In the fight against climate change, many are working to achieve net zero by 2050. And achieving net zero means leveraging quite a lot of emissions reduction, management, and carbon removal.
But Dr. Holly Jean Buck contends that we should focus less on managing the byproduct and more on phasing out fossil fuels entirely by the end of the century.
Dr. Buck is Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo and author of the new book, Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, she joins Ross to differentiate net zero from full zero and share her vision of a fully decarbonized, post-extractivist society.
Dr. Buck discusses what we can do to overcome the political resistance to renewables and describes how critical theory concepts like ‘petromelancholia’ can help us understand the challenges associated with the energy transition. Listen in for insight around the government’s role in phasing out fossil fuels and learn how we can use net zero as a starting point to facilitate the fair transition to a bioeconomy.
Key Takeaways
[1:49] What inspired Dr. Buck to write Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough
[3:17] Why we need to focus less on managing emissions and more on phasing out fossil fuels altogether
[4:06] What differentiates full zero from net zero and Dr. Buck’s argument for working toward full zero
[8:41] What we can do to overcome the political resistance to renewables
[10:12] Why nuclear energy might have fewer political repercussions than large-scale renewables
[12:31] How Dr. Buck thinks about achieving net zero through degrowth
[14:26] Dr. Buck’s take on immersive reality replacement
[17:43] Why Dr. Buck shifted away from using the term ‘managed decline’ to describe the energy transition
[20:55] The concepts of petromelancholia and petro-masculinity
[22:21] Dr. Buck’s insight on how fossil fuel jobs and benefits are gendered
[23:33] How social analysis and critical theory help us understand the challenges associated with the energy transition
[25:30] How a nation’s government impacts its policy around phasing out fossil fuels
[29:05] Why Dr. Buck advocates for big emitters like the US to be more ambitious so that less-developed nations can emit longer
[31:59] What full decarbonization to true zero by 2100 might look like
[33:12] Dr. Buck’s vision of a post-extractivist society
[34:58] Why the petrochemical industry was not inevitable and how we can make the shift to a bioeconomy
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Dr. Holly Jean Buck on Reversing Climate Change S2 Bonus
Dr. Holly Jean Buck on Reversing Climate Change EP103
After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration by Holly Jean Buck
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori’s Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have back with me, I believe for the third time, Dr. Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo, author of Ending Fossil Fuels, Why Net Zero is Not Enough, and a few other books. And most importantly, I think of your entire career, Holly, is the co-host of Carbon Removal Newsroom. I love that show. If you’re not listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, it’s the other show that my company Nori produces.
It’s hosted by Radhika Mulgavkar, who’s Nori’s head of supply and methodology. Holly is one of the regular anchors on the show. Although you’re about to go on break or I guess when we’re recording this now, you’ve just left the show for at least a hiatus. What are we going to do, Holly? Give it as a sabbatical.
Holly Jean Buck: Maybe I’ll come back. Yeah, but there’s great people on it regularly.
Ross Kenyon: Sometimes this show, Reversing Climate Change, gets a little bit loopier. I’m looking for stranger connections to climate. Some of my colleagues might refer to it as indulgent. No, just kidding. No one’s ever said that to my face that I know of, but I can characterize it as such. Carbon Removal Newsroom, though, is really tightly focused actually on carbon removal news and tracking that, which is why we’re glad to have you on that because I think you keep your finger pretty close on the pulse of carbon removal overall.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, well, what I like about that show, too, is they’ll go into some of the scientific literature, like what people need to know about it. It’s pretty great.
Ross Kenyon: I actually find it genuinely instructive for my own purposes, even though I like being involved in production of it, mostly because it’s a show that I am involved in making because I need it to be made so I can continue learning. Yeah. It’s like I am the audience of that show more than anything else. I want to talk about this book. It’s great. Your other book, After Geoengineering, we did a show on. If you haven’t listened to that, it’s definitely worth going back and listening to and reading as well. This new one, Ending Fossil Fuels, Why Net Zero is Not Enough.
