Cleaning Up the Carbon Mess
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We’ve made a carbon mess. How do we clean it up?
Imagine the atmosphere as an overflowing bathtub. The water keeps gushing from the tap. Clearly, we need to turn it off. We have to bring emissions of heat-trapping gases down to zero, stat.
But even after we do that, we still have a mess on our hands. So, we need to open the drain, let some water out.
In this episode, we’ll explore the different ways we can manage carbon emissions with natural and technological solutions.
What are their benefits and drawbacks? And how do we think about them in our broader solutions toolkit?
We’ll explore the role of carbon in forest management, soil management, and agricultural practices. We’ll also look at the need for stripping carbon out of the atmosphere and turning it into useful products, or storing it underground.
Featured in this episode: Lisa Song, Judith Schwartz, Jane Zelikova, and Etosha Cave.
Follow our co-hosts and production team:
A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio.
TRANSCRIPT
Katharine Wilkinson: Last year, ProPublica Reporter, Lisa Song, traveled to a tropical expansive rainforest in the state of Acre, Brazil. It was her first time visiting the Amazon.
Lisa Song: Yeah, obviously I knew the Amazon was a pretty hot and humid place. I think one of the things that struck me immediately was how difficult the logistics would be. We ran into roads that were just mud or dirt roads that became impassable whenever there was a rain storm.
Katharine Wilkinson: She was there to check on a claim that forests were being preserved as storehouses of carbon.
Lisa Song: I became interested in Brazil because a lot of people were saying that this one part of Brazil, this western state called Acre was best positioned to have the best carbon offsets projects, and so I decided it was worth going to Brazil to see what is happening in the place with the best of the best of these programs.
Katharine Wilkinson: Offsets are a big part of climate goals for many countries and industries. Right now, about 10% of the world's CO2 emissions come from ripping down tropical forests. So the idea is, if we can stop doing that, we could save some emissions.
Katharine Wilkinson: That's why in 2008, the United Nations created an offset program. Polluting industries could buy carbon credits, basically a certificate showing that a patch of forest had been saved in order to counterbalance their own emissions, and in 2016, California's Clean Air agency started considering these forestry offsets to be one part of the state's climate program.
Lisa Song: What that means is, if the Air Resources Board voted in favor, then the door would be opened for allowing polluters in the state to offset or cancel some portion of their carbon emissions by paying people in developing countries to not cut down trees, and it's this complicated math and science thing, where you would try to calculate without this funding, a part of this rainforest would be cut down. With this funding, you are able to keep those trees standing and therefore, keep some amount of CO2 from going into the air.
Katharine Wilkinson: In theory, the Amazon makes sense as a place to try to do that. One reason environmentalists are so keen on saving the rainforest is because healthy forests are natural carbon sinks. Biology 101, plants need carbon the way mammals, like you and I need oxygen.
Katharine Wilkinson: So they do a great job inhaling a lot of carbon through the process of, drum roll please, photosynthesis. On the flip side, deforestation, wiping out forests, is a major source of emissions. So since the '90s, when market based approaches for reducing emissions became all the rage, the international community has embraced carbon offsets from preserving forests.
Leah Stokes: And just like you said, in theory, it sounds like a classic win-win but it turns out that it isn't that simple, is it Kathryn?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, it's just not that simple and it's become increasingly controversial and increasingly clear that offsets are not just some planetary, get-out-of-jail-free card.
Lisa Song: So this idea of carbon offsets, I soon found, was very controversial and there were a lot of people in the scientific community who supported it as an idea to help preserve tropical forests and it seemed like just as many scientists who were totally against the idea.
Katharine Wilkinson: What Lisa found in Brazil was an ecosystem teaming with biodiversity, and teams of people who are passionate about protecting it but actually accounting for the climate impacts of avoiding deforestation, literally putting numbers to it. Well, that's where things get tricky.
Lisa Song: Obviously, conservation is a good thing and we met people on the ground who are desperate for the conservation money, but they were much less concerned about the integrity of the carbon calculations and therefore, that scientific flaw really raises serious questions about whether these programs can be trusted in terms of their scientific integrity.
Katharine Wilkinson: And what was the scientific flaw you uncovered?
