As climate change intensifies across the planet, attention is turning toward technologies that offer novel ways to decarbonize our economy and our atmosphere. These include options for capturing, storing, and reusing carbon, and geoengineering techniques that directly manipulate the Earth's climate and environment.
These methods may provide a critical boost to our attempts to achieve ambitious climate goals. Yet, these solutions are not without their critics, who warn about unforeseen environmental and social repercussions.
Watch this discussion regarding some of the most promising emerging climate technologies, the associated risks, and the urgency of these strategies within the scientific community.
With:
Moderated by:
Joe Árvai, Dana and David Dornsife Professor of Psychology and Director, USC Wrigley Institute for Environment & Sustainability
Learn more about the Dornsife Dialogues and sign up for the next live event here.
As climate change intensifies across the planet, attention is turning toward technologies that offer novel ways to decarbonize our economy and our atmosphere. These include options for capturing, storing, and reusing carbon, and geoengineering techniques that directly manipulate the Earth's climate and environment.
These methods may provide a critical boost to our attempts to achieve ambitious climate goals. Yet, these solutions are not without their critics, who warn about unforeseen environmental and social repercussions.
Watch this discussion regarding some of the most promising emerging climate technologies, the associated risks, and the urgency of these strategies within the scientific community.
With:
Moderated by:
Joe Árvai, Dana and David Dornsife Professor of Psychology and Director, USC Wrigley Institute for Environment & Sustainability
Learn more about the Dornsife Dialogues and sign up for the next live event here.
00:00:00:15 - 00:00:25:17
Speaker 1
Welcome back to Dornsife Dialogs. April is Earth Month, a time to both celebrate our favorite planet and to focus on our increasingly delicate relationship with it as we confront the escalating challenges of climate change. Innovative strategies like carbon capture and sequestration are gaining traction as potential pathways to reduce atmospheric carbon. These approaches could play a pivotal role in our efforts to mitigate the impact of global warming.
00:00:25:28 - 00:00:45:27
Speaker 1
And here at USC Dornsife, we have scientists bringing tremendous creativity to the development of technology that can be used in this way. But before we bring in the bulldozers, it's important for us to carefully think through how and where we are building new infrastructure to make sure that we don't create new societal problems in place of the ones we're trying to address.
00:00:46:13 - 00:01:17:06
Speaker 1
It's also important to make sure that we engage and listen to our scientists who can help us ensure that we are choosing sequestration methods that are safe, secure and long term and that don't carry risks of disastrous leaks or failures. Today, we will hear from three of the experts will help us get this right. Our moderator, Professor Joe Arabi, is a Dana and David Dornsife, professor of psychology and director of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, a behavioral scientist who focuses on environmental decision making.
00:01:17:06 - 00:01:39:00
Speaker 1
Professor Urban's research explores sustainable development, environmental policy and the intersection of science and decision making. He is a former member of the U.S. EPA's chartered Science Advisory Board and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Board on Environmental Change and Society. We have a terrific conversation coming up. So I'll hand it over to Professor Aubrey to introduce our panelists.
00:01:39:10 - 00:01:43:25
Speaker 1
Thank you, as always for tuning in and enjoy the program.
00:01:46:01 - 00:02:11:13
Speaker 2
Well, thank you, Dean Miller, and welcome to all of you joining us for this Dornsife dialog. You know, it was a long time ago that I was an undergraduate student, but it was right around the time when climate change started to hit the mainstream. It was the late 1980s. And, you know, the conversation back then amongst a lot of my peers was, you know, if we can put the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, why can't we just take it out?
00:02:11:14 - 00:02:33:08
Speaker 2
And that was a question that seemed a bit like science fiction at the time. But of course, now climate change is very real. It's very clear and it's very present. If you think about all the things that are happening around the world at the moment, oceans as hot as hot tubs in the in the Atlantic, extreme weather, natural hazards all hitting us in the face.
00:02:33:08 - 00:02:56:00
Speaker 2
It feels like it's a time to actually revisit the question of withdrawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And the good news is we've moved from science fiction to actual present day reality. But as you might imagine, any new technology brings with it new challenges and lots of questions. And that's what we're here to talk about today. So joining me in the story Inside Dialog is my friend and colleague Wil Burleson.
00:02:56:21 - 00:03:31:05
Speaker 2
He's the Paxton Field professor of Earth sciences and environmental studies here at USC. Dornsife, where he has taught and conducted research for over 40 years. He has crossover titles of Geochemists, chemical oceanographer, atmospheric chemist and geo biologist. His work broadly focuses on biogeochemical cycling in the ocean, and he's conducting pioneer work on developing ocean in situ devices. His recent work is on calcium carbonate, dissolution, kinetics of interest, oxidized CO2, sequestration and the urban carbon cycle.
00:03:31:11 - 00:04:00:08
Speaker 2
So welcome. Well, we're also joined by Andrew Kahn. She's the entrepreneur in residence at Carbon 180, which is a U.S. federal policy NGO focused on building a just equitable and highly accountable carbon removal sector capable of eliminating gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere. As an entrepreneur in residence I knew was focused on building a new initiative to create, maintain and advocate for the adoption of rigorous standards across carbon removal, science, industry and policy.
00:04:00:14 - 00:04:04:25
Speaker 2
And she holds degrees in chemistry from Princeton and Caltech. Welcome, ANU.
00:04:06:26 - 00:04:24:26
Speaker 2
So let's get right into it. I think a lot of folks are tuning in. Well, and I need to talk about and hear about carbon removal technologies. So can we just start with the really basic stuff? And let me ask you what what are we talking about when we talk about carbon dioxide removal?
00:04:26:10 - 00:04:51:06
Speaker 1
I can start us off on that. So first and foremost, thank you for inviting me to join and really excited to be here and always happy to chat about carbon removal since I'm kind of obsessed with this topic. Superman IPCC perspective like top level climate science. What is carbon removal? The IPCC defines carbon removal as technologies, practices and approaches the things that humans are doing that remove and durably store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
00:04:51:06 - 00:05:11:15
Speaker 1
Two important things They're removed from the atmosphere. So it's not point source, it's not emissions reduction. It's really it's already in the atmosphere and we're pulling it back down. And then the second piece is durably store. There's some ongoing conversation about what that means. And so at Carbon Unity, we think of this as either sort of socially or legally durable.
00:05:11:15 - 00:05:33:20
Speaker 1
So say you have a 100 year monitoring requirement for this carbon or physically durable. It gets thermodynamically very stable, like it's a mineral in the ocean. When we think about it, sort of that's the high level definition. But what kind of things are carbon removal? People are often talking about things like soil, carbon, our soils, healthy soils are full of carbon, organic and inorganic carbon.
