Extreme heat. What does it feel like? Why is it getting worse and who is it impacting?
In this Reversing Climate Change podcast episode, we spoke with Jeff Goodell, contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of The Water Will Come and his latest, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death ona Scorched Planet.
Tune in to hear about Jeff Goodell's personal experience with extreme heat. Learn about what cities are doing to combat the urban heat island effect, and what the true costs of adaptation will likely be.
Could certain cities become uninhabitable due to escalating heat levels? Ross and Jeff explore the variations in heat adaptation across different regions and income brackets, along with the possibility of introducing new labor laws in response to heat-related challenges.
The discussion also delves into the preparedness of the U.S. military for climate change impacts, the future outlook for ranking or naming extreme heat events, and the implications for the fossil fuel industry and the transition to clean energy.
One thing becomes clear, as temperatures continue to rise: the Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Austin that people know and love, is going to look very different in the future.
The show also discusses Jeff's long-running reportage on both carbon removal and geoengineering, and evaluates the status of both ideas, and what's likely to play out in the near-future.
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Resources
The Heat Will Kill You First, Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
Jeff's writing for Rolling Stone
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, which is a carbon removal marketplace based in Seattle. Today I have with me Jeff Goodell, contributing editor of Rolling Stone, author of The Water Will Come and his latest, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. Welcome to the show, Jeff.
Jeff Goodell: Hi there. Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: Happy to have you. I really liked your previous book, The Water Will Come, and now you’re doing fires. You did one on water, one on fire. Are you going to do a tour of the Greek elements?
Jeff Goodell: Well, this is not exactly fire. This is heat, which is a little bit different than fire.
Ross Kenyon: That’s true. They’re related. But it’s interesting that fire actually doesn’t make that much of an appearance in here. Is there much of anything about fire in here?
Jeff Goodell: A little bit about it, yeah. You know, about how more extreme heat dries up landscapes and dries and stresses trees and makes them more prone to these larger, hotter wildfires like we’ve been seeing, and some of the air pollution consequences of that from, you know, the wildfire smoke and things. So I talked about it a little bit, but I don’t really go into it a lot.
Ross Kenyon: One thing that caught my attention in your latest is that when I read The Water Will Come, so much of that is about how the US military is preparing for climate change and what they’re doing. They’re practical people. They want to make sure bases don’t flood, that their readiness is as up as it can be. But that didn’t seem to be as prominent in a story about heat. Given their theaters of operation, you would expect heat to figure into military calculations. But is it not happening, or are you just not tracking that one as closely?
Jeff Goodell: Yeah, I just — I mean, it’s happening a lot. A lot of the research on heat impacts on human bodies and things comes from military researchers, and the military has done a lot on heat. Several of the scientists, the physiologists that I talked to in the book, are former military researchers and physiologists. The whole idea of what’s called a wet-bulb standard, which is a more accurate way of measuring temperatures, the actual effects on a person, including sunlight and, you know, solar radiation and humidity and air temperature and wind speed and all that kind of stuff — it’s a very accurate measurement that is used by heat researchers, called wet-bulb temperatures, that was developed in the military.
But yeah, I don’t have as much about it in this book simply because heat was and is an immense topic, and I just sort of felt like I had done as much as I could. I mean, I could have kept working on this book for another 12 years. So I had to draw some limits.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, fair enough. There is a lot covered here. There’s lots of great reportage too, where it’s, you know, heavily vignetted. There’s lots of stories of people. It’s surprising. I’ve had heat-related experiences too — one hiking to the river and back in the Grand Canyon. I went too late in the season one year, and by the time we were like a mile or two out from Indian Wells or Indian Springs or whatever it’s called, I was like, I need water right now or I feel physically endangered. And then last year I played disc golf in Arizona during the shoulder season. It wasn’t like I was there in the summer — I think I was there like early fall — and I had to stop. I was getting nauseous about halfway through just because I couldn’t continue. And I don’t think I realized how imperiled I was with both of those, where you have stories of reasonably physically fit people just dying from heat, and just like that.
Jeff Goodell: I mean, you know, I — as you know, in the book I tell the story about myself climbing a volcano in Nicaragua on a humid day. This was before I started the book, and I knew nothing about the risk of heat. And, you know, partway up this hike, all of a sudden, you know, my heart started pounding. I started getting really dizzy. I started sweating in an uncontrollable way. It was just like water pouring off me, and I had no idea what was happening to me. I had no idea. And luckily some of the people who were with me did have some idea. But, you know, like most people, I was terribly undereducated or uneducated about the risks of heat.
And, you know, it was a similar walk like that in Phoenix a few years later, when I was thinking about what to do for a next book, when I had to walk just 12 blocks and got dizzy and, you know, felt my heart pounding, that I thought, OK, people don’t understand — including myself, don’t understand — the risks of extreme heat and what it does to the body. And that’s sort of where this book was really born out of: what it did to me, and my understanding that I didn’t understand what it was doing to me.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think I remember that from that Phoenix walk. Were you like down by the convention center and the ballpark and stuff in Phoenix? Yeah, it’s all concrete and it’s just so reflective and it’s harsh.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah, it’s brutal. And, you know, the air temperature that day was 115 or so, and it was probably 140 degrees there because of the reflective heat. And, you know, this urban heat island effect is a well-known phenomenon in every city, and in Phoenix, especially in that area, it’s particularly bad.
