This is episode 376 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, hosted by Ross Kenyon. This blogpost is a short summary and roundup of the episode’s themes and key points. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your shows.
Long a pariah climate solution, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) is having its mainstream moment. As the climate movement ponders the planet's deep overshoot, more conversations about geoengineering, solar radiation management, global cooling, etc. are taking place in the open.
Moreover, for-profit entities are raising venture rounds, with Stardust recently announcing a $60M Series A to commercialize their approach to SAI. This moment is feeling genuinely new, and it feels this way to today's guest Dr. Shuchi Talati of The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering too.
While I believe we should do the research and have the governance ready for possible future deployment lest it be done in a much less responsible way (I do not enjoy writing these words one single bit), I am finding it hard to accept its use as anything less than tragedy. Some felt this way about carbon removal, and I have greater sympathy for that feeling now too. The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk...
Is SAI an instance of brave humans deploying life-saving technology? Or Promethean hubris for which we should keep our livers guarded? How much should the profit motive influence SAI deployment, if at all? I don't have all of the answers—nor pretend to–but I can point you to the emotional and spiritual core of it that helps me make sense of being a historical actor with agency at this moment in time.
This episode's sponsors
Absolute Climate: the only standard that’s developed independent of registries
Philip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliers
Listen to the RCC episode with Peter Minor from Absolute Climate
Listen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP
Resources
The Alliance for a Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering
"I See a Darkness—The Climate Movement Expects Deep Overshoot"
Stratospheric aerosol injection on Wikipedia
Stardust Solutions, a Geoengineering Startup, Raises $60 Million to Build a Solar-Reflecting System by 2030 on Heatmap
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Dwight D. Eisenhower's Chance for Peace speech
"There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Let us first ask ourselves what should be understood by “a tragic optimism.” In brief it means that one is, and remains, optimistic in spite of the “tragic triad,” … a triad which consists of … (1) pain; (2) guilt; and (3) death. This … raises the question, How is it possible to say yes to life in spite of all that? How … can life retain its potential meaning in spite of its tragic aspects? After all, “saying yes to life in spite of everything,” …presupposes that life is potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable. And this in turn presupposes the human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into something positive or constructive. In other words, what matters is to make the best of any given situation. … hence the reason I speak of a tragic optimism … an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action."
- Viktor Frankl in the postscript to Man's Search for Meaning
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Chance for Peace speech
More from the show
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks for listening. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of Reversing Climate Change, the podcast you are listening to right at this very moment. Before we get into the bulk of today’s show, I’d love to tell you about our sponsors, Absolute Climate and Philip Lee LLP. I’ve made great radio with both of them. They should be familiar to you if you listen to the show, but I want to tell you about why you should learn a little bit more. The first sponsor is Absolute Climate.
I did a show with their founder, Peter Minor, a few months back. And a lot of people love that show. I was asking a question of can registries design their own methodologies for carbon markets without it being a conflict of interest? And Absolute Climate’s thesis is no. They shouldn’t be in the business of doing that. We actually need to disintegrate functionality within carbon markets even further. They are literally the only independent standards body for carbon removal that exists. Their name is very well chosen.
I think they are some of the most aggressively idealistic people within carbon removal. It’s come up on Reversing Climate Change so many times about how and why there’s tension between commercial teams and science teams within carbon markets. There’s some fundamental tension between the rules of running a business, or I should say the rules of running a profitable business is maybe a better way to put that, and climate impact. And I think Absolute is one of those companies that, at least from my experience of what I know of them over there, I think they’re going to be some of the staunchest holdouts, just trying to make sure that there can be a justified true belief that a tonne purchase is a tonne truly removed.
They’re betting big on not compromising. It’s a bold strategy. I respect the absolute hell out of that. Absolute is very much doing things their own way and they stand out to me and I will never mistake them in a lineup. Go check them out. I really am endlessly And that’s also true of our other sponsor, Philip Lee LLP. In fact, I told them to pitch me on some weirder legal shows. I really like doing shows about the law. I think the law is such a fascinating part of our shared social life.
It structures so much of it. It’s badly understood by most people. And just structuring deals within carbon removal is hard. I’m talking grown up deals here. Like when you’re trying to put together an enormous package, complicated structuring. A lot of money changing hands. The stakes are high. You really do need a good lawyer. I’m sorry to tell you that if you are a startup out there in carbon removal, you’re going to probably pay a fair amount of money to lawyers. There’s just no way around it.
Your choice is basically, do you get a bad lawyer or a good lawyer? One really cool thing I can say on Philip Lee LLP’s behalf, well, one... Ryan Covington and I did a very fun show about how basically no one except for an elite few really know what bankability and project finance even mean. And he lays it out very clearly. If you’d like to go listen to that show, it’s awesome. And it’s linked in the show notes. And also we ended up talking about Ernest Hemingway, a firm not too.
So it keeps with the tradition of Reversing Climate Change. One also really cool thing is that they just won Environmental Finance’s VCM Law Firm of the Year. They’ve run it three years in a row, 2023, 2024, and 2025. It’s the only award for legal teams operating in the VCM, and they have offices in the US, Europe, and the UK. You should check out Philip Lee LLP. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to this, and thank you to our sponsors. You really make this so that it’s something that, in a busy life with lots of competing priorities, I’m able to keep coming back and making more Reversing Climate Change.
Thanks so much for what you do, and now, here is the show. Hey, thank you for listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m the host of the show and a climate tech entrepreneur. In today’s show, we’re really steering right into the heart of the zeitgeist, by which I mean it is addressing the heart of this tragic moment in climate. Before I do that, if you could please open up your podcast app right now, go to this show, Reversing Climate Change, give it five stars or a full rating, write a review if you’re on an app that does that, It really helps a huge amount, more than you probably even know.
It’s super helpful. It would be much appreciated. And also, if you want to pay $5 a month, you can become a paid subscriber. You’ll get rid of all the ads that I don’t read myself. You get bonus content. There’s a little bonus content from today’s show that I cut out of the main show that didn’t fit as nicely, and it’s on a cool topic. It’s about whether SAI, stratospheric aerosol injection, can be used as an offensive weapon of war and other questions related to that.
Super intelligent AI, et cetera, that I asked Shuchi that maybe steers a little bit far from the, from the heart of the show, but it’s still a very interesting topic. So become a paid subscriber, a great rating and review in your podcast app right now. You can do it right now. I would be so appreciative if so, but also whatever, you’re just here listening. That’s fine too. Thanks for being here. So today’s show, Shuchi Talati is back on. Shuchi’s been on. At least one other time, I think maybe even two other times.
Shuchi is the founder and executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering. Her work has always struck me as extremely brave and visionary. It’s just one of those things where working on a topic and then having the world, the zeitgeist catch up to you in this way, and you’ve been thinking about it for so many years, it shows an incredible amount of vision. There really aren’t that many people dealing with solar geoengineering for this long and specifically from a justice orientation that is not commonly a pairing that one might’ve expected.
