We are attempting to address climate change, which is a problem caused by capitalism and exacerbated by capitalism with capitalism, and it's like yielding some like deeply three-stooges-esque results.
SPEAKER_00And before we get to this week's episode, just an update on the membership drive that I'm holding this month for the podcast's second birthday. Still crazy to think that the podcast is two years old and I've spoken to over a hundred people, but I guess that is the reality. And I guess I have to start this episode by saying a big thank you to the 119 people who have already become supporters or have upgraded their pledge to $5 a month or above this month. That means that we have already hit the first goal of getting 100 new supporters at that level so that I can bring on a producer to help me make the show, and I'll have more information on that around the end of the month. And obviously, for those of you who are supporters, I'll be updating you through updates on Patreon. But I also set a second goal of 150 supporters, so 50 more people. And if we hit that stretch goal, then I'll also start doing occasional bonus series to get into some topics that I feel like don't fit so well in the regular weekly interview series that comes out every Thursday that maybe needs a bit more attention or that are a bit more niche and that I feel like don't fit so well in that regular weekly series. So I'm excited about that because I think it might allow me to explore some other topics. And I already have an idea in mind for what I want to do for the first of those. So yeah, if we get 31 more people, I'll be able to do that as well. Um and if you want to help me hit that goal, like the 119 people who have already joined or upgraded their pledges, you can become a supporter at $5 a month, the Caesar Cut Replicant tier, and you can get access to the Discord server, to new Q ⁇ A's that I'll be starting in May or June, and I'll send you some stickers in the mail. And if you join at $10 a month, that's the Space Cultist tier or above, you'll also get a metal pin. And I haven't made any of those before for the podcast, so you'll be getting one of the first ones that will exist, and you can throw that on your backpack, your messenger bag, your lapel, wherever you want to put it. But I think that those will be really nice and a cool way to show that you like the show. And so obviously, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us if you want to sign up on either of those tiers to help me hit that final goal for the month of 150 new or upgraded supporters. And as like the past couple weeks, I want to thank some people who have signed up. So a thank you to Jeff from Texas, Brandon Schmittling from Singapore, Courtney from Austin, Texas, Steven from Pittsburgh, Will from Hamilton in Canada, Willie Dog, Lou Rentis from the Netherlands, Phoebe from Japan, Aris from New York, Richard from Amsterdam, Valentin, Oscar, Andre Siviero from Montreal, Aspen, Bill Jones from Pittsburgh, Nico Osaka from Charlotte, North Carolina, Joao in Berlin, George from Plymouth in the UK, Ben from Chicago, and Ed who is in Austin, Texas, but desperately trying to escape. So thank you to all of those people who have signed up to support the show. If you want to join them and help me meet that goal, you can go to patreon.com slash techwon'save us. Now this week's guest is Molly Taft. Molly is a staff writer at Earther, which is part of Gizmod. Molly wrote a recent piece that looks at Silicon Valley's involvement in climate technologies to remove carbon from the air, but also the push to create and expand markets around carbon offsets and carbon credits that a lot of companies and governments are trying to get their hands on to show that they are reducing their emissions without actually doing the work of changing their practices. And so I think that this is an important conversation because it's important to understand what Silicon Valley and the powerful people in the tech industry are trying to do with regards to climate change, but also how there is a technological angle to this, and there are technologies that we are going to need in the short and long term to deal with the climate crisis and significantly reducing our emissions. But then one of the core things that we need to remember is that we can't get distracted by the prospect of technologies coming online in the future that can maybe take carbon out of the atmosphere and then not take the actions today to actually significantly reduce our emissions in the present and the near future so that those technologies are things that we need to rely on less anyway, if they are things we need at all. And one of the issues is that powerful people and companies behind these technologies are exaggerating how much we may need them and are using them to say that we need to do less in the present, we need to make fewer structural changes to how we actually live, because we can just rely on these technologies in the future to pull the carbon out of the atmosphere that we emit today. And that is a horribly dangerous thing to be suggesting. And so that is why I wanted to talk to Molly about this very important topic. So I think you are really going to like this conversation. I certainly had a great time chatting with Molly. And before we get into the conversation, a final reminder that if you want to support the show and the membership drive, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter. So thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Molly, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.
SPEAKER_01Hi, I'm happy to be here.
SPEAKER_00Obviously, you've been covering climate change for a long time. Um, but you had this piece that was published, it'll be last week at the time this episode goes live, looking specifically at carbon dioxide removal technologies and what is coming out with all this, how Silicon Valley is approaching it, whether this is really the way that we address the climate crisis. And so I want to dig into all that, but before we do, I want to talk a bit about, I guess, the state of the climate right now, um, because over the past while the IPCC, which is you know the international body that that looks at climate change and the climate science, um, has released a trio of reports looking at different aspects of climate change. And the first two kind of looked at the state of things right now. And I think as we can all observe from different media stories, things are not going too great. So, what do those reports tell us about the state of the planet and how the climate is changing?
SPEAKER_01It's a great question. Um, I think that some people, when they think about how we talk about the climate crisis, they get kind of report fatigue. It seems like there's like always these bad numbers coming out. The IPCC, which stands for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they basically are a bunch of scientists who get together between every five to seven years to review all of the scientific literature and basically like figure out what is going on. So these reports are actually like what a lot of policy makers base decisions off of, like kind of our rules of thumb going forward. This particular installment, they come out in like three chapters, is really important because as the first report laid out came out in August, we're at a real turning point here. We're not out of time, but we're really almost out of time. Like we need to start acting on the stuff we've been saying we need to do for years, like now, like literally in the next couple of years, we need to significantly turn things around. So the way the IPCC lays this out is folks might have heard about the targets set under the Paris Agreement. So the Paris Agreement, which was signed in 2015, was like, hey, look, we really need to keep warming two degrees Celsius below industrial levels. Like that is the absolute limit. Preferably we could keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Like that would be really good.
