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- [00:00]
A
When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing. You can do anything so people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.
- [00:31]
B
There's just a wrong conversation. It's a distraction from what we actually need to be concentrating on, which are other techniques to make the climate safe for people and safer for future generations. And that's going to go through directly cooling the planet, but also through drawing down emissions that are already in the atmosphere. Now, something that we don't talk too much about, but when it is possible.
- [00:56]
C
And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. With our politics going increasingly crazy and haywire in this moment, it's easy to lose track of some of the broader structural challenges humanity faces. Challenges like climate change. We are continuing to emit a lot of carbon into the air. It doesn't look like we're going to have a big global agreement to cut down on carbon emissions anytime soon. And even if we did, that would come at the cost of much needed economic development for some of the poorer nations in the world. So what are we to do? To discuss this question, I invited back Kiko Toro, a good friend, a contributing editor at Persuasion, and the writer of a Great substack called 1% brighter. What Kiko argued is that we need to think very seriously, not just about technologies like solar that can reduce how much carbon we emit, but also about technologies that can help us capture carbon, that can help us make sure that the carbon we do emit doesn't get into the atmosphere and doesn't further drive climate change. Some of those technologies, he argues, are surprisingly simple. If we added a ton of iron into the oceans, that would actually create a lot more seaweed, a lot more plankton, a lot more fish, perhaps even more whales in the ocean, and all of that would help us to deal with the carbon we are emitting. To discuss whether or not these technological solutions can help us deal with climate change, and whether or not we need to get rid of our original sin, thinking about how we are sinning against nature, you need to listen to this conversation. In the last part of this conversation reserved for paying members, I challenge Kiko on some of the potential downfalls of the technological solutions he proposes. Is it really true that adding iron to the ocean in the way he suggests would avoid dangers like geopolitical conflict about how to carry this out and whether to do so. Would avoid a potential catastrophe if we decide to stop doing this and temperatures rise rapidly. Would avoid unforeseeable side effects, though we may not be thinking about right now. And we also discuss in much greater detail what a climate abundance agenda would look like, what it would look like for people across the political spectrum, but perhaps particularly left of center, to promise people a future in which they can crank up the heating in the winter they so feel like and have air conditioning in the summer if that's what makes them more comfortable and go and visit their friends on a plane or without feeling guilty to do so without inflicting serious damage on the climate. To get to that part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please support this podcast. Please go to jaschamonk.substack.com Are you in or near London? If so, I would love to see you this coming Wednesday 4th June at the Perseverance Pub on Nams Kendrick street in central London. We're gonna have some of the Persuasion team there. We're gonna have one or two special guests whom you may know from this podcast and other writings, and we're gonna have a good few listeners to the podcast and subscribers to the Substack show up who have already registered this coming Wednesday from 6pm till about 9pm at the Perseverance on Lamb's Conduit street in central London. I hope to see you there. Kiko Toro welcome to the podcast.
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B
It's great to be here again.
- [05:06]
C
You write about a wonderful array of topics for Persuasion and for other publications as well, and I'm keen to talk to you about any number of issues. But the issue that you you have focused on the most in the last year but you're most exercised by is the climate. Let's start with one misperception that many people have and that you've corrected, at least for me, recently, which is that a lot of the future of climate and climate change is going to depend on the actions of countries like the United States or like France or like Germany. Why is that the wrong assumption?
- [05:39]
B
Yeah, I think these ideas stick around long past their sell by date. A lot of the time we are stuck with this mental model where we think industrialized rich countries in the west are where the emissions mostly come from. And that was true a generation ago. That's how it was in 1970. 70% of emissions came from the rich countries and about a third came from the developing world. Now that's flipped. It's actually just 30% of emissions that come from the rich countries. And almost all the new emissions are coming from developing countries. I mean, this is, yes, China and India are an important part of that, but the rest of the developing world too. But the really important part of this is when you look at emissions growth, because emissions are falling in the developed countries slowly, but they are falling. But in the developing world they're growing really, really fast. So for every one ton of carbon dioxide that the rich countries stopped emitting in the last 15, 17 years, the developing countries have added five. It just puts a different perspective on the way we talk about emissions reductions because we often hear people say, well, emissions reductions have to come first, we have to reduce our emissions and we do have to reduce our emissions. But it's easy to think that that will solve the problem or that if we do that, then we're home free. And that's just very far from being the case. Why don't really have a lot of leverage over decision makings in Indonesia and in Brazil and in China and in the places where emissions are continuing to grow, where they're still building coal powered power plants. And so it brings me to this realization that I think a lot of people resist because we haven't been taught to think about it this way. But we need to come around to understanding that emissions reductions are outside of our control, the ones that really matter, because they're not in the countries where the people who listen to this podcast live mostly. And B, there's just not going to be enough. So we need to look at other pathways to make the climate safe for everybody. And they do exist. It's just we don't usually talk about them so much because we've gotten conditioned to think about climate as an emissions reduction problem, which is a small part of it, actually.