Lisa Song: What I found was that the science of trying to figure out how much carbon is preserved in an acre of trees or a hundred acre of trees is not that established. There are still unknowns about how to calculate that correctly. There is also scientific uncertainty from just the simple observational science of using satellites to track how many trees are still standing or which areas of the forest have been logged versus the forest that is still healthy.
Lisa Song: And then, there's also another wrinkle called, "additionality," which is the idea that a carbon offset only counts if you can show that the thing you're doing to preserve the trees would not have happened without the carbon offset funding. But that's a really difficult and impossible thing to claim because you're trying to compare what happens in real life, versus a hypothetical situation.
Lisa Song: So there are examples where, in order to calculate and get the most carbon credits, it appears that some jurisdictions may be projecting a very gloomy baseline. They may be projecting that a ton of trees will be logged without the money in order to get as big a number as possible and therefore, as much money as possible for the offsets.
Leah Stokes: So Katharine, why are we talking about offsets? Are you trying to make our listeners feel guilty? You know that's not allowed on A Matter of Degrees?
Katharine Wilkinson: I know Leah, we left guilt behind in episode one, so that's not the plan but offsets are a thing that people have probably heard about, and they're one piece of the complexity that I want to try and unpack today at the heart of this episode.
Katharine Wilkinson: Can we manage carbon to undo the damage to our planet? Can we use nature and technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere or is it too complicated, too expensive and too late? This is A Matter of Degrees. I'm Dr. Katharine Wilkinson.
Leah Stokes: And I'm Dr. Leah Stokes and together, we're telling stories for the climate curious. Okay, Katharine, I'm following you. I think your basic premise is this, can we counterbalance all the harmful things we've been doing to the planet with good things?
Leah Stokes: Can we go beyond just trying to do less bad to the planet? So could we, for example, get carbon back to where it came from? Put it back underground and remove it from the atmosphere in a bunch of different ways?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, at this point we know we can make a damn mess but can we clean it up? And what are our tools for doing that? How far can they take us? How fast? And what are the pitfalls?
Leah Stokes: So where do we begin with this thorny topic?
Katharine Wilkinson: Well, for me Leah, it all goes back to the idea of a bathtub.
Leah Stokes: Oh, I think I've heard this one before.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. Imagine the atmosphere as an overflowing bathtub. The water just keeps gushing from the tap. Clearly, you have got to turn it off. You've got to bring emissions of heat-trapping gases down to zero stat but even when you do that, you've still got a mess on your hands, so you need to open the drain, let some water out.
Katharine Wilkinson: That's exactly what plants do through photosynthesis and it's what technologists are trying to mimic by capturing emissions in various ways, trying to make the carbon drain bigger than it otherwise would be.
Leah Stokes: Ah, the carbon cycle. This is one of those ideas that I think is just so powerful for people to understand, to really get at the heart of the climate problem. We have these things called, "fossil fuels," and they are carbon that is stored underground.
Leah Stokes: This carbon is not actively moving around between our air and our land and our water, but ever since humans have started burning those fossil fuels, what we've been doing is digging up carbon from underground and putting it in our air, putting it in our oceans and maybe putting it, in some cases, into trees.
Leah Stokes: But what we really have to do is stop bringing carbon up from underground and we might ask ourselves, is it possible to put some of the carbon we've already put into the air and the oceans and the land, could we put it back underground?
Katharine Wilkinson: Professor Stokes breaks it down for you all, and I'm so glad you did because I think to really understand the climate situation we're in, we have to understand the carbon cycle, and I don't think we talk about it nearly enough. We need to because a lot of the methods and the technologies that people are talking about using to try to right the ship, so to speak, well, some of them are really good ideas and also there are some harmful ones.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, I think the top idea for fixing the carbon cycle problem is to stop burning fossil fuels, and I can think of a recent idea that claimed to solve this problem that didn't really seem very real.
Katharine Wilkinson: Let me guess, Leah, Trillion Trees?
Speaker 4: That's a million million sucking 200 gigatons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the coming decade.
Speaker 5: Who's against the trees? Everyone's for the trees. The trees are a bipartisan issue. Everybody's pro-tree. I haven't met any anti-tree people yet.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, that's the one.