SPEAKER_00And that's probably the difference between saving a lot of like Pacific Island states and not, right?
SPEAKER_01I think people hear like a 0.5 degrees Celsius. It doesn't sound like that much, but when you're talking about like permanent climatic change, it's a lot. It is the difference between like widespread damage and like some damage. It really is kind of life or death for some smaller island nations, which is one of the reasons why at these international climate meetings, they are the ones really banging the table and being like, if you guys don't get your act together on like the more aggressive promises you've made, let alone like the worst case scenarios, like we're toast. This is a real concern for them. And it's in concern for frankly, like millions of people around the world. Like our quality of life, our ecosystems will be severely impacted by a 1.5 degree change, like let alone a two degree change. So that was kind of in the first report that was released in August. That was kind of the warning bell that was really alarming to me and to a lot of people who cover this stuff. Is the report basically found like we're gonna hit 1.5. It's unavoidable. And with that are going to come a whole host of impacts. You know, this report was released. I spent most of last summer, it felt like waking up every day covering crisis after crisis. You know, everywhere was on fire. Like there were so many wildfires in places like Siberia, they had a really bad fire season last year, which was like a hellscape beyond imagining because there's all sorts of stuff trapped in the soil up there that get released when it's fiery. Um, you know, California, Colorado, like all these places in the US, British Columbia. You have Cascadia impacts. So those places in British Columbia, after the fires go through, climate change can also intensify rainfall. So they had those crazy mudslides up near Vancouver, like thousands of people were just trapped on the highway. Landsides can be super dangerous. And then, you know, we saw these like extreme heat waves like in the Pacific Northwest, that horrible heat wave in Seattle that the death toll is like around 700 at this last count, last unofficial count. Like we are really seeing shit happen now, and we're not even, I think we're at 1.1 above pre-industrial level. So this report said we're gonna hit 1.5 and it's gonna get worse. And that is really rough.
SPEAKER_00But Molly, I just want to interrupt you there for a second. I think you're not considering how we're just gonna bring back Willy Mammoths and Siberia and climate change up there is just gonna be completely solved, right?
SPEAKER_01Right, yeah. No, I mean, like one of my favorite like chef's kiss climate denier and like oil industry talking points right now is like carbon's not bad. It makes plants grow. That's one of my favorite big brain. They're like, what if it's warmer and we can just grow more stuff? And it's like, okay, sit down.
SPEAKER_00Um that's one we hear from the deniers in Canada quite a bit. You know, climate change is actually gonna be good for us because we're gonna be able to grow more food for the world. It's like, yeah. And what kind of world are we living in then, actually?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. Like, I would love to see where your like biology and like physical science degree is from, my guy. Really doubtful about that. Um, so yeah, but like the silver lining of these reports right now is that we're gonna hit 1.5, but if we work really hard, we can actually start reversing it. Like we are going to hit it, but we have the tools and the techniques and the technology, and we could be on a path to bring that warming to rein it in and actually hit some negative emissions like throughout the later half of this century and avoid like the worst case impacts that we are afraid of. We have the capacity to do that and we have the capabilities. It's just a question of how quickly we can get our act together. Um, I believe there was a line in one of the reports that said the challenges aren't technological, they're about political will. Like we know how to do this. We just need to figure out how to make everyone work together, which honestly is like almost like a bit of a taller order than like figuring out the tech or figuring out the science. Um, and so that's what this latest report laid out is the third installment of these chapters are always like, okay, we told you the bad news and maybe some okay news. And now we're gonna lay out some recommendations of how we actually are going to get there. And this latest report, this is like a little wonky, but basically before it comes out, a bunch of representatives from all the world governments review what's called the summary for policymakers to make sure that they're all like on the same page about like, okay, this looks good. This is something that the world should pay attention to, this is okay. It was the longest review session in IPCC history because this stuff is so hard to negotiate. There was a lot of debate over like how strongly they should say we need to phase out fossil fuels because there are a lot of countries whose entire economies are based on fossil fuels or where fossil fuels is a strong presence in the economy. I'm looking at both the US and Canada. The nitty-gritty of how we go about this, again, it becomes a scientific question because people have political interest in it. And that's when we see a lot of these debates. We're sort of really heading into the hard stuff now, which is like, okay, we know what we have to do, we know how to lower these emissions. Like, how are we actually going to make that happen? And who are we going to listen to and prioritize in the process? So that's kind of where we are now.
