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: I do know what you’re talking about. I’m insulted that you asked me that.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were a comedy aficionado. Please forgive me. But one of the things that maybe this heat or this coolness, depending on which horrible So this is a little analogy you want to employ here with soil carbon is that a lot of the difficulties of measuring exactly what geophysical process is actually happening in the soil, how this works, how it should be measured, how are we quantifying this? Soil is not an easy task. It’s actually there’s a lot to it that people don’t understand. In fact, I am not the expert here.
We have people on the team like Kristoff and beyond who are working on this. But there seems to be like a mismatch or something because everyone’s talking about soil as if it’s a done deal and really simple. And they’re overlooking that there’s actually still a lot going on in terms of the science. Is that broadly the case, Jane?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, I mean, I think there are kind of like two camps that are dominating the conversation. One, that’s the camp that you identified where we’re like, this is a done deal. We know what’s going on. We can just do this. Let’s go. Sort of ignoring some of the really important nuance of how we measure things and why that matters. And on the other side, we have a camp that’s kind of dismissive of soil carbon sequestration or agricultural soil sequestration as a solution because of how Complex it is and how challenging it is to measure and track soil carbon change over time.
You have these two diametrically opposed camps that are talking about soil carbon from very different perspectives. One like very dismissive of the challenges of measuring carbon because they think that we already know what we need to know in order to scale a solution and the other camp dismissive of the solution because of how complicated it is to measure. And you sort of have folks like me in the middle, and I think you guys are also in this space where we have a recognition that while we know a lot about how to measure soil carbon over time, I mean, soil science is a discipline that’s been around for a long time, and we have the tools to measure it.
What makes it really challenging is the amount of effort that it takes, and that effort is usually physical presence, like digging the hole, having to collect the soil, bring it into the lab, process it. And then analyze it. And that because it’s such a time intensive and effort intensive process, it’s not that we don’t know how to quantify a soil carbon. It’s that we’re not able to do it at the scale that’s needed to actually describe the variation in soil carbon across different landscapes, different geographies, different farms and ranches, different contexts.
That have very different histories and all of that really matters. Like soil carbon is something that changes very slowly, but is responsive to how we manage land and also responsive to climate change. So like we in the middle realize the complexity of the problem, realize we have a lot of the tools we need to start, but also realize that we don’t have everything we need to start at the scale that we need in order to fully scale this solution as quickly as possible. Did I cover that?
Christophe Jospe: You covered it really well. And you also brought up a lot of really good points. And if our colleague Alden Donnelly were on this podcast, who she’s really an expert in this, and Ross, thank you for calling me an expert, but I am no expert. Jane is the expert here. I’ve just learned a lot since starting Nori about soil carbon or soil organic carbon, not to be confused with soil inorganic carbon. And when we’re talking about the soil We’re really just talking about the organic side of it. But if Alden Donnelly were on the podcast, she would be saying, well, you can’t measure carbon.
You can only estimate it. And just to bring up a talking point, which I think is really important to those who are saying, yeah, it’s really hard to measure it. Well, we can have greater certainty or a greater understanding of how much soil organic carbon is actually accruing in the soils with the Right. You’re talking about solutions and oftentimes people at conferences that we’ve both been to get really excited talking about their sort of favorite carbon removal solution to evoke Saturday Night Live. But how much potential is there for the soils through improved management practices to sequester carbon dioxide?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, I think like everything else in ecology, the answer is it depends. I think it depends and there are some studies that give an estimate that potentially the land sink is as big as 900 teragrams of carbon or CO2 per year. But then like if we look at the Fargioni paper, which sorry for your listeners, Fargioni and colleagues published a paper in November 2018 in the scientific journal Science. That essentially estimated for just the U. S. the potential for different agricultural practices to help sequester or remove carbon from the atmosphere.
And also along with doing that estimation, estimated how much it would cost to remove a tonne. So they have cheap solutions, medium solutions, and more expensive mitigation solutions, and also provide additional benefits beyond just the carbon sequestration potential. I don’t know if you guys have talked about this paper on the podcast before.