Ross Kenyon: The most striking I’ve ever seen the difference in shade coverage is in Mexico City, where you land at the airport and you’re at like [unclear], like on the east side, and there’s no trees, it’s just concrete baking. And then if you go to Condesa and Roma, like everyone on Instagram is right now, it’s nothing but trees. And it’s, you know, double-digit degrees cooler everywhere you go. And how does that add up over time and result in different life experiences, and how might that affect people’s health overall?
Jeff Goodell: Well, you know, I mean, heat does have a cumulative effect on one’s body, right? It has a — I mean, it doesn’t have a cumulative effect in the day-to-day thing, but it does have a cumulative effect sort of year to year. So basically what it means is that, you know, people who live in wealthier shaded areas — and shade is very much correlated throughout the world with wealth. I feel it here in Austin, Texas, where I live. I felt it in Mexico City also. I wrote about it in Mexico City. It’s just simply a much more hospitable place. And, you know, trees require space and money to maintain and everything, and poor neighborhoods simply don’t have them. They have just, you know, in Mexico City or here in Austin, their concrete sidewalks, you know, lack of trees sometimes.
You know, there’s tree planting campaigns that go on here and in Houston and in Phoenix too, where they attempt to put in trees, and they do. But, you know, it’s really easy to gather up a bunch of people and get some money to plant some trees, but it’s a lot harder to keep them alive, especially in these kinds of hot places, and to keep them watered and everything. And so the long-term life expectancy — I think the life expectancy of a street tree in Phoenix is seven years, which is just nothing. And especially when you think about it, what you really need are, you know, sort of large canopy trees.
Ross Kenyon: And I think of Phoenix too. I think of palo verde and things that are, you know, trying to limit water loss, so they don’t have large, like, deciduous leaves. Right? So they’re not giving as much shade as you would get from someplace like in Seattle where I am. Right. Yeah. But we also have — Seattle’s cutting down trees right now. There’s conflict over the density versus trees and, like, how much we’re actually able to plant right now. And then also there’s not that many different varieties of trees that are planted here, so there’s also concern about pests. And as the ranges of these change with heat changes, what should cities be doing right now? I feel like a lot of these problems have a lot of different facets to them, and it’s not clear how cities are going to react to this.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah. And, you know, every city is different, and the requirements of different cities are different. But to take street trees as an example, I mean, one of the problems is now that, because our climate is changing so fast, a tree that you plant that works well today — that same environment is going to be very different in 20 years, and that tree is not going to do so well in 20 years.
So a lot of urban arborists and tree planting organizations are thinking about, you know, planting the tree for 20 or 25 years from now, which means a different tree than you would plant if you believed that the climate were going to stay the same — which of course it’s not. So, you know, but I mean tree planting is just one aspect of what cities can be doing, and, you know, are beginning to do. Here in Austin, they’re starting an experiment of painting the streets white in some neighborhoods in order to increase reflectivity.
Ross Kenyon: Has that already started? Is that already underway?
Jeff Goodell: Yeah, there, there. Yeah. It’s only, you know, maybe a 20-block area right now, but it’s happening. LA has been doing it, Vegas has been doing it, Phoenix is doing it. You know, it’s helpful on the margins. There’s a lot of white roof initiatives around the world, lots of different cities. That’s a very easy way to increase reflectivity and lower the sort of urban heat. You know, limiting vehicles from downtown and creating more green spaces is a big thing. Paris is doing a great job of that, of, you know, bringing sort of nature back into cities and turning, you know, these parking oases into kind of green oases. That helps a lot.
So there are a lot of things that cities can do to help cool off and give people access to cooler places in public spaces. But it takes a while. And cities are — you know, it took hundreds of years to build these cities. It’s going to take a long time to kind of reimagine them in a way that is suitable for our rapidly changing climate.
Ross Kenyon: How bad do you and the scientists working on this think heat is going to be? I worry about someplace like Phoenix potentially becoming uninhabitable. I have a lot of faith in human adaptation and ingenuity, but you can’t fight the wet-bulb effect to some degree either. Like, how much room is there for us actually to figure this out? Or what places will have to be abandoned?
Jeff Goodell: Well, you know, when you ask, will places become uninhabitable — you know, the first response to that is, like, uninhabitable for who and at what cost, right? I mean, obviously we can live on Mars if we have enough infrastructure and enough money and, you know, the right kind of rockets and all that kind of thing. You know, I’m just reading a book right now about these submarines that voyage down to the deepest parts of the ocean trenches. You know, I mean, we can survive in all kinds of extreme climates. It’s just for how long, and who, and at what cost.