Katharine Wilkinson: So the Trillion Trees program is a World Economic Forum project to plant one trillion trees across the globe this decade. Basically, to re-green the planet and help solve climate change; that's the idea. Some pretty powerful people signed on, including President Trump. My two cents, these guys love big numbers and simple answers.
Leah Stokes: Yeah. Look, trees are wonderful. I am a big tree fan, a big tree planter actually. I've got 34 fruit trees on my tiny little lot but this plan is so misguided and of course, it doesn't involve the actual solution to climate change which is to stop burning fossil fuels, to stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere.
Leah Stokes: Instead, what they're saying is, "Let's just plant trees," and there's evidence that planting new trees is not as important as preserving existing forests. When we're focused on preserving existing forests, it also raises key issues about the rights of indigenous communities to steward their own land. Let me just say, that has never been on Trump's agenda.
Katharine Wilkinson: No, it definitely has not and we should be wary any time people are pedaling one key answer to the climate crisis. When it comes to President Trump, it really is the height of hypocrisy to sign onto tree-planting while propping up the coal industry, and putting critical ecosystems, like Alaska's Tongass National Forest on the actual chopping block. No, this is not how it works. You don't get to trash the atmosphere today, while planting trees that take decades to remove carbon.
Leah Stokes: So planting a trillion trees is the kind of idea that maybe looks good on paper but in practice, can quickly become greenwashing, but I know there are other ideas in the same vein that have more promise. What are some good ones, in your view, Katharine?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, Leah, there are actually many people who believe that we can team up with nature to remedy some of our misplaced carbon, and we can do it in ways that science and the planet love. I talked to one of those people. Her name is Judith Schwartz.
Katharine Wilkinson: Judith has written multiple books that touch on this topic but interestingly, her introduction to the work of natural climate solutions came relatively recently. She started her career as an economics writer and her path took a rather different course after she attended a conference in Vermont and heard a speaker mention soil.
Judith Schwartz: Someone was talking about soil and I thought, "Oh, my goodness, soil. Yeah, right, I get it. It's a metaphor for local economies, for nurturing," all these things.
Katharine Wilkinson: But the speaker wasn't talking about an abstract econ concept or an analogy.
Judith Schwartz: But no, he was actually talking about soil and he made the comment that over time, more carbon has been released into the atmosphere from farming, from the soil, from agricultural practices compared to the burning of fossil fuels, and that simply hit me over the head and led me to ask, is that true? Why haven't I heard this? How does that work and what is this all about, and does that mean that we can return carbon to the soil? That's when I was absolutely hooked.
Katharine Wilkinson: Judith dove in and her search for answers led her to stories all over the world. Land restoration work in China's lowest plateau region, landscapes return to lush green after forest fires in Butte County California, and even permaculture projects for Bedouin communities in the Desert of Saudi Arabia.
Katharine Wilkinson: The work of soil and ecosystem restoration is happening in every corner of the globe. Judith found that the people working on these projects have become exceptionally good at building up carbon on a given piece of land, while artfully tending to its ecology and when they do that, they win a ton of bonus prizes.
Judith Schwartz: Here's the thing about soil, is that the main ingredient in soil organic matter is carbon. So carbon in the soil creates a sponge. If you can keep moisture in the ground by enhancing the soil carbon sponge, then you're not only drawing down more carbon, not only creating more food crops or whatever it is that is growing in the soil, but also minimizing the risk of fire. That's what got so exciting, was all these multiple benefits, layer upon layer of benefit.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, that strikes me as so very much the heart of the story of nature based solutions that there are both mitigation and resilience and health and community building and, and, and, and... They have such a multiplicity of goodness.
Judith Schwartz: Oh, yes. Very much so and then once you tap into the logic then you see those multiple benefits everywhere. What I see is that in regenerating landscapes, we are doing climate mitigation and adaptation work, because the healthier landscapes are drawing down carbon and they're also bolstering nature's capacity to regulate climate. We have basically devegetated one quarter of the planet but since we know that, we can revegetate and that's where restoring ecosystems comes in.
Leah Stokes: I'll be honest Katharine, I've been a bit of a skeptic of this stuff but restoration, it does sound pretty promising.