SPEAKER_00I feel like in 2020, we were hearing, okay, we have 10 years left to like cut emissions in half. Now is the time to act. And then it was like, oh, here's a global pandemic. You know, we need to focus on this now, and climate change is just going to do its thing. We'll get to it when the pandemic is over, right? And now we have this report coming out. And as this comes out, here in Canada, the report came out on a Monday, and on a Wednesday, the government that likes to pretend that it's like this great green government announced it was approving a new deep sea oil project, right? And released a climate plan that was all about carbon capture and using that to reduce fossil fuel emissions. And then at the same time, this war has broken out between Russia and Ukraine, and a ton of European countries are saying, okay, we're going to invest a ton more money in fossil fuel infrastructure at the same time as the UN Secretary General is saying that the real radicals are not the climate activists, but the countries who are investing more in fossil fuel infrastructure. So I guess I look at that and I have a hard time like squaring what the IPCC and the UN are saying against what countries, Western governments, are actually doing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you and me both. I mean, like everyone also, yeah. And, you know, look, and and some of the wildest things to think about is that the short-term decisions are difficult. Like, no one is saying that like completely reorienting our economy and our energy systems is going to be easy. And there's a lot of things that we have to consider, including like we're about to have a crazy rush for minerals to power renewable energy. I mean, there's a lot of mountains to climb. But also when you think about this conflict in Ukraine, you know, it was partially one of the reasons that Europe is so enmeshed with Russia, is because Russia's been selling them fossil fuels for the last, I think, like two decades. They've been a really major player in Europe's energy economy. And over the long term, it would make more sense in like a purely political sense to transition your economy to an energy that doesn't rely on the oil export and import market that we currently have. Again, that's not an easy order. We have created society based on fossil fuels, but like in the long run, it makes the most sense. And, you know, I think there's also this perception of oil being this product that is purely regulated by supply and demand. It's it's something that we all need. And like, heck no, like the oil industry is very much behind the scenes orchestrating a lot of the crazy prices we're seeing right now. There are vested economic interests, many of them controlled by governments, the tar sands industry, for instance. Um, but many also controlled by private companies who have an interest in seeing their product continue to be the number one thing that we all fight over. So, you know, it is kind of uniquely crazy making. I think there's been seven oil and gas projects approved worldwide since the report. The report said that all fossil fuel infrastructure that currently exists in the world will send us over the tipping point to 1.5. Like we need to basically stop building any new infrastructure. And I don't think it takes being a climate journalist to like hazard the uneducated guess that that's not going to stop anytime soon, but it's a uniquely sort of crazy-making thing to watch. Absolutely. What the science says versus what the folks in power decide to do.
SPEAKER_00I'll note that the project that was approved in Canada is in my province. And it's just like the discourse is crazy because oil was supposed to save us in the 90s from, you know, it's a rather poor province. And still the the narrative is that this new project is going to be the one that will actually save us from the budget difficulties that we've had for decades.
SPEAKER_01The oil and gas industry has a chokehold on the idea of profitability where they operate, and it like almost never actually happens. Honestly, they've done a great job on that PR, so like muzzle to them.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00It's it's just terrible that that people fall for it, right? So I I want to shift to talking about what is in your story. And I feel like one thing we should probably establish before we get into this, and we were talking about it before we started recording, is your story is about carbon dioxide removal technologies. And I told you that my immediate association when I heard that word was carbon capture and storage technologies. So, what's the distinction between the two there? Just so we establish that for the listeners.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And they're very easy to confuse. Climate journalism and climate science at the end of the day is a lot of vocab. So basically, the premise of carbon dioxide removal is literally sucking carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere or in the ocean out of it, like getting it out and putting it somewhere. So think of it as a vacuum. You're vacuuming up your floor because your dog tracked mud in or something. So it's like you are cleaning up stuff that's already existing. Carbon capture and storage is more commonly like at its basic level associated with a power plant or some other facility that is emitting emissions, like is creating emissions as it operates. And it has a little gadget gizmo on there that basically is like, ooh, don't emit. And so that little gadget kind of like captures it and you know puts it somewhere. So again, similar concepts, but like a little bit different when we're talking about these longer-term climate goals. Generally, carbon capture and storage is thought of like a band-aid for the plants we currently have. You know, like there's a lot of talk about building more gas plants with carbon capture and storage technology that basically, like, if you have to build a fossil fuel plant, like it'd be a good idea to have something on there. So it's it's gonna zero out emissions. The technology is very expensive and extremely unreliable, but we're gonna pretend like it isn't for a second. But then when you're talking about carbon dioxide removal, the IPCC is pretty clear that like we are going to need it because carbon dioxide removal can help us with those negative emissions, which is something that we are going to have to figure out how to do. We just put so much carbon into the atmosphere and into our oceans that like in order to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, we're gonna need to reverse some of it. So that's the technology that is going to help us reverse it. It's not like making a mess and then immediately cleaning it up. It's like cleaning up a very old mess, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. And I want to talk about the implications of those technologies and relying on those technologies. But I think we should start by actually defining what some of the categories are, I guess, right? Because they're not all technologies in the sense that we might imagine in like industrial technologies that are run by machines, blah, blah, blah. Like one of the categories is forest-based technologies, which would be like planting trees and forest management and stuff like that. Can you walk us through that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So there's a bunch of different technologies. Some are machine-based, some are like a lot of them are planet-based. Some of them have already been established as something that works, but like we need to do different math on, or we need to figure out ways to like actually kind of refine it. Some are like very, very theoretical. So, like, broadly speaking, um, afforestation and reforestation, forests, you got, you know, planting trees because trees are magical, beautiful things that suck carbon out of the atmosphere. That's how they live. So, like in very basic terms, if you plant a lot of trees, uh, you are going to get some sort of net negative carbon emissions sort of figure out. Folks have probably seen that on, you know, companies will say, Oh, for every thing you buy with us, we'll like plant a couple of trees. That's like, that's an important point we'll circle back to later.
SPEAKER_00Also, the the government of Canada says it's gonna plant a billion trees as anything.