So, you know, Phoenix is and has been a boomtown because it’s a place with cheap real estate, low taxes. Everybody wants to go there and hang out in their shorts and their flip-flops. And, you know, there’s something — kind of everybody likes warm weather. Well, not everybody, but most people prefer warm weather. So there’s a lot of virtues to it. But those virtues very quickly get reversed when temperatures get too high. It’s one thing to be hanging out in Phoenix in 100-degree weather. It’s another thing to be hanging out in Phoenix in 120-degree weather. And it’s one thing to be hanging out in Phoenix in 120-degree weather if you have plenty of money and you can afford to air condition your place and you don’t care about the electricity costs.
It’s another thing if you’re working as a waitress in a restaurant, you’ve got three kids and you’re trying to, you know, feed your family, and then you’ve got, you know, a $600 electric bill because your air conditioner is, you know, ancient and inefficient and you can’t afford to run it very often. So, you know, it’s a different thing if you’re working on a construction crew and you’re outside than it is if you’re working inside, you know, as a lawyer or something. So these questions of uninhabitability really depend on who you’re talking about and at what cost. But, you know, it’s very clear that as these temperatures continue to rise, the Phoenix that people know and love — or Vegas, or Austin for that matter, that people have known and loved — is going to be very different in the future.
Ross Kenyon: So in a case like Southern Florida, maybe, where are we going to adapt to that? Are people just going to keep pumping water out, or will they have to leave? Is flooding in that way maybe even more severe because it will require urban abandonment? Or are we just going to double down on all these things and keep innovating and adapting to all of these changing environments?
Jeff Goodell: Well, again, I don’t think it’s an either-or thing. You know, there will be places that will adapt better than others. You know, you can adapt to rising seas. There’s things that you can do. You know, Miami, Tampa, all those places, New Orleans, you know, the whole Galveston here in Texas, all of these places, Norfolk on the East Coast, are all hugely at risk with rising seas. And, you know, on one level rising seas can be dealt with by elevating structures and changing building codes and things like that. But, you know, other parts of it can’t, or are much more difficult — like changing where airports are, for example, that are often on low-lying places, changing septic systems that are dependent upon water levels for, you know, sanitation, just even elevating roads and things like that.
I mean, at a certain point the cost of — I mean, could you, engineering-wise, could you elevate all of Miami three feet, four feet, five feet? Yes, you could. You know, it would cost bazillions of dollars, and why would anybody want to do it? But you certainly could. And so there will be places that spend more and more money on adaptation, seawalls and things like that, and they will become islands of, you know, habitation in these higher sea level zones. And then there will be vast swaths of places that are just deemed not worth putting the money into and abandoned. And the coastline will look very different than it does now.
Ross Kenyon: Which places do you see changes likely to happen? One potential I saw was labor laws around heat. Is that going to become much more regulated moving forward? You have stories, one particular out of Oregon, about a nursery worker dying. Is there going to be action on that? Is that something that’s likely to change?
Jeff Goodell: Well, you would hope, because it’s not an expensive way to save lives, right? All you require is, you know, small things like requiring shade and water breaks every, you know, hour for 10 or 15 minutes when heat levels get high. It doesn’t seem like it would be a difficult thing to do. But, you know, OSHA has been — you know, the Department of Labor has been working on federal regulations for heat standards for seven years now, and they still can’t manage to do it, because all the corporations complain that it’ll hurt their productivity if they have workers, you know, hanging out under a tree for 15 minutes and drinking water.
Here in Texas, two weeks ago, during the height of the heat dome here, when it was, you know, 112 degrees, 113 degrees here in Austin, the mayor — I mean, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott — signed legislation prohibiting any city or county in Texas from instituting any laws requiring water or shade breaks. And again, on the idea that this was going to hurt productivity and stuff. So, you know, I don’t know where this is going to go. You would think, if it were a rational world, that yes, there would be increased heat standards, and that there would be laws that keep workers from dying while they’re on their jobs. But, you know, that may not be the world we live in right now.
Ross Kenyon: It’s been remarkable to see how much action has occurred since the Delta lawsuit over [unclear] representing offsets that they were buying — like, how much movement that has had in the voluntary carbon market space. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a tortious claim, or even a class action lawsuit, against some set of employers for heat-related injury and death, that would maybe create the regulation just through the common law, just through the courts. It wouldn’t surprise me if that happened. Maybe. Maybe for you — would that surprise you?
Jeff Goodell: No, it wouldn’t. I mean, I think lawsuits of all sorts on these issues are gaining a lot of power. You know, I’ll note that a county in Oregon — the county that Portland is located in — is suing. It has filed a class action lawsuit against big oil companies for the heat wave that killed 1,000 people in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, suing for damages and loss. You know, it’s one of a cascading number of these sorts of lawsuits around the world that are basically arguing that the fossil fuel industry has known for a long time the consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels, and that they’ve waged a disinformation campaign very effectively about that, and that they are in some way — to be determined by the courts — liable for the losses and damages that are related to this.
And, you know, I’ve been covering climate change for 20 years, and there’s no question that just in the last five years the momentum on these lawsuits has really accelerated. And it’s been pushed along by these revelations that have come out about ExxonMobil’s modeling and how good it was in the ’70s on warming related to CO2, and on what’s called attribution science, where climate modelers can now say with virtual certainty, as they did with the Pacific Northwest heat wave, that it would not have happened without elevated CO2 in the atmosphere.