Katharine Wilkinson: I agree and I'm glad it's peaking your interest Leah. I think this is the kind of work that could have some lasting impact. Instead of just blindly planting a trillion trees, crossing fingers and calling it a day, Judith is talking about a more holistic, long-term and multi-solving approach in a given locality.
Judith Schwartz: It really concerns me that up until very recently, trees were considered sticks of carbon, and I don't think that serves us because then you also get a situation where you have monocultured forest plantations, which are meant to offset other things going on but are not functioning forest ecosystems.
Judith Schwartz: If our intention is to buy a lot of shiny objects, then that is what we will do. If our intention is to restore the earth, then that is what we will do. So it's really up to us.
Katharine Wilkinson: Judith has seen many of these projects in action. She knows why they matter and she convinced me that collaboration with nature, not deploying nature as a carbon-sucking technology, is an enormous source of possibility. But that means we have to rethink, or perhaps, remember, our relationship with the planet's living systems. We have to be menders, helpers.
Leah Stokes: I've gotten interested in this stuff a bit in my own literal backyard recently because I'm a big gardener and I've become a big fan of this British gardener named Charles Dowding. He proposes this no-dig approach where, basically, you leave the roots of stuff in the soil, you don't till, you're not constantly digging it up. It's also much easier because you don't have to dig all the time.
Leah Stokes: The idea is that the soil itself will get healthier over time. You add compost which is adding carbon and over time, that soil's going to just store more and more carbon, so I've been experimenting with that myself with lots of leaves and manure piles and all kinds of things and I don't know if it's going to offset all my fossil fuel emissions, but it definitely makes me feel good.
Katharine Wilkinson: And how do your plants feel about it Leah?
Leah Stokes: Funny enough, we have a leak at our house right now in our water system, and a guy came around to try to figure out where the leak was and so he pushed this probe into the ground all over the place, and he went to the part of my garden where I made my own soil with basically compost.
Leah Stokes: "It just went in like Swiss cheese," he said. The soil was so much more open, it wasn't as compacted and yeah, it's been growing tons of eggplants and tomatoes and all kinds of things so I think the plants are happy.
Katharine Wilkinson: I love it. If I were a plant, I would be very happy I think in your newly soiled garden. Yeah, I think this is the kind of thing that people get excited about because you can see and feel the results and you can see outcomes from something pretty simple like don't dig and add some compost, right?
Katharine Wilkinson: So after Judith and I talked and she got me pretty jazzed about these projects and these solutions, I wanted to talk to someone else who has a really intimate scientific understanding of how these systems work, and like Judith, her climate journey also has its roots in soil.
Jane Zelikova: I came to realize soils are beautiful. That they are like these amazing diverse... No two soils are alike. You think soils are brown but there's this variation of brown. These layers of weird orange or white and understanding why soils are the way they are, what the biological, chemical, physiological things are that are happening to change fundamentally what's under our feet.
Katharine Wilkinson: That's Jane Zelikova. She's the Chief Scientist at Carbon180. It's a non-profit whose mission is to fundamentally rethink carbon. Not just as a waste product and a problem, but as something that can work for us.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, I'm actually on the Science Advisory Board for the organization and they've got some interesting ideas. Instead of just thinking about carbon as a pollutant that we emit into the air that's lost forever, they're starting to think about how we can put carbon back underground, we can put it in the soil, we can even use it maybe in industrial processes like making concrete. How can we use carbon and turn that problem around?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, and it's not all rocket science, right? Some really simple agricultural methods, like the one you mentioned Leah, no-till, can actually nurture a powerful exchange that happens underground after plants do their carbon inhale through photosynthesis and it's a microscopic process but it actually makes farms and ranches, a lot like your garden, healthier.
Jane Zelikova: Microbes are my favorite. Part of falling in love with soil is falling in love with things I can't see. So it's like the ultimate leap of faith, and maybe the ultimate in falling in love is falling in love with an invisible creature. Falling in love with microbes was a big part of falling in love with soil.
Katharine Wilkinson: The wee beasties.
Jane Zelikova: The wee beasties. Plant roots are pretty leaky so a lot of that carbon leaks out from the roots into the soil and feeds the many wee beasties, the microbes that live next to roots, they take that carbon, that's a food source for them.