I was going to do very bare bones definition. So we don’t have to get too far into the details, but solar geoengineering, solar radiation management, SRM, it’s sort of the big umbrella concepts here and solar radiation management can be something like Putting satellites into space that bounce away sunlight. It could involve things like marine cloud brightening. An SAI, stratospheric aerosol injection, involves putting certain types of molecules high in the atmosphere that bounces much more sunlight out into space than it allows to pass through, than what would otherwise be there.
For a long time, SRM, SAI, and often when people say SRM, they’re really talking specifically about SAI, was a highly unpopular idea within climate. It was one of those things that even though serious research scientists have worked on it and have worked on it for a very long time, It’s always been considered to be bad politics. It maybe has moral hazard and it distracts us from decarbonization. It pulls us into this future techno fix where we can manage this without having to make any serious changes. That’s different now, though.
As time has gone on and we used up increasingly more of the carbon budget, I think basically everyone paying attention is staring into how far into overshoot we are and is freaked out. Since the second Trump administration has started, I’ve heard way more conversations that do not have optimism fundamentally centered. The conversations that I hear tend to assume things are going to get much worse before they get better, and that we’re unlikely to pull out into a period of a generalized climate multilateralism progress on climate, especially to the degree to which we need it.
And we’re basically making peace with the fact that the world is going to be several degrees hotter. You may have heard me say this on several podcasts recently. This whole thing I’m finding to be emotionally extremely unsettling. I’m not ready to stiff upper lip. Well, we’ve got to do it. It’s our only option. I think the rush into that is a mistake. I think there are still many concerning things that can happen between now and large-scale deployment that should be considered. And also, as I’ve been fond of saying lately, sometimes books just find you at the right moment.
I recently reread Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which is wonderful. If you’ve never read it, it’s so short. You could read it or listen to it in a couple of hours. Viktor Frankl, if you don’t know, was a psychiatrist, an early practitioner of psychotherapy. And was an alternative, especially to Freud in Vienna. Viktor Frankl had the experience of going through several concentration camps as a Jew during World War II. He survived and he wrote this amazing little volume about the kinds of characters he saw in the concentration camps and what kinds of people thrived and survived, which ones gave up, which ones died of hopelessness, And what helps people to persevere.
And much of it centers around this idea of tragic optimism. And here’s what he had to say about what it meant to be tragically optimistic. In brief, it means that one is or remains optimistic in spite of the tragic triad, a triad which consists of one pain, two guilt, and three death. This raises the question, how is it possible to say yes to life in spite of all that? How can life retain its potential meaning in spite of its tragic aspects? I’m going to skip a little bit and then jump back in.
An optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential, which at its best always allows for turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment. Two, deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better. And three, deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action. And I think that’s really great advice. Many of the feelings that I’ve been experiencing around the turn to geoengineering The climate movements beginning to realize the severity of their predictions coming true. I think this captures how to deal with it in a very wise way.
For number one, turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment. If you haven’t listened to this, you should go back and listen to this show I did called I See a Darkness. That’s about me coming home from New York Climate Week and talking about the grief of so much conversation around adaptation, resilience, NGO engineering, mainstreaming, how to make sure you’re able to conduct yourself in a more chaotic world under principles that you can stand behind. So much of Frankel’s work is about people who were heading to their deaths and knew it and still behave with dignity and how that could give their lives a type of meaning.
It may not be the type of meaning that they would choose in a vacuum, but in the moment they chose to live and to die in that manner and how ennobling that can be and can give meaning to what otherwise would be a meaningless industrial death born of race hate. He quotes a line that I love that I’m also going to just read straight up because it’s great. It’s from Fyodor Dostoevsky, where he said, there is only one thing I dread not to be worthy of my sufferings.
And I love that. That is such a beautiful, beautiful sentiment about knowing how to behave when the world is truly an unpredictable and dangerous place. And number two, deriving from guilt, the opportunity to change oneself for the better. I think that’s always a good thing to do, to consider yourself fixed in character and to consider that of other people makes forgiveness very difficult. Of both self and others. And also if you’ve hardened up over a long period of working in a difficult industry that oftentimes shuns naivety, saying things like we should prioritize the least among us and we should optimize for love rather than profitability or things that frankly sound like incense should be burning.
I think it’s okay. We like the cynic. We like the person that confirms that the world is built on lies and greed and to hope for anything better is a foolish thing. And this is one potential way that you could say, you know what? I don’t actually think that’s a good quality and I’m no longer going to consider that a cynical wisdom. And number three, deriving from life’s transitoriness and incentive to take responsible action. We may need this technology. There may come a time when the likely consequences of inaction are much worse than action.
And this will be necessary. And I think given the right frame of mind, given the right spirit, given the right sense of tragedy and world historic import, it could be responsible action. But a lot of that takes place at the spiritual level. If it comes from the place of number two, of a sort of cynical realism of, oh, this is always going to happen. It’s our only move and we have no choice. I don’t think that’s the correct way to do this. And I also don’t think it allows for the sort of tragic optimism that I think any responsible deployment of solar radiation management, especially stratospheric aerosol injection, needs to have in mind is a sense of tragedy.
Every sulfate molecule that enters the stratosphere is a declaration of our own moral failure. In the same way that Eisenhower said in his Way Out of the Oval Office, discussed that every bullet, every bomb, every plane represents food that is not otherwise in someone’s stomach. Every molecule that is sprayed to increase the albedo of the planet is a declaration of our failure of a species to effectively make peace with this world, with its limits, and with our duty to care for it in a responsible way. If you can get there, if you can do it, if you can get on that level, then I trust you more.
If you don’t have this in you, I don’t think you should be anywhere near this topic, really. I think this is necessary to be a responsible interactor with anything that touches solar geoengineering. Without an effective grounding in the tragic, I think the risks of becoming technocratic, of becoming a booster, of becoming an advocate, of losing sight of what an immense tragedy this is, I think is spiritually risky and should not take place. I’ll conclude with one more story. I’ll make it personal in nature too. I wasn’t even planning on telling this story, but here it is.
I have security cameras at my house and there is on my fence, a rat that has lived for several years. And I like this rat a lot. I think this rat is a beautiful creature. I have had no desire to harm it in any way, and even though it runs through my grass sometimes, I think, you know what, I’m kind of glad you’re out here. We don’t bother each other, and I do not want to harm you for its own sake. Recently, I discovered that In one of the areas in our yard that we use, there’s a fair amount of rat poop.
This rat, or maybe it’s another rat, I don’t know, found its way into a dog bed and its waste has been recorded. I know it’s there and it’s enough that it seems to be a frequent visitor and I think for our family’s health reasons, I don’t think we can Allow, especially in space that we share with it, this amount of excreta to exist there. I just don’t think you can do it. And I think I have to set traps for this rat. If there is some other way, I would be okay letting it look.
If I could say, hey, you can be in this part of the yard, but not over here. That could be fine. But with our dog back there and everything else, I just, I don’t think it’s responsible anymore. I suppose I could also set some non-lethal traps and move the rat somewhere else. But then there’s a question of, I have to transport a bunch of rats or at least one rat in my car somewhere and take it to, I don’t know, some other place where it might cause health issues for a different family or to a park where it could also do such a thing.