So it’s not — all events can’t be attributed that clearly. Sometimes, you know, like there was an extreme flooding event in Pakistan last year that they looked at also for attribution, and they basically decided that no, this may well have happened without the elevated CO2, we can’t ascribe it specifically to that. But heat waves are particularly easier to attribute. And not every heat wave can they directly — can they say this would not have happened without CO2. But a number of them they’ve been able to, and the Pacific Northwest heat wave was one of them.
Ross Kenyon: That was surprising to me, that that level of attribution is even possible, or getting better over time. Because this is one of the things that I saw people fighting over, the broad details of climate science, about — oh well, there’s just more monitoring stations, people live more places, of course there’s more damages that accrue over time because people live more places. So is it really — are there really more extreme weather events, or bigger ones, or is it just that we’re better at measuring them now? This is sort of the anti-“climate change is a real threat” camp arguing this. It seems like progress has been made. People can say there is a relationship between CO2 levels and an extreme climate event or extreme weather event.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah, I mean, and like I said, not every event. Because what they basically do is they have very sophisticated models that allow them to run a counterfactual. They can run the model, you know, they can program into the model what happened, and then they can run the same model with lower levels of CO2 and see if they get a similar or same result. And it was very new science 10 years ago, but it’s gotten really, really good recently. And I’ve talked to some lawyers about it, and people who had been skeptical, and they’re basically saying, yeah, this is good enough to hold up in court. So, you know, the day will come very soon when we can point to an extreme event — not all extreme events, but some extreme events — and say this was caused by elevated CO2 levels, which means basically it was caused by burning fossil fuels.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, that would be a game changer. I remember watching the Trump indictment stuff, and even if there’s a mens rea intentionality component to it, where, like, he would have wanted a coup to happen — the idea that you could say, like, his ideas, his words led to a one-to-one relationship between what happened after that is super hard to prove. But if you could prove that, that’s the whole thing. You have intentionality and you have the action that occurred. But climate change may be at the point of having that.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah. Again, not for every event and not in all cases, but in a lot of events. And I would encourage anyone who’s interested in this — I have a whole chapter in my book about this, about the whole history of attribution science, and it’s a chapter called Anatomy of a Crime Scene. It focuses on one climate researcher who’s particularly well known in this field named Friederike Otto, who is in the UK, and her work is really phenomenal.
And in fact, her recent report about these heat domes in the US that was just released like a week ago was on the front page of The New York Times and most of the other newspapers around the world, and again pointed to these heat waves and said, yes, these were caused by elevated CO2 levels. And so this is not some kind of fringe hocus-pocus science, some kid modeling stuff in the basement at MIT. This is really serious, mainstream stuff that I think can have dramatic implications on both the legal and the sort of moral status of this relationship between fossil fuel companies and climate damages.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that relationship really tightens up pretty quickly if you have all those elements. It certainly caught my ear listening to this, and my eye reading this. One of the things that caught my attention is the importance of naming heat waves in the fights over that. Can you retell that story here?
Jeff Goodell: Well, I mean, one of the difficult things about heat waves, and about understanding heat in general, is that there’s no visual component to it. So unlike a hurricane, where you look out your window and if the wind’s blowing five miles an hour it looks very different than when the wind is blowing 70 miles an hour, and you can just tell very quickly what’s going on — you know, I’m looking out my window right now here in Austin, and, you know, I know that it’s 107 degrees, but it doesn’t look any different looking out the window than it would if it were 70 degrees. And so visually, we have a very hard time understanding the risks of heat.
And so there’s a group of meteorologists and a nonprofit group called the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center who’ve really been pushing this idea of naming heat waves, similar to the way that we name storms, with the idea that it helps people communicate in shorthand about the risk. And like, if we know, you know, Hurricane Katrina is coming, then everyone can kind of get that idea, and it becomes a kind of communication shorthand for weathercasters and others to communicate the risks of this.
And there’s a lot of controversy about it, because unlike hurricanes, for example, which are rated strictly on wind speed — you know, 80 miles an hour, I don’t remember the exact category, which category, 1, 2, 3, where the wind speed rank is, but they’re ranked by wind speed — you can’t do the same thing with temperature, because, you know, 100 degrees in Phoenix is very different than, you know, 100 degrees in, you know, Bangor, Maine, and what people are used to. You know, there’s a big difference between dry heat and wet heat. You know, the dangers are different depending on how prepared buildings are, how many people have air conditioning, all that kind of thing. But anyway, this idea of naming heat waves is an attempt to help make them visible.
And there’s all this informal naming going on. Literally in the papers yesterday, in the Times, there was a story about these environmental groups or climate activist groups in Europe naming these heat waves that are hitting Italy right now after oil companies, you know, in order to connect them more clearly. And so I think it’s kind of inevitable that we will have some kind of formal naming system for heat waves, because we need to do something to do a better job of communicating about them.