00:05:34:11 - 00:06:02:15
Speaker 1
Often people are familiar with forestry types of carbon removal. So afforestation reforesting ocean improved forest management. But there's also this broader set of ecosystem restoration projects that can be carbon removal. So mangroves, wetlands, seagrasses, those are usually considered to be kind of the short duration carbon removal. So the carbon is in plants. It's an ecosystem comes, but it could be reversed by something like a fire.
00:06:03:01 - 00:06:25:20
Speaker 1
Then there's a whole set of what people call durable or permanent carbon removal solutions. So that's things like biomass, carbon removal and storage. So you get the biomass and you convert it into a form that is really stable or things like direct air capture. You have large sets of fans that are pulling CO2 directly out of the atmosphere and storing it in geologic reservoirs or underground.
00:06:26:10 - 00:06:41:25
Speaker 1
And then there's a whole emerging set of solutions. I think we'll could probably speak to better than I can. That's around alkalinity management. It's the natural weathering process that happens on geologic timescales, and we're speeding it up to happen on human timescales to account for all the human timescale damage we've done to the environment.
00:06:43:02 - 00:07:10:11
Speaker 3
Yeah, that's terrific. And if I could also sort of complement that wonderful introduction with, with the following, that is the earth of the Earth system has always known how to take care of excess CO2. It's been doing it for 4 billion years. The Earth had a much higher CO2 atmosphere in the past and has on its own, of course, figured out how to mitigate atmospheric CO2.
00:07:10:20 - 00:07:46:21
Speaker 3
The Earth system naturally regulates how much CO2 is in the atmosphere. It does that by reactions between CO2 in the atmosphere and rainwater that falls onto the earth and hits rocks on the earth and weathers the rocks that convert the CO2 in the water into by carbonate by carbonate in the streams. And the rivers end up in the ocean and hence the CO2 from the atmosphere works its way through this process and ends up as by carbonate in the ocean for hundreds of thousands of years.
00:07:46:28 - 00:08:21:27
Speaker 3
A very durable storage method. The Earth has figured this out. The problem is the Earth runs this process. Does this chemistry at its own pace, which is quite slow, whereas we've been putting CO2 in the atmosphere very quickly over the last 100 years, extremely quickly. And so it's figuring out how to get that CO2 out of the atmosphere, how to stop putting more CO2 into the atmosphere is what KDR is really all about.
00:08:23:07 - 00:08:46:19
Speaker 2
So I've got questions already. So I want to go back to what I said when I started working on this. It was maybe around 2010, 2011 and we were working on CCS, carbon capture and sequestration, and there was a lot of interest in capturing carbon dioxide at smokestacks, you know, collecting it and then piping it underground. But I thought that was.
00:08:46:19 - 00:09:07:10
Speaker 2
KHEDR What am I missing? Why? Why the semantic differences? And I could throw in other acronyms like see CCU, like it suddenly becomes a bit of an alphabet soup, which I think contributes to why this is so confusing. But either of you, what are we I mean, do we really need all these semantic differences when we talk about carbon dioxide removal?
00:09:07:10 - 00:09:30:26
Speaker 1
Yeah, I also have to jump in here. It is confusing. There's an alphabet soup of acronyms that are sort of overlapping. They use the same word, but they use them differently. So I think really the two big categories that we're talking about here are reductions and removals. So reductions is this source was about 2% CO2 into the atmosphere.
00:09:30:26 - 00:09:59:08
Speaker 1
But we stopped it, we capped it, we didn't let that CO2 go into the atmosphere. And it's super important to note that reducing emissions decarbonization, preventing more emissions from entering the atmosphere is the bulk of the work in climate. We just have to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere. So we definitely don't want to talk about removal as if it's an excuse to keep emitting or if it's something that allows us to keep doing both climate and environmentally awful practices.
00:09:59:20 - 00:10:26:04
Speaker 1
So category number one reduction decarbonization. Start cutting CO2 into the atmosphere. The second category is removals. So that's really recognizing that we have done harm by putting CO2 into the atmosphere that is causing warming today and we should start drawing that back down. There are three main reasons that the IPCC specifically talks about using removal. So taking CO2 that is already in the atmosphere and pulling it back down.
00:10:26:17 - 00:10:46:16
Speaker 1
The first is around this topic of hard to abate or residual emissions. There's going to be some stuff like land use change, some things in agriculture, some industries that are going to be really, really hard in the near term to fully decarbonize. And yet we still need to achieve net zero. We need to stabilize global temperatures, we need to stop causing this global harm.
00:10:46:29 - 00:11:19:06
Speaker 1
And so people talk about using removals for that purpose. There's a little bit of CO2 that's going to be super, super hard to get rid of. Let's balance it with removals. The other two categories that folks talk about are really removing large quantities of legacy emissions. So if you look at some of these scenarios, projections, you see us going past 1.5 C or to C in some scenarios, but the Paris Agreement says we really got to stabilize at 1.5, C, maybe two C So people talk about removals to draw us back down under that temperature limit.
00:11:19:11 - 00:11:43:13
Speaker 1
Maybe we temporarily overshoot. We really, really don't want to do that because even temporary overshoots are quite dangerous. But if we do, we want to come back down to those safer temperatures. And then there's a third, I think, really important and big category around legacy emissions. How much do we want to draw down closer to pre-industrial levels, particularly when we think about how unequally distributed climate harms are?
00:11:43:13 - 00:12:01:12
Speaker 1
Right. So it's not the same in the US and South Asia, where my family family is from. Like the impacts are wildly different. The temperature swings are wildly different. And so the third category is there's a trillion tons of CO2 that we've already put in the atmosphere. Can we start drawing that down as well?
00:12:01:12 - 00:12:03:27
Speaker 2
So I got Well, go ahead. I didn't mean to cut you off.
00:12:04:27 - 00:12:07:02
Speaker 3
When I've got you, it's all yours.
00:12:07:16 - 00:12:38:18
Speaker 2
Thanks. So when I first started working on this, I said it was around 2010, 2011, something like that. We did a lot of stakeholder interviews and focus groups just to try and understand what people thought about kind of carbon dioxide removal. And we heard lots of really interesting things. One of them was that people sort of assumed it was like kind of blowing up a balloon, that we would capture CO2 and that we would sort of like pump it into the earth and it would sort of be kind of down there in caves and other kinds of geological formations.
00:12:38:19 - 00:12:58:20
Speaker 2
It's just sort of like gas under pressure. And then there were fears about, well, there would be these explosive CO2 events like a volcano where all the CO2 would come rushing out. We heard concerns like, you know, CO2 is going to end up in my carrots and my potatoes and they're going to taste like soda. So there was a lot of like misinformation and misconceptions out there.
00:12:59:14 - 00:13:20:10
Speaker 2
I actually a friend of mine asked me just I think it was yesterday, the day before, like, you know, when you pump it down there, what happens? And I waved my hands and talked about, you know, bicarbonate and solids and slurries. Can one of you maybe will just just clean up the mess for me and tell me what happens when you put CO2 in the earth to start and then we can talk about the ocean after.