And so in my head, at least, I’ve thought that using a humane but lethal trap was the best option for dealing with this perceived problem. This may, in fact, not be true. And don’t worry about messaging me. I’ll think a lot more about, let’s just assume for now that the correct option is to kill the rat. Because that’s how I’ve been thinking about this in my head, that this might have to happen. I need to make peace with it. And in taking this rat’s life, it isn’t nothing.
It’s not absent of moral character. It’s not that I’m going to kill this rat and it’s like, oh, whoop-de-doo, one more thing checked off the list, move on with my day. It isn’t necessarily wrong to take the rat’s life in this case. It has a purpose that’s meaningful and it’s not being done for entertainment purposes or some sadistic reason. But it still just might need to be done. And if that is the case, then it’s tragic. You could wish it was another way. You could try to honor the rat as an avatar of life that is worthy of some degree of respect and still kill it.
And having a sense of reverence of the tragic in that moment, I think is what makes the killing of the rat okay. And I think that’s how it is with solar geoengineering too. It might have to come about. It might have to take place. This might be an example of responsible action, as Viktor Frankl said. And that might give our actions and that rat’s life meaning, acting in this responsible way. It can characterize our action in ways that make it acceptable. But it’s about our spiritual orientation, not about the inputs and outputs, not about the outcome and the results.
It’s that this is what it means to be tragically optimistic. And this is how we get through the really hard times that we may be forced to live out during our lifetimes. If you’re able to do this ahead of time and to think about this, I think it’s spiritually useful to prepare so that this doesn’t catch one flat footed. Being caught flat footed in this way, I think is not where you want to be. I think you want to have a sense of this built in.
A sense of the tragic that is honed by film and literature and music and the humanities that allow one to feel the feelings that come with tragic but responsible action. Shuchi is someone I trust to be a good guide for how to do this. And there’s really not that many people that I feel that way about. I hope you enjoy this episode. Thanks for listening. Here it is. Shuchi, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for having me. It’s been, I think, two years since you were last on.
We are overdue. As you said, right before we started rolling, it’s getting weird with solar radiation management. Yes. What is happening? All of a sudden, it felt like you and a couple others were talking about this with great foresight years and years ago, and now seemingly it’s everywhere. The moment has arrived.
Shuchi Talati: Yeah, I feel like, you know, I can’t believe it’s been two years, first of all. And the last two years have been a whirlwind in this space. I mean, it’s actually kind of astounding how quickly things have changed. And they change in a lot of ways, both good and bad, right? I think I’m really heartened by the fact that more people are willing to talk about this, the fact that The taboo seems to be lifting a little bit to have conversation about this, which I think is really important.
I think it shouldn’t be risky to talk about SRM. That said, I think there’s also been some big changes that have both good and bad elements to them. So a lot more money has been flowing into SRM. I think it’s really important for a lot of that funding to go towards more research, which is critical. Some additional funding has been going towards governance work, but completely insufficient amounts of funding towards governance, which makes it harder to build good research and responsible research, in my opinion. I think insufficient money is going towards places outside of the global north and for work to build that engagement and capacity outside of the global north.
And then lastly, there’s been a lot more private money and I think there’s been a lot of stories, especially over the last couple of months that have really put that into a very harsh spotlight. So we’ve seen some startups start to enter the space and It’s been really deeply concerning. The most recent story that broke about a month ago was that Stardust, which is a startup SAI company from Israel and also based in Silicon Valley, has raised a Series A round of venture capital funding of $60 million.
They claimed they could have even raised more money but decided to stop there, which, sure, I don’t know why I won’t believe that, but sure. Yeah. They’ve been completely non-transparent. They have done no public engagement. They have done outdoor activity that no one has any idea what that actually was other than maybe the funders, I’m sure. And now they’re claiming that they have a particle that they are saying has a lot of scientific potential, but there’s been no peer reviewed work around such particle. There’s been no validation of any of their scientific claims and Here we are, right?
Like one of the reasons it’s so important to have deeper conversation and open conversation about SRM is so we don’t have things moving behind the shadows. It’s so we can shine a really bright light on how we do research to make sure the right types of research are happening. And I think this taboo that we’ve had for a really long time has allowed this type of activity to proliferate. And this is what we know about, right? I can’t fathom that there are things I don’t know about, right?
There must be. And that really scares me.
Ross Kenyon: The new molecule dynamics are interesting to me. The comfort that exists within SAI, SRM is around the fact that we understand sulfur dioxide’s role in the atmosphere decently well. There’s still parts of it that we don’t, of course, but it’s been around for a long time with various types of emissions. So we probably know to the point that the David Key, Zeke Housefather article in the New York Times talking about how we can replace shipping’s emissions and this might be a way to buy us some extra time before tipping points are reached or something like that.
I think the relative comfort with that is seemingly higher, but then when there’s a proprietary molecule that is not peer reviewed, that’s where the line I think definitively gets crossed for you. Am I reading you correctly?
Shuchi Talati: I think there’s a lot of lines being crossed in a lot of places and I don’t limit that to a particle. So I think when it comes to particles and aerosols, what you’re saying is right. We know a lot more about sulfates because we’ve been dealing with them for decades. So we know a lot more about how they function. I still think there’s more to know. I think David and maybe a few other scientists have more confidence than I do and a lot of other scientists do in terms of impacts.
And I think there’s a lot of differences there around where comfort lies, even for aerosols that we understand. When it comes to this new proprietary particle, there are so many new lines being crossed here that I am kind of just simply astounded that there’s any notion of legitimacy. I think first and foremost, they are making claims around the particle being biosage. I don’t know what that means. That is not a scientific term. As a trained scientist, I find that term kind of offensive, to be honest, because that’s not a real thing.
Everything around, anything is going to be dependent on quantity, right, and context. Water in certain quantities is not bio-safe for humans. I mean, it’s just such an absurd thing to make a claim about. First of all, any kind of dynamics. Right. And so that immediate claim makes me question everything. I think the fact that they’ve been doing things in ways that Don’t build trust at all with any type of community, like the communities that they’ve been working in, but also the scientific community, the governance community, makes it so that I have no reason to trust their claims around what their particle can do.
They’ve also been making claims that the particle is inert in the stratosphere, and I don’t know if they’ve done tests in the stratosphere, so if they have, I’m Massive lines have been crossed in terms of experimentation, but the notion that a particle could be inert in the stratosphere is really confusing to me because things stick to particles in the stratosphere. So the inertness is, I don’t know, that’s a very complex claim to make.
Ross Kenyon: It doesn’t react to other particles. That’s 100% inert, no reactivity at all. Even with UV at that height, it feels like that should probably happen.
Shuchi Talati: That’s the claim that they’re making. And, you know, I’m not a stratospheric chemist and I’m not an atmospheric scientist, but the atmospheric scientists that I’ve talked to find that claim to be a little preposterous. So. Is there any version of for profit SAI work that you would say is acceptable to you or do you think it’s inherently wrong? I think it’s inherently wrong. And that’s not to say I don’t think there’s not a role for the private sector in this broader enterprise, right? Things like insurance companies or Plane development or supply chains for aerosols if deployment were to be on the table, right?