Ross Kenyon: I imagine the surprise many people experience your book with, too — is my reaction pretty common, where they’re just like, didn’t realize this was as big a deal as it is? And do we need to do all this now? Do we need to start naming these heat events? Am I alone in thinking this?
Jeff Goodell: Yeah. I mean, it’s a new idea for sure. And, you know, whether we need to start naming them now, I don’t even know. I mean, I think there’s a lot of people who think it’s a really good idea. I think that, you know, I think it’s a good idea too. But I don’t think it’s, like, job one. I think, you know, a more important idea is simply some kind of a ranking system. Because people get stuck on, like, what should we name them, and should we name them after Greek gods? Should we name them after oil companies? Should we do them alphabetically? There’s all kinds of politics in naming. And I think that, you know, just getting better at ranking and messaging about them and having weathercasters talk about them is what’s kind of really important.
And whether that is just a ranking system like red, yellow, orange, you know, something like that, or a numerical system, or naming — something that helps people communicate about the kind of risk that is coming with this heat wave, and to prepare for it. Right? To check in on people, to make sure that, you know, if you have air conditioning that it’s working and all that kind of thing; that if you don’t, you have access to cooling centers; not to go outside at certain times of the day. All these kinds of simple precautions that people take to stay safe during extreme heat events.
Ross Kenyon: I haven’t read one of your earlier books about geoengineering, but you do tell a story about cross-country skiing across Baffin Island with David Keith, which is great. Yeah, wasn’t on my bingo card for this podcast about this book. Didn’t expect that to happen. But you were covering this beat a long time ago — about carbon removal, about geoengineering — when those things were much closer than they are now. I feel like they’re very distinct, or at least often people in the carbon removal camp like them to be distinct categories. How has this changed since you first wrote that book, which was, I think, 2010? Is that when your geoengineering book came out?
Jeff Goodell: Yeah. So much has happened, yeah. So much has happened since then. You know, obviously, you know, the solar geoengineering part, which is the idea of putting particles in the stratosphere to sort of reflect away heat, still remains a kind of taboo subject. There’s nobody doing it, they—
Ross Kenyon: Still, there’s a startup that was doing it. They got a bunch of attention. I don’t know if you saw that.
Jeff Goodell: They weren’t actually doing it. I mean, they were trying to do a little science, little experiments, but I mean, no one’s doing it in the sense of flying airplanes around and actually trying to manipulate the, you know, the Earth’s climate. So it’s still a kind of, you know, last-ditch, nobody-wants-to-talk-about-it-but-we-may-have-to-do-someday kind of idea. And so that’s kind of where it was 10 years ago, 13 years ago, when I wrote the book. It’s advanced a little bit, but it’s still on the fringes of science.
Carbon removal, as you know, is completely different now. You know, I remember visiting David Keith when he was building his sort of little first carbon removal device in an engineering bay at the University of Calgary. And it basically looked like it was made out of, you know, Silly Putty and toilet paper rolls. I mean, it was really a primitive thing. And now, of course, Carbon Engineering is a big company, and companies like Occidental Petroleum, you know, saying they’re going to be the Tesla of carbon removal, getting involved in the offset markets. You know, airlines are really — I mean, it’s taken off in a big way, you know. And so yes, they really have sort of split in their acceleration into the future, these two different ideas that 15 years ago were lumped under the same idea of geoengineering.
Ross Kenyon: David Keith is probably the best illustration of that, who is, like, firmly a godfather of both and so involved there. I see many people — I don’t want to out anyone in particular, but many of the carbon removal people that I’ve spoken to recently — that solar radiation management, at the very least, needs to be well understood, and many of them think it’s likely to be necessary even if we don’t want it. Do you think that’s true? Should we be supportive of more research and maybe even get comfortable with the idea of deploying it?
Jeff Goodell: Well, I actually don’t think we should get comfortable with the idea of deploying it. I think it’s, you know, something we don’t want to do unless we have to do it. But, you know, I think the idea that it’s taboo to talk about, that it’s taboo to do any kind of principled research on — you know, I think that we need to know. And this is very controversial, because a lot of people think that this should just be, you know, like one of those taboo areas of science that nobody should tread into at all, because the potential consequences of fucking it up are so huge. But I do think that, you know, we need to know more about the real-life consequences of it.
And, you know, David and others have supported the idea of small-scale research where you actually, you know, put some particulates in the atmosphere — a very, very small amount that, you know, rains out almost immediately — but just to get a real-world distribution idea of how they work. And, you know, I think more knowledge is good in this context, and I kind of support the idea of a well-structured, well-regulated, well-run scientific research project on this, because there is some sort of, you know, tragic inevitability about this, in the sense that I think that’s the way we’re going. At some point somebody’s going to try it, and the more we know about it the better. But, you know, I don’t know how you exactly structure that program and how you get the rules in place, and it’s a very — as you know, and probably most listeners know — it’s an incredibly divisive and emotional discussion whenever you bring up geoengineering, solar geoengineering.