Of all the books you could write, I know you’re a busy person. Why did you write this one?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, it’s just shocking that everybody pretty much knows that we need to phase out fossil fuels and you would think there would be 20 books on this topic and myriad research programs around the world figuring out the nuances of how we do it. And so it’s very weird that I wrote this book, actually. Why were there not already a whole bunch of books by people smarter than me and better versed in economics or history or whatever? But there’s just kind of been this gap. We’re fixated on net zero. We’re fixated on Cutting emissions, we’ve defined mitigation in terms of reducing emissions.
We haven’t been focusing on production. So at first, the press, Verso asked me to write kind of a short book on net zero. And then it became a book about phase out as well.
Ross Kenyon: You have a section in the book that analyzes the discursive space of fossil fuels, and it’s all about managing the byproduct, the emissions, but very little of it talks about actually the production of energy in that first step. Is that an accurate characterization of your observation?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, it’s such a trick. And I first noticed this when I was at a breakthrough dialogue talking to somebody from a fossil fuel company, and their talking point was like, It’s all about what happens after combustion. And that’s where we need to be focusing. And I was like, okay, wait a minute. What is this? What’s going on? But yeah, I think that we’ve all kind of fallen into that trap to some degree that’s been set for us by this industry.
Ross Kenyon: What even is net zero? I can understand why Some people don’t trust this at all since it has this wonkish, abstract, and weirdly conditional quality to it. You have a quote in your book that says, net zero in a sense is boring. That’s in fact part of why it has had such a robust career. Why not zero? What is net zero? How does it work? Assume someone knows nothing.
Holly Jean Buck: So net zero means... Balancing any remaining or residual emissions with negative emissions, aka carbon removals. And so why are we talking about that instead of full zero? I think part of it is the temporalities. We know we need to zero out emissions quicker than we actually can, given the state of our technology and some of the systems that are hard to change. So We know we need to be at net zero by mid-century to keep to kind of a 1. 5 degree Celsius temperature target. Already, this is getting a bit mathy, but let’s keep going with it.
So we need to be at net zero. Yet, in particular, agriculture is probably the hardest sector to get all the way to zero. We just have other greenhouse gas emissions, nitrous oxides, methane. And agriculture is something that obviously we need to live. But also industry to some extent, also aviation and shipping. There’s just some sectors that are hard to decarbonize all the way right now. And I actually think that we could decarbonize these to a much greater degree by 2100. But we’re talking about mid-century. So that’s how the idea of net zero came about.
Like, well... We can have some small amount of continued emissions. We can compensate those with carbon removals.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t have a prima facie objection to that. It seems like if it actually worked, it would be advantageous to not give up entirely. In fact, a good chunk of this book, one thing I like about your writing in general is this use of imagined futures or thought experiments where you almost have a fictional element to imagining what this world will look like. And you contrast a couple future possibilities, like 100%. I think that.
Holly Jean Buck: Long term, like end of century, next century. I think there’s an argument that it would be to just because, you know, to end extraction because of associated pollution and harms that come along with extraction. But just from a basic sustainability standpoint, you know, having closed looped systems and all that. So I think there’s reasons to argue for a full zero problem. Later on, especially once some of the technologies that we will need to get there are more mature, like potentially green hydrogen, like different ways of decarbonizing agriculture. But I mean, in terms of talking about these trade-offs right now or in the next few decades, I think that we’re not well equipped to debate them right now.
There’s definitely kind of a purity stance that a lot of people take. That are like, we need to decarbonize as much as possible. And it’s challenging because that last 10 or 20% is also the most expensive. So if you went out and asked people, do you want an 80% clean system and more money to build new schools or infrastructure or something versus spending more money to get that 100%, It’s not clear to me that, you know, that would be the majority sentiment among the public, but we’re not even having that conversation because all of this is way too obscure and we haven’t put these scenarios into formats where people can debate them.
Ross Kenyon: The politics of renewables are quite interesting too, in that you document A lot of resistance to them, especially with just how much landscapes will be altered by wind turbines and how much land or sea space, visible sea space will be required to host them or having these enormous solar plants. I drove from LA to Las Vegas last year and they have one of the concentrated solar arrays out there. It is cool. It reminded me a little bit of like a Scary Tesla coil thing. I wondered if they pointed at me and bake me in a second.
So it has a little bit of an ominous quality to it, but it’s cool. I wouldn’t be totally opposed to more of those existing in the desert, but I guess it depends on the scale. If it was like that entire road was just that, I could see why people would not like it so much.