I could see that role. Where I don’t see a role for the for-profit sector is an agenda setting and decision making. And that is what is happening right now, right? Stardust has decided they have set the agenda for deployment. And they’re making decisions around how the field is proceeding and being shaped. And that is where I find it to be really unacceptable. I think there’s a couple of big reasons as to why, right, that I think that’s a really big problem. I think first and foremost, I think the uncertainty is still high enough to where we cannot make claims that we know that SRM is necessarily going to lead to more benefits than harms.
I’m sure there are many SRM people who might disagree with my statement, but that is where I personally land. And so for something that could possibly cause harm, if used in a way that is problematic, To make profit off of that, I find to be really problematic. I think the second piece here is for a for-profit company, the incentive is for your technology, particle, whatever, to be used. So now that you have investors, there’s an expectation that SRM will have to be deployed for your company to be profitable.
So that inherently gets to a place where SRM deployment is their goal. The goal isn’t to figure out good science. The goal isn’t about people. It is about power. It is about use of their technology, right? And so the incentive is so perverse. The incentive is for climate change to remain bad. The incentive is for mitigation technologies to fail so their technology continues to get used indefinitely more and more. So... That structure is just unbelievably insane that we would even consider it in the context of SRM.
I mean, I’ve been saying this for years, but SRM is the opposite of every other climate technology in, I think, a few key ways. One, money is not the problem. Power is the problem. Two, infrastructure isn’t the problem. And three, like, It’s inherently scaled already. We don’t, and I think fourth is actually that we don’t actually know if we should use this approach. And it’s different from every other technology in those key ways. And so the way we think about decisions has to be different.
We can’t follow the same for-profit models that we have for other types of systems and just transport them here, which is what I’m starting to see happen, right? Like over the last couple of years, as the hype cycle has turned down, right, from NCDR, And in other sectors, especially during this administration and the hype cycles going up around climate intervention, especially SRM, we’re seeing this transfer of what people think is relevant or applicable expertise. But it’s different. And I think that lack of recognition is going to be really, really problematic in SRM.
Ross Kenyon: If anyone is listening and you’ve worked at a venture-backed company, you know what it’s like to have a lead investor on your board. And if you went to them and said, we’re going to pause for a year and wait for better signs to come out, your board may fire you if you’re the CEO or be really angry with you. Those dynamics are real. Once you have investors, it’s not like having a small business where you can wait and see. You have to go fast. There is a time value of money.
You’re disobeying it by not deploying. Is that always in the best interest? I’m not sure. I think there are places where markets and the profit motive can do a lot of good, but this is one of those places where until I had the experience of working with a lot of companies that have venture-backed boards and work inside of the VC ecosystem, I might’ve been more hopeful that VCM Dynamics here And the private sector, that’s how you start things up. That’s how you go really fast. That’s how you learn quickly.
And it’s one of those things that the more experience I have with it, the less appropriate it feels to me for something like this, that is both a public good and very risky. And I’m not sure that a board that is eager to make 10X or 100X returns, pushing a company to keep going as fast as possible, is necessarily the right thing that we want to incentivize or set up. I think that’s kind of where I’m at right now with it.
Shuchi Talati: I totally agree. I think this ethos of the whole move fast and break things, it just doesn’t apply here, right? The technology and engineering isn’t where we need to figure things out, right? We need to figure things out around impacts and around governance systems and policy to make it so it can be a public... Boring. Boring. I know it’s so unsexy, which is why it’s really hard to sell governance work to funders. But that’s the truth of the matter, right? And like the notion of moving fast and breaking things when it’s about the atmosphere is just literally like patently insane to me.
Like that we’re going to test things out and just try again. There is no trying again when it comes to the global population. I mean, there will always be uncertainty. I know that, right? Like, I’m not saying that we need global consensus or that we need no uncertainty. Those things are impossible. But there are ways to build things in ways that can serve people in ways that have trust. And these are not those things. And I mean, we just keep Making the same mistakes over and over again.
Like, these notions of self-governance that corporations can be trusted to make decisions that are going to benefit society and not their bottom lines have been proven to be untrue again and again and again. Like, and I’m not saying, like, yes, capitalism is here. I’m not saying I’m trying, like, I’m not under the notion that we’re going to break capitalism and maybe we should, but, like, that’s not what I’m working on. But, like, There are ways to build things that can serve people in the systems that we have.
And we’re not even trying. I mean, I’m increasingly concerned about what collaborative governance is possible as the Trump administration just inches closer and closer towards pure fascism. We’re seeing massive political volatility around the world. But I still think it is possible to make things less unjust. And I mean, I think if that’s not what we’re working towards, then what are we doing in climate?
Ross Kenyon: I love how that’s simultaneous. It’s a very brave statement to make because it sounds so naive, but it’s probably also just the truth. Like, what are, what are we doing here if it’s not that?
Shuchi Talati: Right. I feel like I do probably sound really naive a lot of the time. And I mean, I don’t think ideally just systems are possible, but like if I have some sense of optimism, Then I wouldn’t be working on this. And I think that’s true across every climate space. Everyone has some sense of their naive optimism, but they shouldn’t. I feel like naive optimism is where hope meets action. And I feel like we have to live there. Like a homework card right now, so I’m going to stop.
Ross Kenyon: No, it’s a majority of term to apply to someone or something, but I like that it sounds naive. I’ve been trying to use that in a little bit more of a neutral fashion because I like that we don’t have to couch everything in a thousand different caveats. It’s nice to just say, like, aren’t we here to help people? And it sounds cheesy. It’s a little vulnerable to say that out loud. But yes, that is the job. If it’s not the job, we made a wrong turn somewhere.
Like, where did we make it? You can be naive with me. It’s okay. I respect it. I am there with you. I want that. Okay, I have a question that takes us back several minutes ago because I’ve been doing a fellowship recently with Lichen Ventures and I’ve been looking at a lot of adaptation and resilience deals. And that also makes me feel kind of weird because the bets are there that we’re going into overshoot. We’re going to miss a lot of these targets.
We need technology that helps people have healthier, happier lives. And I don’t necessarily like the... The macro bet that things are going to get worse. I don’t want that to be true, but given that it is true, surely it’s better that we have some of this tech on hand to make sure people can cope with it. But part of what you said makes it sound like the potential profiteering elements of venture backed, SAI, SRM runs the risk of being profiteering. Is what I’m describing with adaptation and resilience that’s ethically different?
What is your moral intuition about what I just said?
Shuchi Talati: Yeah, I mean... It’s really hard because when we look at adaptation, there are so many different scales and there are so many different versions of what adaptation can look like. And we’ve seen, I think, a lot of promises around investment in adaptation from public spaces, like from governments that just have completely not come to fruition. And so as we start to try and figure out how to adapt to things at local scales, at country scales, at city scales, I can see why and how the private sector can make really big strides.
What concerns me, though, is who can afford adaptation And I mean, inevitably, they would go to where people can pay them for it. And I think that is the same kind of problem that exists in SRM of those who can control are the ones who are going to make the choices. And I feel like, I think, I think it’s easier for that to happen with adaptation because there are so many different things happening at so many different scales in so many different places. But I do think we need to have a lot more conversation about adaptation governance than we are, especially in Global North countries around responsibilities and around safeguarding people or ensuring that people have access to different types of information and understanding what exists technologically, right?