Ross Kenyon: I was surprised that I heard people recently speaking with such comfort — or it was almost taken for granted — that it may just become inevitable at some point, that we will not decarbonize as fast. You have multiple sections in your book where you just said we need to stop burning fossil fuels, that’s the main thing we have to do. Are we going to do that? And if not, we should prepare ourselves for, you know, much more extreme measures to be taken. But I don’t think any of us would choose that freely. Probably some people, but it’s unlikely that many would.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah, no, you’d have to be insane to say, you know, we should just keep burning fossil fuels and we’ll just geoengineer our way out of this. I mean, that’s insane. That makes no sense whatsoever. But, you know, the fact is we’re not doing a very good job of eliminating fossil fuels. And yes, renewable energy is cheaper virtually everywhere in the world for new builds. We’re building a lot of it. But, you know, the scale and speed that we have to do to really deeply decarbonize, you know, our power system is just enormous. And so, you know, even though we’re building a lot of renewable power around the world, we’re still burning a lot of fossil fuels.
When you look at the only metric that really matters, which is the CO2 levels — in the Mauna Loa graph of CO2 in the atmosphere, the curve is just going up and up and up and up. And so, you know, as long as that curve keeps going up, as long as we keep adding CO2 into the atmosphere, it’s going to keep getting hotter. And as it keeps getting hotter, we’re seeing more and more of these kinds of consequences, you know, that we didn’t anticipate, and the risks we see even with these extreme heat events now — we’re seeing how dangerous it is just at this level. And when you think about, you know, a kind of doubling of the amount of heat that we’ve added to the atmosphere over the rest of this century, that’s really alarming as to what that would mean for our lives and the lives of every living thing on this planet.
So, you know, we’ve got to figure something out. I don’t know what the answer will be, but we’re doing a great job of changing the economic equation on renewable power. You know, 15 years ago everybody was saying, oh, you’ve got to build coal and gas plants because we need to get cheap power to poor people, because, you know, energy is the engine of development and we need development. And that was sort of always true. And then, you know, now that’s flipped. If you want to get cheap power to people, the best way to do it is renewable power, solar panels, wind and things like that. So it’s not an economic argument anymore.
Now it’s, you know, we’ve slipped into this sort of cultural argument stuff where, you know, do you believe what these people are telling you about climate change? Do you believe science, or do you not? Do you believe these, you know, elites are trying to run the world, and, you know, George Soros is in this conspiracy with Bill Gates to control our energy systems? And it’s just — it’s gotten entrenched in culture wars in a way that it hadn’t, or it wasn’t, 10 years ago, and that’s a very different political dynamic.
Ross Kenyon: Really strange too, because being dependent upon a couple of big oil companies versus having your own homestead-generated power — I feel like that’s that back-to-the-land, small-scale conservative, especially if you’re, like, a populist conservative, of not being dependent upon the elites. That’s pretty powerful. You even see things like in Texas, where renewables in certain parts of Texas have surprisingly done quite well, and at least the reportage that I’ve read about it, apparently that’s an economic thing. It doesn’t even get to the level of culture. It’s just about, is this cheaper and easier and less polluting. It’s kind of just a simple equation at that point.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah. Well, you know, logic and evidence and simple facts and things are not a big part of the discussion right now. But, you know, it’s absolutely true. I mean, I’m here in Austin, Texas, and, you know, it’s the belly of the fossil fuel beast, and, you know, nobody talks about it here, or they don’t talk about it enough. But, you know, Texas is the leader in wind and solar in this country. You know, during these extreme heat waves of the last couple of weeks, we’ve been getting up to 30% of the power on the grid from renewables, which is amazing.
And not only that, it’s cheaper. And not only that, the reason we’ve been getting so much renewables on the grid is because a lot of the thermal plants have been going down, because these thermal plants have, you know, they’re much more mechanical, right? And a natural gas plant has a lot more moving parts than a solar panel does. And these moving parts, these mechanisms of thermal plants, are much more vulnerable to heat. So they are more likely to go offline during these extreme heat events, whereas renewables thrive in this kind of climate. And so Texas is proving the case that not only is a renewable grid cheaper, but it’s also more reliable in these kinds of extreme conditions. And for that to be happening in a place like Texas is, I think, a real landmark event. And, you know, in a rational world it would be a real turning point. But, you know, we don’t live in a rational world.
Ross Kenyon: Jeff, about two years ago I watched your debate, “Can Carbon Removal Bring Us to Net Zero?” Do you remember that event?
Jeff Goodell: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Why did it go so poorly? It was one of the worst carbon removal discussions I’ve ever seen. I feel like the terms were not well defined. People look at this — Julio and Elizabeth Yeampierre. Julio Friedmann was the other discussant. I feel like they were talking past each other, and I think carbon removal people worried that’s the future, where carbon removal gets tied up with carbon capture and in oil and gas and are not well understood. Environmental justice people are concerned, justifiably so, that carbon removal is going to ignore their interests and create another Cancer Alley kind of situation, like petrochemical or just oil and gas infrastructure generally causes. Yeah, sorry to put you on the spot about that. I know it wasn’t your fault. It probably got out of hand. But why was that such an intense carbon removal debate?