SPEAKER_01I love that idea. Everywhere I turn, people are talking about planting trees, and I'm like, where are you gonna put them? But anyway, where are you gonna put the trees? Um, so then there's direct air capture, which is what we were just talking about, the process of like sucking carbon out of the air using machines. Um the world's largest direct air capture facility just opened in Iceland last year to great fanfare. Um it basically is like a vacuum for the air. It literally sucks carbon dioxide out of the air. Very cool technology, but again, very expensive and extremely early stages. Um, then the ocean is a huge component to talking about carbon dioxide removal. There's lots of things you can do. The ocean stores a lot of CO2, and so uh there's theories like kelp farming. There is a theory about dumping, I think it's iron in the sea, which can help like get rid of some of the carbon. Frankly, I don't know how a lot of these work. Um, a lot of them are very theoretical. Treating seawater. And then you kind of also have some stuff with soil, which uh, you know, can also hold carbon dioxide, uh, including like there's this one sort of technique that's like, what if we grind up a bunch of rocks? special rocks and we dump them in the soil and then it like draws the CO2 towards it. Um again I am not the scientist on these like I'm positive I'm like not describing them some of them perfectly but those are the kind of the main categories. And honestly like people are still working on there's like tons of ideas out there and various stages of proof. There's all sorts of ways that CO2 is is stored on our planet. So like if you can brainstorm ways to get it out of the soil, the ocean, the air, then you've got a carbon dioxide removal technology, which is I think one of the reasons people are so excited, especially in Silicon Valley, about the possibility of furthering these technologies is like you could get some really cool results if you if you sort of put your mind to it basically.
SPEAKER_00I know I'm delaying on getting to the Silicon Valley piece of this because there there's obviously that connection. So listeners, you know listeners be patient with me because I I think it's an important topic. But I guess when I think about some of these technologies that you're talking about using forests, using oceans, using the big direct air capture machines, like I guess that there are issues that immediately pop up when I think about them, right? So like when I think about the forest-based stuff, I know that there's been issues with forest management and the use of forests for carbon credits and how people have been pushed out of forests and off those lands so that they can be properly managed quote unquote for carbon credits. But also how at the same time a lot of governments and companies and whatnot are talking about planting forests. They're still cutting a lot of old growth forests, which are the ones that have really stored a lot of carbon already. So that kind of seems like a problem there.
SPEAKER_01And I think this really gets to the meat of like some of what's been so frustrating watching everyone companies and and governments at this point are looking for I don't think they would say this out loud but like they would love a silver bullet. Everyone would love to figure out a way to do this that isn't painful. And so the appeal of something like oh planting a tree is like isn't that easy we can just plant a tree and then we can sort of forget about it. Trees exist in the real world they're not perfect machines. They can burn down they can get chopped down you know it's not easy to actually measure there have been some forest conservation projects that actually emit more CO2 than they absorb. There's been a couple investigations about that. This is not like an exact process. This isn't a program you can run and get a specific result. Like this is nature it's gonna be different no matter where you put it I was just reading a study on kelp farming which has gotten a lot of attention as like this possibility for removing CO2 from the ocean there's already a couple startups out there that say to businesses, okay get in touch with us if you're interested in you know helping us launch this project we basically know jack shit about how it would actually work. Like you can know that kelp in the ocean can absorb some CO2, but then it's like, okay, how much do you need to dump on the floor? How do you make sure it gets down there? How are we measuring this? Like if if a company is going to buy a certain amount of CO2 removal from this field of kelp, how do you actually measure that? It's tough to do that under the ocean. It's tough to do that with seaweed in general are you going to really create like this huge monoculture of kelp just so like Amazon can keep driving gas powered cars and they can like buy the kelp and make to be like, okay, it's fine. So there's all sorts of real world implications here. And it's very clear that we do need these technologies. Like I want to be extremely clear like this stuff needs to get developed but it also should be developed in a way that is responsible and that takes these complications into account and that develops an oversight system for how we're actually talking about their real world impacts and and that protects the forests that are supposed to be sucking the carbon out of the air, which is kind of not what's happening right now.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely and I think we'll come back to that point that you're making on the responsible development. But I I guess you know going back to what you said about the desire for a silver bullet for something that's just going to work and you know then we don't need to make these big changes to society because we can rely on this technology or this process that's going to handle it for us. And I guess that is one of the risks that really comes out in your story with these carbon dioxide removal technologies because on one hand as you say we're going to need them to get these negative emissions to ensure that we can pull out some of the carbon that has already been emitted because as you say it it's already too much. We're already heading toward a place where we're going to be over 1.5 degrees and if we don't act soon it's going to be much, much worse than that. And so we need them but then people who are at the helm of major Western governments who are at the helm of fossil fuel companies who are at the helm of major tech companies or tech investment firms would say okay but we can rely on these carbon removal technologies in a much greater way so then we don't need to transform society and we can just pull all of that carbon out of the air. And so I guess that is kind of the risk with these technologies right is that they delay things that we should be doing now because you're dangling the prospect of this technology in the future that can just solve the problem. So why would we give up our cars and our big homes and our private jets and blah blah blah when we can just take that carbon out of the air later.
SPEAKER_01You hit the nail right on the head yeah and and to be clear the science is clear that that's not the case. Like the IPCC report is incredibly clear it's like listen this shouldn't be the main solution. What we do need carbon dioxide removal for is for there's a couple industries where like we know how to decarbonize them, but it's going to take a long time. So it's steel, chemicals, cement like there's a couple industries that experts are like this is going to take a while and like we don't have a lot of time but like we know how to do this better in other places. So we should absolutely start decarbonizing our electricity system, our transportation system like stuff that's kind of the low-hanging fruit while we work on these other hard to decarbonize things. And that's when carbon dioxide removal can kick in and be like, okay, we'll help take some of this carbon out of the atmosphere so as we're racing towards this sort of, I don't want to say point of no return, but like you know, the clock is ticking and and we do need as much time as we can get. So that's when we need to start incorporating it. And I think what's also important for folks to understand is like the IPCC isn't a rule book. What it does is it lays out different scenarios, different paths forward. It gives us hypotheticals of what could happen moving forward and what we would need to do under like a bunch of different scenarios to keep warming under certain points. So we actually don't really know how much carbon dioxide removal we are going to need to stay below these points. And there's a really wide range of possibilities like if we get our act together and start decarbonizing aggressively and soon using the technologies we already have, which we know we can employ, we might not need that much. If we don't, then we will need more and that is the point of conversation that is often missing when you listen to oil companies that are investing in carbon dioxide removal technologies when you listen to technocrats who are very excited about this is they'll often give kind of the high end of what we need to have happen, which makes folks think like you know what, we got this in the bag we'll we'll figure it out like we don't need to clean our mess up now because we can do it later. And like that is very clearly what the science does not say the science is like no we need to start doing this now. Like we really we really need to emphasize the stuff we already have at hand before we start thinking about future technologies.