Christophe Jospe: We have not talked about the Fargioni paper. We should. Okay.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: You should, and I am not prepared to give you a deep dive into the paper, but I’ll just say that the estimate is that things like cover crops can deliver about 100 teragrams of CO2 equivalent per year in carbon removal or climate mitigation potential, and that’s in the year 2025, so in the next five years. Cover crops could deliver that much and that essentially the majority of that climate mitigation comes at a pretty cheap price tag of $10 a ton. And then things like nutrient management and improved manure management and sort of grassland restoration and improving how we grow rice all have like much lower, well, nutrient management is a pretty impactful practice, but the other ones are like pretty small in terms of climate mitigation potential, but deliver all of these other great Ecological benefits from helping clean our air and maintaining biodiversity and reducing soil erosion and improving water quality.
And so when we talk about soil carbon sequestration, I think one of the things that we should note is that beyond removing carbon from the atmosphere and being a climate solution, it brings a lot of other benefits that are really important for maintaining carbon. Productive agricultural operations and helping support a biodiversity of organisms, which actually really matter for sustaining carbon sequestration over time. And so beyond just the thinking about the climate piece, which I know is really important to you, it’s really important to me. I think it’s also important to think about those other benefits.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, totally. And one of the reasons that we especially like you, Jane, is because you’re not just some scientist who’s speaking from an ivory tower about potential. You’ve actually been on the ground with people who have been implementing improved management solutions that can sequester more carbon dioxide in the soils. And part of that experience came from your time in Montana. Can you talk a little bit about what you did up there and what that experience was like?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for liking me for more than just my science chops. So for the last couple of years, I’ve spent a lot of time in Montana and also in Wyoming and Colorado and New Mexico, spending as much time as I can with producers, farmers and rangers, who are managing their land and have Either are interested in implementing practices that can sequester more carbon or just build healthier soils overall, or need some help figuring out how to do that and put in place robust scientific processes to ensure that as they change practices, they’re able to track The outcomes of implementing new practices in a scientifically rigorous way.
And so in Montana, that mostly has meant that I’ve spent a lot of time chatting with farmers and ranchers, a lot of ranchers, fewer farmers, and trying to understand the challenges that they face as they’re trying to implement these practices. So these are folks who are already interested, but just haven’t fully like gone into scaling the soil health practices in their preparation. So part of is understanding the challenges that they’re facing and then trying to just listen and figure out what types of solutions would be helpful to them. And so a lot of the challenges kind of fit under three broad buckets, I would say.
And these are challenges that have been articulated by the folks on the ground. So farmers and ranchers and then the organizations that work with them. And the three big buckets are sort of access to technical assistance and education. Part of the first hurdle is that farmers and ranchers are really busy people. They’re already operating on thin margins in a really difficult global commodity space, and there’s limited capacity to learn new things and implement new things. The big piece of it is providing the kind of education that producers would be interested in.
And that often doesn’t mean it’s education that comes from me, the scientist. Producers learn more from other producers and their neighbors and other folks that are in that space than from ivory tower scientists. So that education piece is really important and also just getting the right technical assistance at the right time. And what that means is just someone working with someone who’s already done it to be able to like Talk them through some of the challenges they might face, understanding some of the economics of what it means to implement a new practice, how much it might cost, and then at what point they might see the financial benefits of a new practice.
So getting a little bit of a look under the hood of what it takes to actually sequester carbon if you’re farming or ranching. That’s the education piece. The other piece that’s kind of direly needed is this like more clarity on the science and making sure that as folks are transitioning their operations, they’re working with scientists who can help collect the data that’s needed to track the outcomes. Often that means collecting the right baseline data at the right sort of spatial scale and frequency that it can capture the variation that you might see on a farm or on a ranch.
And then having the right kind of frequency of return and resampling so that you can track changes over time. There are some major science knowledge gaps that still need to be addressed, especially in rangeland systems like those we often find in Montana. We don’t have as much robust research on the impacts of different grazing management practices on soil carbon sequestration. And we have very few demonstration projects in Montana itself that would be relevant to help folks understand how long it might take. For them to see the benefits also kind of guiding some of that science and bringing in researchers from the local universities like we work with folks from Montana State University and now have a graduate student working on a project on a ranch.