- [08:03]
C
That's really interesting. So let's spell out first of all what that should mean for climate emission reduction policies in those Western industrialized nations. I mean, one of the problems here is obvious, one of free riding and of coordination. Just the very structure of emission reductions is such that most of the action happens at policy, that is at the national level. There's 200 countries around the world and so that any one country reducing their emissions doesn't make much of a difference in the overall picture. And so it's easy to free ride on the efforts of others. One way to resist your conclusion is to say no, Western countries remain very powerful. It's possible to convince the Chinese public or the Chinese decision decision makers that it's really important to deal with the climate as well. Over time, we're going to be able to put together this international coalition. And the first step in putting together that international coalition is for us, who have historically emitted the most carbon, to give a good example, to show that we act in good faith, that we're actually able to reduce our emissions without courting economic catastrophe. And that's what's going to bring other countries on board. What's wrong with that kind of Steelman version of why we should persist in prioritizing the reduction of emissions in the west, even though most of the emissions today aren't coming from those Western countries first?
- [09:25]
B
Most importantly, that would have made sense this aligned 30, 40 years ago when there was still time to stay within a reasonable ish carbon budget. But that ship has sailed. We are now way above 400 parts per million in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. That is unsafe. That is highly unsafe. And stopping emissions will not bring carbon concentrations down, they'll just stop them rising. But they'll stop them rising from the point where they are now, which is an unsafe level of emissions higher than CO2 concentrations have been in a million years and with consequences that are unpredictable. So even if we could magically wave like a magic wand and stop all emissions right this second, that wouldn't give us a safe climate. It just wouldn't. It's too late for that. So I think that that conversation on the one hand is fine. We do need to obviously bring down emissions over time. But there's just a wrong conversation. It's a distraction from what we actually need to be concentrating on, which are other techniques to make the climate safe for people and safer for future generations. And that's going to go through directly cooling the planet, but also through withdrawing, drawing down emissions that are already in the atmosphere. Now, something that we don't talk too much about, but it is possible, and that's what I spend most of my time thinking about, is how to open up the conversation and how to open the Overton Window about the climate solutions that we are ready to discuss in public to techniques that have been sort of quietly worked on by scientists for a long time, but that haven't really permeated the mainstream of the climate debate. We're out of time. We have to do it.
- [11:18]
C
So in principle, it's obvious, right, that if the problem with climate change is the amount of carbon that is in the air, then there are two ways of Dealing with that problem. One is to emit less carbon. The other is to find ways to manage the carbon that is in the air by binding it to elements that will stop it from fueling the greenhouse effect and so on. It seems to me like there's two sets of objections to this. One is about the technical feasibility, about the potential side effects, about ways in which those technologies could go wrong. And I want to get to those in a moment. But the first one, I think, is actually the one that drives a reaction to this more deeply, and it's perhaps more instinctive and more inchoate. It's somehow that this is the wrong solution, right? That we are sinning against nature by emitting all of this carbon. We're somehow doing something wrong. We're messing with nature. And so the right solution must be to stop sinning against nature. The right solution must be to stop emitting the carbon. You know, that there's something. It just doesn't feel like the right kind of solution. Even before you get to those technological objections and so on, tell me a little bit about sort of why. Emotionally, I think many of the listeners to this podcast are going to have some version of a reaction of feeling like, hang on a second, you're looking for this cop out. That's just the wrong way to deal with that. Why does that have such a hold over the kind of emotions and over the kind of instinctive response of many people who think about this?