00:13:20:10 - 00:13:49:17
Speaker 3
Yeah. Yeah, of course. You know, CO2 has been pumped into the earth, into the rocks that lie beneath our feet for a long time. I'm not sure if it's 50 or even 100 years ago, but it's certainly been at least 50 years that that the oil companies figured out that they could both remove some CO2 from what they were pumping out of the ground and then turn around and pump that back down into the ground.
00:13:49:17 - 00:14:22:18
Speaker 3
And that would actually help them recover even more oil. That's called enhanced oil recovery e0r, But the point being that you can you can pump liquid CO2 into the ground where it will react with water that's in the wood that is contained within the poor space of the rocks. And that CO2 then will reside within those poor spaces, within those rocks.
00:14:22:18 - 00:14:50:20
Speaker 3
And yet slowly, because that liquid with the dissolved CO2 in it is slightly more buoyant than that liquid is naturally by itself that more buoyant fluid like a cork in a in water, will eventually rise. And so the concern is this CO2 we pump down into the ground can make its way back out of the ground. And then what good is that?
00:14:50:20 - 00:15:18:01
Speaker 3
We haven't really gotten rid of the CO2 if it comes back out again. So part of the issue with getting CO2 removal to work underground is you've got to have a place where that CO2 can rise but never make it all the way out. And so there are few places where that can happen, and that's where you've got your best chance of sequestering CO2 underground.
00:15:18:20 - 00:15:38:18
Speaker 2
Now, I was at a meeting not that long ago. It was January or something. I was at an exhibit that I think Clean Works, the Swiss company put on and they had cause like rock cores and they were, you know, showing these off, saying, look, there's, you know, captured CO2 in these pores. So does it turn can it turn solid somehow?
00:15:38:25 - 00:15:39:06
Speaker 2
I mean.
00:15:40:00 - 00:16:07:00
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah, Yes. If it, if it encounters the right mineral which, you know, exists in certain places but not in that many places. So you can't just fill a well anywhere and have this happen. But if you drill the well in the right place and perhaps Iceland is the best example, the CO2 you pump down then reacts with a certain type of mineral within the certain types of rocks.
00:16:07:00 - 00:16:27:08
Speaker 3
It's called olivine for the most part. It's then the CO2 can turn into a solid, it can turn into a mineral, calcium carbonate and other minerals, which actually, you know, solidify that carbon into something that's really quite stable. So, yeah, it can happen if you're in the right place.
00:16:27:18 - 00:16:32:12
Speaker 2
I like the sound of that. And it was is the US the right place for this now?
00:16:32:13 - 00:16:48:26
Speaker 1
I think that's a great question. I was actually going to say there are a few places in the world where folks are actively working on this technology sort of in situ mineralization is what it's called. And it's really cool because it's opening up possibilities outside of the U.S. and outside of Europe, where a lot of the carbon removal development is happening.
00:16:48:26 - 00:17:11:05
Speaker 1
There are some projects in the U.S., in the Pacific Northwest in particular, also maybe off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. There are places where the U.S. has this geology. The U.S. does, however, have a lot of the first type of geology that Bill was talking about that lets us inject liquid CO2 underground. But this newer technology that solidifies carbon, they're projects under development in Kenya and Oman.
00:17:11:05 - 00:17:16:17
Speaker 1
So we're seeing the sort of globalization of carbon removal and carbon storage. That's really exciting.
00:17:17:21 - 00:17:44:00
Speaker 2
Well, so I'm now it's fun being the moderator. I kind of I feel like I know a little bit about this enough to be dangerous, but it's so fun to be around the two of you who know way more And what you just said, both of you is raising even more questions for me. So on the one hand, I want to know, I mean, if we're going to be doing this in countries like Kenya and, you know, you know, countries in the global south where, you know, we should have a lot of concerns, I want to know first of all, is this safe?
00:17:44:00 - 00:18:04:10
Speaker 2
Like are we subjecting people to a risk that we shouldn't be subjecting them to? And then secondly, is it fair and equitable when we do this? Like I the last thing I want to do is work, you know, in places in the United States or elsewhere around the world where we've you know, we've been less than scrupulous, shall we say, about our methods for extracting resources and the damage we've left behind.
00:18:04:20 - 00:18:23:23
Speaker 2
And then now here we go back. Hey, we're back. And we'd like to do this in your backyard now, and we're going to start injecting CO2 into the earth. I just want to make sure that I could, like, confidently tell my friends that we're not making one mess and then kind of making an even bigger mess later with carbon removal.
00:18:23:23 - 00:18:25:00
Speaker 3
Yeah, I'll throw that to you.
00:18:25:00 - 00:18:52:26
Speaker 1
And I have a lot of thoughts about that. So I think a couple of things. I really appreciate the question because carbon colonialism is absolutely a thing and how the voluntary carbon markets operate today. We have seen it particularly around forestry projects, displacement of Indigenous people, projects being developed with the promise of distributing financial and economic benefits to communities that are protecting forest and that really not happening.
00:18:52:26 - 00:19:28:13
Speaker 1
Product developers pulling out big guardian New Yorker exposes on this topic. So it is actually a thing that we should be careful about. And I think it's also something where there's an enormous opportunity for technical transfer collaboration internationally and an opportunity for redistributive justice and climate justice really fundamentally where we can think about building, we can think about not just, you know, extracting resources.
00:19:28:13 - 00:19:57:11
Speaker 1
These are places where there are forests and we can sell them for carbon credits. We can think about building new industries that are going to be hopefully, you know, billion trillion dollar industries across the globe and creating new economic opportunities. And one thing that I think about a lot is can we build some of these more engineered novel approaches globally as well, instead of just sort of saying like, well, it has to be in the US, can we distribute the opportunity to economic opportunity that's emerging?
00:19:57:17 - 00:20:24:06
Speaker 1
And there's a really active conversation around this in the sort of UN and internationally I think it's called international treaty mitigations, where, you know, can we actually redistribute funds from the global north to the global South to take on this activity that is fundamentally about climate justice and have, you know, global north countries essentially pay for their historical emissions and their legacy of pollution.
00:20:24:28 - 00:20:44:05
Speaker 2
That's interesting. I want to but I want to go back to the original kind of question, because to me, when I hear you say, you know, billion trillion dollar industry, new opportunities, new technology, I can't help but go back again, back to my undergrad and graduate school days when we were using a lot of those same adjectives to talk about nuclear power.
00:20:44:17 - 00:20:59:09
Speaker 2
And I'm not saying that this is anything like nuclear power, but the big concern around nuclear power was safety. So I just got to know, well, is this is this safe? You're doing it. I mean, I like you're a nice guy, but don't think you're putting us in any danger. But tell me for real, is it safe?