In central Montana, quantifying the impacts of changing practices on soil carbon. So building that science infrastructure from the get-go and making sure that it’s really driven by what the producers need to know rather than what scientists necessarily want to know. And I can talk more about what the difference there is. And then at the same time, we understand that the early adopters, the folks that are really excited about this, they’re going to do it anyway. We’re thinking beyond early adopters what is needed and part of what is needed is the right business and policy incentives to make this essentially go from easy to irresistible.
And so we’ve been working on developing policy recommendations from chatting with all of these folks in Montana and Colorado and New Mexico. And making sure that the policy recommendations go directly into our federal policy. So as we work with federal agencies like the USDA, what are the kind of programs that they currently offer? How can those programs be improved? How can we ensure that there is enough funding in those programs to meet the growing need? Those are the kinds of things that we see are really important. And we know that this is all kind of a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle that as more producers are interested, they will require more technical assistance and the technical assistance can be supported by federal programs.
And potentially businesses that can help bolster the practice implementation. And then at the same time, we know that as we get more science, the science can help build more policy support and also essentially show producers how the changes that they’re implementing are actually impacting soil carbon. So we kind of see this as all working together and reinforcing each other. So my work at Montana has largely just been like a little bit of a recon mission, learning, doing a lot of listening and very little talking, and then trying to develop some recommendations from that can help us in our work with businesses and with policymakers and with scientists.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. That’s good to know. When I think about the difference between what’s happening with soil, with croplands versus rangelands, rangelands and grazing seem like an exaggeration of what’s happening with croplands. Like the people who are very interested in the dynamic potentials of managed grazing, holistic management, think that cows can do quite a lot. I think that generally tracks.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: I would say The knowledge gaps around the impacts of different grazing management practices on soil carbon and soil health more broadly, those knowledge gaps are much more pronounced than they are in crappland systems because crappland systems just lend themselves better to agricultural experiments or to collecting data in a more scientifically rigorous way. Essentially, you have fields where you’re growing particular crops and then you’re able to compare across field borders in a way that is really difficult to do in grazing systems, especially grazing systems where you’re moving or you have a rotational system where you’re moving your cattle from paddock to paddock.
In a non-uniform way, in a way that’s much more responsive to your environment, which is what you want. You want to be paying attention to the conditions and paying attention to the forage quality in any given paddock and move the cows accordingly. But it doesn’t lend itself to being a controlled, scientifically rigorous experiment. And so those controlled, scientifically rigorous experiments have been few and far between. As people have implemented new grazing management practices and have become converts, I get really excited, which I understand and want to get the word out about how transformative these kinds of practices are.
But there’s little to no data to go along with those like beneficial claims. And that’s not to say that the other kind of benefits of becoming more attuned to the ecological rhythms of their ranch or the grazing system in which they’re operating are Becoming more like aware of the animals and how they’re responding to the environment, paying a lot more attention to forage quality and doing a lot of planning. Those are all very beneficial things. And like with everything else, they bring these other benefits like maintaining biodiversity or growing biodiversity in their systems, helping, you know, kind of deal with like water quality, etc.
But if you’re not able to collect the scientifically rigorous information, it’s really difficult to make the sort of big claims that people are making about soil carbon. And so I would just say like those fights, they’re real and people feel really passionately because of those other like great benefits that are not to be discounted. But when it comes to like actually accounting for the carbon that is sequestered, those studies are fewer and far between. And the studies that have been done have been largely inclusive, especially in more like dry land systems in the West, like Montana, like Colorado, like New Mexico and west of the Rocky Mountains.
We just don’t have enough information to say one way or the other a scientifically rigorous way that particular grazing management practices yield strong carbon benefits.