- [12:47]
B
That's definitely right. I think it goes into the long history of the environmental movement and of environmental thinking, which in many ways has supplanted Christian ethics in the imagination of a lot of people in the West. That feeling of there's something deep that we're born with that is wrong, that we're doing wrong, that we can't help but do wrong, that we continue to sin. I grew up Catholic. I know what that is. That is original sin. That is a doctrine of original sin. And in Christian doctrine, that's very deeply ingrained. We've secularized. But somehow the same mechanisms that make us feel just guilty for having been born and make us feel that we continue to sin simply by existing. Or they've latched onto this, to this separate thing. That's one aspect of it. Another aspect of it is that the environmental movement as such, grew out of this sense of alienation from capitalism, the sense that we had gotten all this amazing abundance and all this prosperity from a market economy, but it had left us hollow inside and dirty, and it had come at this terrible cost. To our relationship to nature. And so this made us feel that capitalism was kind of wrong. I understand those cultural barriers are there. I sort of don't care though. And the reason I don't care is that I've done, you know, I'm from a developing country. I've done development work in some of the poorest places in the world and in South Sudan and in Uganda, in places where people really are on the edge of the viability of agroecological systems to keep them alive and where another one or two degrees is going to just kill them. So I get it that it makes you feel weird, but the real sin here is not you feeling bad about your relationship with the ecology. The real sin is you condemning hundreds of millions of people in the developing world to live in agroecological conditions that are unviable. So this is a serious problem and your feelings are going to have to take a second place to these much more pressing concerns for me. So reversing climate chaos is a necessity. Keeping you feeling good about your relationship with ecology is, to me a luxury. And that's why I also think that a lot of these solutions that I'm talking about will have to come through the developing world, will have to be implemented in the developing world by scientists from the developing world with the support of developing world publics. Because you know what? In the developing world, people don't have these hangups because people are not that alienated from nature and people are not bored with prosperity because they're so poor.
- [15:46]
D
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- [16:03]
E
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- [16:40]
D
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- [16:46]
C
It's one of the really interesting ways in which the environmental movement is coded now contemporary politics as left leaning or progressive. On the whole. If somebody says, I really care about the environment, you're going to guess that they vote for a left wing party rather than a right wing party. And that is in part because left wing political parties have often made that a bigger part of their agenda and so on. But it strikes me that many of the kind of political instincts that drive the environmentalist movement are actually very small c conservative. And the analogy here to me is that when you think about sex outside of marriage or sex before marriage, for much of human history, that really did have disastrous consequences. Sex led to pregnancy. And when you have women being pregnant, particularly in societies that are very poor, where they don't have earning power of their own outside of some form of socially sanctioned relationship that provides for that offspring, that is likely to lead to destitute children and destitute women and so on. And so for much of human history, one sensible solution to this was to create mechanisms that made it very unlikely that people would have sex outside of marriage or before marriage. This was not just some kind of strange moralistic instinct. It actually was necessitated by the realities of that social world that weren't easy to change. And conservatives persisted in saying, well, the solution continues to be to restrict people having sex outside of marriage, even once the technology changed. And it was progressives who said, well, hang on a second, actually, now that we have birth control and we have a pill and we have all those other kinds of things, but perhaps we no longer have a need for those social norms. Perhaps we can actually have a society that deals with those problems in a very different kind of way. And in this kind of analogy, when you're thinking about it, yes, if you don't have the technologies to take carbon out of the air or to restrict how carbon that is emitted is going to fuel climate change, then you really do have to cut down on the emissions of carbon. But if there is a technology that allows it to get around that constraint, then the progressive position should be, so let's try and make that work, let's try and enforce that. And that might have some side effects. The pill has some side effects. The fact that some of those traditional constraints on sexuality have gone away have had some bad side effects as well. But we clearly feel quite comfortable with the idea that on the whole that has led to a better equilibrium. Is that a fair analogy? I mean, it's a slightly weird analogy. I just sort of came up with it in thinking about it. But is that right, that there's this kind of small conservative instinct to how the environmentalist movement acts and would sort of embracing a better future for the environment and for humans require getting over that small c. Conservatism?
- [19:24]
B
I think that's right. I think what's funny about it is conservatives have always had an ethic. I think Jonathan Haidt calls it an ethic of dignity or the inviolability of sacred spaces and the sacredness of the body and things like that. So they're more comfortable saying, well, even if, if nobody is not, if there's not a consent problem, sex is still sort of inherently dirty. People on the left tend to have more an ethic of harm reduction. And so you can show that there's no harm, but they still have these instincts that nature is sacred and inviolable and that it shouldn't be polluted. But they don't like to think of it in those terms. So if you can show them that there are necessarily no harms to some of these techniques, they kind of sputter and don't know what to say next because they haven't come to grips with the fact that they are expressing these feelings of reverence for the sacredness of nature. And so, yeah, the conversation gets really funny that way. But I basically agree. I think that's actually a really fun and right analogy.