Jeff Goodell: Well, yeah, I don’t really know why it was. You know, I think that Julio and Elizabeth came at this from entirely different perspectives. It was an example of how far, you know, the sort of two polarized parts of the climate movement, energy movement, really are, even though they’re ostensibly on the same side. You know, they don’t understand each other very well. There’s a lot of confusion about carbon removal, geoengineering, carbon capture. You know, all of this stuff is very new to a lot of environmentalists and environmental activists. They don’t really understand the difference in what they’re talking about.
And there’s been a lot of distrust sowed by the oil and gas industry, who have done a lot of greenwashing over, you know, obviously over the decades. And to some extent their embrace of this has not helped, even though it has helped in the sense of moving it along financially and engineering-wise. And, you know, there’s a lot of virtues in, you know, a big company like Occidental Petroleum or something like that really staking a claim on this. But, you know, there’s just this enormous gulf of distrust and disinformation between these sort of various wings of the environmental and climate movement that I think was on display there. And then there was also just personality stuff, that, you know, some people get along and communicate better than others, and sometimes people are just on different wavelengths entirely.
Ross Kenyon: I imagine you’re at the very least — you’re very curious about carbon removal, and you have been for a long time. Do you think that we’re doing the right thing by focusing our careers on carbon removal? Is that a good place to focus right now? Do you think it’s a sideshow? Some combination? What do you think about carbon removal?
Jeff Goodell: Well, I mean, I think it’s obviously a really important technology long term. I think, you know, there’s no question in my mind that, you know, we’re going to develop technologies that let us kind of modulate carbon levels. That’s a really important idea, you know, and so in that sense I think it’s fabulous, and I think that all of this progress that I’ve seen in the last decade around it is very encouraging and inspiring.
I think the problem is when it gets to be seen as, or used as, a way just to continue burning fossil fuels — a way to extend the life of oil and gas companies, a way to say, you know, we don’t have to worry about climate change because we have these machines that can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. And people don’t grasp the scope and scale of this project, to really take meaningful amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere, how enormous this scaling up has to be. And, you know, the simple fact is we are in a climate emergency right now, and, you know, technologies that will make a difference in 70 or 80 years at scale — you know, that’s great. But we need to do stuff now, and we need to, like, stop burning fossil fuels now. We need to get off of fossil fuels now. We need to do both the short-term, immediate emergency stuff and the long-term, you know, thinking about technology, thinking about stuff like carbon removal.
So I think that that sort of time scale gets confused, and I think that a lot of people feel that the amount of money that is being poured into carbon removal is, you know, could be better used in other ways. You know, it’s very easy to see how you can make money in carbon removal. It’s very hard to see how you can make money in adapting cities to, you know, weather and climate extremes. You know, you’re not going to make billions of dollars building better bus stops for people, right? Or—
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] company that does it do pretty well, yeah.
Jeff Goodell: Or planting trees, or building cooling centers. I mean, there’s just a lot of things that we need to do in the near term to keep people alive and to help our world adapt and to move more quickly away from fossil fuels. And I think a lot of people see carbon removal as a kind of brain and money drain away from these more urgent measures.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve seen a little bit of a sea change in carbon removal recently, where I previously used to hear people say things like, we should work with oil and gas because they have the infrastructure and expertise to run the system in reverse, and I don’t hear that as much anymore. I think things like the Oxy CEO’s comments that happened recently, saying that direct air capture is going to extend fossil fuel infrastructure’s lifespan for decades — I think carbon removal companies are increasingly skeptical about becoming a concubine to oil and gas. You’re nodding very affirmatively. You think we should stay away?
Jeff Goodell: I think that’s a very dangerous place to be, because within the climate movement, you know — and I mean, there’s just, they are not a — you know, when I say they, there’s obviously all different kinds of actors in this world, just as there are different kinds of people, and by saying they you’re painting with a very broad brush. But, you know, they have proven themselves very well over the years to be, you know, not good actors, right? That they have pulled political levers, spent billions on disinformation, political manipulation.
There’s a huge gulf of distrust around, you know, when you look at the — what, I don’t even remember the number now, what was it? More than a trillion dollars in profits last year? You know, I mean, the enormous profits that they’re making during these extreme times. And, you know, there’s just a lot of reasons to think that they are not, you know, the best people to buddy up with at a moment like this, both for the larger public good and even for the good of people who are really, you know, engaged in carbon removal. And I’m not dissing carbon removal. I think it’s a really important technology. I just think it’s a question of, you know, where it fits into the larger movement and where resources are sort of deployed, right?
Ross Kenyon: Never really wanted an industry as powerful as that to be backed into a corner where their only options are to be stranded or nationalized or something like that, and hopefully having an honorable pivot available to them may be seized upon at some point. But I’m increasingly comfortable with the idea that I’m being naive, and maybe that is not forthcoming. You think they would just fight it all the way? But I think you don’t want to back them into the corner, do you? Shouldn’t they have, like, a way out?