Holly Jean Buck: You know, the point I’m making there is not that we shouldn’t plan on more renewables. We need to, but just that If we face resistance with this pretty small scale relative to what we’re going to need, that’s a signal that we need to be having a dialogue with communities about the energy transition so that people understand the scope of it and that we can work with people to get to the point where they see benefits for them in hosting this infrastructure instead of just kind of dismissing this as an aesthetic concern.
Ross Kenyon: I had such strong reactions to this part, especially because it just points right to nuclear for me. Like you could sidestep all of this with a very small footprint. It’s less dangerous than most people think. Although last time I said this, I got a correction sent in being like, you’re totally wrong on nuclear. It’s way worse than you think. And it’s unfair to expect future generations to be saddled with having to manage your waste that you’re creating right now. It’s like, okay, interesting. So I’m expecting another note, but I was thinking strongly about nuclear being able to sidestep a lot of these fights, but then also the politics around nuclear energy also have a lot of resonance with this too, right?
Like people don’t want to live in Springfield basically for the most part.
Holly Jean Buck: I don’t know if that’s true. I mean, it might be true, but I would like to see empirical data on that because sometimes these can be really good jobs. In terms of nuclear. And I think that, you know, we can debate what’s fair or not, but there’s no perfect situation anymore. We’re past that point. And so that’s what I think is hard to grapple with. Like, do you want nuclear? Do you want carbon capture and storage? Do you want solar geoengineering? Like, which of these things? Because, like, there’s a bad thing no matter what.
Like, all the perfectly good situation... From a mainstream environmentalist standpoint, it’s just not with us anymore. I think nuclear is the best option, frankly.
Ross Kenyon: It’s wild to think that nuclear energy might have less political repercussions than large-scale renewables. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone point that in my face nearly so hard, but do you think that’s actually true? Or is this another empirical thing?
Holly Jean Buck: It depends if we can better articulate the benefits. A lot of times people... Who live next to a giant solar installation, it’s not like their energy bill is necessarily getting cheaper. You know, sometimes they have to live with the stuff and the benefits aren’t going to them. So then other times there are benefits, community benefits. I mean, it’s very different depending on where you go, but there’s just more work to be done there.
Ross Kenyon: One other alternative that we’ve neglected so far is degrowth. We could also just give up on having industrial civilization and go back to agrarian living. That doesn’t sound like something that you’re that interested in, although I think you’re homesteading a little bit where you are now.
Holly Jean Buck: I’ve also just spent the past few days reading every long-term strategy submitted to the UNFCCC. So there’s not that many of them. There’s like 50 of them. But I mean, there’s So countries are supposed to say what their long-term plan is for reaching net zero, say, if they have a net zero target. And it was striking to look at the one from Ukraine because they had a huge drop in emissions since they’ve been tracking this in the 80s and 90s. And they say in their strategy, well, we’ve had this huge drop, but it’s because of our reduced quality of life and our Economic contraction and all these things and just really makes you think about, you know, what sort of degrowth is wanted.
I think that obviously there are some things that need to be degrown and other things that need to be grown and talking about it in a broad brush sense is not really helpful politically or just in general, in my view.
Ross Kenyon: They oftentimes try to sidestep this by saying that quality of life is just a GDP measurement and throughput of the system. And they reject the premise. You can buy that or not, but it is a controversial stance, no matter how you slice it, I think.
Holly Jean Buck: Well, sure. Maybe we’ll just live in a metaverse powered by low carbon energy and we’ll have a great quality of life because all the things we need will be virtual. And all our consumption will be virtual.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think I saw a movie about that once. I’m weirded out by that. We can take a little tangent. How do you feel about all this immersive reality replacement?
Holly Jean Buck: I think it’s pretty absurd. I’m hoping it’s just a moment, this weird artifact. But yeah, I think people need to be in the real world and care about it and want to help it out.
Ross Kenyon: I feel that way too, but it reminds me how on a previous show I was talking about how I had some artsy friends who took me to a Cy Twombly art show once upon a time. And it really made me mad because it was like huge canvases and squiggles and crayons and stuff. This is idiotic. I hate this. And being the guy who’s like, I don’t like modern art is very much a thing. And it’s not a fun position to find yourself in. You feel like a Philistine. You feel like it’s cool to not like it.