- [20:34]
D
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- [20:52]
C
all right, so let's get into the meat of this because it's one thing to say, look, the only objections are these kind of strange, misplaced, mostly conservative moral concerns. Right. It's another thing to prove to make plausible that there are in fact enough technological solutions that are going to help deal with carbon after it is emitted and that are not going to have these disastrous, unforeseeable side effects. What are some of the approaches that scientists are looking at for how we can deal with carbon in a way that is realistic, that is cost effective, and that doesn't have side effects which are really very hard to predict?
- [21:28]
B
Yeah, look, I think the hottest area of research on this is definitely marine carbon dioxide removal. It's this idea that the oceans are absolutely vast. It's 70% of the surface of the Earth, but it's also like thousands of times the mass of the atmosphere is in the ocean. And the Oceans already contain 41 times as much carbon dioxide as the atmosphere does and already absorbs what, about a quarter of the CO2 that people produce. So as a matter of sort of carbon accounting, it's easy to see that like a small uptick in the ocean's ability to absorb carbon safely could draw down quite a large amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and makes it really thinkable that you can not just stop climate change, but reverse it. You could go back to the climate that we had in 1900 or even in 1750 with relatively, apparently relatively benign techniques that have to do with increasing the alkalinity of the ocean because the ocean's been getting more acidic and the more acidic that it gets, the less carbon dioxide it can absorb. That's very benign and straightforward and all. A lot of companies are looking at a way of doing this. It is expensive though. So there's another set of techniques that I tend to be more excited about that use marine photosynthesis so that you just rely basically on seaweed, on micro seaweed. So phytoplankton, like photosynthesizing microorganisms or big seaweed or some combination of them. Photosynthesis is the way that nature regulates carbon dioxide. And photosynthesis at sea is just an enormously powerful driver of the carbon cycle naturally, and one that has been activated in the past that has created. Most of the big swings in carbon dioxide concentrations in Earth history come from cycles of activity in marine photosynthesis. So that seems to me kind of like a no brainer. Bizarrely, we find ourselves in a situation where some people oppose even research into this stuff. They're scared that researchers are going to look into it and realize that it works and then where will we be? But I think that the atmosphere around this stuff is definitely changing. There's a little boom in research into these marine CDR techniques. And I personally, I'm an optimist, Yesha. I don't have any doubt that 20 years from now we're going to look back and we're going to think, wow, that global warming freakout we had in the beginning of the century, that was a bit overstated. It turned out that it was perfectly possible to deal with that with these techniques. And they've had some side effects. A lot of those side effects will turn out to be positive Rather than negative. Some might be negative, but they will not be negative the way that rendering all of the tropics uninhabitable is negative.
- [24:30]
C
There's some precedent for that kind of resistance and for that kind of change. When you go back 20 years in the environmentalist movement, there was a big debate about whether we should exclusively be looking at mitigation or whether we should also be engaging in adaptation. And what that meant at the time was, do we just focus on reducing carbon emissions or do we also think about, you know, how do we stop higher sea levels from flooding big coastal cities? And the argument at the time was, no, no, no, no, you really cannot do any form of adaptation because that's just giving in, right? Because adaptation might make people think that the consequences, for example, of rising sea levels are going to be less disastrous than they would otherwise be. And that's going to stop us from actually engaging in the kind of mitigation efforts that we need. And so really, adaptation for a while was, as I understand it, a real taboo in the environmentalists. A lot of people argue that it's a mistake. And at this point, investing money into making sure that cities adapt to bigger heat waves in the summer, to higher levels of flooding, et cetera, has become an uncontroversial, progressive, coded policy. This seems to have a similar structure where a lot of people are opposing researching these kind of topics because they're saying, well, this is going to give people this false promise that we can fix it in other ways, and it's going to take pressure off attempts to emit less carbon, and that's why we mustn't do it. But I think you're right that very likely some people are going to be funding this research. Some people are going to be doing this research. Some of these methods are so easy to do and so cheap to do that people are going to be tempted to engage in them if the climate veers towards more catastrophic territory. And so not doing the research in advance, not figuring out how to do that best and how to do it safely, seems to me like the much, much bigger risk. Let's get a little bit into these specific technologies, though, and I want to cover a range of technologies that I know you favor and also cover sort of one of the most famous technologies, sometimes called geoengineering, that has taken the most pride of place in this discussion. But I think you are seeing a little bit more skeptically, let's start with the oceans photosynthesis. For those of us who don't remember our biology High school lessons. What role does photosynthesis play in this? Why does so much of it happen in the ocean? And how on Earth can we influence how much of it happens in the ocean?
