With a problem as monumental as the climate crisis, we have a tendency toward proportionality bias. We often believe that the issue has a single cause and can only be solved with a few large-scale solutions.
But in the case of climate change, a diversity of solutions may be faster and more effective than putting all our eggs in a few big baskets.
And that’s why Todd Myers focuses on what individuals can do to solve climate change—while the politicians slug it out over broad policy measures.
Todd serves as Environmental Director at the Washington Policy Center. He is also the author of the new book, Time to Think Small: How Nimble Environmental Technologies Can Solve the Planet’s Biggest Problems.
On this episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Todd joins Ross to explore how individual efforts can fill in the gaps left behind by government policies and explain how climate change differs from pollution in the 1970’s.
Todd discusses the data collected by citizen science apps like iNaturalist or eBird and describes how we can use both moral suasion and financial incentives to promote climate solutions.
Listen in for Todd’s insight on striking the right balance between private sector and government climate initiatives and learn how a business in the carbon removal space might identify the right scale for its unique solution.
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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.
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Resources
Time to Think Small: How Nimble Environmental Technologies Can Solve the Planet’s Biggest Problems by Todd Myers
Todd Myers on Reversing Climate Change EP052
Puget Sound Salmon Recovery Council
Dr. Bryan Caplan on Reversing Climate Change S2EP2
‘The Problem of Social Cost’ by RH Coase
GridWatch: Using Cell Sensors to Detect Power Outages
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: 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. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon, I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the creative director here. Today I have with me Todd Myers, environmental director at the Washington Policy Center. He is also the author of Time to Think Small: How Nimble Environmental Technologies Can Solve the Planet’s Biggest Problems. Thanks for being here, Todd.
Todd Myers: Thanks for having me on. It’s good to talk with you again.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it has been several years since we have, and I’m happy to have you. Interesting book. A little bit of a contrarian take, I think. People are so focused on what the UN is doing, what the federal government is doing for policy, that we lose track of what individual consumers can actually do. And in some cases it’s disparaged — like one’s individual carbon footprint, that was an accomplished tactic of Big Oil to take responsibility off of their shoulders. And so this perspective has sort of fallen out of favor. It seems like you’re trying to rehabilitate it some. Is that correct?
Todd Myers: Sort of, but I also think that there’s new opportunities that didn’t exist even just 10 years ago. And so what’s interesting is that you say it’s a contrarian take, but I think actually it’s not a contrarian take when you actually look at what’s going on in the real world. Lots of people are doing really cool things at that small level that are making a difference on the ground, but they don’t get the attention. What gets the attention is the drama, the excitement of sort of the big stuff, right? The big meetings — while people are making really exciting progress on reducing the risk from climate change on the ground.
So while I think it is contrarian in sort of the media circles and environmental circles, I don’t think it’s contrarian, and here’s why not. I am generally on the center-right, but the foreword of my book was written by somebody who works for an organization called WILDLABS, which is funded by World Wildlife Fund. So there’s really a broad perspective, a broad agreement that these sorts of things can be meaningful — not just on climate change, but particularly on climate change, and on a lot of environmental issues. So I agree with you that these approaches don’t get the attention that they deserve, but that’s why I wrote the book, because I think the potential is enormous for us to do things while politicians slug it out.
Ross Kenyon: That was maybe the biggest revealing of my own bubble bias that I’ve had on the show. I’m like, everyone talks about it in this one way, and it’s nice to have a refresh — maybe that is not actually the gospel truth, and it’s nice to zoom back out from there. Why do you think that is such a conventional piece of wisdom that needs to be challenged? How has this become so ossified?
Todd Myers: I think one thing is what’s called proportionality bias. So proportionality bias says that big problems have big causes, big single causes often. People think — like, this is why people have conspiracy theories, right? It’s that, oh, this big thing, COVID, let’s say, you know, must be caused by one big thing, because it doesn’t seem rational that it’s a lot of little mistakes, or a lot of little things that lead up to a big event. In the same way, it also makes us think that big problems only have big solutions, that a lot of little things are not capable of aggregating into solving that big problem.
But actually, when you look around at environmental problems, the progress that we have made isn’t single big solutions. It is often lots of little incremental bits of progress. If you look at air pollution, if you look at water pollution, and if you look at energy — and that’s, I think, the clearest one, is the energy intensity of the economy. It is a constant downward trend. There are no big drops. It’s just bit by bit by bit. And that seems counterintuitive, that lots of small things can add up to big impacts. So I think that’s why we focus on big solutions.