00:21:00:12 - 00:21:22:18
Speaker 3
Yeah. I'm not that nice a guy and I'm actually not doing it. No, I don't. I'm not involved with getting CO2 and rocks to interact and form these minerals. I think it's a challenge in a couple of ways. We haven't mentioned yet. It's really hard for me to imagine doing that at the scale at which we need to remove CO2.
00:21:22:18 - 00:21:42:22
Speaker 3
Yes, you can do that in Iceland and pump a certain amount of CO2 down into the rocks. Yes, you can do that at other locations. Now, if you had enough locations, it would begin to scale. But also, imagine this. I'm sure the viewers can, too. You're pumping in a CO2 is interacting with a rock and forming a mineral.
00:21:43:27 - 00:22:03:16
Speaker 3
You're pumping more CO2. And now it's got to get past the mineral that it formed and react with the rock to form the next mineral and now you've got more mineral blocking the way for this reaction to happen. In other words, it kind of is a diminishing return in a in a way that would make it less and less efficient.
00:22:04:02 - 00:22:18:01
Speaker 3
And so I don't know that this thing, this process could scale in quite the same way as some other processes. So KDR could scale. Love to hear what our new has has has to say about that.
00:22:19:06 - 00:22:31:10
Speaker 2
And I'd love to have someone tell me if this is safe. You guys haven't answered my question. We're not to paid until someone does.
00:22:31:10 - 00:22:37:11
Speaker 1
Is it safe? Safe in the sense of like, what do you mean by safe?
00:22:37:11 - 00:23:02:24
Speaker 2
Like, I mean, this isn't going to like there isn't going to be like a CO2 explosion. People aren't going to you know, it's not going to Yeah, it's not going to bubble up through their taps. That's not going to you know, I even heard in a recent round of stakeholder interviews we did, it's not going to suck all the CO2 out of the atmosphere and stop photosynthetic processes like our we're not talking about like something that's like a risky geoengineering kind of gambit.
00:23:03:02 - 00:23:03:19
Speaker 2
I think.
00:23:06:12 - 00:23:31:06
Speaker 1
So. Well, would love to hear from it as well. But I would say with respect to those concerns, Cedar is quite safe. Of course, there will be CO2 infrastructure. There is CO2 infrastructure being built for not just carbon removal, but also point source carbon capture. That is sometimes in places where there has been historical development of heavy industry, petrochemical industry.
00:23:31:14 - 00:23:57:08
Speaker 1
So in the sense of are we sometimes seeing an overlap between CVR, an infrastructure that's been associated with pollution heavy industries in the past? Yeah, So I think is a really real concern there. But to your specific questions around explosions or things bubbling up, it's a by and large, the evidence suggests that CVR is quite safe today. We know a lot about the subsurface.
00:23:57:20 - 00:24:07:01
Speaker 1
We know a lot about injecting CO2. We're learning more all the time. So the actual carbon removal part of the process is quite safe still.
00:24:07:02 - 00:24:07:15
Speaker 2
Okay.
00:24:07:21 - 00:24:11:08
Speaker 1
Scalability took you so long to pull that out of one of us to say like it's say.
00:24:11:23 - 00:24:23:22
Speaker 2
I'm I'm tenacious though, so scalability Will I had no idea. Again, I'm learning so much scalability of sort of terrestrial KDR so should we have concerns on a.
00:24:26:08 - 00:24:28:00
Speaker 1
Well go ahead. I can jump in.
00:24:28:29 - 00:25:01:23
Speaker 3
The scalability is is really the £800 question right there. You can imagine scalability if there were enough locations and enough infrastructure to get the CO2 to these locations where it could then be sequestered by pumping it into these rocks. I'm not sure the answer, Joe, but I don't think this is going to scale terribly well, especially at the kind of cost price point that other methods might might arrive at.
00:25:01:23 - 00:25:12:22
Speaker 3
In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not going to hit that price point. And we haven't started talking about money yet, but we know that that's also underlying a lot of this conversation as well.
00:25:13:04 - 00:25:18:29
Speaker 2
So I do want to talk about money, but I did want to hear a news response to your scalability challenge.
00:25:20:01 - 00:25:47:15
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think it's a burden when talking about scalability to zoom out clear from specifics KDR Pathways Technologies, storage mechanisms to that overarching goal, removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it durably. What we're talking about gigaton scale KDR, we're not talking about one monolithic solution. Pretty much everyone. It was talking about a portfolio of solutions. There are certain places, certain times where there is a practice that will remove carbon from the atmosphere.
00:25:47:15 - 00:26:12:09
Speaker 1
It might also generate co-benefits. It might also plug into existing infrastructure. So it's really about understanding what are the suite of options, where are we trying to deploy it and what's kind of the right option for the right place at the right time. And coming from a policy background, really thinking about how you enable that local decision making, how you use the technical expertise of the federal government, the national lab system, to help support communities and municipalities in making these choices.
00:26:12:09 - 00:26:16:12
Speaker 1
What kind of carbon removal is right for this community is not one monolithic answer.
00:26:17:05 - 00:26:35:09
Speaker 2
So that's that's a great Segway. Well, I apologize. I was a little imprecise with my language when I said you're doing this, but you are doing a version of this. So if it's not scalable, perhaps in a terrestrial place, or if there are going to be scalability challenges, shall we say, what about the ocean? And tell us a little bit about what you're doing over there.
00:26:35:27 - 00:27:00:17
Speaker 3
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I thought I knew gave a really beautiful answer about this wind in multiple approaches. There's absolutely no question that this this problem is not going to be addressed by a single approach, a single methodology. But of course, the scalability is that we all want to remove a lot of CO2. And so the ocean is large, covers 70% of the surface of the earth.
00:27:00:17 - 00:27:32:29
Speaker 3
We know it averages 3000 meters deep. We know the ocean contains 50 times more carbon than does the atmosphere. It has a huge capacity for taking carbon, and it's demonstrated because we're putting CO2 into the ocean today of the ten gigatons, roughly of CO2 that are being emitted by fossil fuel use, the ocean is taking up three 2 to 3 of those gigatons just by sucking it up into the surface ocean.
00:27:32:29 - 00:28:05:24
Speaker 3
So the ocean has the capacity to do this. It is doing this. And the question is, and something that I've been studying for quite a while, but others are very much engaged in this as well. Can you make the ocean more receptive to take up more CO2 and so there are various approaches that involve what's called Marine KDR, obviously using the ocean as a repository for that to take up more CO2.
00:28:06:15 - 00:28:41:14
Speaker 3
And again, what the ocean goes with the CO2 is converted to by carbonate and that's the more durable component of carbon that stays in the ocean, doesn't turn back into CO2 and then go back into the atmosphere again. So you asked me about what I do is it's more about targeting an industry, which is the shipping industry, and trying to convert the exhaust CO2 from ships into by carbonate by reacting that CO2 with a mineral calcium carbonate.