And I think that’s part of why we’re doing what we’re doing around SRM, right? Like around building capacity and democratizing information a really critical element that I think needs to exist probably across all spaces in climate, especially adaptation and CDR. People are completely unaware of where conversations are happening, like what investors are doing, what intergovernmental institutions are talking about. And that lack of awareness makes it so they’ll never have a seat at the table. As much as we love to talk about giving seats to the Global South or like making spaces inclusive, those seats have to be actually available to them through knowledge and information and time.
People deserve time to understand what’s going on and to build their own perspectives, right? Like, And it shouldn’t be this notion of giving a seat to someone. They deserve that seat. That seat’s theirs. And it’s more about making them aware that the table exists and that they should pull up a chair. Where are the tables right now besides the ones that we’ve talked about that are behind closed doors with security guards in front of them? It’s hard because that’s really where most of the tables are.
They’re in really elite spaces in the global north. I do think that started to shift over the last few years with work that a few really critical organizations have been doing, like the Degrees Initiative that’s been funding global south scientists, with the work that DSG has been doing in terms of building capacity in civil society and climate vulnerable spaces. But it’s insufficient, right? Like, you know, we can only move so fast. You know, we’re a seven-person organization and I’m incredibly proud of the work that we’ve done, that we’ve been able to prove our model that it works.
But we need more organizations to come to the fore. We need more people willing to say that, yeah, like we want to do this type of work, that we want to catalyze more engagement. And that has to be On the broader community too, right? Because I think one of the big barriers to that is we keep making SRM a risky space to talk about. And I said this earlier too, like the taboo is going away, but it’s not going away fast enough. And I think the ways the taboo is lifting is also not particularly helpful.
I feel... I don’t know. It feels like a lot of like technocrats and technologists are moving into this space, but not enough civil society and justice oriented people moving into this space. And so you still have a really polarized conversation with not enough people kind of holding the radical middle.
Ross Kenyon: I like the framing of it being a tragic necessity to have to talk about it and maybe to deploy it. I find I’m most comfortable with it. Like for instance, people have been saying recently that SRM’s time has come because it can buy us time for decarbonization and carbon removal. And we need this to avoid the collapse of AMOC or of ice shelf stabilization, just buying time to make sure that stuff doesn’t fall apart. And I am theoretically okay with that. I’ve been doing a lot of emotional work trying to figure out which part of this argument bugs me because it’s not even the logical part of it.
The logical part of my brain, I’m like, yeah, we might actually need that. We should be talking about it. We can’t afford not to if we need it and we aren’t ready for it. It’s going to get done in a much inferior way. I don’t like the... I just feel really uncomfortable with it because of the political, economic dimensions of it. I think, actually, I’ve been talking about you a lot privately, in a good way, Shuchi. I’ve been saying nice things about you.
I think yes. The way that I’ve been thinking this is like, okay, if I need oop. Collie Jean Buck and Shuchi and David Keith. I feel like if these people were the people that had their finger on the button of whether we do this or not, I’d be like, all right, like I’m going to trust them to know when is the appropriate time and how to do this and to do the legwork ahead of time. But given the fact that it’s not going to be you, like it’s basically just like in my mind, it’s basically inevitable that it will not be any of the responsible people deciding when this actually goes and gets deployed.
And given that, like how much support should I have for it as a whole? Like how should that change my tragic understanding of SRM that it may likely very possibly be necessary, but it won’t be the people I trust who choose when to use it. What do I make of that?
Shuchi Talati: Yeah, I mean, that’s a really big question. It’s a hard one that I feel like I grapple with a lot. And I mean, to be clear, it should not be me. I should not be making any decisions. It should be an incredibly broad community of people. That makes you
Ross Kenyon: trust me more, though. The fact that you don’t want the responsibility means you maybe are one of the people who should be in the room, at least. The people who think that they should be the one to hit the button, I’m like, you should not be the button pusher.
Shuchi Talati: That I definitely agree with. I mean, and I... Yeah, I mean, it’s a really challenging question that I feel like I grapple with like every day of what is possible to build and what are ways to make the tragedy less tragic? Because I do feel like we are in a tragic reality. Like it’s extremely depressing that we’re having to talk about SRM. It’s a failure of climate governance that we’re talking about SRM. But we’re here, like we are an overshoot territory. There are potential impacts that SRM could mitigate.
It could also make harms worse. It could exacerbate injustices. And that is what we like, we need to live in that uncertainty a little bit more. I feel like for a lot of the people that you’re talking about are moving into like really certain spaces, like really quickly, like I think ideas around SRM as a stopgap have been around for a really long time. Like the idea that SRM could be used or will need to be used to allow mitigation and CDR to scale. And I think it bugs me too.
And I have been grappling with that for a long time. And I think what bugs me is that the people who are saying that are not Properly investing themselves into mitigation and CDR and everything else in climate that needs to be invested in. CDR is essential for SRM to succeed. If CDR doesn’t succeed, SRM will fail. So all the ways we talk about SRM in these idealistic ways of SRM as temporary, as a compliment, that means CDR is successful. And so a lot of the people who are, I think, coming from CDR now into SRM saying, well, now we need SRM to buy time and I’m moving into this space.
It scares me because we need the people in CDR to lift up CDR and to make sure that it continues to succeed. And we need all the fossil fuel non-proliferation people. We need all the campaigners for mitigation. And I feel it’s just these things are so intertwined. And I feel like we are not grappling with the incredibly complex politics of connecting them and understanding what that means. And I think that’s kind of what bugs me. I feel like we try and make things really simple, that we can just deploy SRM and then everything else will scale and go forth.
And we don’t have to grapple with the psychological consequences of doing that and I like, you know, these ideas of moral hazard, which have been around forever that I don’t think necessarily exist right now, but we have to grapple with what they could look like in the future if we deploy these tools. And I just feel like we try and make things simple constantly. And I think it’s the politics that everything lives or dies in. And we’re just not grappling with that complexity. That’s what bugs me.
Ross Kenyon: Staring at the same problem set of CDR slowing down, it’s really not a wonderful moment to be trying to raise money in carbon removal. The policy support, especially in the U.S., is drying up. It’s active in Japan and Canada and Europe. There’s good stuff happening, but it’s not feeling like it once did. And the people that have moved on to focus more on SRM, I think the people I know that are doing this, I assume good intentions. I think there are plenty of thoughtful people who have moved that direction.
I don’t think it’s uniformly bad or anything like that. But it’s actually staring into the same problem set that they are, the conclusion I’ve come to is, holy crap, I need to go back further into decarbonization. We can’t get the politics of SRM right until we almost go much farther upstream. Because decarbonization, seemingly the politics are easy. The economics of renewable energy keep getting better over time, even in the face of policy headwinds. That seems like, if we can’t get it right there, how are we supposed to get this right where there’s probably some people who will be harmed, some people who will be helped, the people who will likely be harmed, or people who have the least political voice?
We’re not going to change the way that we prioritize the least among us in the next 10 years, 20 years, probably not, unless there’s a thousand Mamdani’s who get elected around the world. The world is getting nastier, meaner, more authoritarian. It doesn’t seem like we’re going in a direction that’s going to prioritize people who need more care than they’re currently getting. So then what? That just makes me want to focus on grid work. Which I don’t find to be the most exciting thing, to be honest.