The other thing is that there is a sense of crisis, right? You feel like time is running out, and if you feel like time is running out, you want to rush, you want to do it as fast as you can. And, you know, incremental evolutionary solutions don’t seem up to the pace of the problem. But again, a million little things are often more effective and often faster and more reliable than putting all of our eggs into a few baskets that we think are necessary. Because what we’ve seen is, if you don’t get the results you want on one or two big things, now you’re really in trouble. Now you’re really behind the curve. And so a diversity of solutions is often a better approach than a few big things.
Ross Kenyon: I wonder if part of it, too, is it’s just an easier story to tell. If you can point to the Apollo program or the Marshall Plan or some of these big national projects that we’ve undertaken, at least there’s a coherence to it and it’s very easy to wrap your head around it. Whereas, you know, thousands of incremental changes — how do they add up? Like, your book is a massive set of small stories, as it probably should be, but it’s harder to tell a simple version of it.
Todd Myers: I could tell you 10 different micro stories that all add up to something.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, nobody’s got time for that. Todd, isn’t there a Marshall Plan to be had here?
Todd Myers: Well, and I think the Apollo program kind of screwed up our mindset, because we think, oh, we’ll just do an Apollo moonshot. There’s actually a prize called the Earthshot Prize, which is right after the moonshot, designed to solve environmental problems, and they just came out with their winners. But if you look at the winners, what’s so interesting is they’re not moonshots. They are small local projects — projects going to be scaled up, no doubt, but they are small projects. And the one thing I remind people about using the Apollo go-to-the-Moon as a metaphor is, they chose to go to the Moon. They didn’t choose to go to Pluto, right? So they chose something that was difficult but achievable, rather than trying to do something that was completely impossible or extreme.
And too often I hear the Apollo example used as a justification to try to do things that are extremely unlikely, that are very high-risk, very low chance of success, and that is the wrong lesson that we should be learning from that. So I think it is always good to stretch, to push, to try to find new ways to innovate. But putting all your eggs in one basket and setting targets that are unreachable is not the way to get there. Try lots of different things, engage in innovation, and thanks to the ubiquity of technology, we now have more opportunity than ever to do those sorts of things. And that’s why I included so many examples in my book, because people are skeptical. They say, okay, Todd, that sounds nice in theory, but show me where it works. And I wanted to show in lots of ways it’s already working.
Ross Kenyon: I think part of it is also that people get enthralled by economies of scale. And I see this with single-payer health care debates, too, where they get so focused on the cost savings of increased bargaining power of the state versus medical providers, and they focus on those savings without focusing on what’s being lost. When you have like one enormous one-size-fits-all policy for an entire country, are you going to lose some of the things that make the health care — the parts of it that work — are those still going to work at that scale? I don’t see a lot of concern for that.
Todd Myers: Well, let me first say, I was enthralled once and I limped for a week. But yeah, you know, the nimbleness is really important, because the nature of the problems change, and of course nothing is ever static. All of these systems are dynamic. The environment is dynamic. Human society is dynamic. And so if you have government programs that are essentially static, their ability to address problems quickly and adapt is very low. Now, I say that as somebody who’s worked at a government agency. I worked at the Department of Natural Resources. I currently sit on the Puget Sound Salmon Recovery Council, trying to recover salmon. I don’t denigrate the good work that government can do where it’s appropriate, but it is not always appropriate.
And the other thing is that in the ’70s, when we turned to government for the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, turning to government for those things is entirely appropriate. The types of problems that we faced then were very well suited to those regulations, and what we saw was success. We see much cleaner air, much cleaner water today as a result, and we ought not dismiss that.
But we have more opportunities today, using technology, to engage individuals and small groups in ways that can make a difference in a way we just couldn’t 50 years ago. So it makes no sense, especially given the magnitude of the challenge that we have in climate change, not to engage all of those different opportunities and to maximize them. And even if you believe that government must lead, you still should say that technology and individual efforts should fill in the many, many gaps that are left behind by government. And I think that is something that everybody at all sides of the political spectrum can agree on.
Ross Kenyon: You tell the story in the book very well. I may be foreshortening here, but why were the pollution problems of the ’70s that were addressed by the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act — why were those policy successes, and how is what we’re facing now different?
Todd Myers: Yeah, so in the 1970s, with clean air and clean water, the primary problems that you faced were big smokestacks and big outfalls, right? Everybody thinks of the Cuyahoga River catching on fire. So government can target a limited number of identifiable sources of pollution. The same was true with sulfur dioxide and acid rain. And they could go to those and say, we need you to cut your pollution by this amount by this date, using a variety of different regulations and market forces and things like that. So very successful, because government can leverage its power to stop large sources of pollution in a way that individuals simply can’t. So it was really an appropriate application of government regulation.