And then like the metaverse makes me feel this way too, where my immediate reaction is very much no, the physical world and real relationships in person and being attached to specific places and experiences are genuinely important in a way that I don’t think And it puts me in that position of being the modern art skeptic. This is like not a fun skeptic position to be in. Is this just a contrarian, stick in the mud, don’t want to learn about a new thing? Or is this genuine? It’s hard to analyze myself.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think, you know, physical reality is where it’s at. I think we live in bodies, you know.
Ross Kenyon: The desire to not live in a body, this goes back to Paul King’s North Territory and this desire to softwareize everything and leave the limitations of having a body that breaks down and is inconvenient and have this perfect, unadulterated experience where it’s pure pleasure that’s digitally synthesized for you with none of the things that make life annoying.
Holly Jean Buck: Maybe it’s like the low-carbon virtuous thing of the future.
Ross Kenyon: This is what people get. There’s a meme of Greta Thunberg holding a gun at the screen. It says, eat the bugs. And that’s what people associate where it’s like, oh, the future, we eat bugs. And rather than doing anything in person, you do it all virtually because there’s no carbon. It isn’t that virtuous, but it all sucks. Politically, I think people are going to start to wake up to that where it’s like, We don’t get to hang with people. We don’t get to fly to see our families. We have to eat crickets all the time because it’s low carbon.
Same thing with the progressive aesthetic obsession with buses and public transit. The idea of everyone riding buses is not some beautiful vision of the future. It’s sad. I don’t want to be on the bus. That’s the thing that’s supposed to inspire me. So, okay, this is me ranting about left-wing aesthetics. I think some of those things are frankly failures.
Holly Jean Buck: It depends on who’s on the bus.
Ross Kenyon: You’re someone who’s on the bus?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I’m just saying, if the bus is going to have a creepy guy that’s going to stare at you, then no, you don’t want to be on the bus. But what if it’s friendly people and you get to read a book and you don’t have to worry about the traffic? It can be utopian. I’m just saying.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and I’ve certainly had, okay, I’ve had train and bus experiences that were genuinely pleasant, and I’ve taken a lot of them. I’ve also had some that were frankly terrifying, both here in Seattle and inner city. So in some ways, I prefer the private car experience, but... I need to take a deep breath. Sorry, Holly. I just felt like I was in the therapist chair. I’m like, let me tell you something right now. So you wrote a book. Let’s get back to this. One thing that caught my eye in this book is that you, last time I think we spoke, you were talking about managed decline.
And now I see you’re dunking on yourself and you’re no longer liking this term very much. How did that happen?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I went through a bunch of different words for the same thing in this endeavor. And then I just thought phase out is probably the friendliest, the most accessible, maybe most neutral one. But I mean, yeah, I think in terms of managed decline, right now we’re seeing what an unmanaged decline looked like. To some extent, because we’ve had these energy, I don’t know, crunches or shocks or crises or whatever you want to say about the last year, what’s gone on with fuel prices, especially in Europe where they’re feeling the brunt of this and other countries.
In the US, we’ve been a little bit insulated from it. But I think that the lessons from this is not that we don’t need a decline. We do. But the lesson is that we need to manage the decline. And the only reason I stepped aside a little bit from Decline just because the resonance of the word for people.
Ross Kenyon: Simultaneously sounds both boring and scary.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. I think that’s essentially what I wrote. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Management and decline. Yeah. I think the managed decline or phase out as you would have it strikes me as incredibly important, especially, did you watch Don’t Look Up?
Holly Jean Buck: No.
Ross Kenyon: Oh. A chef doesn’t cook at home. You’re off the clock and you don’t want to watch climate movies.
Holly Jean Buck: Basically.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I thought it was better than I expected. I expected it to be kind of like very smug. And there are definitely moments of smug involved. But there’s a scene, I think it was probably in the trailer. So this isn’t giving anything away. But Jennifer Lawrence’s parents support the asteroid hitting the planet because of all the jobs that will be created. And they’re like, we’re for the asteroid. And that’s a sort of phase out problem that you would like to sidestep.