Jane Zelikova: They take in the carbon and they convert it to other carbon forms, some of which stick around in soils for tens to hundreds to thousands of years. People get really excited about saving the chimpanzees or the wales and the polar bears and how do we get people psyched about microbes?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, microbes. What does PR for microbes look like?
Jane Zelikova: I know, is there some visualization of them that makes them really cute? Can we make them look like a puppy? If microbes look like puppies, we would be doing fine.
Katharine Wilkinson: The thing though about these processes is it can take a while to see results. Sometimes, on the scale of decades and as you know Leah, we don't have decades. Climate change is already here.
Leah Stokes: But as we know, the agricultural sector is a source of carbon emissions and there are changes that we could put in place right now to start moving us in a better direction. What are some of those ideas?
Katharine Wilkinson: I asked her about just that. What are some of the things we can do? It turns out she actually had direct experience with some of these growing up. What I feel like is so interesting about that is that the practices are pretty darn simple, and also they buy and large save farmers money.
Jane Zelikova: This is what farmers used to do. That's what's so great. I grew up in the Soviet Union and we had to do Russian communes, we had to go and everyone had to go work on the farm. So my mom brought me to work on the farm from a pretty young age, just like everybody from the city bussed out to these farms to do the harvests and stuff.
Jane Zelikova: No-till agriculture was a thing that people did, where you just don't use the plow that much, or you plow some but not everything and not all the time. Farmers had a pretty good sense of what makes their fields productive and they used cover crops, they changed what they grew because they knew if you grow the same thing year after year, you accumulate pests or you deplete the soil nutrients in such a way that it's really hard to get them back.
Jane Zelikova: If you vary what you're growing from year to year, it helps maintain fertile, productive soils. These practices aren't new but they may be new and outside the conventional scope today, because a lot of our agriculture has shifted towards this agricultural industrial complex, where it's really high input, a lot of synthetic fertilizer and it's a lot of plowing, and it's not really thinking so much about the soil, and more thinking about the productivity above ground.
Jane Zelikova: Because of that, we've been able to feed a lot more people, so it's not evil in and of itself. We've been able to feed a lot more people. When you go to the grocery store, you can get almost anything you want, right? We're able to make a lot of food. We waste a lot of food, but we're able to grow a lot and that's because we've hacked the system. Instead of relying on microbes or plants that can essentially create and make available nutrients for plant growth, we've figured out a way to do that synthetically and add it on top.
Jane Zelikova: That's not a bad thing in and of itself, because really productive systems means there's more carbon getting put underground actually, so that's not a bad thing. The bad thing is that some of that synthetic fertilizer is washed into streams and rivers, it is toxic to insects and amphibians and fish and reptiles and other animals and it has these other ecosystem impacts that we don't like; these environmental impacts that we care a lot about because we want animals in our water and we want our water to be clean.
Jane Zelikova: In and of itself it's this whole system, where we now rely on outside inputs, instead of working with the systems we have to harness the power of microbes deliver everything that plants need to grow.
Katharine Wilkinson: The thing though about nurturing soil, nurturing ecosystems is that it can take a long time to see results. On the scale of decades in some cases and as you know, Leah, we don't have decades. Climate change is already here.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, and that could obviously throw some wrenches in the problem. I think we've seen that those get-out-of-jail-free cards for polluters turn out to be kind of problematic.
Katharine Wilkinson: That's a great point Leah, that a lot of these practices can both stop emissions and bring some carbon back home at the same time, and I wanted to get Jane's take on some of these. It turns out she actually has direct experience with some of them from back in her childhood.
Jane Zelikova: Oh, my gosh. I was a naïve person until recently and was like, "Oh, carbon offsets. Yay, we're done, we're good." I offset that with this three dollar thing that I just clicked, "yes" on so I think I'm carbon neutral now. I definitely was that person and I know lots of people that assume that when you buy a carbon offset, you're good. You've done your part.
Jane Zelikova: The more that I find out about carbon offsets, the more I learn how little impact they've had in terms of actual emission abatement or reducing emissions in a real way, in a measurable way.
