In this week’s episode, the name of the goal is not ‘net zero’, it’s regeneration. We’re joined by Paul Hawken: author of many books including Drawdown and Regeneration, activist, and entrepreneur to talk about the tools that he believes can end the climate crisis.
Paul takes us through the concept of "carbon tunnel syndrome," an overemphasis on carbon as a mere numerical figure, often favored by the tech industry. He also sheds light on the staggering statistic that less than 1% of the global population actively works on climate solutions. He also is quite skeptical that direct air capture will ever make energetic sense.
Throughout history, the climate movement has urged individuals to focus on future existential threats. However, Paul highlights a stark reality: over five billion people wake up every day preoccupied with current existential threats.
This episode serves as a stark reflection on the array of solutions within our grasp. It underscores the urgency of prioritizing Earth's regeneration and explores the intricate relationship between carbon removal and the broader climate solution landscape. Join us in this candid conversation about addressing the climate crisis head-on, and be sure to check out Paul’s new book Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.
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Resources
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming
Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation
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. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the cofounders of the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace, and the head of creative and marketing here. Today I have with me Paul Hawken, author of many books, including Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, and his latest, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Thanks for being on the show, Paul.
Paul Hawken: Total pleasure. Thank you so much, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: I’m so happy to have you here. I got to see you speak at TED Countdown in Detroit, which is quite an event, and Drawdown was one of the first books — it might even be the first book that I read when I got into climate as a professional, and it really shaped quite a lot about how I think. It was a great anthological view of all of the solutions available, or many of them, for those who care about climate change and how to address it. And then Regeneration, your newest book, has a similar kind of overview, anthology-esque approach to the myriad solutions that are being developed right now. I see a lot of continuity between these two works, but also a lot of differences. How do you conceptualize your choosing to write another enormous book on a very similar topic?
Paul Hawken: And a good question. Well, Drawdown emerged actually as an idea in 2001 — not the title, not the book itself. But in 2001, after the third assessment from the IPCC came out, it became blaringly obvious, and glaringly, I should say, that people didn’t know what to do, and that there was really no place where people could go and research or read or understand what the solutions were. Second of all, there was nobody naming the goal. And I just felt then, and now actually, people still don’t name the goal. You know, net zero is not a goal. I mean, it’d be like if I’m going from here to New York and I get to the Continental Divide and say, hey, I’m here. No, you’re not. It’s just a threshold.
So net zero is a threshold. You know, decarbonization, not a goal. I mean, that’s a process, for sure. But — and even, we can talk about carbon removal — not a good goal. Okay, so I want to name the goal, which is to reverse global warming. Can we just put that stake in the ground so we have the expansive sense of what we want to do as a civilization? Second, I asked NGOs, universities — but friends, universities and institutes — to basically map, measure and model the 100 most substantive solutions to reversing global warming. So the goal is reversing, and then the solutions. And for two or three years I did that and mentioned it, and people said, great idea, we don’t do that, or things like that, and nobody wanted to do it.
And so in 2013 I read Bill McKibben’s piece, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” I think that was in Rolling Stone. And what he’d done is, Mark Campanale, who was Carbon Tracker in London, had basically analyzed the balance sheets of every coal, gas and oil company in the world and said basically those assets, their reserves, couldn’t be assets, because if they burned we would be basically Venus. So, you know, how could it be assets? [unclear]. In his piece in Rolling Stone he set a match to the assets, and it was terrifying. It was global warming’s terrifying new math. And I had people coming up to me, Ross, who said, it’s game over, and I’m going to move to British Columbia, take the kids.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, like, where — it’s over, we’re done, we — I told that to you.
Paul Hawken: Is that who? Yeah. And so I just thought, like, wow. If, when, sometimes — I’ve never been an alcoholic or addict, so — but I know people who’ve been in, you know, A.A. And actually one of the hallmarks of that is to give up, to surrender, to say, look, hello, my name is Paul, I’m an alcoholic, or whatever. But I felt like when you give up on something, that actually is an opening as opposed to a closure. And I felt that, so I saw it as an opening for Drawdown and decided to do it myself. Now, I say myself — actually there’s dozens and dozens of people, but to initiate it. And I didn’t know how to do it very clearly, but just gathered people, you know, Amanda Ravenhill and Chad Frischmann and Zeke Hausfather, and then 66 different researchers from all over the world, all six continents except Antarctica, who were postdocs or PhDs or whatever.