And like I said, it was successful. But the problems that we face today are not the same. They’re not a few sources, they are not always identifiable, there are many, many distributed sources. You’re thinking of climate change, you’re thinking of everybody drives a car, uses electricity, heats their home. I mean, there’s so many sources of CO2 emissions.
And it’s not just climate change. It’s things like plastic pollution, right? Plastic pollution into the ocean, its impact on species — lots of little impacts on their habitat, right? Think of the monarch butterfly, where they rely on lots and lots of private land, and there’s no single impact on the monarch butterfly that is harming their habitat. It is loss of milkweed across a large area. So now you have a very different nature of a problem. It’s very distributed, and that is less suited to the types of solutions we had in the 1970s.
It’s not just me saying that. It’s also Bill Ruckelshaus, who was the first director of the Environmental Protection Agency, in a piece he wrote about a decade ago for the Wall Street Journal. He said very clearly that the types of solutions that we had in the 1970s are not suited to the problems we have today because of the distributed nature of the problem. The good news is we get access to distributed solutions by using technology to aggregate the efforts of lots and lots of individuals, lots of small organizations, to add up to those big environmental benefits and solve those problems in a way that is more suited to their nature — which is that there is no single point source.
Ross Kenyon: You have many examples in the book, too, of environmental nonprofits being technology developers now, of trying to engage with what you’d call citizen science, and now trying to make an app that serves it. It’s almost like mimicry, right? In a biological sense. You’re like, hey, this is a great birdwatching app, also using birds, and maybe you don’t even know about it or care, but hey, it’s doing good things. Is that an example of something like this? It was a nice little twist.
Todd Myers: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So there’s two along those lines. One is an app called iNaturalist. If people don’t have iNaturalist, they should get it. It is amazing. And if you are ever out hiking and you’re wondering what a plant is, what a bug is, whatever, you can literally just take a picture of it and it will use artificial intelligence to tell you what it is. And if it can’t identify it using AI, it will send it out to the community, and somebody will identify it for you based on what it looks like and where the location is. So many people have turned in their photos to this. They now have another app called Seek, where in real time you point your camera — you open the app, you point your camera at a plant — and in real time it will tell you what that is. It’s amazing.
But iNaturalist started not as a tool for scientists but as a tool for individuals who wanted to know more about the world around them and engage them, right? I love going out into the wilderness, but botany — I do not have the patience for botany. I cannot remember all of those various plants and the names. I don’t have to anymore. Now I can use iNaturalist and it connects me. But so many photos have been turned in that dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of scientific studies have now been created using that data. But it didn’t start as a scientific tool. It started as a consumer tool, as a tool for individuals to learn about the nature around them.
The other app is eBird. If people are birders, they’ve probably already heard of eBird, and then Merlin Bird ID. Both of those apps are from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The great thing about eBird is that it’s for birders, so that they can say what birds they see, where they saw them, keep their life list. But they now have so many points of data that the data are being used to understand the migratory patterns of birds and see how it changes over time, related to climate change, related to temperature changes and things like that.
But it’s also being used to identify critical pieces of habitat to protect migratory birds. So in California, they actually used eBird data to identify which parcels of rice paddies that rice farmers had could be used along the path of migratory bird routes. And they went to those farmers and offered to pay them to flood their fields in January and February to create what they call pop-up wetlands. It’s like Airbnb for birds. So when the birds came through, they had good habitat, and then they moved along, and the farmers benefited because they got paid. Birds benefited. So that’s the power of these tools. But the tools were first about helping users, and second, using the data that they put in for scientific and conservation purposes.
Ross Kenyon: One way of understanding that is that there’s a distributed network for finding data, creating data, but the decision-making that is resulting is still at this policy level. That sounds a bit more centralized. Is that correct?
Todd Myers: Both is true, right? I mean, I think especially in the case of citizen science and the examples I just gave, right, you’re aggregating data. You’re taking lots and lots of distributed data and aggregating it so that you can make a centralized decision, so that you can use it in one place to make either good policy decisions or take actions or things like that. But you’ll also see the opposite, which is that apps allow people to do individual things that are multiplied by lots of little actions that lead up to big things.
And I’ll give you an example that’s not in my book but is more recent, and related to energy. In California, when they had their energy crisis this summer — so much of our energy focus is on the supply side. Are we going to build more wind? Are we going to build more solar, or e-mobility, or batteries? Those sorts of things. But not enough of it is on the demand side. So when California was facing their blackouts this summer, they sent a text out to residential customers and said, look, we’re facing blackouts, please conserve where you can. Within 15 minutes demand had declined by 2,000 megawatts, which was equivalent to the entire amount of battery power that is being used in the state at that time.