- [26:51]
B
Anything you see around you that is green and growing any tree, shrub, grass, the reason it's green is that the pigments inside plants that combine sunlight with the air to create the plant itself are capturing photosynthesis and capturing carbon dioxide. And those pigments happen to be green. So that's why the green movement really should be called the photosynthesis movement. Most of it happens in the ocean, just because there's more ocean than land and because there are a lot of photosynthetic organisms in the ocean. So the closest estimate I've seen is 1 billion billion, billion. So one with 27 zeros of these tiny microorganisms all around the ocean, which sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. But they're each very small, and they have been declining in number for about at least the last 50 years, probably longer. Just the nature of what plants do and what seaweed does when they capture sunlight, when they combine sunlight with carbon dioxide, is to take carbon dioxide out of circulation and turn it into their own bodies. That's what a tree is. I think people are quite comfortable with the idea that if you plant a tree that will, in a small way, absorb carbon dioxide and make things better. The problem with trees is that there's just not enough place to put the numbers that we would need. And this is why I think more and more researchers are looking at the ocean as a natural place to do this in particular, because it turns out that there are large sections of the ocean. And when I say large, I mean possibly as much ocean surface as twice the size of Asia or three times the size of Africa, where very little growth, where there's not a lot of photosynthetic activity or anything else, because everything in the ocean ends up eating either the photosynthesizing plankton or something that ate the photosynthesizing plankton is the base of the food web. So if there's no plankton, there's just no life. And researchers have known since the early 1990s that the reason a lot of the oceans have very little life is that the waters there are deficient in iron. They're just too far from land. So if you're near land, you'll just get some dust from the land blowing over the sea, and they won't have a lot of iron. But they. But photosynthesis doesn't require a Lot of iron. It actually requires a very small amount of iron, just not zero. Okay. So it turns out that in these very large areas called subtropical gyres of sea that is far from the ocean, there's just zero iron, and therefore there's very little photosynthesis. So it's been hypothesized for a long time, and I think people are looking at it more and more seriously, that if you just add a very small trace quantities of iron, you can provoke these large photosynthesizing phytoplankton blooms that will then some of it sink to the bottom of the ocean and just lock the carbon there. People have been tinkering with this idea for the last 40 years. There is now a large trial being proposed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which is this blue chip research institution associated with the US Government, to try to do a large trial off the coast of Alaska in international water and to try to establish a scientific methodology for measuring how much of the carbon dioxide actually gets locked away permanently.
- [30:20]
C
So let me just try to check my understanding of this. Right, so what you're saying is there's these large parts of the ocean that really don't have any life in it and that don't have any plant growth in it. One way to change that is to drop some iron particles into those parts of the ocean. And the hope is that those iron particles are going to be enough to stimulate new growth. And what's likely to grow is plankton or seaweed or other kinds of things. And one of the great side effects of that is that it captures all of this kind of carbon. Is that probably right? And if so, is that doable at scale? How expensive would an undertaking like that be? And what are the kind of potential side effects that we have to worry about here?