Holly Jean Buck: Yes, that’s a good illustration of it. Yeah, well, I mean, in terms of like the way, you know, stepping aside from decline, thinking about this as an opportunity, there’s going to be an amazing amount of jobs involved in building all the stuff we need for the energy transition. So, you know, how do we develop a language and emotional register?
Ross Kenyon: There’s a term in here that you use for the first time quoting another scholar called Petro Melancholia. Is this related to that?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I was also reading in the Energy Humanities around this and Petromelancholia, Cara Daggett and others write about this, kind of the feeling of loss or maybe even abandonment. It’s all mixed up together, I think.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, is this like hauntology? Is it kind of like that? Or it’s just like, I guess people who work in this field probably imagine... I don’t know, because hauntology is like an imagined future that never arrived, right? That you’re nostalgic for, but it doesn’t exist. Is that right?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, for me, it’s all mixed up in like kind of these echoes of the past cultural things. I think that with the Petro stuff, I was looking through my photos at this gas station in North Dakota where they were selling these t-shirts that was like, Rugged Work America. And it had like a pump jack logo. Like it’s all like mixed in and kind of the package that you can buy the gas station and wear around. And, you know, so it’s about it’s not just about petroleum, although that’s foregrounded. It’s also about masculinity.
It’s about, you know, imperial decline. All of that.
Ross Kenyon: Another one of those terms, too. I think it’s used. Petro-masculinity. Yeah. That’s also referenced pretty much what you just said, or is there much more to it?
Holly Jean Buck: Pretty much. And I guess I’m also thinking a lot about this in terms of how fossil fuel jobs and benefits are gendered. Like if you go to some of these towns and you not just look at the census statistics, which will tell you a story about incomes of men and women in these towns, which are vastly differentiated, but just like Every single person you see in a service job in a drilling town in West Texas, say, is going to be a woman and then going to kind of knock on the doors of people to interview.
This is my experience. Women might want to speak to me, but they’d be hesitant and their husbands would be like, no, don’t speak to her. Like this kind of a dynamic, I think, in some of these places. And so there’s a question about who does ending fossil fuels impact, but also what sort of new jobs might be created in other industries that would be more equal. Was that too much of a tangent?
Ross Kenyon: No, I think it’s great. I was just trying to think of how to respond or where to take it here. I wanted to ask about theory in general, but I don’t want it to sound insulting to specifically to petromasculinity. But I do want to ask, I know you operate in this area of high theory where new words are created to describe things seemingly all the time, employing some obscure philosophies at points. Do you ever read some of the social analysis and critical theory stuff and say, okay, this is, I don’t really buy that.
Do you ever go over the hump like that?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, often. I mean, you know, I mostly publish in like academic journals that are for scientists, like interdisciplinary scientific journals, just because I don’t have the stamina for trying to do that work, frankly, the work of creating and engaging with theory. And also just because I’m interested in, you know, what we can do in terms of Changing material reality right now. But there are some things from theory that are useful to that. I think if you think about petromelancholia or petromasculinity, it helps us understand what some of the challenges are in the energy transition.
So I will definitely read and pull from things that seem like they can inform how we approach the transition.
Ross Kenyon: I think that seems wise. And I’ve gotten a lot out of reading various bits of social theory over the years. I’ve definitely read some, though, that have caused deep eye rolls. It reassures me very strongly to hear that sometimes you’re like, all right, guys, let’s come back a little bit. The worst one I ever read, and it’s a classic, too. Have you read The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer? You ever read that?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, a long time ago in graduate school.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, if you’re listening, this is nonsense to you. It’s like a classic of the Frankfurt School canon. The point was just like the enlightenment mentality has sought to quantify things that are fundamentally non-quantifiable. It’s resulted in sort of the disenchantment of the world. And this has been a great loss culturally for all of us. And rather than proving this in strict analytic prose, it’s just like, let me have a block quote from Homer. I was like, will you just say the thing? Speaking of theory, one of the books I’ve read that I’ve gotten a lot out of is Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.
Is there no alternative? Is there any alternative? What’s the subtitle there? You were saying that you hadn’t cracked that one though.