SPEAKER_00Yeah like in the piece you say that there are scenarios ranging from single digit gigatons a year to like 10 to 15 gigatons a year and that taking out a gigaton is not this small thing like it's not it's not no big deal. Like you write in the piece that a gigaton would require planting 80 million hectares of forest or 309000 square miles, which is larger than the state of Texas, or using carbon dioxide removal technology would require using about 10% of the world's total electricity consumption. That's for one gigaton so like this is a huge undertaking.
SPEAKER_01Yeah like it kind of frustrates me you know I was on Elon Musk's XPRIZE page where XPRIZE was his big sort of initiative to like launch the carbon capture industry competition and he was giving this 10 gigaton by 2050 number and I'm like actually like the lower ends of the spectrum are still very impressive. Like we really do have a big job ahead of us like we do need to encourage these technologies. I think like right now our carbon dioxide removal capabilities are something around like 100,000 tons a year which is nothing like a gigaton is a billion tons. You know that plant in Iceland that just got like God I think it's like $650 million investment. Like they got this huge investment. It pulls 4,000 tons a year out of the atmosphere it is fucking dipshit it's nothing like we need to scale this up monumentally even just to get to the minimum. So it's it's it's almost frustrating watching people hype up the technology as something that could save us in the long term without the changes we need to make now and being like no wait a second like we already are facing a really long road with the minimal stuff. So like why don't we focus on that basically you mentioned must there.
SPEAKER_00So I I know we've waited a while but let's let's transition to talking about these Silicon Valley billionaires and and their involvement in this I feel like as we were talking about before we started recording, I feel like when we look at Silicon Valley, I think there can often be this perception that like oh it's technology it's it's green it's about the future you know Elon Musk is making electric cars, blah, blah, blah. But then we can also see companies like Microsoft or Amazon working with fossil fuel companies to help them, you know, more efficiently extract more oil, right? Using their AI and data tools and all that kind of stuff. So what is the interest of these tech billionaires, people like Musk, Bill Gates in these carbon dioxide removal technologies?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that, and Bill Gates has been very open about this as well, that they see it as a smart business decision. It is an emerging industry. Partially that's how this process is getting set up right now. And it's kind of been like a default almost is like of course this is going to be a private industry thing, but it really kind of doesn't have to be and the more you think about it, like I was thinking about it when I was writing this piece and I was like this is insane. The way that carbon dioxide removal is moving right now is it is being developed at the hands of private companies. And the way that people are encouraging it largely is um there was this huge announcement from I think it's Meta, it's Shopify, I want to say Amazon was on there, it's McKinsey it's a whole bunch of big companies all the worst people. I know I saw that first announcement and I was like ooh boy. But they basically were like hey look we want to create a market. We want to buy carbon offsets which is true. Everyone is looking to buy carbon offsets right now because their customers want to see them reach net zero. They want to look like a green company and they're like how do we offset all the pollution we're making so these companies say we want to start a market for offsets. We want to encourage the development of these technologies and we're gonna invest all this money into this fund that will basically create ways for us to buy offsets. And so what's happening is this is going to be a largely private enterprise. So you're going to have companies that and I should also like caveat that like I think there are very well intentioned people working in this space. And I think that the work is necessary and cool. Like again we do need to figure out these technologies. I think that there is an absolute issue to be sorted out when a private company buys an intellectual IP or has a scientist sign an NDA about their work they're doing, takes that work to another private held fund that then will review it with a panel of scientists, decide whether or not it works using some mechanism that isn't public, create sort of a market-based mechanism for other private companies to buy and then those private companies are allowed to say, oh we did it we fixed the emissions and there's no oversight of how these things work, how these things are measured. Are you doing something called double counting which is are you buying pieces of forest that have already been bought for offset projects like there's all sorts of tricky math you can do on a balance sheet or in a carbon plan that the atmosphere just doesn't give a shit about.
SPEAKER_00But cities have done that and it's failed utterly like it's been utterly miserable.
SPEAKER_01So yeah like cities have done that look listen you can privatize anything but like people have tried to privatize everything. But you know and then there's an argument to be made also like a lot of these ventures probably aren't going to be profitable. It's expensive to do this stuff. It's really expensive and you know the argument that it shouldn't be expensive, that it should work within this capitalist model of we make money and and you pay us for this service, I find very strange because it doesn't accept the fact that like this might not be profitable, but it is a public service. It is something we need to do. And there's a conflict there that I think with the model of how these technologies are developing isn't really addressed. It reminds me both of like tech VCs developing all sorts of products in the tech space, but also pharma. And the important like distinction between those two is that if your tech product doesn't work it's in proof of concept it's it the company's gonna fail. But if your pharmaceutical product has to go before the FDA and you know you need to have a thorough outside review. And right now with the carbon dioxide removal space there's no outside board to review this stuff. And if it fails no one's gonna be able to tell like because the public isn't like looking at the carbon capture plant measuring you know what it's actually doing or isn't observing these forests and having an independent monitor review what's going on. Like it's it's kind of a bit of a wild west and I think there's a lot of opportunity for abuse within that system.