- [31:04]
B
So you said the hope is that this will happen. It's not a hope. We know it'll happen because this has been tested in open ocean trials 13 times now. We know it'll work. That's one thing. The other thing is that because you need very little iron, really, for just trace quantities, you wouldn't need that much iron. You get these big ratios, these big leverage effects. So I was talking to the guy who's running the Woods Hole experiment, Ken Buessler, just the other day, and his estimate is that for one ton of iron sulfate in the ocean, you can capture 10,000 tons of CO2. Not all of the 10,000 tons will end up at the bottom of the ocean. And their job is to figure out what Percentage of that will end up being captured for at least 100 years. That's what their whole research effort is about. Those kinds of leverage ratios of 10,000 to 1 make this very attractive because actually iron sulfate, we're not talking some engineered, exotic, nanoparticle, expensive thing. This is an industrial feedstock that we have been manufacturing at scale for 100 years. It's just you put it in farm fertilizer. The manufacturing already exists. I've seen calculations that for less than 0.1% of the current worldwide production of iron sulfate, you could simulate all ocean gyres. You wouldn't even have to increase the production of iron sulfate. It would increase fertilizer prices on land. We're not talking a lot of material. I think when people start to understand those ratios, they start to realize that. Okay, well, let's get serious. Let's look at the cost per ton of carbon dioxide captured. You're going to have to capture, by the middle of the century, you want to be capturing at least 10 billion tons per year. It's an unimaginably large amount of CO2. Unless you have these big leverage ratios, these 10,000 to 1 ratios, 10 billion tons of material, it's just too much stuff. It just would become impossibly expensive to do with many of the other mechanisms that have been hypothesized. But the National Academy of Science, in a report on marine carbon dioxide removal from a couple of years ago, hypothesized that just the iron needed to capture a ton of CO2 would cost less than 40 US cents. So 40 cents for a ton versus some of the more high tech methods being proposed now can be up to 400, 500, sometimes $1,000 per ton versus 40 cents just for the iron. Of course, it costs more than just the iron. You also need the ships, you need the verification, the environmental impact assessment. But still you're in a different order of magnitude of cost, which makes it much more realistic that by the middle of the century you're going to be able to be doing this at scale.
- [33:58]
C
Let's do some math here for one second, Kiko. So let's say that if the cost for the iron is 40 cents a ton, you can do it for $1 a ton once you factored in the cost of actually dispersing it and the ships and whatever else.
- [34:12]
B
Say $10? Let's just say 10.
- [34:14]
C
How many tons a year did you say that we need to capture through this technology by mid century, about 10 billion tons. Yeah. Yes, but $10 is the price per ton. So this basically comes out to a cost of 100 billion per year, which is a very, very significant cost. But by the standards of what governments are already spending on climate change policies, and by the standard of what the global economy is likely to be by 2050, that is very small. Correct.
- [34:44]
B
$100 billion is what Germany has spent on a hopeless attempt to dec. Just. It's one economy. $100 billion a year is a tenth of the Pentagon's budget. On a global scale. It's super affordable compared to some of these other techniques. So it makes it real. It's the thing that makes it real. Now, we want to then talk about side effects and ecological impacts, but that's where I think this technique gets really, really interesting, because you have to remember what the mechanism you're using to do this is to stimulate the bottom of the marine food web. And so we have very good reason to believe that the main ecological side effect is going to be an increase in krill and fish and whale populations in the ocean. And that is not a bad thing. So some people working in this field propose iron fertilization, mostly just for the ecological benefits. Forgetting about the carbon stuff. The carbon stuff doesn't even need to be the point here. This can be a whale restoration method, this can be a fisheries restoration effort. So the side effects are not necessarily bad.
- [35:57]
C
What does that mean for our ability to emit carbon without doing damage to the environment and inducing further climate change? Presumably, there is a certain amount of carbon that's already in the air that we have to deal with, but the more carbon we emit, the more of this kind of storage is going to be necessary. So with each year with which we emit additional carbon, we would need additional carbon storage in the ocean to make sure that that additional carbon being emitted doesn't have a damaging effect. So is this a kind of transitional solution which allows us to make sure that we don't have runaway climate change in this century, and allows us to make sure that countries in Africa, in Asia, able to develop industrially at a rapid pace, which is very important for people there to be able to have good lives, to be able to have food on their tables, to be able to have electricity in their homes and so on and so forth. But we will still eventually need to wean ourselves off of carbon, because sort of the carrying capacity of the ocean is eventually going to run out. There's only so and so many whales and so on that we can create for this policy. Or does this effectively obviate the need to stop basing the human economy on carbon for the foreseeable future.