Jeff Goodell: Well, I mean, no one’s talking about shutting them down. There’s no — like, that’s not going to happen. You know, it’s just a question of, like, for example, you know, stopping new exploration, right? Saying, you know, we’re not doing more exploration, we’re not giving you more permits to drill in the North Sea, we’re not giving you more permits to drill in the Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. You know, there is a finite end, and we’re going to sort of enforce that, right? And from a government point of view, you know, I think that this is pretty obvious, that the strategy of the oil and gas industry in general — and again, there are good actors and bad actors in there, it’s not monolithic; there are certainly people who are doing a much better job and are much more progressive and sort of trustworthy than others — but, you know, the basic idea, and as you just said with, you know, the comments about carbon removal, is to extend this as long as possible, right?
To slow this transition down to renewables and to the elimination of fossil fuels as long as possible, for all kinds of obvious balance sheet reasons, stranded assets, all kinds of things. So to the degree that carbon removal has become seen as just a tool to extend that slow transition, that is a very bad place to be politically for this technology, because you’re just going to be seen as a tool for these larger interests and not as a solution, but just as a tool. And that, I think, is a bad place to be.
Ross Kenyon: It’s very strange to me too, because if oil and gas companies were forced to pay for their emissions to be truly negated with permanent carbon removal, it would very radically change the economics of oil and gas in general. Like, the price would go up quite a bit and would hopefully encourage them to decarbonize faster or to switch to being renewable energy companies, I hope. But I also — yeah, go ahead.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah. Well, I just want to underscore that, you know, there are a lot of people working in the carbon removal space who I have huge respect for. You know, you mentioned Julio Friedmann before, a well-known figure in this space. I think he’s fantastic. I’ve known him for years. He’s just fantastic. I think David Keith is fantastic. I think David Keith cares more about the planet and the climate and what the right strategy is and how to manage all of this than almost anyone I know. So, you know, I think that there’s a lot of really smart, thoughtful people engaged in this, and so I hesitate talking about it in a kind of broad kind of way. But, you know, at a certain point there’s no — like, you know, how you control the technology is beyond anyone’s kind of reach, right? I mean, for one thing, these oil and gas companies have a lot of money, and a lot of money comes with a lot of power, and, you know, they can do with this what they want.
Ross Kenyon: One proposal I’ve seen is to say that carbon removal can be used for legacy emissions, that it shouldn’t be used for current emissions. That might address a fair amount of the problem.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah. And, you know, I have to say that — I mean, I wrote my book about all this 13 years ago. This book we’re talking about now, The Heat Will Kill You First, took up four years of my life. The book before that was about sea level rise. And so I do not want to, like, in any way advertise myself as up to date on the latest proposals and sort of dynamics in the carbon removal business, because I am certainly not.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, certainly not. Yeah. That’s a lot of beats to cover. There’s too many things happening in climate these days to really cover all those beats.
Jeff Goodell: Well, but the interesting thing for me — so, like, we’re talking about carbon removal, and, you know, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, I remember David Keith’s first carbon removal device made of, like I said, of, you know, Silly Putty and toilet paper rolls in the engineering bay. So it gives me a really interesting perspective on the movement of these technologies and the movement of the sort of climate and energy world in general. You know, I mean, like I said, the economic change in how we produce energy is so dramatic in the last, you know, 15 years. And just this whole conversation, you know, shifting away from, you know, the economics being reversed, is such an enormous deal that I think a lot of people just haven’t grasped yet.
And, you know, here in Texas — you know, I moved here four years ago — you really feel the sort of fossil fuels sort of legacy power, you know, that they have in a lot of the institutions here, including the government and state government, but also universities, philanthropic groups and all that, that are funded by oil money. And there’s a lot of cultural and political inertia behind keeping that alive, even though the economics don’t really make sense anymore. And so it’s a really interesting kind of dynamic watching that shift, you know, and watching these new clean energy entrepreneurs rising, and then, you know, Elon Musk moving the Tesla Gigafactory here. And, you know, Elon’s a whole other, you know, nightmare of paradox and contradictions. But there’s some advantage in having been around long enough to watch a lot of these changes play out over the landscape.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. What a purview you’ve had. And also listening to it and being like, wait, did I hear that right? Is this the same David Keith? I’m like, oh, you’re going on a monthlong vacation with David Keith. You’re as plugged in as anyone to the latest in climate just by that much David Keith FaceTime. You’re good, Jeff.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah, in a little tent on ice in the middle of nowhere for six weeks. Yeah, I know. I know David very well, and I can only tell you that this trip and all the things we went through and the much hardship and difficulty only increased my respect for him.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s very cool to hear. Well, the book is great. If you’re listening, you should definitely pick up a copy of The Heat Will Kill You First. I very much enjoyed it. And also The Water Will Come is great. It’s a great book because the work on the military preparedness angle that we started the show with is fascinating. I think people assume that the right-left dynamic is going to play out in the same way, and it doesn’t when it comes to sea level rise. It’s super interesting reportage. Check out that one too. I need to catch up on your old books. Maybe next time we speak I’ll have all of them under my belt and I’ll be fully, fully ready for your next one.
Jeff Goodell: OK. Sounds good.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks for being here, Jeff.
Jeff Goodell: Thanks for having me. It’s a great conversation.
Ross Kenyon: 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.