SPEAKER_00What you're describing like just makes me want to scream like it's just like completely the wrong way to approach this if we're actually serious about decarbonization, addressing the climate crisis, ensuring that like we have a livable planet well into the future but of course these like rich assholes need to make their money so they need to make it all about themselves. And I I think what you've described really hits the nail on the head with a big problem here, right? Because when we hear about governments many of our governments talking about how we're going to decarbonize and what that's going to be about it's all about what are the green industries and the clean tech industries that we can create as part of this transition. So you know here in Canada in the US, the focus with transportation is on electric vehicles because then you have all these manufacturing jobs, you have all these resource jobs that can be created even though that's not the best way to actually create a sustainable transportation system. And there are just so many more examples of this where exactly as you're talking about there's this incentive to turn all these things into a private company and you know then maybe not to have the proper oversight or then you have like as we've seen during the the pandemic like all these things are patented and so they're owned by a private company that is going to make money as these technologies are distributed instead of sharing them around the world as much as possible so everyone is making them to like decarbonize as quickly as possible. My example here being the vaccines and how we kept those locked up under IP rights instead of sharing them with everybody and letting anyone produce them. So like it just seems completely backwards.
SPEAKER_01It is and to like some of these actors credits so like Stripe, the payment company and they're kind of a key component of this new fund and they post applications on their website. So they they keep all their applications public. Fine, that's great. I think that there is good intent there to share knowledge and to share information. But I also think that it's going to be very easy to lose sight of this as we consider the implications of creating a new industry out of fixing climate change. And that's kind of my main concern is like I think there's a lot of really good actors in this space who are working to make things better. But it's kind of like we saw with recycling where you know there was all this impetus to find a way to you know clean up our waste and to lessen the amount of litter we have and I think it's what less than 10% of plastic worldwide has actually been recycled. Like it created a privatized system that is incredibly opaque, is you know heavily reliant on the end user and isn't working.
SPEAKER_00And then there's the whole question of whether plastic can be effectively recycled in the way that glass or metal can and how it seems really good to recycle your plastic, but actually it's a way for the oil companies and the plastic companies to ensure that we keep using plastic instead of thinking about how maybe we shouldn't be doing that.
SPEAKER_01Exactly and there's a lot of kind of concerning parallels you know where you've got a company like Coke now that says that they are pushing to make all of their um you know plastic recyclable when in reality the question is like well you should have been figuring out how to transition off plastic. And that's that's like my big concern and I think some people working in this space's concern about carbon dioxide removal technologies is what's it going to look like 20 years down the road? Are these technologies going to be deployed as science says they should, which is to really pitch in and help take emissions out of the atmosphere as the rest of the world really does its homework? Or is it going to be a way for companies to keep emitting and a way for companies to point to the fact that they're working, they're doing good, but in reality it's just we're going to keep polluting and and this is going to be a tiny band-aid on a huge problem.
SPEAKER_00I want to come back you know we were talking about Elon Musk and Bill Gates for a second there, right? And I feel like these technologies fit perfectly into their visions of how we address the climate crisis, right? Because Elon Musk is one who wants us all to drive electric cars. He hates public transit and then live in like large suburban homes with solar panels on top. So it's like don't really change the structure of anything just add some solar panels add some electrification and then we've solved the problem even if that's not really the sustainable solution and then we can rely on these direct air capture or carbon capture technologies to get these emissions back out of the atmosphere as you're saying he has that X prize. And you noted in the piece that Bill Gates who you know published a book on climate change last year that I think a lot of climate activists were very critical of, you know, very, very focused on technological solutions rather than structural solutions. In your piece you noted that he called existing technologies that have been proven to cut emissions the easy stuff. And so he's more interested in technologies that haven't been created that are dangling in the future as the things that can save us. But as you noted the IPCC report says we have all the technologies we need what we don't have is political will. So how do we understand what these tech billionaires are doing and how they're shaping the discourse around climate change and addressing the climate crisis in a way that is not helpful but serves their interests.
SPEAKER_01Yeah and I think this is where the climate crisis gets like very met up and gets about like messaging. Wait it's in the metaverse? Right it's in the metaverse sorry um so when you see when someone who you know I've gotten more messages than ever since I started this job a year ago about people who are like really like for a bet lack of a better term waking up about the reality. The reality sucks like it really sucks to kind of have that moment when you sort of realize how serious the climate crisis is I think a lot of people have experienced it recently and it's not something you really come back from. I think what Bill Gates is doing, it's a tricky tightrope. On one hand I don't blame him because he is seeing a lot of opportunity for solutions that need to happen in the future and he is putting some of his money behind that. And he's getting very excited about the possibilities of the future of all these technologies that will probably come into play in one way or another. I do think that there is a hard conversation to be had that he is not having, he is not equipped to have that's not where his brain works about the things that need to change now that can change now, that will ultimately be more important than developing a cool new piece of tech. It's getting distracted by kind of a shiny ball that's you know bouncing around 50 yards in front of you versus what actually needs to happen now. I think a good example and this isn't carbon dioxide removal but like you know and then then sort of actors who have another interest can then co-opt that sort of lack of attention there's a really it's really cool scientifically so basically there's been this discovery over the past couple of years that methane emissions from cows, I think folks might know is a huge it's a huge issue. Agriculture is a big methane emitter methane is a super serious greenhouse gas we need to start bringing it down like now it's very intense In the atmosphere, and cows are a big emitter, and the beef industry is like very responsible for a lot of the methane emissions we have right now.