- [37:13]
B
Look, I think all the indications we have is that once countries reach a certain level of wealth and development, they start to become, they start to emit less carbon. And we've seen that sort of across the developed world. The problem is that poorer countries, as they're trying to reach that level of development are under strong pressure to produce as much energy as cheaply as possible. And for now that ends up sort of forcing them into this carbon pathway. If we had a century to get more of the developing world to the level of development where they're ready to devote more resources to decarbonization, then we can, on a much more reasonable timescale of like one to two centuries, which is still in geological terms very short, but in human terms not. You could end up decarbonizing. You need to decarbonize for climate reasons. But. But you need to decarbonize for a much more basic reason which always gets left out of this conversation. It really shouldn't be, which is that burning coal and natural gas and oil will kill you through particulate matter in your lungs. We store the waste from these energy sources in the air and then we breathe them and they make us sick. And then literally millions of people each year die and tens or hundreds of millions are made sick by particulate pollution. From my point of view, that is the real reason to stop using the. That is the biggest harm that these energy sources make. And we've sort of lost sight of that, which I think is highly unfortunate. We will decarbonize. We are doing it. Developed countries are drawing down their carbon emissions. Now. It has been impossible. And you can ask John Kerry about this next time he's on the show. Ask him what it was like negotiating with the Chinese about their coal power plants. It's impossible to get them to sacrifice their economic national interest to these net nebulous long term goal of carbon drawdowns. They just wouldn't do it.
- [39:11]
C
Let me understand why you are not advocating in that case for a different kind of solution to climate change that is also not captured by the kind of nostalgia of we just have to forgive our sins to nature and go back to the 1950s. And that is to say that we've had a lot of investments in clean energy, that solar panels are much cheaper and much more efficient than they were 10 years ago, that there's all of these kind of alternative sources of energy and if there price continues to fall as rapidly as it did for the last 10 or 20 years, that's going to take care of a problem. One of the reasons why a country like Kenya, say, faces this very genuine trade off between their economic growth, which is an important moral imperative, and making sure that they don't build coal plants and so on that emit a lot to the climate is that a coal plant continues to be cheaper and easier for Kenya to build. That was no longer the case. If Kenya, which is in a rich climate, could get ahead just as quickly by installing a bunch of solar panels, then we wouldn't even need all of this kind of newfangled stuff in the oceans and so on. So why is it that people who care about the environment like you do, who are open to technological solutions like you are, shouldn't be focusing on those kind of renewable energies rather than on what they might regard as untested technologies to do with making more seaweed grow?
- [40:31]
B
Look, I'm a both and kind of guy, not an either or kind of guy. I think Kenya and developing countries in general should be doing that. We, at this point, when they sit down and they do the math, they realize that trying to decarbonize their grids requires investments in batteries that make price issues uncompetitive. I pray every morning that battery technologies, some of these exotic new solid state batteries, are being researched now that they're going to come through because yeah, they would solve the problem. And in 20, 30 years, I really hope that this has been a solution that we found those remainder speculative in a way that iron fertilization isn't speculative. That's never been shown to be able to work in the lab. So I think we need to advance on many tracks at the same time. It's just that I don't think that we need another batteries and solar advocate out there because they're in the middle, in the center of the conversation. And what our focus on those kinds of solutions is doing right now is displacing any talk of other solutions that we will need to create that kind of safe atmosphere, bridge between now and the time that you're able to go big on things like solid state batteries.
- [41:50]
C
So the idea is that at the moment, yes, solar panels have become much cheaper. Yes, we should be rolling them out. Yes, this is a big hope for the future of how we're going to deal with the climate. The problem is that at the moment we don't have the cheap storage of energy to make sure that they are a solution at scale. That if you end up with an energy grid in which the ratio of solar is too high at the moment and then you're in winter, then you're in a few days without sun, then you're at a moment when there's a particular surge of need for electricity. Perhaps because it's the summer and it's sunny, but it's so sunny that everybody has their AC cranked up really, really high. Solar is not going to be able to deal with that problem. Perhaps it might in 50 years, perhaps it might in 100 years, but we need a bridge in order to get there. Am I summarizing that correctly?