Ross Kenyon: Great. We just need to do a proper episode on grazing and catch people up on this and give someone a chance to really defend some of these claims that are very broad about the potential of rangelands and managed grazing in the way that we’re discussing here because we’ve sometimes been a little bit hard on it, but I know people are optimistic. I think the line that you’re walking, though, is very sensible and it’s very careful in the right kind of way.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: I don’t mean to be punting on any of this. I’ve seen with my own eyes that people that are managing in a rotational manner, they’re getting really nice ecological benefits. Those are difficult to deny. You can see more soil fauna in the soil. The forage quality looks better. You get a lot more birds and other animals. There are these other ecological benefits. I don’t in any way want to discount those, but I do as a Ecologists want to measure the soil carbon outcomes if we’re going to be making claims about that specific metric, and especially if we’re going to be setting up systems to pay people for the carbon they sequester.
I think the other ecological benefits are absolutely important and worth being compensated for, but if we’re just going to count carbon molecules, we have to measure it in a way that stands up to scientific review.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, absolutely. And you’re bringing up so many important topics that we obsess over and also painting this continuum that goes from the theoretical sort of estimation and quantification of soil organic carbon increases to the practical level. As well as bringing up a lot of nuances. I mean, I think this is something that I personally grapple with, that NOAA is effectively commoditizing one ecosystem service, which is carbon removal, while recognizing that actually to be an effective land steward, you can’t just be thinking about that one ecosystem service. You need to look at the whole suite of things.
And you’re talking about the water quality and the water holding capacity. And it kind of all has to add up. And then it’s kind of like there are these just... Things happen and you have to respond to them. If you have a lightning storm, you need to move your herd of cattle away and you might not be following a certain management plan and you need to make a whole new management plan. And for Nori, the way that we see ourselves kind of sitting in between the practical and the science and to ensure that we have robust metrics is to look at practice-based additionality and So that we’re able to isolate out what are those additional practices that we want to be able to incentivize in service of drawing down more carbon while also realizing that like weather and geography are going to be major factors in affecting climate.
Soil dynamics and that soil in itself is indeed dynamic. So maybe I was just throwing way too much jargon and you can help our listeners out by trying to unpack some of what I just laid out there, which is how does weather and geography affect soil dynamics?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, that’s a really good question. And I think maybe the most frequent thing that I say or write about this topic is that geographic context and climate are like the really important things we need to think about. So I’ll just say this. So soils are living systems. That have, you know, biological organisms that are making their living, eating things, respiring just like we do, creating waste products, dying, decomposing their decomposing bodies, like sort of incorporated into other organisms. So it’s a dynamic living system. And as such, there is carbon going in and carbon going out.
So when we talk about soil carbon sequestration, I think we have to be really clear that these systems are also respiring or emitting carbon. They always have and they always will. And what we’re really trying to do is increase the amount of carbon that is going into the soil while keeping the carbon emissions from the soil either the same or relatively lower. But at the same time, Climate is changing. And as things get warmer, organisms usually respire more. And there’s been a lot of research that has shown that in climate change experiments, when you warm up the plots under future climate change conditions, your plants and your organisms are sort of change their function.
And the microbes, the parts in the soil that are driving the carbon cycle, microbial respiration goes up. So microbes metabolize faster and respire more carbon. So at the same time as we’re trying to draw carbon into the soil and sequester it, microbial organisms are also kind of ramping up their activity and they necessarily have to do that. They have to become more active in order for us to sequester more carbon. So it’s kind of a necessary cycle thing. As one era goes up, the other one is going to go up too.
It’s a dynamic system. Part of the reason why I sort of struggle with the questions about carbon sequestration permanence in soil systems, or like how long is this carbon going to be sequestered for, is that even for thousands of years, it will eventually go back into the atmosphere just because Carbon eventually will be decomposed by microbes and go back into the atmosphere. But there are things that we can do to sort of help balance the pluses and minuses of what carbon is going in and carbon going out and maximize the in part.
And that means adding more organic matter, essentially feeding the microbes so they can sequester more carbon as they sort of turn over. I just threw a lot of jargon back, but I’ll just say this. In this living system, it doesn’t easily lend itself to a sort of capitalist frame where we are going to pay people for some tonnage of carbon that is sequestered and need assurances, all kinds of assurances about that carbon staying in place. Otherwise, we’re in the hook. So as soon as we lend this capitalist lens to it, It becomes more challenging.