SPEAKER_00And still growing, of course.
SPEAKER_01That's still growing. Listen, I love beef, but you know, it's I get it.
SPEAKER_00I'm a vegetarian, so more than I am.
SPEAKER_01But you know, the industry is like exploding, and there's more and more cows being added to the world. So instead of taking the tack of like perhaps everyone should eat less meat, and it's not even like you don't have to be vegetarian, I like eat red meat like once a month, then the industry has sort of seized on this new piece of scientific data, which is actually really cool, which is in a lab, if you feed cows feed sprinkled with seaweed, it actually lowers their natural methane emissions by like a pretty big number. This has been in the works in a couple different labs for a few years now. They've like proven in a couple fields that it's a cool scientific development. I believe Gates has invested in a couple startups that like are growing seaweed to feed to cows. The thing that it doesn't necessarily always play out in the real world, though. So when you think about this, it's like, okay, so we need to start bringing down methane emissions within the next seven years. And if the beef industry is right in what it's saying about this seaweed, it basically means creating like an entire new monoculture of seaweed around the world just so we can farm enough to feed it to like the hundreds of thousands of cows that exist on the planet so we can all keep eating burgers. Like it's just, you know, part of the reason that there's such a disconnect is I will take some responsibility. The way that the media reports on scientific developments and scientific breakthroughs, especially when it comes to climate, is often very excited. It's like, oh my God, this one cool trick could help us. And it's like, yes, it could help us, but you also need to contextualize the help that it could have in how much time do we have? Not very much. How much could this actually do? Not that much. Is there a better solution? Yeah, it's a little bit harder, but it is that everyone should just stop eating as much beef. So whenever you hear about a cool thing that a Bill Gates is talking about and Elon Musk is talking about, it is important to just add some context to it of like, where is this technology actually existing, like in time? How close are we to adopting it on a scale that would make a difference? And then also, like, is there an easier solution? And the answer is like almost always yes, basically. I think that Bill Gates didn't set out to be like a responsible climate spokesperson, but like if I had my druthers, I would love if he could talk more about the stuff that we could actually do now instead of just kind of thinking forward into the future. And I wish that more reporters would report on his comments in that context. But you know, he's got a billion freaking dollars, so I don't know if he really needs to listen to that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and you know, because he has a billion dollars, or what, a hundred or eighty billion or something like that, yeah, his incentives are completely different, right? Like the way he thinks about solving the problem, the way that the problem is going to affect him, is very different from a lot of other people. And just to pick up on your on your beef example for a second there, it's like, okay, you know, you can feed them seaweed to reduce the emissions, but then you're still growing the number of cows. So like it's just an excuse to keep doing that. Like you know, like intensity of emissions versus total.
SPEAKER_01The like sort of backwards like backflips that exist in some of these climate like solutions. I'm using air quotes is absolutely bonkers. Like it's real nutter butters. I mean, there's Britain right now uses biomass, which I'm not sure if you've read a little bit about that, where basically there's a bunch of forests in the US, they grow a bunch of trees, they chop these trees down, they turn them into wood pellets, they put them on boats, which shipping is a huge source of emissions, they ship them overseas to England, and then England um has a couple different biomass plants where they burn them for energy. It is not a very clean source of fuel, and then you add in the life cycle of trees, but like in some loophole, you know, England's government has been like, oh no, this is fine, like we're gonna keep doing this. Again, there's just a lot of tricky math that exists in this space that like when you actually talk it out, it makes absolutely no goddamn sense. Um, but we continue to employ some of these techniques, and it blows my mind sometimes.
SPEAKER_00It feels like this is the problem with kind of marketizing it and turning emissions reduction into a market then as well, right? Because then you're not necessarily looking for the best ways and the easiest ways and the and the most effective ways to reduce emissions. You're looking for the ways that are the cheapest or that take advantage of some issue in the way that the market is structured to make money. I remember reading years ago how like plants in China were set up to emit this gas that contributed a lot to climate change. And so then when they shut the plants down, when the carbon markets took effect, they got a bunch of credits for that, and so they could make a ton of money. So, like, you know, all the ways to kind of game the market system, instead of actually like looking at how, okay, we need to stop building new fossil fuel projects and and start winding down what's there, and we need to get people out of cars, and you know, we need to build dense, walkable cities so people don't need to live out in the suburbs and like all these really structural things that need to happen that are not going to happen because we set up some kind of carbon market that is going to, I don't know, supposedly reduce emissions, but I don't even really believe that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think part of it is like this funny sort of thing where it's like consumer concern about this has gone up. Like businesses are worried about it. Businesses are making net zero plans. You know, over here when Donald Trump was president, there was a lot of like businesses are still in and Paris, like all these good corporate actors. And even if you are the best corporate actor and you genuinely want to cut your emissions, which like I will give, probably some companies are really actually worried about this. There's sort of a limited way you can do that and demonstrate to the consumer that you're doing it. And so offsets are huge because everyone wants to be able to say that they're doing something. But in reality, the stuff that would help the most is like these CEOs lobbying for significant structural changes and how we live our life, which is like to their credit, that's like not how they work. We are attempting to address climate change, which is a problem caused by capitalism and exacerbated by capitalism with capitalism. And it's like yielding some like deeply like three stooges-esque results, you know, like companies paying offsets, they get credits for renewables projects that are started in different countries that would have gone into place anyway. Like people are overcounting offsets. It's kind of a big mess right now. And without any sort of further regulation or like serious intervention from governments, it's like probably not going to change very much. My favorite part of all of this is the plant in Iceland that just opened up that is supposed to be, you know, the kind of great future of um this like really complicated, really expensive technology. You can actually buy personal offsets from them. So you can pay them, like if you're going on a flight or something, you can pay them, and then I guess they just run the machine for you. And I saw that and I was like, I get it, but also just like, Jesus Christ, like it's it's just a wild example of like how we're driving at this problem all wrong, which is like the end user kind of takes the responsibility for this thing that we all should be working on collectively.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um what what do we even say to that? Like it's just so frustrating. Like the IPCC, for example, is saying what we should do. And again, you know, I think I would say that personally. Sometimes when I hear the UN statements, they're maybe a bit too positive about some of these capitalist approaches, then I would say. Um, but but still that's like a UN meeting, it's the fucking worst. But but still, there's some degree of realism as to what we're facing up against and and the the degree of the challenge that we're facing and the structural solutions that need to happen. Just thinking about what you're saying there about what companies need to do or could be doing, the thing that immediately came to my mind is like, is it the most green or sustainable thing in the world to completely reorient our consumerism around like having stuff delivered the same day or the next day at Amazon, you know, or all these gig companies? Like, no.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And that's like the funny part about this is the rabbit hole that you can get into, which is Amazon is saying that it's using solar energy at its data centers, it's going all, you know, plastic free and whatever. But like at the end of the day, you are still putting people in punishing conditions to deliver plastic packaging at like an unsustainable rate, and that also has effects. Um, you know, not all of this can be broken out in a balance sheet as badly as these companies want it to be.