Katharine Wilkinson: Lisa described to me a complex accounting system. Trying to put numbers to exactly how much carbon a forest project offsets and it turns out that's tricky, if not impossible, given how much forest you need to account for. What's maybe more surprising, is that many of the people in charge of running these programs, they don't seem too worried about that.
Lisa Song: What we found when we went to Brazil is we spoke to some government representatives who were very blunt in saying they didn't care as much about how perfect or how precise the calculations were. They were very desperate for the money that would be paid for those offsets.
Lisa Song: They saw it as worthwhile if they got the funding for the offsets so that they could use the funding to fund conservations efforts and fund enforcement against illegal loggers.
Katharine Wilkinson: What was your take upon departure? Did you feel yeah, this had some moderate success or did you really feel like, no the offset project really didn't work out?
Lisa Song: What I felt at the end of the reporting process was that there's always going to be a huge disconnect between what you see on paper, and what you see calculated, versus the reality once you go on the ground. When we were there, we met with residents who had tried to participate in the program.
Lisa Song: There were government-driven initiatives where they would pay local residents to harvest Brazil nuts or do forest-friendly farming or agriculture. All of these alternative ways, so that the residents would still have a livelihood and earn money, in a way that disincentivizes them from logging and destroying the forest. But what we found was that there wasn't enough of a market for these forest-friendly products.
Lisa Song: So a lot of the residents said they care about the forest, but they also need to earn enough money to eat to build themselves a house, to be able to send their kids to school.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, these calculations are not easy to figure out and maybe that wouldn't be a big deal if we just said, hey we're preserving forests, we're giving people new livelihoods, that's all great stuff. But the problem is that these programs, these offsets are providing cover for continuing fossil fuel use in developed countries.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, it's the pairing of these things that starts to become the issue and the problems that Lisa saw on her reporting trip in Acre, that's not the only place where these issues are cropping up. They did analysis of a forest project in Cambodia, for example, and that also showed that numbers on paper, they don't add up to what's happening on the ground there either.
Lisa Song: Through satellite imagery, they were able to show that about half of the forested areas that had been there at the beginning of the project were no longer there. All of that forest had been cut down. What it meant was that the project had started in 2008 but by 2019, half of the forest that was supposed to be there to soak up the carbon had already been cut down.
Lisa Song: We found that out before the official project documents noted that and so this really made us question the integrity of the monitoring systems of these projects.
Katharine Wilkinson: This is pretty bad news because big companies all over the world have already bought forestry offsets, and they've done that as a way of washing their hands and saying, "Okay, we've bought these offsets, we're going to keep emitting carbon into the atmosphere now."
Leah Stokes: Yeah, but if the trees they're paying for aren't actually protected, and if the carbon isn't really being saved, then the program is doing nothing to help the planet. If anything, it's maybe giving cover to make people think you're acting on climate change, when really, you're just delaying.
Katharine Wilkinson: Right, and that means corporate pledges to be, "carbon neutral." Well, they may not be anywhere close.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, I've been hearing this story from a lot of folks in the climate policy space for years now. These forestry offset programs, they may have other benefits, but they are struggling to generate real results in terms of carbon and if we can't do the carbon accounting right, then what's happening is we're letting people continue to pollute elsewhere in exchange for this theoretical reduction that is not actually materializing.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, it's super problematic and in some ways, if we peel back another layer of the onion, I actually think carbon accounting and the financialization of nature is at the crux of this whole thing, right? If we're not using offsets as corporate indulgences to wipe away carbon sins, then we wouldn't have the issue of perverse incentives. We wouldn't have the incentive to bulk up numbers to get more money from polluting companies so they can keep trashing the planet.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, and there's still a couple problems we haven't touched on. Let's go back to that carbon cycle. When we're digging up carbon from underground, we're taking it from a very stable, long-term storage place but when we put that carbon in forests or in the soil, that's not as stable when it comes to storage.
Leah Stokes: Think about all the forest fires that are happening all across this planet, in Australia, in California, in Oregon, in Siberia. All of these forests are burning, which means that they're not holding that carbon anymore and that could happen more and more as we warm up the planet. What we really need to do is to try and get that carbon back underground.