But it might be backwards, not forwards to the next cool, sexy intervention thing.
Shuchi Talati: Yeah. No, it’s really hard. And I feel like people, I think, live and die by these hype cycles. And I think that’s what’s really dangerous, right? We’re in this upward hype cycle around SRM and climate intervention, right? But that will eventually come down to, right? And so what I find to be really important is to figure out what piece of this like massively complicated puzzle you can contribute the most to. And I think for SRM, right, like when people come to this space in like a technology hype upward swing, it’s coming to it in a very, I think, un-nuanced way where you’re excited about like the potential of it.
But you haven’t yet grappled with the really, really deep complexities around it. But I think what’s important, SRM is not going away. We do need people to work in the complexities of SRM science and governance. But I think it’s figuring out what You can actually add value to rather than just trying to set up money, right? For this kind of hype cycle space, right? Like it’s, it’s, and I, and it’s a new one difference, right? But like, I feel like, you know, for example, just like creating a new thing for the sake of creating a new thing, because there are now funders in this space is not particularly helpful because then the money doesn’t go to where the money should be going, but that, but I’m not the one who can dictate that.
And I shouldn’t be dictating that. But like the money that’s we’re not getting enough money for all the unsexy stuff, like for the engagement, for the capacity building, for the governance, like for all the impacts research. Right. And like that is what I think is so critical to focus on and for funding to go towards. And if people want to contribute to like building better governance and like Changing the foundation of trust, welcome, please. But if it’s about creating advocacy or if it’s about building another startup, I think that’s going to contribute to the failure of SRM.
Ross Kenyon: One of the models I have for what’s attractive to people who are now focusing more on SRM is This is a little bit like me being a cool youth pastor, you know, sitting on the backwards chair. Hey, kids, I’m going to share a little parable with you by a really cool guy named Jesus kind of thing. But it’s like you’ve been dating someone for a couple of years and like you’re past the honeymoon period and you’re starting to have fights and having to figure out what it means to be in a relationship with someone.
And a lot of people, I think at that point, if they haven’t done work on themselves, they’ll quit the relationship and they will find someone new and then they will date them for two years and then they will come to that same point where it’s like, oh, this is really hard. This is when you actually have to negotiate and figure out like how to be in relationship with someone and they’ll quit and they’ll do it again. I’m wondering if some of that is, CDR is kind of in that moment now, where we’re like, what is this?
Like, this is really hard. The story is not the simple, it’s up there, we’re going to bring it back down, and it’s just like one-to-one, it’s so simple. Like, you know that’s not actually how it works, right? Like, anyone who works in CDR is like, they were... They fell for the siren song of that. And now they’re in this field where it’s like, nothing makes sense. There’s no natural reason to buy this. We’re here just because companies behave like a little bit irrationally and are supporting us for reasons that barely make any sense.
I might have to edit that out. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll keep it in. Is that why we’re moving on? Is this like, we’re like, okay, the relationship with CDR has reached the mature or quit moment, and a lot of it is kind of like, let’s just move on to something else, like where the story is simple, where everything is new and green again. This is like, maybe like, it’s a little unfair of framing, but I catch a whiff of that a tiny bit.
Shuchi Talati: No, I mean, I agree. I mean, I think like CDR is like really grappling with a lot of hard truths and realities now, right? Like, I think at the beginning, it was a lot easier to talk in like vague terms about like, because it just didn’t really exist yet in any real way. And now that it’s like started to exist, the technological challenges, the political challenges, the policy challenges are all just like Just so much deeper. But that’s the reality, I think, of any big thing.
As it starts coming into reality, it gets a lot harder. And I think that’s kind of the message that’s really important to send about SRM right now. Because, yeah, it is simpler right now at this kind of early stage of the field. But the political complexities of SRM are... Massive. And like, I just, I don’t think that people have spent enough time at SRM to really understand kind of the insanity of the space too. Like it is not an easy space, right? Like it’s not, it’s not a space that I, um, I’m doing for fun.
But like, you know, But it is interesting, right? It is an extremely fascinating space that we do need more attention to. I think the questions for me are around where are people wanting to work in SRM that are really critical? I’m not, I don’t want to gatekeep. And like, I think it’s really bad for anybody to gatekeep people from any field. And that’s not what I’m trying to say. I think, but it’s around finding the real places of value and how we actually turn SRM into a public good.
And I think those are the really critical questions that look really, really different than CDR, right? Like the notion of building technologies and a market and like, you know, MRV and like, these are all like really, really different questions of a technology that we know we have to build versus SRM. And so I feel like, um, it’s just, uh. And I don’t, I don’t want people to leave CDR. And like, I feel like a hypocrite saying that because I did, right? Like I was in CDR for a long time and I decided to work on SRM.
And so like, who am I to like tell anyone not to do that? But I just, I feel like there’s, there’s so much writing on CDR being a success and it happening the right way, right? Like for CDR to actually result in climate benefits. Like I’m not here for scaled shitty CDR. Like that’s not going to work out very well for any of us. And so like we need it to work well for people. And so I’m just worried about the reasons as to why people are leaving CDR and why they’re coming into SRM.
How’s your level of hope right now? Yeah. It’s rough. I mean, it’s been rough out here, man. I feel like I live in D.C., so it’s been a hard time. I think the last, like, what, 10 months have been kind of traumatic for a lot of people. And, I mean, I struggle with it. I really do, right? Like, my naive optimism and my cynicism are clashing, like, hardcore. Yeah. But I feel like when I’m in different places, like when we’re doing work on the ground in different countries, when I get to meet with different types of civil society organizations and activists, researchers, it’s kind of amazing.
It feels different. It’s a different kind of just mental space to be in, which I really appreciate that this work gives me the opportunity to do. And that’s not to say that we’re not in a bad place globally. I mean, this is not a US-specific situation. There’s a lot of really problematic political structures just growing really rapidly in a lot of places. But the people in a lot of these places are really incredible. And I think that’s kind of where my hope lives.
Ross Kenyon: Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who listen to this show work in carbon removal. That’s not a surprise. Carbon removal and SRM, David Keith is the godfather of them both. There’s the core genetics of both of those. It has a shared parentage in some way. You’re about to challenge. You don’t even like this framing, by the way. Okay, sorry. Do you want to interject here? You can totally do it. I’m just laughing because I feel like A lot of people say that, but I don’t necessarily agree.
Let’s stop there. Correct it then, because I’ve been saying that, so I’ve been misinforming people. So that’s not correct.
Shuchi Talati: I think David is a really strong figure in the formation of both of these fields from a science perspective. I think he’s also, you know, contributed to a lot of the discourse, a lot of like different types of research that have existed. That said, I think a lot of other people have contributed to the landscape of governance, of justice, of how we think about the politics of SRM that David doesn’t have expertise in. And so like, I don’t think they get as much credit or focus, but if you look at these really early reports, there are a lot of other people on them, in addition to David, that have really shaped the foundation of how we think about SRM.