And we started making a list of the solutions, and we had a hat in the office — like, I think we put, you know, we think of a solution, paper cup to Starbucks, put it in. But just whatever it was, we start, and then we start to go through it and winnow it into what were substantive solutions. And again, the idea was to map, measure and model the 100 most substantive solutions to reversing global warming. And away we went. When we got down to about 100 or so, we started to do models, and probably had the biggest — we were, you know, broke — we had the biggest Excel spreadsheet in the world, that if you just whispered at it, it would break down completely, have to restart it. I mean, it’s just huge models, and I give Chad Frischmann a whole lot of credit for those models.
And out it came. But I knew, as a writer, as an author, that when you do a book, you have to stay in your lane. If you’re going to write a bodice ripper book, you don’t talk about philosophy. And so in this time—
Ross Kenyon: Is the bodice ripper coming out, though? You’re at home, you’re not traveling a lot. Write that.
Paul Hawken: I’ll get to that. But I think — but the point being is that these are the most substantive solutions, but they’re global, and they didn’t take in social justice, they didn’t take into account culture, they didn’t take into account gender, they didn’t take into account colonization, they didn’t take into account so many other things. And furthermore, there’s no such thing as a global solution, because there’s no global. They’re all local. Causes are local, and so are the cures. And so I knew that, and the reason — I always knew, before it was even completed, throughout, as I was writing — I knew I was going to do Regeneration, that it was the sequel.
Because really, if you’re not talking about the biosphere and regenerating what has been lost and damaged — whether it’s land or rivers, or whether it’s desert, desertification, deserts, and certainly farms, or industrial agriculture — then you’re not serious. Because then, and now, there is what’s called the carbon tunnel syndrome, which is basically the idea that somehow if we get the carbon thing right, we’re good to go and we get a hall pass to the 21st, 22nd century. It’s like, no, you don’t. And please do it, and we need to do it, no question. It’s just imperative.
But so Regeneration was really sort of stepping back and looking at it from a broader perspective, which is how to bring back life. In other words, if you’re not creating an increasing amount of life on earth, then what are you doing? What are you doing? Because there’s no middle ground. There’s no neutral ground there where you can say, I’m not creating life, but I’m not taking life. Yes, you are. And so that applies, of course, to agriculture specifically, profoundly, but in all other human endeavors that applies. And so that was why Regeneration was always in my mind as the sequel.
Ross Kenyon: It’s such a heavy cognitive load to transform everything about your life. If you’re in a difficult marriage and you think there’s one key thing stopping you from having a healthy marriage, that seems achievable. If it’s that you need to change your entire personality and how you relate and everything else, that actually probably is what you need to do to fix the marriage, but it’s a much more daunting step. I imagine just focusing on the carbon math is a simple story. It’s misleading in many ways too, because there are several overlapping ecological crises happening concurrently. But do you think that’s actually going to mislead us? Or maybe it already has misled us.
Paul Hawken: Yeah. It’s created what’s called the carbon tunnel syndrome, which is this narrow focus. You know, you see that especially in the tech industry — the idea that tech is a savior, that now we have AI and tech, we’re going to fix it. And the very verb is wrong: fix. You don’t fix nature. You create the conditions for regeneration. You don’t come in — you know, the idea that humankind sort of understands better than the living world is kind of an attitude that has brought us to this point, which is, we’ve been taking, taking, taking, extractive economy. Everybody knows that. But the fact is that we’ve lost half of all life on the planet, biomass, life in all forms, in the last 200 years, and the rate is increasing right now.
And so that’s what I’m saying. You can look at 2050 projections, IEA this, that, World Bank — we can get net zero by 2050 if we do X, Y, Z. Good, good, good. Now do a 180 and look at our forests, our lands, our waters, our oceans, our people, human health, poverty, inequity, injustice. Look at our megaforests, all five of them. Look, I mean, look what happened to the boreal this year, the boreal forest this year, Canada. That’s a regime shift. That’s not a fire.