And I know y’all are trying to figure out how to address that uncertainty. And part of that is just measuring it. We have to measure the uncertainty. If we don’t fully describe it, then we don’t know how to deal with it. So measuring the uncertainty and measuring the variation is really important. And then the other piece is, besides understanding the variation, if you’re going to be paying people for tonnes of carbon, But you have to do that understanding that this is like a dynamic system in a living system. It doesn’t work the same way as you would do carbon capture on a point source like a power plant.
There will always be CO2 going out of the system at the same time as you’re sequestering.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, totally. And I think in past episodes have talked about, think of it like a pool. We just want to increase the amount of water with the pool and not see too much splashing out. And if we’re able to incentivize the addition of water into the pool, that’s a good thing. But we hear you. I’ll only speak for myself. I hear you loud and clear on some of the issues that come up when you start to financialize it. It’s not slowing us down. We’re going to try anyways, because there’s way too much CO2 in the atmosphere and people want to pay to remove it.
So we’re just trying to service that need.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Right. I guess like my thing is, I totally understand that. And we live in this like capitalist framework and socioeconomic system where we rely on these kinds of ideas of paying for services. But I guess like Broadly as a carbon removal field and a climate field even more broadly, I think we should at least ask ourselves the question of whether the capitalist kind of system or the tools that capitalism gives us are the right tools for the job. And that’s not to say like these are the tools we have and we have to use them.
So I’m not like advocating that we don’t. But I just want us to be critical about the tools that we’re using and whether we’re Furthering the system that has sort of created the problem and harnessing the kinds of solutions that are inherently problematic. Just putting it out there, I have no solution.
Ross Kenyon: You really buried the lead though, saving it till the end of the episode to lay out so much for us to pounce upon. And that could be a whole episode too. But I think we agree that there’s something about making carbon removal commoditized I think it could change the way that people view it. And maybe if your ideal is everyone does this out of the goodness of their heart, or maybe a less pejorative way of saying it is they do it because they care about the place, almost like a capital P place, proper noun, Wendell Berry style place.
That would be very good. And I wonder if that’s actually... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, I think, I mean, it’s not satisfying, but no answer will be. So it’s not your fault for not being able to address this like centuries deep question about whether capitalism is the right framework in general. But I think as we, I think it’s still worth thinking about this question and bringing that kind of like critical lens to the solutions that we do want to scale, in part because If we don’t do that, we’re just much more likely to kind of deliver the kind of solutions that perpetuate the problem. And so I think just being deliberate about asking the question repeatedly of yourself, of Nori, of other people you’re working with, to make sure that as you’re scaling the solution, which is needed and is working within the system that we already have in place.
So you’re not having to replace capitalism, which could be its own separate situation.
Ross Kenyon: That is not Nori’s goal at the given moment. Not Nori’s goal.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: And it’s also not my goal. I’m asking the question because I ultimately want to make sure that as the solutions are being developed, we don’t just default to, well... Capitalist systems trend towards technological solutions, right? And so like soil carbon sequestration, agricultural systems have some technological sort of aspects to it, and we can develop better technologies to measure carbon. And obviously, like there’s a technological solution to monetizing it, which is the platform that you’re developing. But that trend towards technological solutions kind of disregard some of the really Challenging and interesting components of what it’s actually going to take to scale agricultural soil carbon sequestration, which is much more about cultural change, understanding how people make decisions, how they perceive the world, how they learn, And it’s much more sort of like about a systems change and a societal cultural change, at least in order to like fully scale it.
You can definitely like monetize it for the early adopters, but we’re not going to meet the full like 10 gigaton removal need without really thinking through the socioeconomic aspects of this and understanding that like at the center of this humans, humans are messy. The way that we make decisions isn’t always logical and it doesn’t always like It’s not always in our self-interest. And so just bringing a critical lens to that, I think, is going to be really helpful.