So you think about how much we’ve spent on battery storage in California, and with one text you are able to replicate that just by people finding ways to conserve. There are lots of other ways to do that, which is smart thermostats, which use artificial intelligence to shift demand outside of peak hours so that you’re using electricity when it is not only lower cost but lower carbon intensity. And then I have in my home a thing called a Sense monitor, which is hooked up to my electric panel, which tells me exactly how I’m using electricity, where I should be conserving, where I’m wasting it, so that I can again reduce the amount of electricity I use.
My use of smart thermostats, my use of Sense, when somebody texts and says, you know, turn off your lights — all of those things are small. My turning off my lights doesn’t do much for the global grid. But if lots of people do it, now we’re to a point where we can avoid blackouts, as they did in California. So as you say, this works in both directions, right? In some cases it is aggregating data for a centralized purpose and a centralized decision, and in other cases it is distributing the powers of the individual, where people can take actions that add up to big environmental benefits.
Ross Kenyon: I like those examples, too, because one of them is moral suasion — the text saying, hey, please help, please be altruistic, please conserve your consumption or decrease it — and the other one, presumably you are also seeing the cost savings by not purchasing peak load power. And is it that you were seeing those savings? Which of those is more effective? When should which be used? How should we think about those?
Todd Myers: Well, they both are. There’s been a lot of talk about doing things on electricity bills where you say, you are using more than your neighbors and things like that. And what the research shows is that those work for a duration.
Ross Kenyon: Very, very shame-based.
Todd Myers: Oh yeah. Yes, and they are very shame-based, and they work for a period of time. But I actually in my book outline research that compared the two. And one was just moral suasion, just encouraging people to do the right thing, and there’s no doubt that that works. People spend money to buy electric vehicles or other things like that that they know the additional cost is going to be more than they are going to save on gasoline, but they do it because it’s a cool car and because they want to do something to reduce CO2 emissions.
But if you can add on top of that a financial incentive, then you do two things. First, what the research shows is that it lasts longer, that the impact on people remains, that they don’t sort of give up, that they continue to find ways to reduce energy and save money. So it is more permanent. Second, you start to engage people who don’t really care about climate change, or think it’s exaggerated, or whatever, right? If you tell somebody who thinks climate change is a hoax that they can save money, they’ll save the money. And so that becomes a way to broaden the circle of people who will take action to reduce environmental impact. When you get to the point where people are doing good things for the environment either without knowing or caring, you’re really starting to make progress.
Our political solutions rely on people agreeing, a majority of people agreeing that we must take action. But as we see, that changes, right? Republicans just took control of Congress. So what is going to happen for the next two years? Anything meaningful? Probably not. So if your strategy to help the environment is contingent on you winning every election, you are in big trouble. If your strategies for helping the environment engage people who don’t agree with you politically but benefit personally from taking actions for the environment, now that’s truly sustainable in the truest sense of the word, in that you can sustain it over long periods of time.
Ross Kenyon: Why does that feel so icky to so many people? I think it could be an American missionary relic, that we want to convert people, that we want to change their hearts and minds rather than paying them to care about something. I think it feels inappropriate to the — the example I’ve often used on the show has been, if a parent said, I’ll give you $20 to respect your father, you would say this is a category error, you should not be paying for this thing, it’s wrong for intrinsic reasons. And I think a lot of people — maybe that’s why it feels icky. Is there more that we’re missing? How important should that ickiness really be here?
Todd Myers: I understand that, but I also think that one of the problems that we face is that in politics, people across the political spectrum — and this I think is becoming worse — people’s politics are wrapped up in their identity. They see themselves as environmental activists, or on the right as patriots or things like that. And if you say to them, the things you are doing are not effective, or you need to engage people who are not patriots or who don’t care about the environment, it seems like an attack on your identity. Because what you’re now saying is that it’s not that important that you care about the environment to do good things. And people want to feel like, when I do something for the environment, I’m doing something good.
I understand that, right? I’ve been working on this for 22 years. I care very much about helping the environment. But I think if our personal identity gets too wrapped up in what environmental policies we support, we are missing gigantic opportunities to help the environment in so many different areas. And so that’s what I would encourage people: if you promote a policy and it feels really good to promote it, you might want to think about whether you are too personally invested in that policy, and whether it is about making you feel good about helping the planet.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. What a deflating idea.