So unless we have a more expansive view — expansive being holistic, that is to say the whole tamale, which is called planet Earth — I feel like we get into these things like direct air capture. Like, okay, it’s a very male thing, with all due respect to our gender, to think that, well, we’ll fix this. And then, you know how you have Occidental Petroleum announcing last week, or whatever it was, that they’re going to build the first one-billion-dollar direct air capture plant in Ector County, Texas, that will sequester, or remove, some people say, 500,000 tons of CO2 per year, at a cost of $300 million per year operating costs. You have to think about: one billion capital costs, 300 million operating costs, 500,000 tons, which is 360 seconds of global emissions. 360 seconds of global emissions for a billion.
And you just think, what a billion dollars would do for so many aspects of the living world. Or for poverty. Or for equity. Or for forests, for the megaforests. I mean, it’s just mind-boggling that there’s this allocation of capital, and everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon, because it’s like, people think, oh, it’s going to happen, it’s going to make money, these companies are going up in value, the direct air capture companies and so forth. And to me, it’s just absolutely ludicrous.
Ross Kenyon: I was so interested to hear you say this, because Regeneration, I don’t think, mentions much about industrial carbon removal until there’s an appendix where I think you mention something very similar to what you just said. Whereas when I compare that with Drawdown, Drawdown had a much more ecumenical focus, where tech did have a clear role to play, and some of this could be quite helpful in conjunction with more natural climate solutions. It seems that you’ve soured on that over time, or maybe I misread your original book here. But what happened in the past couple years that caused you to revise this thought?
Paul Hawken: There’s nothing wrong with technology per se, but when technology starts to breathe its own exhaust, there is something wrong with it, which is to think that solely, somehow, it’s going to do something. The fact is that we don’t want to remove carbon, we want to change the flow of carbon. So just the fact that people use the term removal — like, removing from what? That means the atmosphere is different than the biosphere, which is absolutely not true. They’re one thing. Just like you have gas in your lungs, right? It’s a gaseous thing, and you have—
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Paul Hawken: And you have your material. Okay. So the earth has a gaseous expression, you know, 15 miles at the most, I mean, in terms of functionally protective of the earth, and then we have the planet itself in terms of living matter and geology and water. Okay. So just that idea that we’re going to remove it, othering climate, and the whole language around it — like, we’re going to fix climate, we’re going to fight climate, we have to fight climate change. All those terms are the language that have basically been emblematic of the mindset of othering people, cultures, place, nature, the world, which is the hallmark of Western deterministic science, that has brought us to this situation we’re in today.
And so to use that same mindset of othering is the cause. It’s not the cure, and that’s what — it’s not the technique, which is technology. It’s not that technology is the thing. It’s like, to what end? To what end? Is it synchronous? Is it harmonious to the living world? Or is it mind over? Is it trying to dominate? Is it trying to fix, in this case, and so forth? And that’s where it goes wrong.
Ross Kenyon: There’s actually a lot of terminological back and forth within the carbon removal community. Many think that more temporary carbon storage should not qualify as true removal, because it’s in the fast carbon cycle and it’s going through soil and forest and going back to the atmosphere and oceans in a pretty quick cycle. But a lot of people think that carbon removal should refer to lithospheric storage, where it’s going back in a similar sink as it emitted from, so fossil emissions should go back into the lithosphere, in probably the same reserve spot that it came out of, and I think removal in that case is probably an appropriate term. Do you disagree with that?
Paul Hawken: It’s appropriate in terms of the function, but it’s inappropriate in terms of understanding the flow of carbon. Which is that, and furthermore, like, even at the DAC best case of $200 a ton, just removing last year’s carbon, 2022, will cost the world five billion — $5 trillion. Okay, so again, you think, okay, five trillion, what could we do with $5 trillion, given all the other modalities? And the idea that somehow the carbon cycle, which you referred to, is not adequate to the task at hand, I would argue against that one too. The carbon cycle is supposed to be — a cycle is — and my new book is called Carbon: The Book of Life. But it’s all about the flow of carbon, and that’s what we have to look at.
And yes, have we subverted, diverted, have we — definitely, you know, by burning fossil fuels and so forth, old, old trees and animals, and rapidly changed the amount of carbon in the atmosphere? Of course. Everyone knows that. But I’m just trying to get back to the language here, Ross. And that is — we have, we are a crisis of — I would just say, I just don’t think — very, very few people understand the enormity of the crisis that we’re in right now. And it’s okay, maybe it’d be a bad thing if they all knew at the same time, I’m not sure. But the fact is that less than 1% of people on the planet today are doing anything at all whatsoever about climate. Okay? Less than 1%. It’s so much less that it’s just scary.