Holly Jean Buck: Well, it’s lying prominently in my house. And I mean, I’ve read other works by Mark Fisher. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Just to sum it up for someone listening is that the thesis is that capitalism has been so successful that it is increasingly difficult or maybe even impossible to think outside of its logics and to imagine a world that is non-anti-post-capitalistic. I wonder how much of that applies to something like fossil fuels and this world that we’re building, trying to imagine what a truly non-fossil fuel world, but also some of the stuff you talk about with politics. I feel myself being the person that Mark Fisher is pointed at, basically calling me dumb.
But I have a hard time imagining what a truly democratic politics will look like, how it will work. If it will work, it sounds like a lot of meetings. I don’t always have that much faith in certain types of activism. I find myself much more like when I hear the government’s going to do a new thing, I’m always just like my default is this is probably going to be bad. It’s probably going to make things worse. And when I hear of startups working to solve things, I tend to be supportive.
And I’m open to this, Holly, being a failure of politics on my end and a deficiency. Help me. Therapize me.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, don’t you think if you lived in a smaller jurisdiction, you might have a different feeling about this? I mean, you know, either like suppose a state really got its act together and was leading or, you know, like a US state, like something of that size.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. I think if I was from New Zealand or something, I probably wouldn’t feel the same. I think my attitude is actually quite American.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. Because I mean, I don’t think we all need to be in this kind of direct democracy where everything is made as a collective decision with every single person. You know, representative democracy exists for a reason. And just because we have an imperfect version of it, we have like these crazily gerrymandered districts and Crazy voting restrictions and a whole bunch of stuff that it’s not hard to imagine our system of that being better. And I think in other places in the world, it is better. So I don’t feel totally hopeless about this, but I am concerned in terms of ending fossil fuels about all the authoritarian regimes.
I mean, independent of the way this country is heading, there are And so how do we deal with that? I don’t think climate advocates have been wrestling with this very seriously yet.
Ross Kenyon: You have a good section in here too about climate reparations and the geopolitics of climate change, relative winners and losers, and some slights against their resource curse thesis for why countries, quote unquote, blessed with oil and gas and other resources tend out to be quite tyrannical. What are some imagined futures for how geopolitics will play out?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, one thing that’s really clear is that Big emitters like the U. S. should be more ambitious. I mean, everybody in the world’s been saying this. But in terms of like the U. S. is projecting to have about 30% of its emissions be residual emissions in 2050. So around six gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions, taking that down to two and then compensating the two with two gigatons of removals. Much of which is from the land sink, but some of it’s from technological CDR. And so, okay, why can’t the US take its emissions down even further, scale up that CDR more, and that would buy some space in the carbon budget for some other countries to continue emitting a little bit longer?
So, I mean, in terms of thinking about what’s fair with regards to the transition, It seems obvious that we should be talking a lot more explicitly about this.
Ross Kenyon: As a form of reparations saying that less developed countries should emit longer if they need to, and that the US should just go whole hog on CDR and eat up their emissions for them.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, so many of these countries are like 0. 02% of emissions anyway. Like, you know, I think that Really, there’s so many that, I mean, I’m not saying that they should be locked in the fossil fuels, but in terms of figuring out how to change their industry and, you know, build a whole bunch of really new expensive factories with CCS or, you know, that run on green hydrogen or whatever. I mean, that’s just going to take some financing and some time. And I also think that the US should provide some of that financing too, but This is why I don’t end up rejecting the whole concept of net zero is because I think that there’s some flexibility that it brings to potentially organize this transition in a fairer way.
And I wouldn’t go so far as to necessarily call that reparations because I think reparations involves repairing social relations. And I think that’s a broader and deeper project than talking about energy systems or emissions or any of that. But I think we can think about it together.
Ross Kenyon: So Wither, Net Zero. You want to keep it around? Do you want to pitch something new? What are you thinking?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, what I wish I had done in this book, which, you know, not to be apologetic about it, but I wrote it in nine months during a pandemic where I was taking care of a small child who was mostly at home. So in a better world, I would have written a somewhat longer book that was more explicit about like, what does a full decarbonization, like a true zero by 2100 look like? I mean, that’s kind of like the next piece that would be natural to write about because so many of these roadmaps end in 2050.