I just want that to be something that we think about. There are other mentors that people can Turn to, like, as, like, they’re just other senior researchers, right? Like, that we shouldn’t forget about, right? And I think it’s because, like, I think David has, like, a really particular, like, love for, like, talking, right? So he, like, talks to media a lot. He does a lot of, like, you know, lectures in a lot of spaces. He did a TED Talk, right? Like, he has a lot of But I do think a lot of other people have just contributed to the foundation of the field.
Ross Kenyon: Fair enough. And a useful corrective. And there are plenty of people such as yourself. Holly is someone, too. I’m like, Holly has contributed a huge amount to both of these fields. Yeah. I look to Holly for a lot of wisdom on what are we even doing to make sense of these things. Bizarre fields that somehow we all ended up in, maybe against our better judgment, maybe because we’re meant to be here. It’s kind of still unclear. Okay, so someone’s listening to you, and we’re not talking about the shared parentage from one common ancestor, but we’re talking about this funky kinship network that birthed both of these fields.
And... Someone feels inspired by what you’re saying. They want to honor their background in carbon removal. They think that they have things that they can offer to the SRM space that can help. What do they do in a way that you would perceive as genuinely additive?
Shuchi Talati: Yeah. I think it would be through understanding SRM, taking a really long time to really understand The field, like to understand the nuances, understand the context without a preconceived notion what it is you want to do in SRM, right? I think it’s understanding like where the true gaps are. And then I think also having a really frank like internal like introspection on is that something that you should be doing or like should you help someone else do it? Like are there other people that you should lift up to help contribute to the gaps in SRM versus yourself?
Should you do a collaboration? Should you like stay in CDR and like work with SRM people to figure out the intersections of these two spaces? And I think that’s just like, and like a ton of people because of this like shared ancestry that you’ve talked about have worked in both, right? So like that shared ancestry is going to exist for a really long time. As you mentioned, like Holly’s worked in both, like I’ve worked in both, like David’s worked in both. Like it’s just something that is kind of intrinsic to this work that like there’s a lot of these complexities that exist for both fields.
I would just say like the last decade has just really changed the landscape of both of these fields in very different ways. And so now I think that assumption is different, right? And I feel like that shared ancestry is shifting. And like, that’s okay. And I think that’s a good thing. That means that CDR is evolving and SRM is evolving. And I mean, we just, and I think it’s being really conscious of how those evolutions are different and why and where we want these spaces to end up.
But yeah.
Ross Kenyon: You are encouraged by some of the SRM conversations that are happening outside of the global north, it sounds like. Can you say anything about that?
Shuchi Talati: Yeah. So a lot of our work is focused on kind of building capacity and engaging with civil society in a lot of different places. And what I’ve been really, really encouraged by is how open people are in coming to this conversation, which I don’t think would have been true a decade ago. Like, I think it’s a really unique time to be able to do this kind of work. And I think, you know, the types of questions that people ask, the willingness to even come into the conversation are all just like really...
Really amazing things that I was really worried would not come into fruition when I was thinking about how to start DSG. But, you know, like, for example, earlier this year, we did a workshop in partnership with the Human Rights Institute of South Africa, and we brought together a bunch of different human rights organizations from across southern Africa, so from four different countries. And I was really, you know, worried about kind of how some of these conversations might go. It was incredible. I mean, like the, the depth and the, um, just like the types of knowledge people were bringing to the table and talking about SRM.
I mean, like I learned so much, like I am not a human rights expert and learned like such an incredible amount from how they think about this technology. Right. I don’t know. That’s just like one example of like where I think there’s so much mutual learning. I kind of hate the term capacity building sometimes because it sounds really pedantic. Somebody shared a term with me recently, which was capacity sharing, which I really liked because it’s mutual. It’s a dialogue. And like we want to democratize knowledge about SRM, but that also means the SRM field needs to update itself based on kind of the new learnings it’s getting from the new people coming into the field and learning about it.
Ross Kenyon: I get kind of gatekeeping oriented hearing that too, where when I hear something about democratizing really difficult political, economic, scientific information that we need to make Or potentially make decisions about in the near future. I worry that we’ll kind of polarize into we should never talk about this. This is the worst or we should just start doing this right away. We should have done this a long time ago. And a lot of that middle ground is just going to be lost. And I don’t know, I feel kind of discouraged seeing how poisonous political discourse has become.
I basically see many of the major networks to be for-profit institutions that make money off of keeping major parts of the population very angry and very engaged on a regular basis to the extent that they just believe stuff that’s very obviously not true. Why should I have any higher hopes for this going better with something like SRM? It makes me like a democracy skeptic, which I don’t want to be in that position because I feel like I am somewhere on the egalitarian plane. I just feel really uncomfortable with opening it up in that kind of way.
How do I thread the needle there?
Shuchi Talati: Yeah, it’s really hard. It’s really, really hard because I think it’s exactly what you said. I think people are being set up. So to be are being manipulated and being pushed in these boxes through misinformation, through disinformation, through profiteering motives that have resulted kind of in where we are. I mean, it motivates me to do some of the work that we do more. Right. In not sharing good knowledge and not providing access to good knowledge, it’s not like it’s that or nothing. Misinformation will fill that void.
So I feel like we have an even deeper responsibility to do better education, to do better capacity building and sharing in ways that we’ve never really put that much of a focus on in other areas, which I think has left this void open. For misinformation and disinformation to fill. And I think they’ve been open. It’s just now they’re being taken advantage of. And I think we’re seeing that the ways we were doing things weren’t durable anymore. And so I think that’s really what’s been the most shocking and jarring to a lot of us.
But I think this also gets to the importance of civil society. I feel like also in climate, we tend to focus on Government, academia, and the private sector. And I feel like we act as though those are the three sectors in climate. Civil society is massive. And that is where a lot of mission-driven people end up. It’s where people go, like when administrations turn over, right? IRA happened because it was incubated in civil society during the first Trump administration. Civil society is an incredibly powerful sector that is super diverse.
You have activists and advocacy organizations. You have think tanks. You have huge research institutions that are civil society. You have political organizations. You have policy organizations. It’s such an immense, powerful sector that could build a lot of different types of things outside of states and governments. And I feel like we haven’t Really thought about all the different ways in which civil society could be really powerful and change some of the foundation from which we’re making these decisions or doing this work. That’s one of the reasons why when I started DSG was for it to be about civil society because it’s the sector that is left out.
So you have only these really loud polarized voices Driving the debate because the this kind of like diverse set of institutions has been completely left out of it. And so, like, I am scared of that continuing to be the case, but I also feel like. Information can’t like good information and knowledge. Inherently to me is a good thing and people having access to it. Right. Like I don’t want to fall into this trap of like keeping information away from people because I’m worried about ultimately what decisions will be made because like it’s not going away.
So like the foundation of good information has to be better than the opposite. And I think I feel like I think there’s like a lot of privilege that also lives in this notion of like Well, we’ve had the opportunity to see this information and decide that this is too dangerous for people. And so we should limit conversation and access to information. And I think there’s a very neocolonial tint to that way of thinking, even though I can see the justification of this is too dangerous. But again, who are you to make that choice for other people?