Now, why? And that’s really what I want to get to here, as opposed to parsing this technology versus that one. And the fact is, after 50 years of being in the public sphere, we have to ask ourselves, are 99.5% of the world stupid and insensitive and don’t care? Or is the narrative that’s been used by the climate movement, right up until today, absolutely causing that distancing, and that ignoring, and that, like, I hope they figure it out, because I don’t know what to do and I don’t have any role in this and I don’t even understand what they’re talking about when they’re talking about net zero and decarbonization and DAC and this and that? It doesn’t mean anything to the vast majority of people in the world.
And furthermore, the original rhetoric about, you know, future existential threat — this poses a future existential threat to the world. Well, for sure we can say today it’s a current existential threat. But the fact is that at least 5 billion people wake up every single morning — it’s probably more than that — and the first thing they think about is current existential threat. It’s not about future existential threat. And so if the climate movement is talking about future threat and not seeing that actually climate solutions, the solutions that are brought out, that are Regeneration and many other proposals that exist right now — if we don’t see that they absolutely address current existential threat: housing, food security, security, education, warmth, equity, that they do.
And yet somehow the money that is going to things that basically are concentrating capital in the world, as opposed to — absolutely. Starting to — even, even carbon offsets, it’s just painful. You saw the Guardian piece: 87% of them are probably junk. Junk, not just, you know. I mean, junk means junk, means like — and even worse than junk, they cause harm. Now, you could argue that one, say, well, that was just this study and not that study, that’s one NGO and the Guardian altogether. But the point being is, it’s pretty much true.
And so you have a $2 billion industry. Who’s making the money? I mean, it’s in the North, it’s in concentrations of capital, and the money is not going to the whole of the planet, to the Global South, to people who need it, the 5.1 billion people who wake up every morning with current existential threat. And the golden pathway to reversing global warming is to serve humanity. And you serve humanity by restoring, renewing, regenerating the biosphere on all levels.
Ross Kenyon: How might we operationalize that and change the approach to offsetting? You have in the book the phrase, or term, onsetting, that you’d like to catch on. Is that how you might change the framing here?
Paul Hawken: Yeah, because offsetting is just a gerbil wheel. Just a gerbil wheel. That’s all it is. It’s like, I’m going to emit and then I’m going to buy an offset. Let’s just say that offset was actually genuine, you know, I mean, even if temporal, okay, like 30 or 40 or whatever. Okay, that’s temporal, got that. But even for that to be the case, you know, nothing’s changed. And basically it is a hall pass for polluters and for people who are exploiting the world and extracting more, to keep going. And so onset means, if, like, when I fly, I do 5X.
Now, that’s — I mean, just, you get this thing like 56 kilograms, you know, you buy a ticket, it says that’s the jet-A fuel carbon content that was emitted from takeoff to landing. That isn’t — what about the plane? What about the people? What about the airport? What about the transport? What about the hotel? What about the highways? What about — it’s just a ridiculous number. And not only ridiculous, but as you know very well, I mean, these — Delta, now, these are buying offsets at $2 a ton or $3 a ton from God knows who, and doing what? But you know, and that’s what I’m saying, when you commoditize, you monetize. When you get that way, you know, you’re right back where you started, which is, you’re selling the earth to people. That’s what you’re doing, you know?
I just, like, can we just step back from that? And so I fly very rarely now. When I do, I do 5X. That’s an onset, which is, I have a lot of past emissions to make up for, you know, and I’m not even sure 5X makes up for the emissions from a single flight. I’m not sure it does, really. So yeah, I mean, the offset world is just, it’s crooked in every way. Now look, there’s amazing things going on there too, like with TNC and other organizations in Tanzania, I think Tanzania, and doing with Hadza lands there, which is pretty big — [unclear] in England. I mean, it’s a huge tract of land and people.
The Hadza tribespeople who are actually illegally cutting logs and doing things, you know, to support themselves, are now basically wardens. You know, they’re guarding their land, and they’re the last hunter-gathering culture in the world, and now they’re protecting themselves as cultural pride, too. That, to me — call it offset, onset, whatever you want to call it — that is really excellent. So I’m not just blanket condemning onsets, but they’re just very rare where they actually do what they set out to do.