Todd Myers: Well, I know it shouldn’t be deflating, it should be freeing, right? I mean, that’s the thing — I think we put these constraints on ourselves about what is allowable. And I think that when you get rid of those constraints, you can start to see all sorts of opportunities. Like I said, that’s one of the reasons — I think I’m on the center-right, and my book is full of people who are on the left who are doing cool things. And if I had fixated on the fact that these people disagree with me on some very fundamental issues that I think are important, I would have had a hard time writing this book and recognizing how cool this stuff is. So it’s not easy, I admit that, but I think it can be liberating. And then once you start to look around a little bit, you see a lot of cool stuff that you might not have noticed before.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I like this idea. I’m fairly sympathetic to it. There are cases where it makes me feel — I got this example from Bryan Caplan, an alum of the show, about how we should consider paying dictators to step down and have immunity. You’ll go to Kim Jong Un and say, like, what’s it going to take? You can live out your life in Switzerland, your family will be fine, but North Korea turns into a democracy. That would probably be a pretty great deal and would eliminate an enormous amount of suffering.
And there is some amount of money that it is probably worth pursuing, but I think we would all feel pretty terrible about it. Here you go, Kim Jong Un, here’s a billion dollars for being a horrible dictator. Yeah, that doesn’t feel great. But I think you do make a good point: if the end result is that millions of people’s lives are better and are liberated, it might be worth it.
Todd Myers: I try not to think — you know, I hope that telling people that they can save money on energy isn’t like paying Kim Jong Un. That’s not literally the exact same thing. But yeah, I think it sort of stretches the bounds of the analogy, that sometimes to be most effective you have to work with people who you might not agree with and actually think are doing things for the wrong reasons.
Ross Kenyon: There are constant fights about those, and if you haven’t noticed this before in your listening, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. And another place I’ve seen this a lot is about paying for plasma and donating blood, and whether or not paying people to donate crowds out the altruists who do it just because — and how big are the magnitudes here. And even if it doesn’t matter for those, like, instrumental reasons, is it still wrong to be paying for bodily tissue in this way?
And I think I would support the idea that: does this get the job done? Does it help the people? I feel like symbols are less valuable than people, and getting — fixing climate change, or making sure someone who needs regular blood or fluids has them. I think, right? If the alternative is the problem doesn’t get solved, it shouldn’t matter that there’s some sort of semiotic issue lingering. Do you agree with that in general, or no?
Todd Myers: Let me give you an analogy that goes back to one of the things we discussed, which is eBird. So we talked about eBird, and that the purpose of the birdwatching app was to reward individuals — to give them an app that they could keep their life list on, so that they had something of value, right? So putting data into eBird helped them independent of whether it was used for science or anything like that. It helped them, but then you get all these scientific data.
But then also, going back to your moral suasion, they also talk about how the data are used and encourage people to do it to promote science, and people certainly do that. And then they also do gamification, which is — they have roadside bias, which is where people are seeing birds in areas that are easy to get to, but sometimes you want data in the areas that are not so easy to get to, so that you know what’s going on. And they would do gamification where they would say, okay, if you can identify birds in these areas you will get a certain amount of points, and if you get points then we’ll give you a hat or things like that. And then, you know, you’re on the leaderboard. So now you engage that sort of personal competitive spirit and things like that.
And that sense — again, the sense that you and I are talking about, which is that I’m doing a good thing, that I am helping science and research and filling in these gaps — and even if I don’t get a hat, if I’m just at the top of the leaderboard or, you know, among the top in my region, those things are important. So I’m not trying to just take a green-eyeshade view of the environment where you have sort of a ledger of one side and the other about, okay, what are we willing to pay there?
I definitely want to engage people like you and I who at a fundamental level care about the environment and are willing to spend our own money and do things to help the environment rather than benefit from it. But if we can add other people who are more interested in saving money than reducing CO2 — now that starts to build on itself, it multiplies our efforts. So I think that’s the power, again getting back to the power of the diversity of these tools: that it engages both of those things and doesn’t have to choose one or the other.
Ross Kenyon: We used to talk about this all the time, especially because Nori, my company, was — we started working with farmers engaging in regenerative agricultural practices, and many of them did switch for practical purposes. There are lower capital costs, less fuel needed, different kinds of equipment needed, and this could result in cost savings for them if done appropriately. And we’ve seen that this was a great way to engage people who are traditionally from a more right-of-center background, who may not be as keen on climate change, to actually do something that would benefit them and the rest of us at the same time, and also not require finger-wagging. You know, carrots, not sticks. And this is a way to engage people. I think maybe that’s a good generalization. Are there any stick examples, even in your book? I feel like most of them are carrots. Am I right?