00:28:41:27 - 00:29:07:19
Speaker 3
In short, my idea and a process that we're working on is basically taking a Tums. When you put a Tums in your tummy, it's made of calcium carbonate and it neutralizes the acid in your tummy. And so we want to neutralize the CO2 from the smokestack with calcium carbonate, the tunnels reaction or Rolaids if you prefer, and let that product.
00:29:07:19 - 00:29:21:14
Speaker 3
But the bicarbonate which it is and by carbonate, is a neutral compound that goes back into the ocean. That's that's one idea that we have. There are many other marine KDR methodologies.
00:29:22:08 - 00:29:28:27
Speaker 2
Is this what we refer to when we talk about enhanced rock weathering? Is this the same thing or is it different?
00:29:28:27 - 00:30:05:12
Speaker 3
It's it's a little bit different. And again, it's a lot of this different initials for different ways of doing this. What we're doing is called accelerate added weathering. So we're trying to make this reaction of CO2 plus water plus limestone happened quickly. Hence the word accelerated. Enhanced rock weathering is a term that's generally used for the idea that other types of rocks, limestone, but mainly other types of rocks that are more like the olivine rich rocks that are found in Iceland, for example.
00:30:05:12 - 00:30:25:17
Speaker 3
Those types of rocks, ground ground up into small grains and those grains thrown out into the ocean or poured out on the beach will slowly suck up CO2 as well. And that's that's considered enhanced rock weathering.
00:30:26:01 - 00:30:51:17
Speaker 2
So fascinating. Okay. So I got you. You talked about the £800 kind of question. I'm going to I'm going to talk about the million dollar question now. I mean, this all sounds terribly, terribly expensive the last I checked. And, you know, this was a month ago, but I think the global average kind of price of carbon dioxide, the global average price of carbon dioxide, I think was around $4 a ton.
00:30:51:17 - 00:31:14:15
Speaker 2
And that's what it was sort of selling for in the carbon marketplace. I've heard from people who work in this industry that maybe $150 a tonne might be the break even point. I'm kind of pulling these numbers out of the air based on memory, but long and short of it, even if it's 100 and not 150 or 70 or 100, there's a big gap between four and any of those numbers.
00:31:14:25 - 00:31:37:16
Speaker 2
So I'm wondering how much does this cost, How much is it going to cost? Are we going to be able to afford this hour? Do you know? Do we have no choice but to make it? Can we afford not to do this? So I'm very curious about the cost question. And I know you and I have talked before about zero sum games in economies that, you know, a dollar you spend over here is a dollar you don't spend over there.
00:31:37:16 - 00:31:47:12
Speaker 2
So if this is really costly, how are we going to pay for this at the expense of other things that we might need to pay for? Or am I thinking about this the wrong way?
00:31:47:12 - 00:32:19:05
Speaker 1
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here. There's actually a report that came out today from the Rhodium Group that said US 2050 goals Current estimates would be 100 billion per year in 2050 for carbon removal. So it is potentially a lot of money. The market development market shipping problem for carbon removal is really interesting because unlike other green technologies like solar, which produces electricity, there isn't a natural market for carbon removal, it's just pollution cleanup.
00:32:19:13 - 00:32:43:03
Speaker 1
There isn't like, well, have the CO2 now you get to use it for something. The actual market for CO2 is quite small. So what we're talking about is really creating a whole new market for a public good. And that raises a lot of interesting questions. Who's going to pay for it? What is the mechanism? I think there's a few different ways that you could think about paying for carbon removal at scale.
00:32:43:03 - 00:33:02:00
Speaker 1
Most folks I know really arrive at something that looks like a policy driven demand. Essentially. Eventually, governments have to say you don't get to emit anymore and if you are going to emit, you have to take it back out. If there's something that's truly hard to abate, you have to take it back out. Governments can help with subsidies, all of that stuff, infrastructure.
00:33:02:08 - 00:33:20:22
Speaker 1
But eventually you kind of have to get to a place where if you're going to MIT, you have to take it back out. And then that creates a really powerful market incentive to drive down the cost of carbon removal because you want to be able to cost effectively remove it. The other thing that's I think powerful about that mechanism from a policy perspective is it's almost like a tax on emitting, right?
00:33:20:22 - 00:33:42:17
Speaker 1
Like if I have to pay to take it back out and it costs $400 a ton, I'm going to do everything I can to not omit it in the first place. So I think there's a few different ways that we get to a scale market. There's a lot of conversation around this, but most folks really think at the end of the day it's going to be policy, it's going to be government supporting, building stuff on the supply side, and then also saying, Hey, you just have to do this.
00:33:42:17 - 00:33:44:22
Speaker 1
We can't keep polluting the atmosphere.
00:33:45:24 - 00:34:13:06
Speaker 3
Yeah, and Joe, I mean, $4 a ton of CO2 might be what you and I could pay for it, but the European Union has already it. As of 2024 this year, they instituted a kind of a penalty tax on ships that are traveling through EU waters or docking at EU ports of $100 a tonne of CO2 emitted by that ship.
00:34:13:28 - 00:34:42:14
Speaker 3
So the ships are under incredible pressure to mitigate the amount of exhaust that comes out of their smokestack or change their fuels or come up with a methodology that can basically negate some of those emissions. It's gotten. It's going to be a very much market driven effort, but maybe $100 a tonne is more is a more reasonable number.
00:34:42:14 - 00:35:00:19
Speaker 2
That's really interesting. I think, you know, in addition to the markets, I'm obviously a psychologist and, you know, a bit of a consumer psychologist at that. I kind of feel like I agree with your point about, you know, someone's got a lead and it seems like policy is the most natural place for leadership to happen. But there's still got to be some social license here.
00:35:00:20 - 00:35:26:00
Speaker 2
People still on sort of the general kind of consumer general public general voter side need to buy this, not like buy it with cash, but like buy into it. And it philosophically and morally. And I've been talking to a lot of folks about this and I've heard people say, hey, if we if we can do this, isn't it going to disincentivize decarbonization?
00:35:26:00 - 00:35:46:04
Speaker 2
And I will just kind of address this a little bit. You talked about it earlier when you said this is part of a part of the portfolio of activities, but decarbonization of our economies has to be at the heart of this. But, you know, I can already imagine in the halls of Congress, you know, certain politicians representing, you know, certain political ideologies being like, hey, this is great.
00:35:46:04 - 00:36:07:24
Speaker 2
In fact, I mean, I can't even only imagine I read about this in the paper. The CEO, Occidental Petroleum, said when they bought carbon engineering, hey, we can we this gives us social license to drill for oil for the next 150 years because every, you know, CO2 molecule we put in the atmosphere, we're going to be able to draw it back down using carbon dioxide removal.