Ross Kenyon: We in Nori mostly work with farmers right now, trying to store soil carbon. Is there anything that you’ve seen in your long experience in the environmental movement and around voluntary carbon markets that might help us do things in a way that would be compatible with your thinking here?
Paul Hawken: Sure. I mean, my thinking is to make sure people understand that carbon is the metric, not the purpose. Carbon is a metric, not the purpose. Okay. The purpose of regenerative agriculture is to restore life to the soil. Carbon is obviously the measure of that. Life and carbon are inseparable. All life forms are carbon based. So you see things like Indigo Ag and others and so forth, and now you’re seeing Bayer Monsanto, you’re seeing Cargill, you’re seeing Syngenta, you’re seeing Corteva, all get into this idea of regenerative ag with this very, very small singular focus on carbon. And then there’s rhetoric about the other things.
You know, the Syngenta website about regenerative agriculture is one of the best I’ve ever seen, until it gets down to the very bottom, and it says, with appropriate use of chemical fertilizers, you know, pesticides and herbicides. It’s like, this is small print on the bottom of the website. And so the focus on carbon as, you know, an outcome for farmers is, to me, sort of missing the point. And the point is to restore soil health, that is in the farmer’s interest, by the way, of course, you know, in terms of water retention, plant health, you know, and then whoever eats the plant, people or animals; not killing the pollinators, you know, what a great idea that is; and then not using herbicides to basically desiccate the crop, whether it’s wheat or barley or rapeseed, etcetera.
Most of the glyphosate that’s in our baby food and our children, in breast milk and dust and everything, is coming from desiccation — paraquat, dicamba, glyphosate that’s used to desiccate crops, because you do get an increased yield if you speed up the ripening of a commodity crop. But you know, so you can have a practice where you’ve got more carbon in your soil, and by the way, you know, when I harvest it, I’m going to kill, you know, birds, insects. And we just don’t know the final result of glyphosate in our bloodstream, and almost everybody in the world today.
So you know, that’s why I think the focus on carbon itself now as a metric, as something to be fungible — that is to say, hey, we got some over here, do you want to buy it? Okay. But what’s going on? Is it really — is it really what we want to accomplish, the carbon itself? Or are we using it really as an accurate measure of an overall change in that farm, in the soil? You know, everything from springtails to pollinators to everything, it’s a system, you know. And so I just think that systemic emphasis should go along with carbon metrics in farms, so that there is that validation, as opposed to just carbon itself.
Ross Kenyon: I think you take for granted, and maybe there’s disagreement about, to what degree carbon in soil is an adequate proxy for other types of ecosystem benefits. Maybe that is a really tight proxy, and maybe it’s looser than one might hope. But just doing one thing correctly and measuring one thing successfully is extremely challenging. Also having to take into account something like biodiversity, which, measuring that is a whole minefield too, as I’m sure you’ve seen, water, things like that.
And then somehow bundling this into an asset that the average person who buys an offset — even well-informed ESG professionals are buying junk, and they’re mostly just trained to think in terms of, a ton is a ton, the duration doesn’t really matter. Is an avoidance the same as a removal, or sequestration, or however you want to call it? But this is not well understood. We’ve trained people with bad carbon math for a very long time, so introducing increasing complexity here — I think what you’re asking for is essentially a spiritual revolution for the planet, and we probably need one.
Paul Hawken: No, I don’t. I mean, I agree with everything you just said, and so forth, you know? But it’s not about measurement, it’s about practice. It’s practice. That’s what it’s about. And okay, are the farms, you know, using neonicotinoids? Okay. You can say, like, if you’re using the neonics, I’m sorry, we don’t care how much carbon you’ve increased it by, because you have a systemic pesticide that’s killing pollinators and birds. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, you know. I mean, so there’s things you can do. They’re just like, these are thresholds. You can’t measure that, you know, changes in moisture content over the time. I mean, the farmers are going to notice it, measure it and so forth. That’s fine. And so that’s not something that’s just an outcome. Again, outcome is simply, the more life in the soil is going to attract more moisture and retain more moisture. We know that.
But that’s about practices. You know, is the land covered? Are there live roots in the land and so forth? And these are checklists, and the farmer can just say yes or no, or I’m working on it, and it’s not like you’re going to say, you’re out, you know. But there’s some things you can say. Look, we do not approve of glyphosate, whether it’s in any shape, manner or form and so forth. If you’re using it, well, or dicamba, or whatever, paraquat — that’s it. If you — that’s it. We’re not going to use — thank you, but get your money someplace else, but not from Nori, you know. And I think you can do that with neonics, neonics and so forth.