Todd Myers: Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing is that technology can make the sticks stickier. It’s funny how that works, but I’ve got to get to my point, which is, in the case of climate change, one of the things that we constantly focus on is the right — you’re going to tax CO2, putting the right price on CO2 to get the reaction that you want, so that people say, we have to put it at $50 a metric ton and then people will reduce this amount.
The challenge to that, though, is that you want people to be able to recognize the price signal and respond to it. When gas goes up 10 cents a gallon, everybody in the world knows it, because it is on every street corner. If your price per kilowatt-hour went up by 10%, people might not realize it, because they don’t — it’s hard to discern from your monthly bill. It’s very difficult.
So the lack of information transparency is a barrier to using price signals in some cases. But there is, even independent of a carbon price, there is a price signal on energy: it costs you to use energy. And the more transparent you can make that price, the more that you can get a response from people to those prices. So what you do is you increase the elasticity of demand by making people see those prices more clearly. If you can do for electricity, and for, you know, environmental impact, what we’ve done for gas prices, you don’t need to raise carbon prices to $200 a metric ton to, you know, beat people really hard with a stick. You can have a smaller carbon price and it will be more impactful. It will seem like a bigger stick because it’s more transparent.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, I’ve never had it framed in terms of elasticity before. I also — I look at my energy bill, it kind of comes out like every two months, I think I get it, and I have no way of knowing like which days. Yeah, the transparency is not present. I think I’m like reasonably well educated and involved in these things, and I still find it hard to know. So there’s something there for just simply giving people information, helping them make those decisions.
Todd Myers: Or in the case of smart thermostats, using artificial intelligence, which can monitor prices for you, and monitor carbon intensity if you choose to do that. It does it for you, so you don’t have to monitor it. But on the other hand, we are now to a point where technology is such that we can have instantaneous responses to things. So for instance, in the UK there is a utility called Octopus Energy, and they have a program called their Fan Club. And the Fan Club is for communities that are near a wind turbine that is owned by Octopus Energy, and when the wind turbine is running it will tell you, and if you use electricity then your prices go down. And if there is a particularly high level of wind and a lot of wind energy, prices go down even further.
So think about that, how instantaneous that is. We go from getting a bill once every two months, and in a case where you sort of try to figure it out, to now being able to know what your prices per kilowatt-hour are instantaneously because a wind turbine is generating excess electricity. That’s where we are right now, and we have only just begun to [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: I like those two options, and I think in the medium to long term I think the AI one’s going to be more powerful, primarily because I just — I have a million things to think about all day long. Do I have the cognition to spare for eking out like small little gains in my kilowatt-hours? I think I’d rather that be automated. I’m busy, damn it. [unclear]
Todd Myers: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So I mentioned that I have this thing in my electrical box called the Sense monitor, which connects to the wires into my house, and it detects the amount of electricity coming into my house a million times a second.
Ross Kenyon: Oh my.
Todd Myers: So that it can use artificial intelligence to identify the unique electrical signals of each appliance in my house. So it will look at it and say, oh, I know what that is, that’s a light bulb. Oh, I know what that is, that’s your dryer. That’s your washing machine. Whatever it is. And then it will tell you, okay, here’s how much electricity you’re using right now because your dryer is on, and over the last week here’s what you’ve been using.
So this week it’s been cold where I live, and I got a notification from Sense on my phone that said, you have just reached your peak electricity demand for the last, however many months — which doesn’t surprise me, because it’s been cold where I live. But it tells me that. So now I’m like, okay, I need to think about, is there a way that I can, you know, adjust my thermostat or do something to reduce that? Or is it just really cold outside and that’s just the way it is? But again, I don’t have to monitor it every second. It does it for me, and then gives me a little notification that says, hey, you’re using an awful lot of electricity, you may want to think about it.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm, well, while I have you, Todd, I’d love to get some free business advice for the carbon removal community, because I think this is a legacy, I think, of just companies that have done amazingly well in various tech boom times. Everyone wants to be a unicorn and then some. Everyone wants to be the Google of carbon removal, to be synonymous with it, to be an enormous company, the marketplace that moves lots and lots of units. I mean, Nori is susceptible to this too — that’s part of our vision. Are we wrong to be thinking in this commodity-scale way? I feel like that can do a lot of good. Or how might you contextualize it, too, to take the best of your learnings from this book?
Todd Myers: So let’s take two scenarios. Scenario number one, which is that you continue to do the work that you’re doing at about the scale that you’re doing it. Is that meaningless? Absolutely not, right? You are making a real impact. You are helping some farmers earn some revenue that they wouldn’t have otherwise. You are helping companies and other folks. You just did an amazing deal that is going to help you become even bigger. But if you stay basically the same size, you are making a real impact. And if there are a thousand other Noris out there, the combination of what you’re doing and what they’re doing is going to be helpful, and others will learn from you and improve upon it. You will see them as competitors, but the world will see that as progress, because they will get better thanks to you, and the other way around.