Give them good information and build coalitions around good governance and decision making. But don’t become, I think, the actor, the non-democratic thing in the space where we actively want democracy. It’s a really, really hard needle to thread that I think I really, really struggle with, especially now. But I feel like I trust in that knowing that more information, good information has to be kind of the path, this kind of step zero to everything else.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s really wise. That makes me feel better about that question. And I asked that question. I know that tendency that is just elitist exists inside of me. I don’t necessarily want to endorse it. I don’t necessarily want I don’t know that I want to bet against that because if you’re betting against that, we’re not creating the kind of Naive, kind, beautiful place that we started off talking about. We’re creating the stuff that we see taking place around us with horror. And I don’t want to contribute to that.
I’d rather take the risks, I think, of trusting people and being open in that way. I think the do otherwise is very, it feels protective. It feels like it’s going to work out and make things better, but I don’t think it’s going to.
Shuchi Talati: I don’t think we’ve done a particularly good job at leading the world in making good decisions, to be honest. I mean, climate-wise, for sure. But, I mean, if you look at AI, for example, I feel like we’ve done an absolutely horrific job at decision-making around AI. We’ve built no governance systems, no regulatory systems. Yeah. The harm that is already proliferating, that will proliferate over the next decades from AI that we’re not even talking about. I mean, it’s just kind of absurd. So the notions that the Global North is doing things well is also, I think, something that we really need to examine in
Ross Kenyon: ourselves. That is such a good point. Yeah. I mean, I’m talking about not necessarily... The Global North, whatever the hell Western civilization means at this point. I’m talking about me personally. I’m talking about my own heart. I can’t speak for the U.S. Do I necessarily think Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg should determine what AI governance looks like? No, I don’t think you should let these people near that. Did you read the new Eliezer Yudkowsky book, by the way?
No, I haven’t. Do you know about it? It was all over the New York subway during Climate Week. If anyone builds it, everyone will die. Do you know about that? Oh, no. I don’t. Your next book to read, it’s the, I mean, people were critical of it for various reasons too, but it was talking about the dangers of super intelligent AI and what it means when that gets built and what that means when it escapes the lab and how its values are so different from our own that it very well could be apocalyptic.
Oh, that sounds like my jam. I definitely want to read this one. Yeah, I think there’s an adjacency to your interests. Do you feel a little entitled to some gatekeeping behavior given that you’ve been doing this for so long and all of a sudden everyone’s rushing into it and you’re like, hey, I’ve been here for a long time. Are you reading all of our stuff? We have a whole backlog.
Shuchi Talati: Are you up to date on everything? I don’t feel entitled to gatekeeping. I would like people to read the stuff though. Like we spent a lot of time writing it and like doing the research, like trying to like surface ideas and like And like, and like, obviously, like just, there’s just so many really amazing researchers who have written so much stuff that I feel like, I feel like people will be like, oh, well, have you thought about this? And I’m like, yeah, I think someone thought about that like 10 years ago.
Like you should just read, just like, you know, do like some Google searches and just like spend, spend a little bit more time. That’s all I would say. I don’t want to gatekeep. I’m entitled to nothing, but just spend, spend some more time Googling. It would be nice.
Ross Kenyon: Is there anything that you want people to look at? Are there ways that people can support your work? What would you like to leave people with as we conclude?
Shuchi Talati: Yeah, I mean, I mean, like, I’m not looking, like, for, like, individual donations or anything, like, but, like, I think, like, people just, like, engaging, like, I think the climate community being willing to engage in, like, How SRM connects to the broader climate policy portfolio is I think still really hard. And I think that’s probably like one of the most important ways that I think people can help contribute to this conversation. Cause I still think like a lot of organizations and people find it so risky to still talk about.
And like, I think that is just something that would help contribute to making this a better conversation. Um, And I think also it’s engaging with like the complexities of not doing that, right? Like making a choice to let SRM stay quiet is kind of a governance choice, right? Because you’re saying you’re okay with things moving in the dark. You’re okay with like us not building like the big governance things that we need to build. So just contending with that a little bit, I think, would be something that I would just ask of the climate community.
I don’t even know how I would define that community, but people who work in climate in all different ways. I think other than that, I would also just ask people to kind of gut check their immediate responses. I think it’s completely reasonable for your first response to SRM to be like, that is batshit. Because that was my first response. I think it was a very rational first response. But it’s also, I think, sitting with where we are in climate in a rational way, right? Like in thinking about like the cascading impacts that are coming and like all the different things that need to happen for people in climate vulnerable places.
I don’t know. It’s just kind of like, I feel like we need to move out of a mitigation-only framework. Because I think in the U.S. especially, after the infrastructure bill and IRA passed, yes, these were absolutely the biggest climate victories in our history, and people were celebrating them as they should. But if we really reflect on them, what did they really do for impacts and adaptation? There’s very, very little, if any. And so it’s just, I think we need to start Just having a broader framework for how we think about all the different responses that we need.
Ross Kenyon: That’s good advice. I think carbon removal in particular spent so much time in the early commercial days trying to be like, well, we’re not geoengineering or like we’re not affiliated with that at all. And then now it’s like, oh, yeah, we’ve always we’ve always like the astronauts in space with the gun. Like, oh, it’s all geoengineering. Always has been like, you know, like we’re back here already. Like now we’re all back in the geoengineering gang all of a sudden because the zeitgeist has changed around us.
It’s weird. I’m sure some people feel probably whiplash, like, looking around being like, what the hell? Like, are we, we’re not talking about this? Like, where did this come from? Like, I wasn’t, I took a nap and all of a sudden now we’re talking about SAI? Like, where did that come from?
Shuchi Talati: No, I think you made that into a meme and it was really good because I laughed really hard at that. Because there was, like, such a, like, immediate rush to be like, oh, SRM, like, that stuff’s still crazy, but CDR is okay, right? And I That was always pretty funny to me. And now I feel like we’re doing this thing where we’ve invented a whole new term that does the exact same thing, which is climate intervention, which now includes MCDR and all these Arctic and Antarctic approaches and SRM.
And I’m like, okay. I mean, I feel like we just created the same problem all over again, but we’re doing this. I mean, I think it’s just like, I think it’s really hard when we try to, I think, treat a lot of different approaches in the same way. And I feel like that was kind of a hard thing about geoengineering. But I think we just need to stop making the mistake that any one approach deserves more attention than the other. Because the hype cycles are always going to shift, right?
Like they’re going to shift away from SRM at some point, right?
Ross Kenyon: Oh, sorry. You’re going to get outflanked by them. Just wait for ocean iron fertilization’s day.
Shuchi Talati: Right? But like the CTR hype is going to come back too, right? Like it’s not going away. And so I think we all need to also start making... I think, like, better collaborative decisions on how we move forward in these spaces, right? And I think it makes it really hard because all of us depend on philanthropy or, like, funding from – and it’s inconsistent, right? And so it makes us competitive, which is not super helpful when you’re trying to do, like, nonprofit work, right?
And so it just – it makes it hard. But I do feel like finding ways to be, like – I don’t know, like, just more – I guess like cross fields in how we think about the progression of them. I think it’s just going to be really important.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for coming back, Shuchi. I’m always really glad to speak with you. It was both challenging and also made me feel a little bit better. So thank you.
Shuchi Talati: No, I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much, Ross.