I think you can do it with that, and I think you can definitely call out in a positive way people who are planting their fence lines, doing prairie strips, you know, whatever, to increase biodiversity, and really, you know, bringing back populations of beneficials, whether it be [unclear] or insects and so forth. So I think you’d call that out and say, our farmer X in state Y is doing this and this and so forth. And then you can make it known to the farmers and so forth that these are things we’d really love to see. Let’s be positive about this. These things come on, you wrinkle your nose on the neonicotinoids and glyphosate, that kind of a paraquat, silly, you know, no, no thank you. Sell your carbon to somebody else. We’re not going to be part of that, because that’s just industrial agriculture in drag, in disguise, you know. I mean, and it is not actually truly regenerative.
Ross Kenyon: If you think agribusiness is just terrible for the planet in general, changing some of those practices could be some of the highest-impact things one could do. Do you not think so?
Paul Hawken: Give me an example.
Ross Kenyon: I think even moving from conventional ag to regenerative light — I mean, if you compare it to a permaculturalist living on an acre, there’s no comparison to row cropping in the Corn Belt. It’s almost a different thing entirely, by kind. But surely moving agribusiness towards more regenerative ag practices is a good thing, and you are seeing companies move in. Probably some of it’s camouflaged, some of it is sincere, some of it’s driven by bottom line and not some sort of spiritual connection to the earth. Well, I think on net it probably is good.
Paul Hawken: Yeah, I don’t use the word — the second time you use spiritual, it’s like — I think everybody has a spiritual life, whether they know it or not, and, you know, so honor that. I don’t use that as a—
Ross Kenyon: Sorry, tell me how you would say it then, and I’ll gladly adopt.
Paul Hawken: Well, spiritual sounds amorphous, and I’m actually very, very hands-on, down to earth, you know, practical and pragmatic in my discussion. So look, this is what I suggest, and I’m doing it for two of the biggest food companies in the world, so I know. Which is, what I think you need to do is say, look, these are the principles, and they’re original. These are principles, and this is what these principles mean. Okay. Practice is wherever you’re starting, wherever you are right now. You know, you have 5,000 acres in Iowa and corn, and you live in a toxic environment and you can’t even drink your own well water. Okay, that’s where you are. But this is where we need to go.
And each farmer, she or he, is going to have to figure out whether they want to, first of all, and then how to get there. It’s not like, if you’re doing this, you’re X’d out. It’s not binary. It’s actually a process. That’s what I say, it’s a flow. And so practices that would typify, you know, what Gabe Brown and others do, you know, and so forth, which are kind of like the rock stars of regenerative agriculture, and they’re all over the place. And I used them when I started Erewhon. And, you know, in the 60s I was working with regenerative farmers, okay? But they were there then, and they’re here now, en masse, and you’re seeing this movement.
For Nori, I just feel like it’s saying, like, this is where we want to go. We want to work with you, and by the way, we can get you money for your measurable changes in carbon and so forth. And who knows, you know, at some point maybe you can get foundations or family funds or others, maybe ESG companies, to even pay more if people are doing, you know, prairie strips and, you know, hedgerows and fence line planting, and, you know, other practices, you know, and forsaking all form of herbicide, of having live roots in the soil, of not just having cover crops but always having cover on the land, so the land never sees the sun, and, you know, which is preventing erosion and feeding the crops. And you get somebody who goes to on-farm fertility, well, that’s going to be, you know, hit the bell.
I mean, but the point being is that you’re really putting out there what Nori is about, the commitment it has, the direction it wants to go. And you’re there as a partner to farmers, you know, to help them, to be, you know, a cheerleader. But in the meantime, you know, here’s some extra income, by the way, for practices that do increase carbon in the soil and so forth. I hope that’s helpful to you, in terms of continuing this journey to make your farm less toxic, if not non-toxic, more productive, that you make more money, you save money, you know, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, what you hear from every regenerative farmer is they’re more profitable, without exception, the ones who, you know, are getting there. That [unclear] from where they are, you know, being squeezed by prices and commodity companies and so forth, and getting to that regen side, is difficult, you know, because, you know, they’re all addicted to practices that they can’t get out of easily.