So that’s one scenario. So great, you’re doing that. It may not be all that you would wish for, but you have made the world a better place. Now let’s say that the combination of your accounting systems, your technology for sequestering carbon, all of those things can be universally applied, and you take off, and now you become really big. Three years from now you won’t return my calls. Well, that’s fantastic too. But it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Obviously you want to make the biggest impact you can where applicable. But I just think that the mindset that everything has to scale or it’s not very meaningful is not a useful mindset.
A lot of environmental problems are localized. A lot of environmental opportunities are small, but they are still meaningful in their own way. And the beauty of technology is the things that we couldn’t do before, because the overhead costs of doing those small things were so high — it wasn’t worthwhile to do those small things. Now the overhead costs are extremely low thanks to technology, and so doing small things now makes sense, because the costs are so low and the benefits, albeit small, are still much larger than the costs. Which changes that whole cost analysis.
So I’ve known you guys for a while. I wish you all the best. I think that the new deals that you’ve done have put you on a really cool path, but it’s taken you a while to get here. And if you had never done that, you still would have played a very productive role in being a part of the community that is fighting CO2 emissions.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks for the kind words. I’m trying to read you back to yourself a little bit. It sounds like there’s a version of what you’re saying that small is beautiful, and that’s like a Wendell Berry kind of vision, and that’s not what I hear you saying. It sounds more like subsidiarity, where things should grow to the scale at which they can be addressed and no bigger. And the focus has been bifurcated between those, right? It’s like huge scale, or like super local and do everything local, and you’re saying it just needs to fit the problem appropriately. Is that right?
Todd Myers: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. But then the second thing is that we now have more opportunities to find that right scale than we did before, because a lot of things that were worth addressing, worth taking on, we just didn’t have the ability to do that because the cost of addressing them didn’t scale well, right? It was either a bunch of people volunteer to go and help your park, or it was, we need a government program that addresses this. And the in-between part was really hard, and now the in-between part is not that hard. It’s much easier. And there are lots of cool things that are able to fulfill that more broad spectrum of actions.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, you have my permission to talk about Ronald Coase now. You can — it’s all transaction costs, right? All the way down.
Todd Myers: Well, and that’s it. So we talked about the fact that I give a lot of examples. The reason why I give a lot of examples in my book is because when I talk about theory, people say, okay, Todd, that’s really cool, but show me where it works. And so — I actually thought it was funny, one of the earliest reviews of my book was that you will be overwhelmed with information, which I thought was kind of a funny critique. But I did that on purpose, because the one thing I didn’t want people to say was, sounds good in theory but not in practice. But I do try to say, look, there are theoretical reasons why these things are happening, why we are seeing these emerge, and one of them is that technology reduces transaction costs. It reduces the cost of coordination and information.
And that is Ronald Coase, as you mentioned, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on transaction costs — what it takes people to collaborate, why they choose to collaborate in a company, why they choose to outsource, how you allocate. One of his famous papers is on how you allocate the costs of environmental harm. If you have a factory that has smoke that’s impacting the whole community, how do you allocate those costs? We now can solve those types of problems because of information technology in a way that we just couldn’t a long time ago.
One of my favorite examples of just how low transaction costs are is, if I said, okay, take a room of 100 people and say, okay, I’m going to buy you all pizza, but you have to tell me exactly what kind of pizza you want and exactly how much you’re going to eat, and you have to come up with that — all 100 of you have to come up with what kind of pizzas I should buy. People will say, okay, that’s fine, we can do it, it’ll take a while. I can do it. I say, okay, now you have 30 seconds to do it. There’s no chance, right? I mean, you can’t even get five people to agree on what pizza they want in 30 seconds.
But I have an app that says, okay, how many pieces of pizza do you want? What toppings do you want? You can put it in in 10 seconds, and now within 30 seconds I can have an entire pizza order for a room of 100 people with exactly what they want. It’s sort of a silly example, but it is an everyday example of how reducing transaction costs can solve problems that were previously very difficult and make them very simple — even a very straightforward problem, which is just coordinating what everybody wants. The fact that you can do it so much more rapidly with information technology makes all the difference.
Ross Kenyon: Do you have a sense of what the appropriate relationship should be with the private sector and government? That’s probably a question that’s so big that it’s almost antithetical from the ethos in which you wrote this book. Is that way too general a question? Should we even be talking like that?