Ross Kenyon: So insofar as you’re talking about rational choice theory with inside of economics and neoclassical economics in particular, which is there’s sort of this logic to everything that people do and their self-interested methods. Self-interested maximizers, I should say. And of course, there are challenges to this even within the discipline of economics, like behavioral economics is big on this of saying, actually, there are plenty of cases where this doesn’t pan out. People do act irrational. I’m fine criticizing that perspective so long as it remains one of the lenses which you can use to analyze this.
I don’t like it when people say, I want to criticize economics as an entire discipline and say, like, this is just a BS way of understanding human behavior. But like any set of tools, like it illuminates some things as it obscures other things. And you should have it in this set. It should be a colloquial.
Unknown speaker: Is this about you Ross or about the world but that was so poetic?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: I mean, it would be really annoying to be like, Russ, where do you want to go get dinner? And you get a kaleidoscope out and sort of like consult all your disciplines to make a rational decision. Yeah, not good. Which would be annoying. And I could understand not wanting to go to dinner with you. But I mean, I think that it is like everything else. Like if you make every argument here that for soil health has like all of these economic benefits and those economic benefits should actually be quantified for one.
Just like we want to quantify soil carbon, we also want to understand the economic implications of implementing new agricultural practices. And even if you are able to pay people through the Nori platform or some other one $50 a ton for the carbon they sequester, there are still going to be lots of people that don’t do this, right? And understanding why is really important. And so I think you’re saying the same thing. But in the interest of just understanding we’re trying to scale a carbon removal solution or a climate solution that is available to scale today on lots and lots of acres of land, not just in the U.
S. , but across the world. We have to sort of understand the technical challenges, but also understand the socioeconomic challenges. And we can’t really solve the problem without solving both.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we did an episode of the show with David Roberts recently. And at so many points, he’s like, man, that sounds nice. But the political economy of what you’re saying just doesn’t work. And I was always just like, it’s hard to argue with. We’re getting too esoteric here. I’m sorry.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: I’m going to add another layer, which is the other thing that I think a lot about is like, as we scale these climate solutions, if we just focus on the carbon mass, we might Inadvertently sort of perpetuate the like systems of inequality that are really persistent in our current society that are if we don’t solve those like other sort of societal inequalities, no climate solution is really going to stick. And we’re like kind of in a danger of leaving behind a lot of the same kinds of people that have already been marginalized for lots of different in lots of different contexts and continuing to marginalize the same people.
And asking the same people to bear the brunt of now the climate solutions. Initially, it’s like sort of the industries that created the climate problem and now the industries that are going to be creating the climate solution. And specific to what Nori works on, when we say frontline communities, I think a lot of agricultural communities and rural communities fit that bill. And so we want to be really deliberate about creating solutions and making them accessible to everyone and not just to the very wealthy And the people that are able to buy their way out of dealing with climate change.
I mean, at least I think if we want these to be sustainable, sticky solutions, we want them to be accessible to everyone.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s a fair point. And it also rides tandem with where we’re going in this conversation because you’ve also been working, I believe you’re one of the founders too, of 500 Women Scientists. So you’re clearly interested in how science interacts with gender and you’re interested in environmental justice concerns too. How does this all play out for you or how should we be thinking about this in a way that is left out of the conversation as it’s currently happening?
Christophe Jospe: But maybe start with what is 500 Women Scientists?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, I can definitely start with that. So 500 Women Scientists is an organization that grew from just an open letter after the 2016 U. S. election to I wrote an open letter with a few women scientist friends that essentially addressed the election and some of the themes that were given a very powerful kind of megaphone during that election, including the very strong currents of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and the very strong anti-science and anti-knowledge rhetoric that was given a really large platform And what we wanted to do was write a letter saying, we’re not going to let that stand.
We’re going to organize and work to push back against these very problematic issues. And recognizing that science is not immune to any of these very deep institutional problems of racism, discrimination, gender discrimination, and that as a system, science and the scientific enterprise If it’s not immune to these problems, then that’s an area where we can start. So as scientists, while we want to root out racism, patriarchy, and change societal norms across all of society, we can start with science because we are scientists and we recognize that scientific institutions are problematic.