Ross Kenyon: Appreciate the advice. I’ll be sure to share it. I’d also like to ask for advice. Many of our listeners are in the carbon removal community. Many people are doing enhanced rock weathering, ocean alkalinity enhancement, direct air capture. That is a space that we roll in quite frequently, and we are anticipating that the cost will come down. Cost curves will come down as they have in other spaces like solar. The grid’s going to clean up. It’s going to change the equation here. Hopefully nuclear fusion comes online. God, please don’t take the bait on that one though, because that’s going to derail the entire rest of the conversation. But what advice would you have for them? Do you think they should stop trying to make more engineered carbon removal solutions?
Paul Hawken: Even, you know, enhanced weathering, all of those are all part of natural processes. Okay. So, you know, it’s sort of like hybrid is often what people—
Ross Kenyon: Thumbs up around here.
Paul Hawken: Yeah, thumbs up to all that. No question about it. You know, and that is an acceleration of a natural process, you know. So, hey, can we get in here? Can we help? Can we get the stuff, and we’ll spread it around, either on the land or, you know, on coastal areas? No question. When you get to direct air capture, I would challenge one physicist anywhere in the world to show me where Moore’s law applies to direct air capture. It won’t. It can’t. And that’s different from looking at things where, you know, there is going to be economies of scale developed over time, because the fact is there’s more customers, the customers are closer to source. You know, I mean, there’s techniques and so forth. I can see that happening and being very, very valuable.
In terms of carbon removal, I still wouldn’t use the term removal. You know, I just feel like you’re not removing carbon, you’re just changing where it is. So that’s what I’m talking about. I’m an English major, so I find words important, you know, because I feel like people say, oh, it’s gone. No, it’s not. It’s actually — what you made a very good point, but it’s actually where it came from. So it’s bringing carbon back home. It’s a very different way of speaking about it than removing it and so forth. So that’s why I take a little bit of exception to the term, because it’s not actually inaccurate.
You know, and so, but when it comes to direct air capture and bundling it in with other solutions, I say, well, show me the Moore’s law here, because it’s about basically fluid dynamics: four parts per 10,000, we’re going to bring it down into something, and okay. You can’t change the cost on that very much. You can change the energetic cost, that is, how much energy is required. You can change the source of energy, for sure. It could be nuclear, it could be, you know, coal, it could be renewables, etcetera. Okay. But now you’re going to liquefy it. Show me the Moore’s law of liquefaction from the sorbents. I’m all ears. I would love to see the breakthrough.
Now that you’ve liquefied it, show me the Moore’s law of pumping liquids into depleted oil wells, which is what Occidental’s going to do, or in pipelines that go who knows how far away into geological formations. You know, like, there is no such thing as a Moore’s law in these areas, you know. So that’s why I say DAC to me is a dead end. It’s a dead financial dead end, and all the beliefs in the world, it is not going to change the physicality of that. You know, notice, that’s just physics, you know. So that’s why I do draw a line.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I’m going to get so many emails for this episode, which is good. That’s engagement. That’s good for its own sake, I think. Are there other types of carbon sequestration that you think are financial or otherwise dead ends?
Paul Hawken: Dead ends. I think more in terms of possibility instead of dead ends. I’m not here to call things out. I’m here to think about what’s possible. I think about InventWood, which is a company in Maryland, you know, and basically invented by Chinese scientist Liangbing Hu, who got his PhD in nanotechnology when he was 20 at UCLA, and then went to Stanford for his postdoc, and then went to University of Maryland, and has 10 years of ARPA-E grants. And the grants were to transform wood into a substance. InventWood — he calls it MettleWood, M-E-T-T-L-E, as well, MettleWood — that basically is two times stronger than steel, one-sixth the weight and one-half the cost, and doesn’t burn.
Now, to me, that is using nature, because it’s pure wood. And there’s a process of removing the lignin and the hemicellulose and some of the cellulose, and then compressing under heat. Okay. And I wish I had — I had it in my desk, I’d show you a piece. But the point being is that that can replace steel. You can make I-beams out of it. You could make a Tesla out of it. You can make paneling out of it. Whatever wood is used for, and metal and aluminum for that matter, you can use InventWood. And the DOE just gave it, or granted, I think, $20 or $25 million to build the first factory, which is being built in North Carolina. See, that to me is what I’m focusing on: possibility. Not — I will call out things which I just think, you’ve got to be kidding, people.