SPEAKER_00I have one final question for you before we wrap up this fantastic conversation, in my opinion. Um, you talked earlier about how there's this particular approach because we live in this capitalist system, and so the way that we are approaching addressing these problems is through a capitalist lens, allowing these companies to invest in them, allowing all these technologies to be locked under intellectual property laws, and what is coming out of them to be kind of hidden as like, I guess you could say, trade secrets by these companies, in the way, you know, if listeners listen to my episode with Lauren Smiley, it'll be last week at the time this airs, about how, you know, in the case of the Uber crash in in 2018, you know, the regulators, the people who investigated crashes on roads couldn't figure out what the system was doing without Uber's help, because Uber controls all that information, right? So my question then is we see that approach. I think we can clearly see that it's the wrong approach if we're actually serious about decarbonization on the level that we need and on the timeline that we need. You know, we need the governments to really be taking action on this. So then what is the approach to these technologies and to decarbonization that actually gets us there and that is actually oriented around having these technologies as a public good instead of something that's being controlled and developed by these private companies and capitalist forces that actually addresses the serious, I think, existential problem that we're all facing right now?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think like one alternative, and again, there's there's advantages to the tech approach in terms of speed, in terms of money, in terms of getting buy-in, but like I think that a lot of these processes should be rather than developed in Silicon Valley, developed in national laboratories. And like to the US's credit, there is some of that going on right now. They are working on that. It's just they're behind in terms of catching up to the tech space. And I think they're probably happy to let the tech space hold some of the water for this. But, you know, like the the US government has developed like a lot of really incredible technologies that uh we then can deploy. Like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory could absolutely be having a heavier hand in this. And in that case, then these processes would be open for public review. They wouldn't be like under an IP, and there would be, I believe, fewer questions about like how well these things are working. It would be more of a collaborative effort and there would be more review and oversight. Another thing that like governments could do is establish like a national review board for some of these technologies. For you know, we we desperately need more maintenance and the offset of space in general, but like as we're developing more carbon removal technologies, like we do need some sort of federal oversight. Going back to the example of big pharma, like the buck stops with the FDA. If if your science doesn't hold up or if your medication has an alternative effect, they're gonna catch it. And we do need something like that for these technologies that are getting developed, where there is a panel of independent experts who can review this science, who can review how it's deployed, who can like check on the kelp farms or the or the forests in question or the like the open soil where people are working and like actually do due diligence about how these things are working. There just needs to be a level of transparency and openness that again, this this industry is still in its nascent stages. Like maybe the tech companies will surprise me and it will be a completely open and collaborative process. I don't want to say never, but like I just think that some sort of oversight really does need to come into play to prevent the worst-case scenario from happening.
SPEAKER_00I know I said that was the last question. I'm sorry. But as you were, as you were answering that, what my mind really went back to was what you said is in the IPCC report, and I know the Secretary General has said as well, is that these technologies are going to be important to removing carbon dioxide in the future that we have already emitted. But really, the key here is that we have the technologies we need right now. We don't need to rely on private companies to create new ones because we have everything we need right now to actually address the problem, which is the emissions and to change the way that we live, the way that society operates in order to address the climate crisis. And the real problem we have is political.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. We can do a lot of this work right now and we should be doing it, basically. And we can develop these technologies, we should be, we should be working on them, we should be thinking of them. I'm like heartened to see people excited about it, but I am less heartened to see them excited about it at the expense of thinking about the real work in front of us, which is deep decarbonization on multiple levels of society.
SPEAKER_00Molly, I don't know if I come out of this conversation feeling less existential dread, but at least I am better educated about Welcome to my world.
SPEAKER_01It's fucking crazy here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like at least I guess me and the listeners have a better grasp of what is happening here. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat, to fill us in, to educate us about all of these things. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, thank you. This is great anytime.
SPEAKER_00Molly Taft is a staff writer at Earther, and you can follow her on Twitter at Molly Taft. You can follow me at at Parismarks, and you can follow the show at at TechWon't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at Harbinger Media Network.com. And if you want to support the show and help us meet our final goal for this membership drive, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter of it. Thanks for listening.