And so we wrote this letter and we wanted to get 500 people to sign it as sort of like a sign-on in agreement with what we set out. We’ve gotten tens of thousands of signatures from people across the world, many of them women scientists, but also lots of women science supporters. And very organically and rapidly, it grew from a letter to kind of like a grassroots movement to a nonprofit organization. And now we are officially a nonprofit. We work across the world. We have More than 400 chapters, about 150 of them in the US, the rest international, where women scientists and supporters are able to come together and even just coming together and meeting is in some places across the world a radical act.
That identity of a woman is already really galvanizing it, but also can be radical. But in some other places, it’s coming together and creating opportunities to help other women scientists succeed, to do outreach and advocacy in communities, to essentially do the work of changing perceptions of what a scientist looks like, who can be a scientist, and also changing perceptions of what it means to do science, and that science itself is problematic, and that it was created by You know, European white men. And it was created in a system where, you know, everyone else didn’t get to have a say.
So it was created to help those folks succeed. And so part of what we do is recognize that the system wasn’t created for us. And so what we really have to do is change the system. And in order for all kinds of marginalized identities and people to feel welcome and to feel like they can succeed in science, we have to one, create a common language of what’s not working and two, change the system so that it is actually inclusive and accessible to everybody. Part of what working with 500 Women Scientists has done for me is kind of given me the language To approach topics of science more critically and ask myself the question like, are these ideas or the way that we sort of created the framework of gathering knowledge?
Is that the only way of knowing? Is that the only way that some information is valid and other kinds of information is not? And can we like step back and really think about what science means and what It doesn’t just like mean in terms of knowledge acquisition, but in action, like as we do science, can we avoid the very long history of like science being harmful, like using science to harm people, which has been done repeatedly. And so how do we like avoid participating in scientific institutions that are harmful? And how do we change the way that we do science so that it is actually inclusive and accessible?
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. It’s a fascinating topic and one that absolutely deserves its own episode. When I think about the ideal of science, I think of it as trying to find ways to I guess one of the postmodern critiques of this is that knowledge or they usually say knowledges. Knowledges are not neutral. They’re not objective. This is not something that happens. How does one... Keep that insight in mind and also still practice a science that takes what is still best about that aspiration to objectivity. Or is that even, am I even thinking about this in the correct kind of way?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah. I mean, I think objectivity is kind of, it feels like a myth to me because science can be theoretically objective because it’s To me, when I think about science, it’s the framework for going about in a rigorous way of answering a question, but then realizing that science is done by humans who are inherently biased and are not objective, how do we essentially ensure that the system or the tools that we bring to answering questions are Help us sidestep or minimize our own lack of objectivity. So part of what we like, what I run into a lot is that people assume scientists are inherently objective, which is not the case.
We are like everyone else, influenced by our upbringing, our cultural context, our kind of view of the world. And so thinking that scientists are objective kind of Makes it seem like science is infallible and objective and that just isn’t the case. So like recognizing that objectivity doesn’t exist helps us then think about like how to assess the information in front of us and make the best decisions that we can. Recognizing that the best decision of today may not be the same decision that we would make in 20 years or we would have made 20 years ago even.
But understanding like objectivity doesn’t exist because we’re like gooey humans that are not objective. And the scientific process as like well laid out as it is in practice is also not objective because the way that we even ask the questions is driven by like cultural and social context. Like the questions that we’re asking in and of themselves are biased.
Ross Kenyon: Man, I want to do a whole show just on that topic. I want to wrap my head around that. I feel like there’s probably a bunch of books out there that I should read. I understand the general postmodern criticism of this, but I’m very curious how one practices science in that kind of way. I guess you’ve given us some good hints on how to do it. I need to just learn more.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: I think there are some frameworks and scholarship around this, obviously. We’re not creating this from scratch, but... Just having some of the language and the tools and some of the scholarship around justice and equity is already really helpful as I think about climate solutions and the work that I do at Carbon 180. It’s like bringing that sort of equity and justice lens. It doesn’t mean that every single thing I do or we do as an organization passes the equity and justice sort of like litmus test, but that We’re bringing those two ideas, the foundation upon which we build our work.