- [42:35]
B
That's exactly right. I mean these weather dependent renewables do well up until a certain threshold of how much of the electricity comes from them. Once you start to get north of 35, 40% of a grid, they bring a lot of instability because on those sunless days or there's no wind day, suddenly you need to get your power from somewhere else. And then power prices go way up and sometimes you have brownouts. And this makes like for industrial users this is a nightmare because now you don't know what your power bill is going to be. So then industrial producers move out and then voters get upset because you lose jobs. There are a series of problems associated with intermittency and with the way that today's renewables are dependent on the weather that I think we didn't really think through before we started to go big into these technologies. And I think a lot of jurisdictions have sort of gotten their fingers burned. One thing that I hasten to add that shouldn't be left out of this is advanced geothermal, because advanced geothermal really would solve this problem. Geothermal does not depend on the weather and some of it is getting very good and quite cheap. So that's definitely a solution that we need to look at. And of course nuclear, which is the right now the one source of reliable, safe, zero carbon electricity that we know how to do at scale. So yeah, so all of these things need to happen at the same time. They are happening at the same time. But my fear is that they cannot happen quickly enough to prevent tipping points having to do with the amoc, the circulation patterns in the Atlantic that keep Europe habitable, that have to do with perma, permafrost loss in Siberia that could set off really a self reinforcing spiral of rapid heating. We're getting very, we don't know how close, we're getting quite close to some of these tipping points. So we need to cool, we're in an emergency mode here. We need rapid CO2 drawdown. And so if we are in that kind of emergency, I just don't see how we're in any position to be ruling out potential solutions because, I don't know, they make us feel weird.
- [44:47]
C
One of the rapid solutions that has been discussed prominently in the past that seems to have faded a little bit from the conversation is what was called geoengineering. If you remember when that volcano in Iceland erupted and flights were disturbed from Europe to the United States for a long time, one of the impacts of that was that it had a significant cooling effect. So you know, if you have additional elements of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, as you did after this volcano erupted, more sunlight is going to be reflected back out into the atmosphere and that is going to cool global temperatures. And so the idea here is that similarly to what you're talking about in the oceans, it doesn't take a ton of those particles of sulfur dioxide additionally in the atmosphere to have a relatively significant cooling effect. It's not very difficult technologically. You basically just have two to retrofit planes to fly at high altitude and emit some of those particles. Similarly to your proposed solution, it doesn't take a global compact of 200 countries agreeing on this, at least technologically, it would be relatively cost effective for one large or couple of medium sized nations to carry out. And so this was one of the proposals that people had for how to bridge this kind of period of emergency. Why is it that you seem less excited about that than the other technological alternatives and why that feels like it has faded a little bit from the conversation about the climate?
- [46:16]
B
It's a funny one. The solar radiation management stuff, which is what they call it now because people get scared when you say the word geoengineering. But it's a funny one in that technically we sort of know it would work, but it would really mask the warming because it wouldn't do anything to address the, the basic drivers of warming because it wouldn't draw down the gases in the atmosphere that are heating the planet. So it's definitely a temporary, it's not a solution, it's kind of a palliative in the meantime. So that's one thing that I think gives people pause. The reasons I'm less excited about it than some of these other solutions are two basically. First, I think it has a much harder road to public acceptance. People, you sound like a crazy person when you advocate this stuff. You just sound like a Bond villain. I don't see any way to get around this. The more you try to explain the science, the weirder it sounds and it just gives too many people the heebie jeebies. So I think it would end up being very, very divisive socially. And then if you yank it, if it becomes so divisive that you suddenly stop it, then you get all the warming all at once that you had been masking. People call this termination shock. It's a real concern. You can see it making things worse. But the real Achilles heel with this is that I disagree that one or two countries could go it alone. I think if you did this, it would create huge international tensions because some countries would definitely be winners and some countries would be losers. There's been a lot of work showing that there are many scenarios in which either China is a winner and India is a loser, or India is a winner and China's a loser. Their nuclear armed neighbors at each other's throats with unsettled borders. And if you add something like this, you can just see things spinning out of control. So the geopolitics of it seem dicey. But just mostly what it is is that they wouldn't really solve the problem in the long term.
- [48:28]
C
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, I challenge Kiko on whether some of the dangers and pitfalls he foresees for solar radiation management might not also apply to adding a lot of iron to the oceans. And we talk much more broadly about what a climate abundance agenda, what look like, what it would look like to promise people credibly that they can use a lot of energy for the important things in their lives. That people in really hot countries in Africa and India might one day enjoy the comforts of things like air conditioning, that we can go and visit our friend or go on holiday by plane. All of that without feeling guilty. All of that without actually causing irreparable damage for the climate. Is such a abundance agenda for the environment a feasible option to answer that question? If you want to listen to that, please become a paying subscriber. Please support this podcast. Please go to jasamunk.substack.com that is yashamung.substack.com to support our work. Thank you so much much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about this show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [50:08]
B
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License.
- [50:12]
C
Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.