Katharine Wilkinson: You make such a good point Leah, and it brings up for me another point which is the issue of scale. Even if everything went perfectly with these agricultural solutions, with these forest solutions, other ecosystem restoration, the planet is only so big and we've put so much excess carbon into the atmosphere that the planet alone can't sort things out. We've got to think about how we can go beyond what forests and plants and soil can do.
Leah Stokes: You're right. There is a journalist at The Atlantic named, Robinson Meyer, who wrote this amazing piece called, This Land Is the Only Land There Is and he talked about how some of these really optimistic takes on forestry or soil, forget that we're using land to do a lot of other things.
Leah Stokes: Katharine, there's a second problem too which is that we still need fuels. If we're going to keep carbon underground by stopping burning fossil fuels, we need other kinds of fuels and could we, for example, suck carbon out of the air and turn that into a fuel?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah and there are folks who are really excited about the possibilities that technology presents, right? That we can use engineering to compliment and go beyond nature's carbon sinks. Things like direct air capture which is also something Jane's organization, Carbon180, is looking at. They're taking a both/and approach.
Jane Zelikova: In the last three years, I've come to realize that we need every solution, plus solutions we haven't thought of yet, and as I see us continuing to pass these moments where action needed to happen and it didn't and the emissions trajectory continues to be in the worst case scenario, as we continue to do that, the case for direct air capture becomes more and more important.
Katharine Wilkinson: Jane remains bias towards microbes and soil. They are her true loves, but she knows that we're going to need a whole suite of solutions.
Jane Zelikova: We can't meet any climate goals at this point, especially, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees without removing vast amounts of carbon from the air. We're going to need everything and I can envision a world where capturing CO2 out of the air and moving it underground, is somebody's business model. That's what they do, that's their job.
Katharine Wilkinson: The opposite of mining or something. It's air mining, yeah.
Jane Zelikova: Yeah, it's air mining, right?
Katharine Wilkinson: As it turns out, I actually spoke to someone with a tech startup who also imagines an entire industry emerging to do this important work.
Etosha Cave: I am Etosha Cave and I'm the co-founder of Opus 12 and we build reactors that convert carbon dioxide into useful products.
Katharine Wilkinson: Etosha's company is at the edge of carbon innovation. Her perspective is like, yeah, we have trees and soil. We have ecosystems, they draw down carbon. That's all fantastic. But what if we can also build a machine to do some of that? What would that look like?
Leah Stokes: Yeah, I know a bunch about this kind of technology from other companies based in Switzerland and in Canada. What is her company up to?
Katharine Wilkinson: So Etosha and her team developed a device that basically takes carbon dioxide, and with the help of water and electricity, recycles it into other useful carbon based compounds.
Etosha Cave: We are basically doing an industrial version of photosynthesis and so we're doing a very similar thing where instead of using just sunlight directly, we're using electricity in the form of maybe solar electricity, or wind, or any other carbon-free electrical source, and using that electricity to rearrange the CO2 and water molecules into compounds that can be useful for industry and be a feedstock for industrial processes.
Katharine Wilkinson: In other words, waste becomes value. I asked her what this machine looks like.
Etosha Cave: Yeah, our first system is about the size of a dishwasher and it looks like a dishwashing machine, or maybe a washing machine, kind of that size. So it's a box basically.
Katharine Wilkinson: But not just any box, a box that packs the carbon transforming power of 37,000 trees into the size of a suitcase. And ultimately, Etosha imagines her carbon converters getting bigger, scaling up to the size of an industrial refrigerator and eventually a shipping container.
Leah Stokes: Wow, that sounds pretty big.
Katharine Wilkinson: I think it's going to be very big in many ways, and I was really curious where she thinks this tech could have the biggest impact.
Etosha Cave: Ideally, we would love to couple with other companies that take CO2 out of the air directly and then we could use that CO2 and make a fuel out of it. In the near term though, there's plenty of CO2 sources that are already concentrated and localized, that are more concentrated. So you could imagine just having our system take that CO2 out of that point source emission from that industrial plant, and just convert it on the spot.
Katharine Wilkinson: There are now dozens of startups and pilot projects around the world that are trying to prove out different forms of basically carbon wrangling technology.