Or at least the goal is for that to be the foundation. And we’re working towards that.
Christophe Jospe: Well, Jane, you’ve given us a lot to stew on. And to take us on a complete segue, we never even talked about leafcutter ants.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. You tease the audience with it. I know.
Christophe Jospe: I can’t tease the audience and then not talk about leafcutter ants. What do leafcutter ants have to do with carbon sequestration?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: They’re the most charismatic of ants. They’re so cute. Well, leafcutter ants make ginormous colonies underground. They go out and they forage, not forage, they harvest leaves from trees up to like a kilometer or two away from their nest. So they’re foraging pretty far and bringing this like fresh plant material underground. That plant material is organic matter. That is fed to their mutualist microbes that help break it down. And then it’s a very ancient form of farming because the ants don’t eat the plants. They eat the fruiting bodies that their fungal symbionts, these microbes they cultivate, the fruiting bodies that grow.
And so they’re doing the farming, they’re collecting the fruiting bodies and that’s what they eat. And essentially the plants are just the substrate. They’re like the fertilizer and the substrate upon which the fungal symbiont grows. So it’s an ancient form of farming and it’s a lot of carbon being brought underground and processed by microbes. Some of that carbon goes back up through the soil matrix and into the atmosphere. A lot of that carbon gets transformed into like different kinds of carbon molecules. Some of it washes away when it rains, and then some of it gets sequestered for a very long time.
And that’s why leafcutter ants are important for soil carbon.
Christophe Jospe: So what you’re saying is Nori should figure out how to incentivize ants to sequester more carbon as our next methodology.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: I think that would be a really smart move on your part. It is a completely untapped market. You’d be the first in that space.
Ross Kenyon: You can start in your kitchen, Christophe.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: If you can grow a colony of leafcutter ants in your kitchen, that would be very impressive.
Christophe Jospe: I think they need to be outside, right?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: They should be outside, but there is a lab at University of Texas that has an indoor lab colony that is very cool.
Christophe Jospe: Awesome. Well, Jane, this has been so much fun. I look forward to the next time I see you and you’ve given us so much to think about and conversations to pull on to have with you and others. And thanks for coming on the show.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah. Thank you, guys. I really appreciated the meandering ability just to say whatever I was thinking. It’s great. I can’t wait to listen to the rest of the Nori podcast, which I haven’t had a chance to listen to.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. And there is quite a lot there waiting for you.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Overwhelming, but I’m excited. I love podcasts.
Ross Kenyon: Great, us too. And Jane, if someone wanted to follow your work or the work of your colleagues at Carbon180, what is the best way for them to do so?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, thanks for asking. So you can follow us on Twitter at Carbon180, but you can also check out our website, carbon180.org. And we have a Medium page where we wax poetic about these issues of carbon removal in hopefully more coherent dialogue than I was able to muster on the podcast. And if you wanted to check out what I tweet about, it’s a lot about carbon and a lot about equity and justice in science. And I am at J underscore Zelikova on Twitter.
Christophe Jospe: And if you want to be the 50,000th women scientists to sign up to your group, where can they go?
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, we would welcome you. Please come to 500womenscientists. org. 500 is 500 and women scientists is written out and sign up. And you don’t have to be a woman scientist. We welcome all supporters.
Ross Kenyon: Great. That is good to know. All of those links are in the show notes. If you would like to participate in any of those communities, track Carbon 180, 500 Women Scientists, or Jane personally. Thank you again for being here, Jane.
Dr. Jane Zelikova: Yeah, thank you guys. This is awesome. Thanks for everything you’re doing.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up with Nori at nori.com where there is a newsletter. That’s nori.com slash subscribe. There’s podcast. There’s a whole bunch else. Or you can send us an email at podcast at nori.com.
We are also now on Patreon at patreon.com slash Nori Podcasts if you’d like more content, engagement, and community. And thank you so much for your support.