And it’s, for me, Ross, I do the math. It’s about math. It’s not about belief. You know, I mean, we said when we did Drawdown, in God we trust, all others bring data. Okay. So that’s my thing about direct air capture: bring me the data on Moore’s law here. No one’s using that term, but they’re invoking it. They’re implying that it’s there somehow. Doesn’t it get down to $200 or $100 or whatever a ton? You know, I’m saying, I’m all ears. I want to see the data, not the belief. But so I think about things that are actually making a huge difference in the world, and using the principles of biology, or the living world, as a way to reimagine our relationship to it.
And growing regenerative agriculture is simply a reimagination of our relationship between producing food and then feeding the world as well. That’s right. Now we’re feeding people — it’s arguable how the quality of the food, but let’s put that aside for a minute. But we’re not feeding the earth. And an agricultural system that actually feeds the mother, which is the earth, is going to be one that endures, that produces better food. And we know now that the food that comes out of really rich, healthy soils is a rich, healthy plant that has more phytochemicals in it and is far more nourishing, for whether it’s children, goats or people.
You know, I mean, the fact is we just — we know that. I mean, this is happening at the Rockefeller Institute, and there’s 10,000 ingredients in broccoli. Not 17, not 42 — 10,000 different ones. We have no idea, actually, what’s in our food and how that relates to our microbiome. But we do know that if we go to a farming system that creates very healthy, vibrant soil, which is a whole mystery in itself, you know, down below — I mean, we’re like, what’s going on? We really don’t know. But we do know healthy soil and the plants that come out of it are going to be far different in terms of levels and types of nutrients that we haven’t even understood or measured yet.
And so this is a win, win, win, win, win thing. And yeah, it’s going to be very difficult for farmers to make that transition. We get that, and that’s why I love what you’re doing, because, like, can we help? You know, that’s what you’re doing. Can we? It’s not about a business. Of course it’s a business. But I mean, it’s about, can we help? Can we be helpful? But I think the most helpful thing you can do is to really, you know, provide a sensibility to the farmer, she or her or him or whatever it is, family, you know, wherever they are, about the possibilities that lie ahead, if they wish, if they can, if they maybe just take 500 acres over here, if they have a huge farm, or 100 acres, and just try things out and see how it works. And, you know, experiment. Don’t do anything that’s going to threaten your livelihood or your income stream, but step by step, you know. That’s a nice thing.
Ross Kenyon: I appreciate the kind words, and you may get your wish, by the way. I know some very thoughtful direct air capture people, so you may receive some of this data that you’re looking for. Whether or not you buy it, it’s a different kind of question here. Paul, I’m really grateful for you being here. You have a lot of resources on your website too. I imagine you’d like to drive people to your website, books. Is there anything you’d like people to do to engage with you?
Paul Hawken: Well, the website regeneration.org has solutions, many of which were not in Drawdown. But what’s interesting is that what I wanted to do is combine the solution with a sense of agency. So when you look at a solution, it’s really about what you can do as an individual, as a family, as a neighborhood, as a community, as a town, a city, as a county, as a province, as a company, as a corporation. And not all of them have things that you can do on those different levels of agency. But what it allows somebody to do is to understand where the points of intervention are to actually enact that solution.
And people ask me all the time, you know, what should I do? And I’m going, you know, look at a list like that, and when you find something that lights you up, because you want to know more about it, or you’ve always wanted to do it, or you actually know a lot about it, maybe, and you want to do it, that’s what you should do. Don’t do a should, do a want. In other words, I want to do this, it just lights me up, you know. Great, that’s what you should do, you know, because it’s you, and that’s where you’re going to be most effective. And so Nexus on regeneration.org is just saying, look, it’s like, here’s a huge buffet of possibility. And is there something there that you want to get involved with, whether you’re in fifth grade or whether you’re the ESG department of a big corporation?
Ross Kenyon: Thanks so much for being here, Paul. I appreciate you being a good sport with all these direct carbon sequestration slash removal slash — am I even allowed to say removal at this point anymore? Probably not. Thanks for having a real conversation about this stuff.
Paul Hawken: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks so much.
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, and we will catch you next time.