Leah Stokes: If I harness my inner techno optimist, I feel great, let's dump a ton of money into these things and let's see if we can make some headway, but I got to say, I'm a little skeptical about the scale.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, there's some real drawbacks we have to think about. Cost is a big one, the energy that's required to run these technologies and also the sheer scale that's needed to make a dent, much less fix the whole shebang. And of course, there's the issue of time. How long have we been hearing about autonomous vehicles? I've still never seen one in real life, right?
Katharine Wilkinson: Innovation takes a while and it can create a false sense of security, thinking that we're going to have this magical technology to do all the work for us when what we need to be focused on is using the solutions that we have in hand right now.
Leah Stokes: So Katharine, we've covered a lot of literal ground in this episode. We've covered land, and forest, and soil. We've talked about offsets and putting carbon underground and turning it into products and you've come up with a lot of ideas, technology, solutions for trying to undo the damage, and at the end of all that, what do you think? Can we undo the damage?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, we definitely covered some ambitious breadth of topics today and to be honest, Leah, I have mixed feelings. Clearly there are very real tools in the toolbox. Clearly, we should be using them. There are solutions that are already working, there are solutions on the horizon. If we think about the bathtub, we actually can do a lot of things to start opening up the drain.
Katharine Wilkinson: But I worry that people may think, "Oh cool, great, we can just keep on keeping on," and that's the fundamental idea behind an offset, right? That it is somehow possible to counterbalance our emissions, to cancel them out. But we know that's just not true. Carbon that goes up into the atmosphere stays there for a century, and I think that's why Naomi Klein has said it best perhaps. That carbon offsets mean under the best case scenario running in place, and that's just not going to cut it.
Leah Stokes: Meanwhile, climate change is just racing forward, getting worse and worse every year. We can't unmelt Greenland, we can't unburn forests and we can't turn back hurricanes.
Katharine Wilkinson: Totally, the clock is ticking and that means stopping emissions right now is the most important thing and it's actually the easier thing and I think we can't lose sight of that.
Leah Stokes: We can't get distracted and fossil fuel companies are trying to distract us. They're using offsets. They're using carbon-removal technology, they're using all these things to get our eye off the ball. The biggest thing we can do is to stop digging up this ancient carbon. We need to be clear-eyed about what the real problem is which is fossil fuel combustion.
Katharine Wilkinson: Can we undo the damage that we have done to the atmosphere?
Jane Zelikova: We cannot undo the damage that we have already done because we've already, fundamentally, changed how ecosystems function. We've already led to the extinction of plants and animals, some that we know about, many that we don't even know about.
Jane Zelikova: We can't undo that damage but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to limit the damage we do in the future, because working on climate change is depressing as hell, and on most days it's almost impossible to find a way to breathe through the day, and the only reason that I can breathe is because I am fighting like hell for the things that I care about, and that's the people that I love but it's also the mountains outside my door and the microbes in the soil. Someone's got to fight for the microbes. They're important and I don't get to choose whose life is important.
Katharine Wilkinson: Even if we can't undo the damage that's already been done, it doesn't mean we give up on all the rest.
Leah Stokes: I think that's a nice place to end it Katharine. A Matter of Degrees is co-hosted by me, Leah Stokes.
Katharine Wilkinson: And me, Katharine Wilkinson.
Leah Stokes: We are a production of Post Script Audio.
Katharine Wilkinson: Jaime Kaiser, Sydney Bartone and Stephen Lacey produced the show.
Leah Stokes: Sean Marquand edited, mixed and composed our theme song.
Katharine Wilkinson: Additional music came from Blue Dot Sessions.
Leah Stokes: The show art was designed by Karl Spurzem.
Katharine Wilkinson: Our website was designed by Caroline Hadilaksono.
Leah Stokes: A special thanks to the funders and supporters who made this show possible. The Hewlett Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The 11th Hour Project, UC Santa Barbara and others.
Katharine Wilkinson: You can subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google Podcast or any other place you get your shows. Or go to our website degrees.pod.com.
Leah Stokes: And you can follow both of us, the Pod and our production team on Twitter. You'll find our accounts on the website and in the show notes and if you're liking the show, tell your friends about it.
Katharine Wilkinson: Stay with us as we tell more stories for the climate curious.