00:36:08:04 - 00:36:22:22
Speaker 2
I think what a lot of folks here that they're like, hang on a second. This is not what we thought we were talking about, nor is it something that we really want to sign up for. Or is it?
00:36:22:22 - 00:36:58:13
Speaker 1
Yeah. Oh, man, that is a that is the potentially hundred billion dollar question. Right. Or is the public going to accept, want provide social license for policy driven demand? I think well I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I would say first and foremost, as a carbon removal professional, I guess whatever that means and carbon removal communicator, I want to just keep drilling into this point that reductions must come first, decarbonization must come first.
00:36:58:16 - 00:37:36:07
Speaker 1
Anyone who's saying the point of carbon removal is to keep drilling for oil, they can't hang out with us. And that's just not what this is about. And fundamentally, carbon removal is for climate justice, which causes harm. We need to undo it to the extent that we can. But I think for me, coming from a policy organization where it really comes down to is really tightly defining what the policy is and what the use cases and tying it to use cases that are actually going to be levers for decarbonization like what we were talking about with what some folks call a carbon kickback obligation or a polluter pays mandate.
00:37:36:24 - 00:37:56:29
Speaker 1
There's versions of this floating around in California. There's a version of this that was floating around in the EU and their Net zero Industry Act, where they're saying if you are developing or extracting fossil fuels, you have to actually pay towards building the infrastructure for storage. No one had really talked about that in a policy context before, But we're starting to hear we're starting to hear this.
00:37:57:18 - 00:38:31:02
Speaker 1
If you are polluting, you have an obligation to take that CO2 back out. And I think that's how we build trust with the public, that it's really about undoing the harm. It's about addressing concerns that people have that are really real. But the question I would have for you, Joe, given your experience and the engagement work that you've done, is how do we build that, make it clear and accessible to communities that we are actually doing carbon removal, that they can verify this for themselves because?
00:38:31:02 - 00:38:41:10
Speaker 1
The really hard thing about carbon removal, there isn't a product like it's not like you said, you're going to build a house and now there's a house there, like there's just nothing to see. So how do we how do we address that? I think about that a lot.
00:38:41:10 - 00:39:00:17
Speaker 2
Wow. That that is a really fabulous question. Now. Now, you know, there's a lot for me to unpack. You know, the tables have turned. You know, I think, first of all, you know, we have done some research on this just on the moral hazard question in general, this idea that, you know, if we have this technology, we won't be incentivized to decarbonize.
00:39:00:17 - 00:39:16:19
Speaker 2
And one of the interesting things we found in our research on that particular point is, hey, I don't think that way. If I asked the person, hey, do you do you worry about it from this context of we have this technology and that will disincentivize carbon dioxide almost to an individual, people say, no, I don't think like that.
00:39:17:02 - 00:39:51:14
Speaker 2
But I worry that you think like that. So there's this sort of like blame game around moral hazard, which to me actually makes me worry a whole lot less about it as an impediment to policy. Like if people are all thinking about it that way, then it seems like a pretty light lift to convince people that, hey, you know, like you said, our new and will, but decarbonize first and then kind of worry about carbon removal after that the second thing we found in our own research is that if you can just by some method, take that carbon dioxide and convert it into something usable people will like that better than if you say we're
00:39:51:14 - 00:40:20:05
Speaker 2
just going to store it underground or perhaps in the ocean. And what's interesting there is if we said, hey, imagine a carbon removal company that with only you know, that all they do is put carbon dioxide underground. People generally tend to be pretty leery about that, to your point. I know, but if we say, hey, there's this company and they put carbon dioxide underground, but they also extract some of that carbon dioxide and make polymers to make plastic or, you know, they can make fuels out of it like synthetic fuels.
00:40:20:11 - 00:40:47:00
Speaker 2
Suddenly people's perspective changes. It feels a whole lot more entrepreneurial and businesslike and sort of forward looking and perceptions of that industry go way up. But, you know, we just can't use that much carbon for stop. You can only pump so much into Coca-Cola. And so that becomes a question of how do you sort of do it in a way that you sort of, like you said, kind of convince people that we're doing it as sort of a public good?
00:40:47:11 - 00:41:14:17
Speaker 2
And I think the answer to your question there is, you know, really solid public engagement and not only public engagement, but decision support where people understand why we're doing this and what alternatives we're deploying amongst a suite of decarbonization options. But then secondly, that we that we not only try and convince people that we're actually doing it, but can actually verify that we're actually putting carbon dioxide away, whether it's in the ocean or and into the earth or into products.
00:41:14:25 - 00:41:34:01
Speaker 2
And I think this is really at the moment for me, one, the big undiscovered countries. And how can how can we like certify that, you know, carbon removal Company X is actually delivering on their promise to deliver a certain tonnage of carbon? That I'm not really clear on, but. Well, it sounds like you might have an answer or.
00:41:34:03 - 00:42:02:29
Speaker 3
Yeah, I'd love to jump on the soapbox on this one. There is such an important role for science and such an important role for academia, science and academia. Those who are the younger generation moving into this area. Because what you've hit on is this essential opportunity where science needs to make the kinds of measurements that are really going to very find that this CO2 has been removed or converted in a safe way.
00:42:03:10 - 00:42:32:10
Speaker 3
Science will do that. Scientists are working on this. We're really understanding the KDR methodology A or B or C or D, It has to be verified, it has to be measured. You have to report it accurately. Science loves those terms. Science is geared around addressing that. We really can push this approach both at USC and through academia in general.
00:42:32:10 - 00:43:00:15
Speaker 3
I think our college is really embracing this idea that there is an opportunity with CPR that science needs to step forward even more so that the public can trust that, you know, A company A and B says they've removed this one CO2 that, you know, trust, trust people who might trust in science again, would say, yeah, we believe this is actually happening.
00:43:00:25 - 00:43:28:23
Speaker 3
And secondly, science can also tell you when you're doing something in the ocean, for example, what I describe in what a lot of other groups are doing to the ocean, how much harm is that doing? What are the impacts? And science and oceanographers have always been capable of measuring things in the ocean very carefully, very accurately, understanding how variable ecosystems in the ocean are and how they respond to different things.
00:43:29:04 - 00:44:00:23
Speaker 3
So we really have to jump headfirst into this, in my opinion, both at USC and around the globe as scientist, to really address your critical questions about monitoring, reporting and verification. That's MRV and then impacts what are the ecological impacts of what it is we're doing. And I and I really you know, I just think that's sort of a soapbox thing to say here in academia, but I think it's awfully important.
00:44:01:07 - 00:44:02:12
Speaker 3
I want to I want to.
00:44:02:12 - 00:44:07:23
Speaker 2
Keep going on this. So I know in your in your in the bio, I read it sounds like you are working on this MRV question.