Todd Myers: I think it varies. What you see is, some of the best innovations in my book and around the world are occurring in places where government action is simply not an option. You know, I tell a story of one city — I think it’s the capital of Ghana, if I remember it correctly — where they were having power outages regularly, and the hardest thing was to figure out what was causing the power outage. People think about this in the United States: utilities, up until fairly recently, in the last decade or so, the way that they knew that they had a power outage was people would call. They couldn’t detect it. Now, with smart meters, they can do that, but until very recently people calling was the way.
So if you’re in Ghana or something like that, detecting power outages is very difficult, especially if they’re very frequent. So a group at Cal Berkeley created an app, and so if your phone was charging and was connected to Wi-Fi and suddenly lost the charge and suddenly lost the Wi-Fi, but it wasn’t moving, right — so that you can unplug it and take it with you — it would send a signal, a ping, to the utility to tell them, hey, I think the power’s out. And if that utility all of a sudden got 20 pings in one area, they would go, okay, power’s out in that area. Right? All it took was an app. It didn’t take installing smart meters and things like that. Super low cost, very simple application of technology, whereas in the United States we were spending literally billions of dollars to install smart meters.
So in some cases the best and most clever solutions are where government options aren’t even available, where the only thing you have is to find clever ways to apply the technology. So to your question about what is the proper balance between private and government — it depends. But the beauty of these small technologies is that they are so adaptable and the solutions are so diverse, that no matter what level — whether you have a very high level of government engagement, like you do in the West on environmental issues, or where you have a very low level of government engagement on environmental issues in developing countries — there are solutions that can address those problems, and there are lots of really cool examples.
Ross Kenyon: Are there places that you see now, even in the United States, where government action has crowded out what might have emerged otherwise, and it may in fact be better?
Todd Myers: How long have you got? I think the easiest is electricity. And a lot of the interesting things that utilities are doing across the country to incentivize people to use technology and to have options to buy electricity that is lower carbon and things like that aren’t available in Washington State because of the way our utilities are structured. Our utility tariffs are structured, and our utilities are structured, in a way that was basically set in the late 1800s.
And in other parts of the country — and I just gave an example in the UK — around the world there are lots of really innovative things that are engaging people, both people who care about the environment and people who are looking to save money to reduce their carbon emissions. In a lot of these cases we simply don’t have those options here in Washington State — not just Washington State, other states as well — because of the way our utilities are structured.
So I tell a story in my book about one organization that was trying to provide renewable energy, getting people to invest in renewable energy and then having them benefit from it. And they said that the biggest problem they had was trying to get the regulatory approval for what they were doing. When they started it, they were on the leading edge, and actually I think Wired magazine called them one of the most innovative companies in the sector. And a year later they were gone, because of the regulatory barriers. So there are lots of cool ideas that people have, technology that is available, that are being slowed down because they are at odds with our current regulatory system.
Ross Kenyon: Those stories are really hard for people to understand, because they’re so often counterfactual. It’s like the thing that would have existed never emerged because it couldn’t, and then people don’t see that, and then they just assume that it never existed in the first place. Is that happening? Is that one of the reasons why there isn’t a larger upswell against regulation that may be stifling innovation?
Todd Myers: I think it’s also theoretical, right? What you’re telling people, to your counterfactual point, is: this could happen. Well, it’s sort of intangible, and it’s like you’re facing something that is very tangible, which is the risk from climate change, and saying, trust me, I have this very intangible solution. That’s a hard sell sometimes, so I get that. So what I ask people to do is not to put all their eggs in one basket, or, you know, just rely on hope, but to say, let’s just open the space. Let’s create these opportunities. Let’s remove barriers so that if these things are out there to emerge, they will. Let’s let them.
That doesn’t mean tearing down everything else. That doesn’t mean that I’m an anarchist and that we ought to get rid of all government. It just simply means that we make sure that there are opportunities for these new innovations to solve these problems in ways that we’re not thinking about right now. So it doesn’t have to be an either/or, but we do need to take a good look at ways that we are not being accommodating to the innovation which has so much opportunity and so much promise to address climate change and other issues.
Ross Kenyon: If you’re listening and you’d like some examples of where that might be taking place, you can pick up a copy of Time to Think Small: How Nimble Environmental Technologies Can Solve the Planet’s Biggest Problems by Todd Myers. Thanks for being here, Todd.
Todd Myers: Thank you very much. It’s always nice to chat with you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it was very fun. Thanks so much for listening. If you like what we do here, please give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Tell a friend. And hey, thanks so much for listening to the show today. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