Part of that is because we don’t know yet totally what technologies might be available later in the century. But I think that it’s important to have these goals and be explicit about them because without an explicit commitment to a full phase out end of century, then there’s still a way for fossil fuel companies to talk about their future that doesn’t look as radically different as it needs to be.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe we should make them more explicit because I think if we were truly at net zero with no accounting shenanigans, which maybe you might be suspicious of that in general, but assuming that were the case, would it be so bad that they were still in existence? I’m not an objection for its own sake of that. Should I be?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, just think about all the horrible extractives. Sites where people are suffering from asthma and other, you know, issues from all the pollution.
Ross Kenyon: What about like, you know, mining for photovoltaic panels? Not so nice. Batteries? Is it cobalts in that?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, these are all problems too. So like, I think that we need to articulate the vision as a post extractivist society.
Ross Kenyon: Help me. What should that vision be?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, the other part of this also is the petrochemical industry. So you could end fossil fuels and these companies would pivot even more strongly to petrochemicals. So if you want to be post extractivist, you have to address that part of it as well. Otherwise, you’re just like a wash in plastic and then plastic is your big problem of the century. Right. So I think that the alternatives there are, Sometimes called carbon recycling, which some people will call greenwashing, but carbon capture and utilization and biomaterials. I mean, these are things that we should be seriously pouring so much more R&D into than we are.
If we want to think about long term, next century, what do our systems look like? What does industry look like?
Ross Kenyon: This goes back to where we started it with the focus on production rather than emissions. I almost never hear anyone talk about petrochemicals. That phrase, I think it’s probably appeared on the podcast only a couple of times. I think it’s only been when we’ve had people making biomaterials on because that’s their competitor. Like I think New Light, I think we probably talked about that. Why is that? Why don’t we talk more about it? It’s just we’re so caught up on Like the main problem, but you might even frame this as that isn’t the main problem.
You’re thinking downstream at the emissions level.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I guess I started personally thinking about this during my first book. I wrote about Khmergy, which was this movement back in the 30s to create products out of biomaterials instead of petroleum and fossil fuels. And Obviously the fossil fuels won out and nobody’s heard of this discipline because it just like faded out in the 40s. And there’s a lot of reasons for that I talk about in after geoengineering, but I’ve always seen it as kind of this, it wasn’t inevitable necessarily that we’d make all this stuff out of petrochemicals.
Like we could have had much more of a bioeconomy than we do. Maybe now is the time for a better movement towards The bioeconomy more generally. Okay.
Ross Kenyon: I like that as a concept. I don’t like seeing things that will never degrade or microplastics being everywhere, horrible contaminants and groundwater. To start wrapping up, Holly, I want to pitch you on your next book. Would you kind of hint at a little bit here at the end? Reverse engineering. You should just, we’re reverse engineering for 2100 and the failure to imagine that future in your opinion. I think you should read the Mark Fisher and I think you should call it fossil realism. I think it’s going to be a big hit.
Holly Jean Buck: I’ll consider it. I’m going to write that down. Fossil realism.
Ross Kenyon: If you’re listening, I just earned a co-author credit. Literally all it takes. You should buy this book. You should read it. Ending Fossil Fuels, Why Net Zero is Not Enough. Also, After Geoengineering, your previous book. Is it only those two?
Holly Jean Buck: I also co-edited a book. It’s called Has It Come to This? The Promise and Peril of Geoengineering on the Brink. And there’s many chapters in that book by many different scholars who have many different takes.
Ross Kenyon: That’s neat. Was that recent?
Holly Jean Buck: Pretty recent. And, you know, some of it’s on solar geoengineering, some of it’s on carbon removal. A bunch of different perspectives.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. I’ll have to check that out then. I didn’t even know that existed. So, you writing books? Is there another one in the future coming, by the way? Is it the one that we just talked about?
Holly Jean Buck: I’d kind of like to write a book called How Twitter Broke Science.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, we talked about this last time, too.
Holly Jean Buck: This might be my next endeavor.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, well, thanks so much for being here, Holly.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, number three. I’m sure there’ll be more to come. You can check out Holly’s book, Ending Fossil Fuels, Why Net Zero Is Not Enough. Give it a read. It’s a great book. Definitely made me think. Give us a great rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, et cetera. Thank you so much for listening and have a lovely day. 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.
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