00:44:08:28 - 00:44:36:05
Speaker 1
I spend a lot of time thinking about the MRV question and the the role of civil society, academia, nonprofits in supporting the ecosystem and building trust. I think there's a couple of things that are important here. First is what are we using the carbon removal for? MRV is functionally a system for accountability, but you have to know who you're holding accountable and what you're holding them accountable for.
00:44:36:05 - 00:44:59:22
Speaker 1
It makes a difference if you're designing MRV for someone who is literally pulling fossil fuel out of the ground and burning it and saying this carbon removal is compensating for that activity versus say, at the jurisdiction level, a state or a country trying to rebuild healthy soils and monitoring at scale. If there's carbon in those soils, those are very different monitoring problems.
00:45:00:09 - 00:45:21:08
Speaker 1
Often we default to an assumption that the only thing that matters is monitoring. That looks like the voluntary carbon market. But the voluntary carbon market does not scale. It does not achieve the gigatons of removal we need. So we need to also expand our thinking about what kind of monitoring can we do, how can we do it in a more cost effective way, and what are the alternatives to just this pure sort of like, can I sell this thing called a credit?
00:45:22:27 - 00:45:45:10
Speaker 1
But Joe, I had a question for you that was related to this. I think you are tying together this MRV question and this trust and social license question. How do we build technical capacity and technical knowledge about carbon removal and the monitoring and verification of carbon removal in host communities? So, for example, you know, in the Pacific Northwest, there's a lot of CO2 activity.
00:45:45:15 - 00:45:55:16
Speaker 1
There's enormous technical knowledge in tribal leadership around fisheries management, but maybe less knowledge about carbon removal and how it works. How should we be thinking about building that capacity?
00:45:56:05 - 00:46:19:24
Speaker 2
As a fabulous question. We we've been doing research in my lab on this question for a while now, and I think the traditional sort of answer to that question is based on something in the decision sciences and in communication. That's called the deficit model. People sort of lack information. There's an information deficit. So let's fill up the tank with knowledge and people will just know better and, you know, be able to participate more effectively in our own research.
00:46:19:24 - 00:46:42:27
Speaker 2
What we've found is that's true to an extent. There is an information deficit out there. But to really make information stick and information usable and information from a wide range of different information sources usable is to engage people with that information in decision making so that there's this cross talk now amongst people who might have information deficits, but different kinds of information deficits.
00:46:43:05 - 00:47:15:05
Speaker 2
So suddenly the you know, the First Nations elder is speaking to the engineer. The engineer is speaking to the business owner, the business owner is speaking to the customer. And people are sort of hearing it from a variety of perspectives and are able to sort of triangulate their knowledge. And then secondly, if you involve those same groups of people in being able to maybe for an economy or for a business or for a startup, set some priorities around how that company ought to do business, then that information isn't just something that you read or hear, but now it's something that you have to use and it becomes a whole lot stickier.
00:47:15:14 - 00:47:38:19
Speaker 2
So that's kind of my my take on that. But of course, if you do that, you know, that conversation gets really wide and I think appropriately wide. So there are questions popping up in the chat now. We've addressed a few of them, but, you know, I encourage people to keep bringing them in. But if you're going to talk about sort of talking about the pros and cons and the sort of decision support context, you know, we inevitably have to talk about the MRV question, which we've talked about.
00:47:38:19 - 00:47:54:24
Speaker 2
We have to talk about the boomerang effects. QUESTION Is it safe? Is it safe for the environment or is it something that we can afford to do? Is it something that we should be doing? Maybe should we be doing geoengineering or something? But I think, you know, that's kind of how I look at it. Let's take this from a decision kind of perspective.
00:47:55:00 - 00:48:10:00
Speaker 2
Use information to inform choices and then be open to the idea of broadening the conversation to account for a portfolio of options on the decarbonization side. But also on this, you know, if you will, a kind of carbon removal climate adaptation side as well. That's my take. I'm sure there are others.
00:48:10:22 - 00:48:37:07
Speaker 1
I think one thing that you said that really jumps out to me is the crosstalk between different stakeholders and institutions that it's not one monolithic end to. And we do everything and it's carbon removal. It's a tribal leadership, it's business owners, it's community members, it's local governments getting together. And I think that speaks to a concern that I have about the voluntary carbon market and also an opportunity that I see in the voluntary carbon market.
00:48:37:07 - 00:48:58:01
Speaker 1
Things tend to become highly vertically integrated. That is kind of the business model that works, but that also leads to a lot of financial conflicts of interest rate. The same person writing the rules is also getting paid to check if someone met the rules and they're selling the credits on the back end. And it also excludes these more rich and robust and capacity building decision making architectures.
00:48:58:08 - 00:49:14:24
Speaker 1
And so I think a lot about how can we start separating out these functions, How can we provide the appropriate information to stakeholders to have a more robust conversation and also to increase the supply of institutions that are feeding into this process?
00:49:14:24 - 00:49:28:11
Speaker 2
Well, I'm curious, what do you wish people knew about carbon removal? I mean, you're you're sort of, you know, working in this space as a researcher. Clearly, you think about what people think of this as a as a engineering enterprise, but also as, you know, as a product of your work.
00:49:30:01 - 00:49:53:14
Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, Joe, I love to promote with people, not maybe, you know, not in this area. They promote the understanding that the Earth has a mechanism already in place that mitigates CO2. And then if we can if we can capitalize on that process and potentially speed it up, I think that makes a lot of sense, perhaps to a lot of people.
00:49:53:14 - 00:50:21:20
Speaker 3
The ocean as a repository of this excess CO2 is just a very, you know, well-known fact that this is where excess CO2 goes in a geologic sense. It could go there in a in a in a mitigation way as well. If we were careful about how we did that. The Earth system has a very good mechanism for dealing with excess CO2, as my is one of my points.
00:50:21:20 - 00:50:55:09
Speaker 3
And I if could answer one of these questions that we've received when policy seems to work, it was when we had to get rid of the acid from sulfur, sulfur in gases that were being emitted by by burning fossil fuels, and that sulfur turned into sulfuric acid and created acid rain. The policies were established and within a few years the sulfur was removed by make it by pretty simple, straightforward mechanisms that took down the other out of the out of the emissions.
00:50:55:09 - 00:51:15:22
Speaker 3
And it really made a big difference in in the ecosystem, you know recovery from this acid rain problem. There are ways that there are times at least the examples of which of of policies that work on these hard environmental problems. That's one example of that.
00:51:16:07 - 00:51:35:00
Speaker 2
But I'm glad you brought that up, because there's another question in the chat about about our thoughts on a carbon tax. And the minute I read a question like that to me, and I'm not suggesting that the person who raised this question is thinking about it this way, but to me, I immediately think of like politicization. This is one of those like trap questions to separate the RS from the D's.
00:51:35:10 - 00:51:58:01
Speaker 2
I kind of feel like, you know, when it comes to what you're talking about, Will and I knew that the sulfur is the acid rain, maybe even the ozone stuff that didn't seem to be quite as politicized as climate change is these days. So is is that is that really a a useful analogy for what we're confronting now, just given how polarized a society we live in?
00:51:58:01 - 00:52:01:05
Speaker 2
And I don't know who can answer that question, but I'm throwing it out there.
00:52:03:08 - 00:52:08:27
Speaker 3
And you can answer that question. Yeah.
00:52:08:27 - 00:52:34:09
Speaker 1
So I think one thing that's really interesting and important to note about carbon removal is that it has had over the last five, eight years really bipartisan support. There's something about it. There's lots of places you can do carbon removal, lots of resources, inputs, opportunity to use the national labs. Just put out this Roadster removal report that looks at the county level where there's carbon removal opportunities and basically everywhere.
00:52:35:12 - 00:53:11:09
Speaker 1
So carbon removal politicization, the outlook is actually has been and continues to be quite good. There's a lot of opportunities for a lot of people that said on the carbon tax piece, yeah, because that's always going to be tough. I think what I think about a lot is what are some more tailored specific industries, specific opportunities to embed carbon removal in existing policies and infrastructure so less like monolithic carbon tax and more here's places where we could just start doing the work.
00:53:11:09 - 00:53:48:08
Speaker 1
We can start creating proof points that build to bigger policies. And last thing I would say on a carbon tax is maybe the the US federal government going full hog in a carbon tax, not in our immediate future, but there are a lot of companies that are talking about internal carbon taxes. So switching from we're going to offset our scope three with $4 per ton trees that probably aren't a real thing anyway to an internal carbon tax, really trying to keep track of their own emissions using existing industrywide standards and then putting that money into innovation, things like purchasing innovative carbon removal solutions.
00:53:48:19 - 00:54:04:12
Speaker 1
And I would really encourage anyone who's thinking about this, who is working at a company that has a sustainable policy, that has a net zero policy to think about things like an internal carbon tax and or an internal carbon fee, and what you can do to support innovation.
00:54:04:12 - 00:54:24:23
Speaker 2
It's really interesting. I was at a I was part of a conversation. I won't say where or with whom. All I'll say it was, it was that it wasn't at USC, but it was it was a conversation about the overhead rates we pay at universities. So when you get a research grant at a university, you pay a certain amount of overhead to the university to keep the lights on and keep our labs equipped and so on and so forth.
00:54:25:25 - 00:54:46:10
Speaker 2
And we introduced this idea of a carbon tax on overhead that there was certain sciences that weren't as carbon intensive. So they should have a lower overhead rate. Others might have a higher overhead rate and it didn't go over so well. People started to sort of, you know, scream and yell about equity. But it also reminds me of when I was a science advisor to the administrator of the EPA under the George W Bush administration.
00:54:46:10 - 00:55:07:12
Speaker 2
Yes, that's how old I am. There was a conversation about, you know, a nickel extra on a on a tank of gas to pay for some some environmental initiatives. And we were told back then when gas was like a dollar 50 a gallon on average, that a five cent extra on a gallon of gas would crush the economy.
00:55:08:09 - 00:55:27:27
Speaker 2
Maybe I'm being naive, but it just sort of seems like these kinds of very modest fees, premiums, taxes, if you will, could actually work like I bet you, a few pennies on a gallon of gas could pay for a lot of not only the R&D on carbon removal, but a lot of the early term implementation that helps us scale.
00:55:27:27 - 00:55:32:18
Speaker 2
Why aren't we just doing that? It seems like table stakes at this point.
00:55:32:18 - 00:56:07:13
Speaker 3
Well, I can't say why we're not doing that, Joe, but I mean, there's a lot of politics policy wrapped into the draw of a heat wave, extraordinary heat, extraordinary flooding, extraordinary droughts, extraordinary wildfires, extraordinary damage from cyclones. Red and blue states are hit equally. And you know what Katrina did, politically speaking, it really did change things. We we are all together in this.
00:56:07:13 - 00:56:12:23
Speaker 3
And I think there will be some way to all pull together to try to get us out of this.
00:56:13:27 - 00:56:26:15
Speaker 2
That's that's Wow. Well, that's a very hopeful, you know, perspective. Not that I'm surprised that it's coming from you, but I'm just happy to hear it. I knew we're running out of time. Do you want to do you want to? One up, Will on hope.
00:56:27:15 - 00:56:28:01
Speaker 1
Oh, my God.
00:56:28:01 - 00:56:29:06
Speaker 2
Please try to time.
00:56:29:22 - 00:56:29:27
Speaker 1
Well.
00:56:30:19 - 00:56:32:27
Speaker 2
I knew for the tide, maybe the wind.
00:56:33:27 - 00:57:02:04
Speaker 1
I hold them to. I think the the thing that I love about working in carbon removal is that it is almost necessarily naively optimistic. We were trying to do this crazy thing of sucking carbon back out of the atmosphere, you know, roughly 400 ppm running uphill against thermodynamic and we're doing it for climate justice. Like there's this whole industry of people that are switching out of lucrative tech careers, out of academic life, all all sorts of places all over the world.
00:57:02:04 - 00:57:12:14
Speaker 1
We're like, We need to do this. And we're just going to we're just going to start building and we're going to make it happen. And I love that. So I think there's a lot to be optimistic about in the field of carbon removal right now.
00:57:13:19 - 00:57:35:17
Speaker 2
And I would agree with you. I've seen it myself. I've seen people in academia jumping on the entrepreneurial bandwagon like like well, and being very successful at it. I've seen people in policy from the right side of the aisle and the left coming together. As you said, I knew around carbon removal, I've seen agreements between the EU and Europe and a story in North America and Asia happening.
00:57:35:17 - 00:57:51:21
Speaker 2
So I agree. I think there's something magical about this, and I think it's magical because it kind of feels like not only kind of the morally kind of right thing to do, but it sort of feels like kind of the like the next moonshot, like we can all kind of rally around something. There's some you got to build some things.
00:57:51:26 - 00:58:06:01
Speaker 2
It kind of looks cool, you know, It's something that we can all kind of get behind for a variety of reasons, and if we can find a way to pay for it and then, you know, ultimately supported so much the better. So I tend to be pretty hopeful as well. And maybe on that note, we should call it a day.
00:58:06:01 - 00:58:25:04
Speaker 2
I mean, we're all pretty hopeful. I've learned a lot. Hopefully people who have watched have learned a lot. Well, I know I can't thank you enough. Thank you to the Dornsife College for putting on these dialogs. And with that, I think we'll sign off. Goodbye, everybody.